The American Church: Episode #4

In this episode we talk about how the American Church has evolved alongside our countries history.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hey guys, Jake here. Before we get started with today's episode, I just wanted to give a little heads up. This episode, my mic does have some audio problems with some cutting in, cutting out. Ryan's audio came out perfectly. But if you're listening and my audio just suddenly cuts out and goes back in, just want to give you guys that fair warning. Still new to this, uh, next episode won't be a prom, I promise. Anyways, guys, enjoy the episode. We'll see you later.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

Welcome to the Green Dragon Podcast. My name is Ryan Collins. I am here with Jake Kotke. How you doing, Jake? I'm doing good. How are you? I'm doing great. We've just spent way too much time laughing.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Yes. It's a comedy show every every time before we start an actual show.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Just talking about potential sponsors for the show.

SPEAKER_01 0:46

Well, uh, how have you been, Jake? I'm in good. Um the wife had an ultrasound today. All right. Baby's great, baby's healthy. Good. Yeah. Maybe baby's got big lips.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

Is that what the is that what the doctor said? Big lips.

SPEAKER_01 1:04

Uh that's what that's what the photo looks like. Yeah, I don't know how they make up any.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

Maybe the baby will grow into it. Yeah, those ultrasound texts, they can see all kinds of stuff, and I'm like, I have no idea what I'm looking at. I see that there's something in there.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

Yeah. It can honestly just be fake. It gets to be pulled. They just make things images from like AI, and I'm like, oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:23

It's like the forehead, and they're like, yeah, here's the uh here's the the eye, one of the eyes. It's like what?

SPEAKER_01 1:29

Yeah, it's zoomed into it.

SPEAKER_00 1:30

Does anyone really know like we confirm that? Well, it's been a while. It's been a while since we've recorded, and uh, we have already broken our promise of every other week. Yep. All right, it's every other week. Is that is that the original promise? That was the plan I think we said in episode zero.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

I meant to say every other like month. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:51

Uh yeah, yeah. We got busy. Yeah, we just got busy. And then we had sickness roll through, at least in my home, we had a lot of sickness roll through, and it was just kind of this rolling sickness that just wiped out people at a time, and then it wreaked turned, and yeah, it was just crazy. So life got ahead of us, and we just weren't able to record. So we apologize about the delay. Uh, we do want to try to keep to our every other week episode. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 2:22

And if you're one of the five listeners who is waiting on Monday, we apologize. We apologize. We doubt you exist.

SPEAKER_00 2:29

Yeah, yeah. We want to think there's five. At least. One is my wife. Okay, well, that's good. Yeah. I'd like to say one is my wife.

SPEAKER_01 2:39

Well, we'll see if she listens so much.

SPEAKER_00 2:43

But there's probably somebody that was looking, all right, I'm ready to go. Yeah. And you just waited and waited.

SPEAKER_01 2:53

Refashioned the Instagram.

SPEAKER_00 2:55

And then the week went by, and uh, yeah, it's just been it's been a long go. So we apologize, but we are going to uh try and get back going now that everybody's healthy and schedules are less so busy. They're still busy, but you know, what can you do?

SPEAKER_01 3:14

And we'll make it up with this episode, right, Ryan?

SPEAKER_00 3:16

Yeah, yeah. It's gonna be a shorter episode. I mean, you would think that we would have this grand episode for you, but uh this was yeah, you know, you know the statistic, like you know, like 90% podcast fell after three episodes.

SPEAKER_01 3:32

We made it past the third episode and we thought we were in the clean.

