A leader from the "Seeker-sensitive" or "attractional" church movement discusses why this movement is fading, and how churches can pivot so as to be effective in the new situation we face.
I am deeply critical of many aspects of the "seeker-sensitive church" movement, and so I was very interested to see someone "on the inside" saying some of the same things I've been saying.
I believe that what the church needs to do is 'return to the ancient paths': the Bible as traditionally understood, the Creeds, the Liturgy and the Sacraments, the spiritual heritage of the universal church. We need to do this not because "that is what people want now" (which seems to be what many evangelicals are saying at the moment), but because this is what it is to be a true expression of the universal Church; these are the treasures God intended us to have and to share with the next generation.
I really like the conversations what Peter Robinson hosts with various scholars and thinkers. They are always in-depth and nuanced looks at very serious social, economic, or political issues. This one is no different and hits on an issue that has become important for me: declining birthrates and family formation.
Especially interesting, to a priest, is the suggestion at the end of the conversation that beyond economics, this is somehow a spiritual issue. I think there is certainly something to that.
Since I am a priest in the Anglican Church in North America, it may come as no surprise that I have a special affinity for the Church of England. Many of the saints and teachers who have most influenced me - from Thomas Cranmer to John Wesley to C.S. Lewis - were devoted members of the C of E.
Not long ago I watched a series (available on YouTube) with David Suchet called The Pilgrim's Way to Britian's Great Cathedrals. I was amazed by the wonderful heritage of the Church of England - not only of beautiful architectures and treasures - but also of history and saints, many of whom are buried in these great churches even to this day.
I've visited Church of England parishes and cathedrals as a pilgrim myself. It was a special privilege to touch the pulpit in St. Mary's Oxford from which both C.S. Lewis and John Wesley once preached sermons.
I know there are many faithful members and clergy in the Church of England. When I attended the Provincial Assembly of the Anglican Church last year in Latrobe, PA the preacher for our opening festal Eucharist service was an evangelical vicar from a large and vibrant C of E parish in Oxford.
Yet I'm also painfully aware that much of the leadership of the 'mother province' of Anglicanism is also deeply compromised. Many - perhaps the vast majority - of the bishops are theological revisionists who are willing to conform the Bible's message to the values of contemporary society, rather than calling contemporary society to conversion by faith in the Lord Jesus.
IN a bid for "relevance", many of the great cathedrals and abbeys that house the relics of ancient saints (who put to death pride, vainglory, and lust within their own hearts) are now adorned with pride flags - just like those that adorn the local police cars.
It also appears that many of the leaders who are not theological revisionists by conviction are not orthodox - or anything else - by conviction either, but simply institutional creatures dedicated to institutional preservation.
The "LLF Process" (pushed through by the bishops in heavy-handed fashion) was intended to find a compromise or middle way between holding to Biblical truth on marriage and sexuality on the one hand and, on the other hand, accepting the demands of the LGBTQPIAN++ advocates to abandon the historic teachings. Unsurprisingly, this Process has been an utter fiasco that has actually exacerbated divisions, rather than healed them.
As someone who believes the Bible and the historic Christian faith - and simply as someone who has been watching the trends in churches these last 30 years and more - it comes as absolutely no surprise that the C of E has seen its attendance decline precipitously in recent years. Nor has The turmoil among church leadership - with recent resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury in disgrace, amid calls for many other bishops also to resign, and so on - seems like a perfect microcosm of the dysfunction and disarray and demoralized state of things.
So the question naturally comes up: Can the Church of England be saved?
That is the question being discussed by a couple of priests from different churches in the Anglican tradition in this video:
I think The Church of England can, by the grace of God, be renewed; and I believe that renewal will happen on the ground level with traditional churches - of all styles or "churchmanships" - that announce with clarity the Biblical Gospel and the historic faith. I believe that renewal must include the breaking down of traditional rivalries and suspicions between more "high" and "low" Anglicans.
I believe that a renewal must also include an institutional renewal: traditionalists have got to be independent of bishops, dioceses, and structures that are revisionist. There must be a genuinely safe and insulated space within the Church of England for traditionalists churches, clergy, and seminarians to follow their callings without even the possibility of interference from revisionist leaders.
This "traditionalist space" cannot rest on promises from or "gentlemen's agreements" with the revisionist majority of bishops. It has to be completely autonomous or it won't last.
I believe that there needs to be a genuine Third Province with its own structures and with the ability and authority to maintain its own integrity. We will see what develops. But I do pray for the Church of England it stands, to quote Galadriel, on the edge of a knife and it needs heavenly help.
Over the years I've run across videos from a British YouTuber called Carl Benjamin - a.k.a. Sargon of Akkad. In the early days he would have described himself as a liberal and an atheist (like me, he came of age during the "New Atheism" days), but nevertheless was voicing concern about what he saw as problems in Western society - especially British society.
