Blog

When I was a young pastor, I used to bemoan how evangelical Christians, and I considered myself one, were portrayed in the press and popular culture. Evangelicals were described as morally rigid, stiff and unyielding, firmly placing people, events and cultural phenomena into right or wrong, black or white columns in our Christian ledgers. Dana Carvey’s hilarious portrayal of The Church Lady on NBC’s Saturday Night Live in the late 1980s provides the perfect visual.

Now, however, evangelicals are increasingly likely to be accused of moral relativism. We appear to be warming ourselves at the enemy’s fire, just as Peter did after Jesus’ arrest ( Luke 22:55), setting the stage for Christ’s crucifixion all over again. We are considered only too happy to become political bedmates with any politician or cause for the sake of expediency, as long as it promotes a narrow spectrum of core issues near and dear to the evangelical heart.

As reporter Eugene Scott noted in an analysis piece in The Washington Post in 2018, Jerry Falwell Jr. has called President Trump, who would have been an unlikely choice for evangelical support by evangelicals’ past standards, the “perfect President.” Scott also observed, “For many evangelical voters, moving America forward means continuing to support the most antiabortion candidate regardless of his track record on any other moral issue.” Scott went on to cite white evangelical support for Senate candidate Roy Moore in a 2017 special election in Alabama as a case in point, despite the allegations of  Moore sexually assaulting teenage girls in a previous decade.

Many of us may disagree with Eugene Scott, or the secular media at large, but we can’t ignore the ramifications these perceptions, right or wrong, have on our next generations. It’s already a struggle to reach them, regardless of how Christians and the church culturally present themselves. The Pew Research Center has reported more than a third of young adults are religiously unaffiliated. In fact, 36 percent of the youngest millennials, born between 1990 and 1996, are religious “nones” (they say they are atheists or agnostics, or their religion is “nothing in particular”). That’s twice the percentage of my own age category.

It’s not just the “nones” that concern me, however. Young adults who were brought up within a faith community are also choosing to walk away. According to Barna, millennials who opt out of church do so for three primary reasons: the church’s irrelevance, its hypocrisy, and moral failures within its leadership.

As Jesus followers we may not care what The Washington Post, CNN or Fox News has to say, but we had better never forget the forward momentum of the revolutionary kingdom will stop dead in its tracks if we lose the generations who must carry the mission of Christ forward.

*Blog excerpted in part from Revolutionary Kingdom: following the Rebel Jesus.

Mike Slaughter, pastor emeritus and global church ambassador for Ginghamsburg Church, served for nearly four decades as the lead pastor and chief dreamer of Ginghamsburg and the spiritual entrepreneur of ministry marketplace innovations. Mike is also the founder and chief strategist of Passionate Churches, LLC, which specializes in developing pastors, church staff and church lay leaders through coaching, training, consulting and facilitation services. Mike’s call to “afflict the comfortable” challenges Christians to wrestle with God and their God-destinies. Mike’s latest book Revolutionary Kingdom: following the Rebel Jesus is available on Amazon and Cokesbury.