The Quiet Decay Inside Good Churches, Part One
There’s a specific type of “decay,” and I choose that word carefully, that’s been happening in American evangelicalism for quite a while. This “decay” isn’t the same kind that comes out of seeker-sensitive churches and the rest of the entertainment-driven evangelical machine. That stuff has been written about for decades. There’s another issue I want to address, and I believe it’s happening more and more inside the walls of good churches.
This problem has more than one layer to it, and trying to handle the whole thing in a single article would do the subject a disservice. So I’ve broken this into two parts. This first article deals with the loss of reverence itself. It looks at how a church can hold to sound doctrine while slowly losing reverence before God, and how that loss begins to show up in the way we speak and how we fill our church calendar. The second article, which will be released on Thursday, May 14, deals with what comes next when that decay is left alone, especially in how a church receives new members and decides how to select leadership.
When I say good churches, I mean the conservative ones. The churches with expositional preaching and sound doctrine, with pastors who actually believe the things they preach. These are the churches that you and I would recommend to people, where the preaching is solid and, by every external measure, the church is operating as a faithful church should.
And yet, somehow, in these same churches, the reverence for God that once marked His people has slowly taken a back seat. Good churches can lose reverence without losing their doctrine, and that’s what makes this hard to see. The signs of the “decay” aren’t obvious, but the result is a Christianity that holds the right doctrine on paper but no longer trembles before the God it confesses.
A lot of churches that should know better have lost their reverence for God.
But, before we look at how this happened, we need to start in Isaiah 6.
Isaiah sees the Lord seated on His throne, high and lifted up, and the train of His robe fills the temple. Above Him are the seraphim, whose first instinct in the presence of God isn’t to look at His face. Instead, they cover their own faces with two wings, and their feet with two more, and with the remaining two, they fly. As they fly, they call out the only word that adequately describes what they see.
Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of His glory.
(Isaiah 6:3)
Their voices shake the threshold of the doorway, smoke fills the temple, and Isaiah sees himself clearly for the first time.
“Woe is me, for I am ruined, he cries, because I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips. For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.”
(Isaiah 6:5)
That’s the response of a man who saw holiness and became undone. Isaiah collapsed and confessed his inadequacy in the strongest words his language had available.
We don’t see that anymore, and when the holiness of God disappears from the life of the church, reverence dies, and what’s left is a Christianity that uses the language but doesn’t take it seriously.
Before we go any further, the doctrine has to be put back on the table, because most Christians have inherited a version of holiness that doesn’t hold up to what Scripture actually teaches.
Holiness, in the Bible, isn’t just a moral category. It’s also an ontological one. The Hebrew word qadosh and its Greek equivalent hagios both carry the meaning of separation. To call something holy in the biblical sense is to say that it’s been set apart. When Scripture calls God holy, the first thing it’s saying is that God isn’t like us. He isn’t a bigger version of human goodness with more power or wisdom. He is the Creator, not the creature, self-existent and set apart from everything He has made.
R.C. Sproul, in his book The Holiness of God, gives several pages to explaining why the seraphim repeat the word three times in Isaiah 6. Hebrew didn't have superlatives the way English does, so to make something the highest degree of itself, you said it three times. Sproul writes,
"On a handful of occasions, the Bible repeats something to the third degree." -R.C. Sproul, The Holiness of God
Holiness is the one attribute of God elevated to that level. Sproul said,
"The Bible never says that God is love, love, love; or mercy, mercy, mercy; or wrath, wrath, wrath." -R.C. Sproul, The Holiness of God
It says He is holy, holy, holy, and it’s the strongest statement the Hebrew language could make about anything in existence.
The moral aspect of holiness is bound up with the ontological one. Because God is separate from creation, He’s also separate from the corruption that entered creation through the fall. His moral purity isn’t an added feature in Him, but part of the beauty of who He is. He can’t be tempted by evil because there is no evil in Him, and He can’t look on sin with favor because sin rebels against the order He established. Habakkuk 1:13 says,
Your eyes are too pure to see evil, And You cannot look on trouble.
(Habakkuk 1:13)
That doesn’t mean God is unaware of evil, God sees all things. It means He can’t look at evil with approval. That’s a statement about the kind of being God actually is.
The Puritan Stephen Charnock wrote that “holiness is the crown of all his attributes, the life of all his decrees, and the brightness of all his actions. Nothing is decreed by him and nothing is acted by him that is not consistent with the beauty of his holiness.”