SPEAKER_00 3:35

We were good. We were good. No, no, it is gonna be a shorter episode today, and that and that's because we don't want those hour and 10-minute episodes or hour episodes to be the norm, because that wasn't our original plan, right? Like, like our our original goal was to have like 40-minute episodes, and so um, so it's gonna feel shorter today, and it's probably gonna be shorter today because the reality is that we're winding down on this kind of introduction period that we're in. Um, you know, we've been diagnosing the problem in our country, and we're still diagnosing the problem that we're in, but we are gonna come to a to an end with this kind of diagnosis so that we can begin to kind of plod forward in talking about more specific issues and subjects and how we can be equipped as Christians in that. But, you know, for episodes now, a few episodes, we've been kind of just talking about the cultural drift that's happened in this country, right? We've told the story of our country's origins, that it was a Christian nation, uh, built on a Christian foundation with a Christian moral framework and Christian vocabulary. And we've also kind of shown through statistics and and different uh categories uh where uh and how things have have turned. Um and now what we want to do with this episode is we want to kind of look at what the church was doing while all this was, you know, while all this happened. Because I think it's easy to point fingers outward, right? Like it's the politicians, uh, it's Hollywood, it's the universities, right? Pointing the finger at culture is easy to do, but scripture calls God's people to examine themselves first, right? Judgment begins with the household of God. And so what we want to do is we want to take just a kind of a sober look, very brief sober look at how the church oftentimes unintentionally helped create the very conditions that we're now mourning. And maybe didn't help create, but allowed to create, right? Like they they kind of took a more passive role. And of course, before we get started, like not every church bears responsibility for this, right? Uh I'm talking about the church, but I don't mean every church, every local church, because there's some great churches out there, a lot of great churches in America. But but really what I want to just highlight are the trends, some of the trends that have happened in the American church as a whole, um, and and where things started to go wrong, and what the church began to emphasize was not conducive to, you know, maintaining a healthy Christian culture. And then we'll end the podcast episode with, you know, like what is repentance and renewal look like? Where do we go from here? And so that's what we're looking at today. We're looking at the church, uh, some trends and movements in the church that maybe allowed the culture to drift the way that it has. And then we'll uh we'll end with just a brief uh summation about what what we can do from here on out. What does the rebuild look like? What does renewal look like in the American church? So pull up a chair at the Green Dragon and let's talk about it. So, as we've been saying in the episodes uh leading up to this one, America's cultural drift didn't happen overnight, right? And the church's role, I would say, wasn't, you know, one single misstep, but it was just a series of um compromises that kind of snowballed over the decades, right? Because there were these trends and these movements that were happening within the church that uh that just led to one thing after another. Like for instance, in the mid-uh 20th century, you could say that evangelicalism um shifted its focus, right? It became more obsessed with decisions, decisions for Christ, rather than discipleship in Christ. So you had kind of this movement where revivalism replaced catechesis in the church, uh, and and then therefore emotional responses uh were suddenly uh, you know, more favored or uh desired than doctrinal formation in the church. And that's why you would have, you know, kind of this emphasis on walking the aisle, you know, like walk the aisle, the altar calls, you know, raise your hand. I can't tell you how many times I heard, you know, every head bowed, every eye closed, and then there was like that background music that would play, and then it was like raise your hand. And and that kind of movement, the walking the aisle, the raising the hand, that replaced the more like die to yourself, take up your cross, yeah, and follow Jesus. And and in that kind of trend, that trajectory, it resulted in millions of professing Christians with very thin and shallow doctrinal roots. And so you had professing Christians who ended up being easily swayed by by culture because ultimately speaking, they were never deeply formed by scripture. Yeah. Right? Yeah, they were deeply formed by emotionalism and experience, but not by scripture. And that kind of decisionism that the church entered into, it was a vastly different perspective than, you know, say, like the the perspective of the eighteenth century evangelist and preacher George Whitfield. Right. George Whitfield was a was a man who was very cautious of uh ironically of mass conversions and emotional responses to his preaching during the Great Awakening. In fact, he has this quote I have it here, it says, uh he once said, I think it was during a funeral, um, but he said something he said, that makes me so cautious now of dubbing converts too soon. Now I wait a little and see if people will bring forth fruit. For there are so many blossoms which march winds blow away that I cannot believe they are converts till I see fruit brought forth. So like George Whitfield essentially adopted this attitude of, you know, like we'll see, you know, like when it came to converts, like time will tell. Emotion itself wasn't evidence, only lasting fruit was what proved genuine conversion. And so Whitfield was a was an evangelist and a preacher that repeatedly warned that emotional responses during preaching were unreliable. And he warned that, you know, s many so-called converts would in fact fall away, and that only perseverance and only a transformed life are the things that validated true faith in the individual. And so he he refused to count decisions, or you know, like unlike, you know, unlike uh revivalists who kind of live off of those numbers, you know, God alone knows the human heart. And therefore the church should wait for fruit. And so if somebody were to ask George Whitfield, you know, how many were converted during your sermon, you know, or how many were converted during your ministry, he'd probably respond and say, Well, like, we'll we'll see in a few years, you know, it remains to be seen.

