Interesting study on both the scope of the unchurched (100 million in the US) and the reasons why they don’t go (Hat Tip to T19). Two quotes:
“Based on past studies of those who avoid Christian churches, one of the driving forces behind such behavior is the painful experiences endured within the local church context. In fact, one Barna study among unchurched adults shows that nearly four out of every ten non-churchgoing Americans (37%) said they avoid churches because of negative past experiences in churches or with church people.”
“The solution, according to Mansfield, is forgiveness – the same forgiveness that Jesus offers to each of us who have wounded Him. Christianity, after all, is about receiving freedom through God’s forgiveness extended to us.”
Also on topic, our upcoming speaker Rod Rosenblatt’s piece “The Gospel For Those Broken By The Church” and our beloved and late Internet Monk’s “Why we must embrace our brokenness and never be good Christians”.
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4 responses to “Millions of Unchurched Adults Are Christians Hurt by Churches”
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This reminds me of Tim Keller's sermon at http://tinyurl.com/y777nke where he says that to get to Jesus we have to "Climb up tree…and get over crowd…"
I'm all for forgiveness, but what?! I'm a little disturbed that all four paragraphs in the original article that cite Mansfield have him asking those hurt by churches to forgive. What about asking churches to stop hurting people? Surely it's best for everyone if no-one got hurt to begin with! Maybe Mansfield addresses this in his book and I should really be angry at whoever wrote that article for not going deep enough, but as it stands, the article pushes an agenda that will only hurt people even more.
I cannot speak to the American situation, but if believer's are being 'hurt' by erroneous teaching, then there's something more key required – a rejection of the error!
There simply is no place for 'another gospel' in the church, and those who advocate and enforce to such doctrine are the ravenous wolves, the angels of light so clearly warned about by Paul and others. The most 'loving' thing we can do with our lives in the context of such an onslaught is to continue to speak the Truth in Love, and earnestly contend for THE Faith once delivered to the saints by standing fast in the Liberty of the Gospel of reconciliation, and take whatever action is required to affirm this.
Thanks a lot Arni. I thought the same thing — hard to tell exactly what Mansfield really says from that article without getting the book.
But certainly you — and also Howard — are right. If there are deep systemic problems to a church that could in fact be changed, then YES! These should be changed! So for example the systemic problems of the Roman Catholic Church (in the US, in Ireland, etc.) that has led to children being so terribly hurt — well this is just an awful problem that has to be fixed.
Likewise Howard is right about the way that certain kinds of TEACHING can be terribly cruel to Christians. Our beloved Fitz Allison (THE CRUELTY OF HERESY) and Rod Rosenbladt ("The Gospel for Those Broken By The Church"), both of whom just spoke at The Mockingbird conference, would agree with Howard 100%, as would other friends of MB like Mike Horton (CHRISTLESS CHRISTIANITY). These teachings are cruel in themselves, and what is worse they can lead to treating people in ways that are terrible. (All three of the fellows I mentioned above see this happening in both "conservative" and "liberal" churches.
One of the things that we at MB are trying to do, clumsily much of the time, is trying to stay very rooted in the Gospel given to us by St. Paul and the four Evangelists — the forgiveness of bound miserable sinners via the shed blood of Jesus — while also finding intentional ways to reach out to those people who have been crushed by the church and have a deep distrust of Christians.
OK — end of short radio commercial for MB (grin).
All that said — and remember I am 100% on board with you about church reform — where Mansfield might be coming in those few soundbites is something else we connect with here, and that is the belief that Christianity is for SINNERS and that people stay very bad even after they start going to church. Those bad people are also going to include rectors, sunday school teachers, people on the vestry! The fancy term for our MB approach is to say we have a Low Anthropology. We expect Christians to continue to screw up — badly. And so maybe what Mansfield was getting at there is that aspect of mutual injury that comes with being human when Christians (terrible sinners) try to be in relationship with each other.
For sure, ALWAYS look to see how you can make the institution better. But with the remainder of the awfulness, the stuff that no amount of institutional fixing will prevent, accept that part of our Christian life together means just exactly learning how to forgive one another, over and over and over again.