Charnock argued that of all God’s attributes, holiness is the one the angels most insist on in their worship. They don’t cry out Eternal, eternal, eternal or Mighty, mighty, mighty. They cry out Holy, holy, holy. That’s the attribute through which all the others are seen.
The “decay” we’re tracing is the natural consequence of a church that's stopped taking seriously what Scripture actually teaches about who God is, even when the church still confesses the doctrine on paper.
The good church doesn’t fall into irreverence the way a seeker-sensitive church does. There’s no fog machine, and the pastor isn’t walking out in a hoodie with an energy drink. The music is generally traditional, and the preaching is most often expositional. By every external metric, the church is operating the way a faithful church should.
And yet, somehow, the reverence for God you should be able to identify has slowly taken a back seat. No one would immediately agree with that, and most members of these churches don’t want to admit such a thing about their own. But hear me out.
The first place you’ll notice this is in the vernacular used. This is something I learned from my friend, Jim Osman, in his book God Doesn’t Whisper. The basic premise is this. A pastor, let’s say a man I respect, who pastors a church I’d recommend, will sometimes catch himself saying that he “felt led” to a particular conclusion, or that he “sensed God saying” something during his prayer time. He’ll talk about having “a peace about” something, or about how the Lord “put it on his heart” to make a particular call.
Now, he doesn’t mean what a charismatic pastor would mean by those phrases. He’d be the first to defend the sufficiency of Scripture and the closing of the canon. If pressed, he would probably say he meant providence or wisdom. But that isn’t what he said. The language has slipped into his vernacular anyway, because the language has so thoroughly saturated American evangelical culture that even careful men borrow it without realizing they’re borrowing it.
But language shapes thought. When the words we use to describe a believer’s relationship with God are imported from a movement that takes God’s holiness less seriously, those words pull the whole notion of God in a direction the careful pastor never intended. The congregation, hearing the sermon, picks up on the speech and starts using the same phrases at home and with their friends. The kids in the youth group hear the phrases used by their parents and assume they’re the standard Christian vocabulary. By the time anyone notices, if they ever do, the reality of God’s holiness has weakened across the entire congregation, even though the church or its leaders never changed or moved from their doctrinal beliefs.
That same tendency shows up in how we pray. A faithful man will stand up to pray during service, and he’ll begin with, “Hey God, just want to say thanks for this beautiful day.” The casualness isn’t nefarious, and the man would never describe himself as irreverent. The rest of his prayer may even be sincere and biblical, but it started in a way the seraphim in Isaiah 6 wouldn’t recognize as worship.
These are small things, I realize. And each one taken in isolation looks like a minor preference issue. But the damage comes not from one small issue, but from the cumulative effect. A thousand small decisions about how we address God and how we describe Him will eventually produce a church in which the language of careful reverence is replaced by the language of casual acquaintance.
That’s the first layer of the “decay,” and most members of the church it’s happening to never notice.
The second layer is even harder to see, and it does even more damage when it isn’t addressed. The language issue I just described is something a discerning member can notice, but this next issue is something most members never notice at all. That’s because this whole structure looks and feels faithful, and the church itself has been operating like this for so long that nobody questions whether this is right and healthy.
This structure is ultimately best described as busyness. Specifically, the framework I’m talking about is the exchange of activity for reverence as the way the church measures the spiritual life of its members.
A solid church can fill its calendar with activities that are good things to be a part of. Their youth group may get together and perform a service project for some of the more senior members of the congregation. Or, the men of the church may gather for breakfast and fellowship on a regular basis. Or the women of the church may have regular, weekly Bible studies. Someone is always planning the next event, so the calendar stays full months in advance. None of those activities is wrong. Many of them are unambiguously good for the spiritual life of the church when they’re held in proper balance.
The problem isn’t the events and activities themselves. The problem is what these events and activities have come to mean.
In a church where the holiness of God has faded from the heart of corporate life, the activity itself starts to function as a proxy. The believer who can’t articulate what real, tangible reverence is will tend to appraise his spiritual life by his calendar. He’ll calculate the events he’s been to this month and the service projects he signed up for, and that total will be his standard of faithfulness. Don’t misunderstand me. Those metrics aren’t wicked, but they also aren’t a matter of reverence for God.
Now, I want to be careful here, because the temptation in writing this kind of thing is to swing the pendulum in the other direction and end up implying that involvement at church is somehow questionable. That’s not what I’m saying at all.
And let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the day drawing near.
(Hebrews 10:24-25)
Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.