SPEAKER_01 10:55

It loose loose parallel, but kind of reminds me of like YouTube, right? You know, someone having a hundred thousand subscribers versus one million. Yeah. But the person with a hundred thousand has way more views and a higher attention span versus the million. Yep. No, it's kind of like a dumbed-down internet version of it, but it is a very similar.

SPEAKER_00 11:12

Yeah. Yeah. And so, but but evangelicals drifted from that perspective, which I think would be the the perspective of like kind of the pure it would it would be the perspective of the Puritans, the the the importance of bearing fruit and keeping with repentance and and and and weighing the profession of faith by one's life. What happens from them? Is there transformed life? Is is there new birth? You know, is there uh evidence of God's work of bringing a dead center to life in Christ? But evangelicals drifted from that and they began to rely more on mere decisions. And I think it's because they desired, you know, inflated numbers, because who doesn't like numbers? You know, they they want to have the the reports say one thing. And I th but I also think that resulted in shallow evangelism um and you know emotionalism to try and meet those numbers and manipulate the numbers. And so the church underwent this kind of fundamental change where they went from discipleship to decisionism. And it and at that same time as we talked about in the last episode in the mid-1950s, you know, America prospered, and out of America's prosperity, the churches began to think about prosperity as well, and they began to adopt kind of the same mindset. And so you began to see kind of this rise of consumer Christianity in the country that coming out of like you know, the the prosperous age of the the mid-1950s and the boom. You know, so you had this desire for bigger buildings and bigger programs and bigger crowds, and all of that leads to bigger budgets. Um but you know, bigger doesn't mean deeper. And so instead of the church asking, you know, what will form people into Christ likeness, the church started asking, what will attract more people? You know, what can we do to to attract more people? And it's sad to say, but when when the church does that, the church becomes a vendor. Right? And the people become customers. And it's just like, what what do you have to offer me? You know, what what am I able to take from you? Um and in that instance, discipleship becomes optional. And I think that problem still persists to this day where people or churches will go to great lengths to try and get people in through the doors, and then once you have them, it's like, well, you're gonna have to keep them with whatever you attracted them with. And so there was this kind of uh consumer Christianity and decisionism that was beginning to grow more popular in the country, and that still exists to this day. But th that wasn't the only problem, right? As the church lost its grip on its, you could say, its mission and biblical evangelism and a biblical view of conversion, the church was also losing its grip on the authority of scripture. Uh, you could say that the church was losing confidence in God's word. And when the church loses confidence in God's word, the culture will lose its compass, right? And I think one of the clearest examples of this kind of theological drift as it pertains to the authority of God's word was the rise of higher criticism. And it maybe you've never heard of higher criticism, but higher criticism is a scholarly approach that ultimately treats the Bible primarily as a human product. And it tries to explain the origins and the authorship and the sources and the historical development, all using the same methods applied to other ancient literature. And I would say foundationally that it assumes that the Bible didn't arrive at a as a unified, divinely revealed whole, but that it evolved over time through layers of tradition and layers of redaction and layers of different communities shaping the scriptures. And so it was a very much human-centered prod product. And one of the you know, examples that I like to go to with higher criticism is uh is something called the documentary hypothesis. And it was something that I was introduced to in higher education as I was going through you know seminary, uh Bible college and seminary, and the documentary hypothesis is the idea that the first five books of the Bible weren't written by Moses, but they were stitched together from you know, classically speaking, four different sources. They called the first source J, which stood for the Yahwist, the second source E, that stood for the Elohist, the third source D for Deuteronomist, and then the fourth source was P for Priestly. And each of those sources were written centuries apart from each other, and then they were edited into the form that we have today. And that idea originally came from this guy named Julius Wellhausen in the late 1800s, and it fit perfectly with the kind of the intellectual swing of the day where everything was being interpreted through an evolutionary lens. Yeah. You know, religion evolved, uh, morality evolved, cultures evolved. And so Wellhausen essentially said, well, if everything's in evolutionary swing, then Israel's religion must have re evolved too. And he built his theory around that assumption. And so he divided the Torah into four neat sources and