Shrinking churches preach incomplete message

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Why are some churches dying while others are prospering?

A very long time ago, some 750 years before the birth of Christ, there lived a prophet in the land of Israel whose name was Hosea. He lived among the breakaway 10 tribes that had revolted from the house of David and had made themselves a king called Jeroboam.

They no longer worshipped at the temple in Jerusalem but had set up the worship of golden calves at a city called Dan. This kingdom was eventually destroyed and the inhabitants carried into captivity by the Assyrians.

At one point in his ministry, Hosea said, "Israel has forgotten his maker, and builds temples." I thought of this comment from this prophet from ancient times as I read the article by John Longhurst in the Christmas weekend Free Press in the FYI section. In it, he bemoans the parlous state of many inner-city churches. Large, ornate buildings, many of them very old, are beginning to fall apart, and small and aging congregations are unable to meet the financial requirements of their upkeep.

Longhurst seems to be advocating taxpayer-funded support to maintain these old churches, which are no longer able to maintain themselves via the collection plate. This solution, largely based on sentiment, would make these churches wards of the state. He asks, at one point, why congregations are diminishing and answers his own question by saying people no longer want to go to church. But he never asks why.

Leaving aside all the man-made denominational divisions, the church in its origins is an other-world spiritual, supernatural entity. It began with the descent of the Spirit of God at Pentecost and expanded and grew by the preaching of a crucified and resurrected Jesus Christ. Whether the rank and file of humanity want to accept the fact of the fallen state of man and the provision by god of a saviour, that is the ground on which the preaching of the gospel began, which resulted in the formation of the church.

This church was not a building but a community of believers. That they likely met in a building, was evidently, to the early church, an irrelevancy. It was later, as spiritual fervour began to wane, that building large, ornate places of worship took over, no doubt owing a good deal to the feeling of envy Christians had of the pagan temples around them.

Many churches no longer preach the gospel of a crucified and risen Christ. I have no way of knowing, short of going to a Sunday service in each of these churches, just what they preach. I am sure there are many fine people in every one of them. But the fact is that not all inner-city churches are having financial problems. There are some, very old churches that are doing very well indeed, a fact that Longhurst didn't say much about. So the question may well be asked: Why are some churches dying while others are prospering?

While there may be many reasons, it seems that at least part of the answer is in what message the church is proclaiming.

Is it a message of the love of God as revealed in Christ, or is it social gospel whose main content is concern with societal issues? I know of one large church in the very heart of downtown, which shall remain nameless, and of which I am not a member, that has a very large and active membership and no financial troubles that I have heard of. They preach a clear and unequivocal message of man's fallen state and need of a saviour, and those who want to hear that message, and they are many, flock to hear it.

There is a saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Would old Hosea nod knowingly if he were able to read John Longhurst's lament and proposed solution? I think he would.

John Beckham is a Winnipeg writer.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 15, 2011 H13