(Galatians 6:2)
And they were continually devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers. And fear came upon every soul; and many wonders and signs were taking place through the apostles. And all those who had believed were together and had all things in common; and they began selling their property and possessions and were dividing them up with all, as anyone might have need. And daily devoting themselves with one accord in the temple and breaking bread from house to house, they were taking their meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord was adding to their number daily those who were being saved.
(Acts 2:42-47)
The New Testament expects active and ongoing involvement in the life of the local church, and any reading of what I’m saying that treats it as permission to be uninvolved has misread it.
The point is that participation was never meant to be the primary measure of a man’s spiritual life. The man who’s busy at church every day of the week and hasn’t been still before the Lord in months has exchanged the work of the church for the worship of God, and that replacement does appear faithful, especially when the heart of the man is to serve the church and the Lord.
But we’re missing a vital detail that Luke 10 makes clear. Martha was distracted serving, and the verb the text uses is a strong verb. It’s the word perispáo, which means to be over-occupied or too busy with the work she’d taken on. Mary, on the other hand, was sitting at the Lord’s feet, listening to His word. When Martha complains that Mary is leaving her to do the serving alone, Jesus says to her,
“Martha, Martha, you are worried and bothered about so many things, but only one thing is necessary, for Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her.”
(Luke 10:41-42)
Is that not what the modern church has reversed? In our churches, Martha is the model member, and Mary is the one we’d worry about and pray for. Jesus’s verdict is exactly the opposite of how the modern church functions, and the difference is one of the clearest signs that something has gone wrong with our standards.
So we come to the question of what to do with all of this. If a man reads what I’ve written and recognizes his own church, what follows now must be practical. A few thoughts to leave you with..
The first is your own communication. The vernacular issue I described doesn’t start and end with the pastor. The members of the church pick it up and carry it home, and from there it spreads. Which means a member who’s reading this with conviction has to start by listening to himself before he listens to anyone else. The phrases I described are likely already in your own vocabulary. If they are, the place to start is to take them out and replace them with words that mean what you actually mean. If you mean providence, say providence. If you mean that you prayed and made the best decision you could with the information available to you, say that. Replacing careless language with careful language is one of the few things every member can do without anyone’s permission.
The second thing concerns corporate prayer. You may not be the one asked to pray during service, but you probably will be at some point, in some setting. When that time comes, the casual speech and greetings are something you can’t do. You don’t have to read from the Book of Common Prayer to address God reverently. You just have to remember who you’re speaking to and let your first words reflect that. Some of the older men in your church already pray this way. Listen to how they pray, and when it’s your turn, follow their pattern instead of the pattern that’s become so common and irreverent.
The third thing is harder, because it insists on a conversation. If you’ve recognized the speech issue in your pastor, or if you’ve noticed the busyness problem in the way your church mainly operates, the right step is to have a respectful, private conversation with your pastor or one of your elders. Be specific about what you’ve noticed and bring the texts that informed your concern. Go in to ask honest questions and express what you’ve seen, and then trust the leadership to receive it the way faithful leadership should. They may receive it well, but they also may not. But the conversation itself is part of being a faithful member, and it costs you nothing to have it the right way.
The fourth thing is the calendar. The draw to be involved in everything is genuine, and a faithful member can’t pull back from the life of his church to protect his soul, because Hebrews 10 won’t let him. But he also doesn’t have to say yes to every request. The man who serves on six committees and signs up for every event is going to find that the depth of his fellowship with the Lord isn’t what it once was, and the way to address that is to evaluate what he’s actually been called to do and what he’s been recruited into because the church needed bodies. Stay involved in what genuinely fits the gifts God’s given you.
None of these things will fix a church on their own. But every one of them is a faithful response from a man who’s seen the problem and refuses to add to it.
That's the first half of what I want to address. The “decay” of reverence inside the walls of good churches is the foundation for everything else, but it doesn't stop with the vernacular used or the church calendar. When a church functions like this long enough, this will work its way into how new members are treated and shaped and how future leaders are chosen. I'll address that in the next article, releasing Thursday, May 14.
In His Service,
I talk about Jesus and the Bible a lot. Sometimes on the radio, sometimes to people who willingly show up to listen. Occasionally, I write things down.
Before You Go
Word of mouth predates every distribution platform ever built and still outperforms them. When someone sends you an article, you’re more likely to take it seriously because you trust the person who sent it. So, you’re not starting from scratch.. you already have a reason to give it your attention.
Most of the people who read this got here that way. Passing something along like that is still the most helpful thing you can do.