claimed that you could slice the text apart, you know, like layers of a cake. It was nice and clean and tidy, but it was utterly wrong. Yeah, it was utterly wrong. And and and scholars knew it. Like by the mid-20th century, scholars started noticing some problems. Right? First, the criteria didn't work consistently. You know, one scholar would divide Genesis one way, another scholar would divide it completely different. And if your method then produces like 50 different results, then your method's not objective, right? Yeah. So you had the criteria not working consistently, and then you also had archaeology, archaeological discoveries that started pushing back because Wellhausen didn't believe that someone at Moses' time could have written something like the Torah, right? Because Israel was too primitive for that, you know, too illiterate, uh, you know, writing, language, things of that nature. It was just too primitive of a culture to produce what we have in the first five books of the Bible. But then you have these archaeological discoveries where you know you see that there were law codes that existed long before Israel, and there were covenant forms in in Deuteronomy that matched second millennium treaties. And so you had archaeology that started to prove that the text looked older, not newer. Yeah. And then by the uh 1970s and 1980s, that neat four source model had basically fallen apart. Right? Scholars couldn't agree where J ended and E began, or if E even existed, or if P was primary. Like there was so much discussion. And so then some people were arguing for 10 sources, some people were arguing for 20 sources, some said the Torah was, you know, this patchwork of tiny fragments, others said it was a core document, one core document with, you know, kind of layers added over time. It just became pure chaos. And so, like as they tried to dissect the text, uh the the less agreement they found. And then something happened, right? By the 1990s, a lot of scholars, including non-ev uh evangelicals, started saying, you know what? We we can't actually reconstruct these hypothetical sources, but what we can do is we can analyze the final form of the text. And that led to literary criticism, narrative criticism, canonical criticism. And these were all approaches that take the Torah as a coherent intentional work. And what do you know? The unity of the text started to shine. There were patterns and there were structures and themes and narrative arcs. All right, things that don't make sense is if you look at this kind of text as uh, you know, almost a Frankenstein, you know, made up of all these competing documents and fragments. And so they started to do some work on the text as a whole, and they began to see what it was. And today, you know, the classical documentary hypothesis that I was introduced to is basically dead in academic circles. You know, scholars still debate sources, um, it still continues to this day, it's nauseating, but there's no consensus anymore. You know, there's no clean model, there's no confidence that the original JEDP framework actually existed. And so the theory has evolved so much that it barely resembles the original form. And that's the point, right? Like that's like that that's that's where we're at. Like higher criticism as a whole, as a science, it pr it presents itself as this objective science. But the conclusions it reaches, it shifts. Right? It shifts with academic trends, it shifts with philosophical assumptions, it shifts with cultural pressures. It's not a stable authority. It's this like ever-moving target in the academic world. And and what happens is that you start with skepticism with the text rather than with scripture. And once you assume that the Bible cannot be what it claims to be, you'll always end up with you know the Bible looking more like your own imagination or your own assumptions rather than God's revelation. But you had this kind of movement of higher criticism that weakened the church's position on the authority of Scripture. Because this stuff was taught in seminaries. I was taught this in seminary and Bible college. And if it's taught in seminaries, then it's also held by pastors, and there's this trickle-down effect that happens. And so what happened is it wasn't just this academic mistake, it was a spiritual mistake. And you think about the fallout from this too, right? Like just think about it. If Moses didn't write the first five books of the Bible, then what do we do with Jesus when he mentions Moses writing? You know, like Jesus, Jesus says in John chapter 5, verses 46 and 47, he says, For if you believed Moses, you would believe me. For he wrote about me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words? So like if if Moses didn't in fact write, you know, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, what do we do with Jesus mentioning that Moses wrote? Well, then, you know, we say that Jesus just becomes this kind of culturally conditioned first century Jew. Well, if Jesus is a culturally conditioned first century Jew, then what do we do with Jesus? You know, like was he was he a rabbi? Was he just simply a revolutionary during his time? Was he just a really devout Jew? Okay, but more importantly, was he God? Was he really born of a virgin, like we read in the Gospels? What what did he really physically, bodily, visibly resurrect from the dead?

