I think that the most important challenge facing the American
evangelical church today is to retake the ground that has been lost by the
mainstream denominations in American culture since the 1950s. Over the last
several decades the old mainline denominations, like the Episcopalians, the
United Methodists, the Congregationalists, the Catholics, and so on have been going
into steep decline. They are losing members every year, their seminaries are
closing, or coalescing to try to stay open. These mainline denominations, who
have largely abandoned the preaching of the gospel, are in free fall, and hence you
have the rise of the so-called "nones," those who respond "none" when their
religious affiliation is asked for on a survey. These formerly nominal Christians
have I think come rightly to see that there's just no reason to give lip
service to some sort of a religion that you don't really believe in, and there's
no reason to participate in that kind of a religion. And so the mainline
denominations are in this catastrophic decline in our culture. The result of
this is that the influence of Christianity upon our culture has just
waned in the kind of crudeness, violence, promiscuity, sexual explicitness,
profanity, incivility that characterizes contemporary American culture, and I
think that it is vitally important for the church to try to regain
the ground that has been lost by the mainline denominations. They're not going
to come back, but I think it is possible for evangelical Christians, through
aggressive evangelism and effective apologetics and engagement with the
public square to commend biblical faith to people in such a way that could lead
to revival and to a turning to God on the part of many people in our culture
that would be a kind of leavening effect of Christianity on American culture. And
this is so important because as the culture goes, so goes the Christian
influence; our culture will shape people's receptivity to the gospel. Jan
and I lived for 13 years in Europe in 4 different countries, and we saw there the
effect of a culture of overwhelming secularism upon people's openness to the
gospel. For many of these secularists you might as well tell them to believe in
fairies or leprechauns as in Jesus Christ.
That's how absurd it appears to them. Now in the United States we have
not drifted that far yet, but there is advancing secularism as a result of the
collapse of the mainline denominations, and if we want the gospel to continue to
be heard as a reasonable option for thinking men and women,
I think it's vitally important that we reclaim this lost ground. And so I would
urge every listener to this interview to be engaged culturally, whether on the
internet, or in grade school or high school, at the
university, on the job, in letters to the editor, the newspaper, call in radio
programs, whatever way you can to be culturally engaged to be salt and light
for the gospel in a decaying culture.