J. Mitchell Lane

According to a Gallup poll, 42% of Americans attend Church regularly (almost weekly). 47% of Americans who claim to be protestant have attended Church in the past seven days, and 42% of Catholics. If these statistics are correct, then why is immorality so rampant in our culture? If it’s true that almost half of our population is attending Church regularly, then why is the recession of morality from our culture increasing drastically, and not decreasing drastically?

They forget to mention that this isn’t actually a statistic on the number of Christians. They lump together all Protestants and Catholics into the same group, and call that group the “Christians”. In fact, according to another Gallup Poll, 81% of the US population is “Christian”.

This presents a couple different issues. First, It’s a very obvious example of John 10 and the presence of false teachers and false sheep who are not actually preaching the Word of God, but are instead preaching a watered down version that suits their lifestyle and motivation to exalt themselves above God.

Ask those 81% what Christianity is, and you would come back with a much smaller number of those who can explain exactly what being a Christian is and means Biblically. Beyond that, an even smaller number of those would say that they believe exactly that.

This leads to the extremely skewed view that the world has of Christianity. If you ask someone on the street what they think of Christians, most likely they will tell you that Christians are hypocritical, judgmental, and self-righteous. The problem is that they only see the false Christians. They’re looking at that very high percentage of Americans who are “Christians”, because they outweigh and out-speak the those that truly believe what the Bible teaches. Obviously this is a major problem.

One of the major contributors to this is that the true Christians are so incorrectly focused on trying to get people in the door that they forget to proclaim what Christianity really is. They are so focused on trying to reach non-believers that they forget to teach the true believers. These “seeker-friendly” Churches put so much emphasis on being culturally relevant, that they forget what they are there to do in the first place, and only end up adding on to the number of people who claim to be “Christian”, but have no idea what it means.

I’m echoing one of John MacArthur’s sermons from the Resolve Conference on this part. There’s some good notes on it here. I frequently come across people who are surprised to run into a Christian that knows exactly what they believe and why they believe it. I’m reminded of a conversation that I’ve had more than once. I will be talking to someone who is a “Christian”, and we will have to stop for clarification. On more than one occasion, the question for clarification has been phrased, “Wait, we believe Christ died for our sins, right?” That is the sobering reality of “Christianity” in America. What’s worse is that most of America can’t even get that far in a description of Christianity. It is an extremely harsh realization.

The second issue is trying to do something about it. Since there is such a skewed (or non-existent) view of Christianity out there, what can we do to make that view correct? I’m not saying that if the America knew what Christianity really was, everything would magically get better. It’s actually the opposite of that. John 15 says that Christians will be persecuted for their beliefs. However, most Americans don’t know what a true Christian (not the statistic) believes in, and that persecution is basically non-existent.

I’m also not saying that we need to invite persecution, but we do need to be able to communicate what our beliefs really are instead of sitting back and letting everyone have a false (or non-existent) view of Christianity. We need to weed out the false teachers and the false sheep by preaching the actual Word of God, and not sermons like, “A Christian’s Guide to Financial Security” where the Bible isn’t even opened.

We often think of missions and evangelism only being for the missionaries, and we forget, or don’t even realize, that there is a huge portion of people we come in contact with every day that have no idea what Christianity really is, but only that it has “something to do with that guy Jesus”.

We need to preach the Word through our lives and live out our beliefs instead of standing by the conversations people have around us about those “crazy Christians”. We should doing what many missionaries do every day. When we hear that familiar conversation, many of us have never turned to ask them the question “can you explain to me what Christianity is?” and then told them the truth when they respond incorrectly.

If we spoke plainly about our beliefs instead of keeping them to ourselves and letting the world interpret them for us, maybe that statistic would be more accurate and give us a sobering look at just how vast our mission field here in America really is.

When was the last time you had that conversation?