unknown 22:35

Right?

SPEAKER_00 22:35

It's open season, not just on the Torah, but on everything in the Bible, including Jesus. Right? What do we do with miracles? What do we do with him walking on water, changing water into wine? I mean, higher criticism in the seminaries and the church brought these kinds of discussions to the forefront, and that filtered its way out to society. And when the church treats the Bible like this, like it's a human product, then the culture will begin to treat it as irrelevant. And that's precisely what we saw happened. And then when biblical authority is weakened, it's just game over from there because what does the church do, right? It doesn't replace the scriptures with nothing. It starts speaking of the scriptures in a different way. It starts emphasizing different things. I think you could say that in one sense, the church replaced the scriptures with therapy. Right? Sermons shifted from being about sin and salvation to being more about self-esteem and self-fulfillment. And the gospel became less about repentance and faith, and it became more about personal improvement, where Jesus was your very own life coach, you know? And guess what happens when the church stops confronting sin? When it stops preaching the text of Scripture, when it stops holding to the authority of God's word, when it stops preaching about sin and salvation and confronting sin, well, guess what? Culture stops believing sin exists. And then when the Bible and the gospel are softened, the church embraces a new virtue. You know what that virtue is, Jake? Niceness. Not kindness, not love, niceness. Where offense is avoided at all costs. Right? It's the kind of niceness that refuses clarity because clarity may upset somebody. Harsh. Yeah, it's too harsh. It's it's the kind of niceness that believes that the worst thing, the very worst thing that a Christian could be is divisive. It's like, was Jesus hated and crucified because he was unclear? You know, like no, I don't think so. Right? But when the church fears being disliked more than being unfaithful, then drift is going to be inevitable. And so the church went through these trends, these movements. It shifted from discipleship to decisionism. The church experienced a theological and authority shift. And then the cherry on top was, I think, just the increasing popularity of pietism. And pietism is something that's that's not inherently bad, right? In the 17th century, pietism pushed back against kind of this cold, formal state church religion because it was emphasizing heartfelt devotion, it was emphasizing personal holiness, it was emphasizing an experiential faith. And those are good things, right? They're good instincts. But over time, that pietism, I think, developed a kind of shadow side that profoundly shaped American Christianity. And it could be argued that it that it also contributed to the very drift that we're now living through. For one thing, Pietism, it privatized faith. Right? It taught that real Christian life happens in the heart, right? In the prayer closet, in the world of personal experience, which again is good in itself, but the unintended consequences of that predominant thinking was a shrinking of Christianity to the private sphere, where faith became strictly internal and personal rather than public. And faith became devotional rather than doctrinal, and it became individual rather than covenantal, like you see with the Puritans. And that privatization led to Christians seeing their faith as something more felt, right? Personally, not something that certainly, you know, that shaped institutions. Yeah, and and that and that was a private feeling. So therefore, it couldn't shape institutions and it couldn't shape laws and it couldn't shape public life, right? Because it was private. Only shape personal convictions, personal convictions. And so the gospel became more about like my walk with Jesus rather than the lordship of Jesus Christ over all of life. It was just private, and when faith becomes private, culture becomes secular by default because we retreat. And when when the church retreats into this kind of privatization of Christian faith, something fills the void. And that's what we've been talking about. Something filled the void in our culture. And then you begin to think how doctrine itself was viewed. Like doctrine became this cold and divisive thing. It was something that was secondary. And what mattered was sincerity and warmth and spiritual experience. And that produced