Bruce McLaughlin

Evangelical Christians are Failing

Evangelical Christians are failing to accomplish the assignments given to them long ago by Jesus Christ and prefer ritual faithfulness instead.

The fastest growing religious affiliation in America is “none” now comprising nearly one third of the adult population.  In at least a dozen developed countries, including America, between twenty five and sixty five percent of the population reject the concept of “life after death.”  By any statistical assessment, religiosity is declining and atheism is ascending in all but the poorest nations of the world.

Evangelical Christians are failing to accomplish the assignments given to them long ago by Jesus Christ [Great Commandment (Mat 22:36-40), Great Commission (Mat 28:18-20), Healing (Luke 9:2, 10:9)].  Could it be that evangelical Christians concentrate on ritual faithfulness instead of Great Commission fruitfulness?  ‘Well done my good and faithful servant’ are the words each Christian hopes to hear from Jesus; but, someday, American Christians might hear instead, ‘My Church effectively died in America on your watch; I am holding you responsible.’

Could it be that traditional outreach practices (i.e. invite your neighbor to church, workplace evangelism, friendship evangelism, door to door witnessing, etc.) are marginally effective in 21st century America?  Could it be that the motives of those who deliver the Christian message are frequently viewed with deep suspicion and mistrust?  Perhaps Christians worldwide could rediscover an ancient approach unaffected by motives and independent of marketing strategies.  That approach would be logic and reason.

Is Christianity grounded in the events of history, the facts of science, the rules of logic or any reasonable concept of truth?  Supportive evidence has been available for decades but it was often concealed in a web of unsound science, false logic and personal truth.

By 1960, the victory of science over Christianity was nearly complete.  Jesus Christ was a mythical crutch for ignorant, illogical, weak-willed, neurotic people who couldn’t cope with life.  In that era, intellectuals embraced the following:

• Although some evidence supports the idea that the universe had a beginning, the steady state theory is alive and well!
• The earth should be viewed as an insignificant, meaningless speck in a universe vast beyond comprehension.
• The moral law is a product of biological evolution or learned social behavior.
• Life appeared spontaneously by random chance from non-living matter (abiogenesis).
• The gradual evolution of complex life from primitive life can be explained by Survival of the Fittest (biological evolution).

But, by 1985, the evidence supported different views:

• The universe began at a definite point in time (The Big Bang).
• The universe appears to exist as a home for us since the slightest change in any one of its fundamental properties would preclude our existence (The Anthropic Principle).
• The moral law appears to have been written on our primitive consciousness.
• The spontaneous generation of first life from non-living matter cannot be explained by any known scientific process.
• Primitive life does not exist; the blueprint for any type of life is incredibly complex. Furthermore, the overall fitness of a creature can neither be measured nor computed since no paradigm exists for reducing the creature to a calculable whole.

Obstacles to Christianity based on physics, chemistry and biology were substantially neutered in less than a generation.  During roughly the same time period, Freud’s attack on Christianity, as a dangerous mental disorder which should be replaced by psychoanalysis, was also dismantled by evidence.  In the absence of new arguments, intellectuals continue to attack Christianity using discredited concepts from the 1960’s.  But with actual barriers substantially removed, the truth seeker is free to evaluate Christianity based on classical logic, sound reason and the evidence of Scripture, personal experience and great traditions of the church.

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