Why?

So it’s been awhile since I posted. I was out of town acting as a coach for a seminar for church planters. What a challenge! Not being a coach, but just seeing the commitment of those individuals and couples who were going to go into communities to bring the good news of God’s love, most of them with no salaries at all.

All of this has me asking myself what is going on in the US. I mean, at a time when Christianity is widely perceived as good news in most of the developing world, why is it that it seems to be dying in Europe and barely holding its own in the US? Oh, I know the typical explanations. Probably the most popular is that the increase of scientific knowledge has left fewer and fewer places for God to live. We no longer have need of an external power in a world where so much is explainable in natural terms. But somehow, that seems hollow to me. I mean, sure, we have been able to identify many of the natural processes in our world, but that is like saying that because I understand how my car runs – from the internal combustion process to the method of manufacture, that it is all naturally occurring and has always been here in one form or another. The fact is that this cosmos is a contingent existent – cause and effect are the order of the day throughout. Science has been able to follow the chain of causation back to just a few moments after it all got started to a thing called the “big bang.” Now, all of this is old news – but what it seems to say to me is that everything came from somewhere else. There must be some kind of uncaused thing or being that got the whole thing started.

Of course, none of this means that there is a God, let alone that Christianity is true. But that brings me to the thing that I just cannot get past – the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As an historian, as well as a person who deals with people all the time, it is inconceivable to me that multiple people would have insisted that they had seen Jesus crucified, buried and then alive again when they were faced with torture and death unless it was true. I know that there were similar claims for others, but never were those making the claim faced with the kind of torture and death that the first generation of Christian leadership was. And yet, that first generation, and all subsequent ones, have all insisted that Jesus really rose from the dead and is alive to this day, and that faith in him makes a genuine difference in one’s life.

So what is going on? Some think that it is the unwillingness of people to give up their lifestyles – something they think would be required if they become Christians. Others say that the real deficit is in church attendance, not faith. I suspect that the latter is true. So why? Why do people not want to attend church anymore? I would love to hear from anyone who thinks they have an answer. In the meantime, keep the faith!