Often provocative, in his earlier days I didn't care too much for what he had to say about Christianity and the Church, yet I sometimes found myself resonating with his critiques of certain aspects of secularism, or radical feminism, or Islamic immigration, or consumeristic globalism.
Despite often disagreeing with Benjamin, or sometimes thinking "I can't believe he just said that," I have also found that I cannot help but really like the man.
So, it has been interesting to see Benjamin move in a more conservative direction culturally and politically, but also to see his attitudes toward God and the church softening. Today you can find him saying that, while he doesn't believe Christianity is literally true, he does think it is good - maybe even indispensable - for the flourishing of Western Man and Western societies.
This leads to a new kind of argument in favor of God and Christ that I have been trying to articulate over the years: we have all sorts of evidence now that - in terms of mental health, physical health, even the health of whole societies - being Christian is actually (on the whole) good for you.
That in and of itself does not prove God's existence, but it is precisely what you'd expect to find if God - and specifically the God of the Bible - really is 'The Living God.' To be in alignment with his revealed truth would mean being in alignment with the deepest core of reality, and this would (quite naturally) be better for you in all sorts of ways than living discordant with Reality.
Anyways, I ran across this video recently in which Carl Benjamin talks about his and his wife's decision to start attending church and even to have their children baptized. I was surprised how emotional this made me to hear, but I'm certainly praying for Carl Benjamin and other influencers (Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, and so on) who seem to be wrestling with Christ, and whose conversions would no doubt be tremendously influential for the Gospel.
I sometimes watch the "Disciple Dojo" YouTube channel hosted by James-Michael Smith, a Biblical scholar (or scholarly pastor; certainly his knowledge of the Scripture and the Biblical languages go much deeper than mine).
Not so long ago he posted a video discussing one of the reasons he is not a Christian Zionist. As with many theological terms, there will be different understandings of that one, but most Christian Zionists see the modern nation state of Israel as equivalent to Israel, the covenant people and kingdom in Scripture. As such, the promises of God to Israel in Scripture - specifically the promises of ownership of the Holy Land - should be understood as applying to the modern nation-state of Israel. This has significant geo-political or foreign policy implications.
In practice, many Christian Zionists feel it is their duty to God, as Bible-believers, to support the state of Israel no matter what.
I have long felt that there were significant problems with this approach. Not least among them is the fact that the modern nation-state of Israel was created in part by the UN (resolution 181 in 1947), and orthodox Jews have always held that only the Messiah could re-constitute the nation of Israel. Yet, ironically, many American Evangelicals who hold to Christian Zionism are often deeply suspicious of the UN.
The larger problem, however is that Christian Zionism simply ignores what the Bible teaches about the Church - both Jew and Gentile - being the covenant people and the Israel of God.
That is what J.M. Smith discusses in this article that I do recommend. For those who are Christian Zionists, you may not agree with Smith's conclusions, but I suspect you will go back to your Bible wrestling with new questions, and that is no bad thing.
I should also say, I think the instinct of the Christian Zionist is to see prophetic significance in the creation of the modern state of Israel, and on some level I also share that instinct. It would be strange indeed if there was no connection at all between the purposes of the God of the Bible and the re-emergence of a Jewish state in the Holy Land.
But I wonder if the connection is not about the modern Nation of Israel simply being the continuation of Biblical Israel as such, but rather a place where Jews can be more easily reached en masse for the Gospel of Yeshua Messiah (as I am hearing reports is in fact happening in these days).
I am intrigued by his suggestion at the end of his article that there are other forms of Zionism that might be more compatible with Scripture, and I'd love to learn more about what those possibilities may be.
In any case, I will continue (as Psalm 122 says) to pray for the peace of Jerusalem - both the physical city on the other side of the world, but also the Heavenly Jerusalem, which is the true home of all the faithful believers in Christ (Hebrews 11; Rev. 21-22).
Here is an interesting video on the de-enchantment or de-sacralization that has taken place in Western Civilization and how to re-enchant or re-sacralize our collective imagination in order to save the soul of our Civilization.
Though an Anglican, he is perhaps a little too hard on the Reformation (it is worth noting that the collapse of religious observance has been quite profound in culturally Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox countries as well as Protestant ones), but I cannot deny that some of the factors he mentions (such as the dissolution, rather than the reform, of the British monasteries) probably did not help much.
I do not see anything fundamentally contradictory between monasticism as a vocation and Protestantism's recovery of the great truths of grace and Biblical authority and "heart-religion," and I'm glad to see that today there are some Anglican, Lutheran, and ecumenical monasteries and convents and similar monastic communities devoted to prayer, study, and simple acts of service.
In any case, I share this video because I think he is quite right in describing some of the spiritual problems facing the West today, and some of the potential medicines, including the importance of recovering older and more nuanced approaches to Scripture, and to the importance of symbolic forms of communication, than what is often on offer among Protestants (conservative or revisionist) these days.
