ViaCrucis
Confessional Lutheran
- Oct 2, 2011
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I don't know how it is in Australia, Canada, the UK, or the other major English-speaking nations. But in the US there is a growing epidemic of "churchless Christianity".
According to the Barna Group which tracks things like this, if one were to take all the unchurched people in the US ("unchurched" refers to anyone who hasn't attended a Christian religious service in the last six months, excepting things like weddings or funerals), including children/teenagers, it is around 156 million. If the unchurched in the US were an independent nation, it would be the 8th largest by population. This would be one thing if this were about non-Christians; but Barna also says that of the unchurched adults, 62% identify themselves with Christianity.
I'm sure there are indeed lots of factors involved with why. But I think more relevant here is what churchlessness is doing, and how it is harmful.
Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote of what he called "cheap grace",
"Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate."
But what happens when we move a step even further away? "Grace" without the Gospel? "Grace" without the Sacraments? When not it isn't even the lack of discipleship and discipline--that the call of Christ is "Come and die"--but the rejection of Communion, the rejection of what our Baptism means, the rejection of the Call itself (and the Call cannot be lived outside of the Church, for the Call is very explicitly the Call to come into the Church and partake of what her Lord has gifted her)--then what actually is left?
This isn't me judging people who simply haven't been to church in a while. I know as well as anyone that life gets complicated, and what we want to do, and what we actually do, don't always coincide--whether through circumstance or sinful laziness (and I am certainly guilty of the latter).
Rather this is about the intentional rejection; it's not implicit churchlessness but explicit. That is churchless Christianity; and I use "Christianity" here very loosely. Because I think a major affect that this has is "Christianity" as a cultural identifier, it's just a form of identity politics. It's political, it's cultural, but it can hardly be called religion. Indeed, "religion" can be seen as itself a gross word. But Christianity without religion is Christianity without the Cross, Christianity without Grace, Christianity without the Commandments, Christianity without the Empty Tomb.
-CryptoLutheran
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