a church that, you know, downplayed confessions of faith. It's amazing how many Christians today don't know about the Westminster Confession of Faith. They don't know about the Heidelberg Catechism. They don't know about the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith, right? Because we've downplayed those things. Uh it produced a church that minimized theological precision, where it's like, you know, like we don't care about the specifics of one's views about who Christ is, truly divine, truly human, the hypostatic union. Uh we've just downplayed uh theological precision. We've also grown to distrust intellectual rigor. And part of that is, you know, I just got done talking about higher criticism in the seminaries. There is a there is a part where you should distrust, you know, academia because they don't have good motives, but but not all intellectual rigor is bad. And then we have a church that also replaced, you know, catechesis, catechism, teaching people rich and strong doctrine, and we substituted that for emotionalism. And I think that's why we have so many American Christians today that, you know, kind of play into this. They feel deeply about the faith, right? Their faith feels true and real, but they cannot articulate the basics of the faith, right? Their faith is something personal to them, it's spirituality, they feel deeply about it, but they don't know the basics of the faith because Pietism, this shadow side of pietism, taught them to value the temperature of their heart in terms of faith rather than or more than the truth of scripture when it came to their faith. And once you begin to emphasize the inner life and the feelings and the individual, it unintentionally trains Christians to withdraw from the more outward life. And so the goal becomes personal holiness, personal devotion, personal quiet time, personal spiritual experience, which are all good things. Like, don't misunderstand me, but it's an incomplete picture, right? The pietistic impulse would be like change yourself, but not the world. Whereas I think from scripture, what we see across the pages is is the command to be transformed and also be salt and light in the world. I mean, it was literally like the last direction of the gospel. Go and disciple the nations, right? And baptize them and teach them to observe all that Jesus is commanded. Right? We're called to be salt and light. And how do you be salt and light when you withdraw and you just emphasize the individual, the private faith, to the disregard of the public sphere? And so I don't think that pietism intended to weaken the church, but you have to look at the legacy that this shadow side of pietism left. It's less than ideal. Right? It privatized faith, it minimized doctrine, it was discouraging cultural engagement. We have to be separate from the world, distinct from the world, yes, but we also need to engage the world. It elevated emotion over endurance. And I would say that it ultimately, you know, kind of paved the way for the therapeutic consumer Christianity that we still see today. And it helped create a church that was spiritually warm in one sense, but you know, largely culturally absent. And that absence, coupled with the diminished authority of God's word, I think created space for the drift that we s we've seen and are seeing today. And I would argue that's why we see kind of the morally confused nation that we're living in. The church stopped proclaiming moral clarity, and secularism filled the void. It filled it with expressive individualism, it it filled it with uh sexual autonomy, moral relativism, because the church prioritized entertainment and emotionalism over formation. And that's why we have Christians who can't articulate the gospel today. And that's why we have Christians who don't know basic doctrine, that's why we have Christians who are shaped more by, you know, TikTok than the truth of scripture. And the church tried to be like the world. And when the church tries to be liked, um and tries to be like the world and liked by the world, it loses the ability to speak truth to the world, right? I would say that we lost our prophetic voice. And that's what we're seeing today. What are your thoughts on that so far, Jimmy?

SPEAKER_01 32:36

I mean, honestly, the the thing that sticks out to me the most growing up was the topic of homosexuality. It was always such a struggle for Christians to talk about homosexuality because it was being pushed out as such a positive thing, such a warming theme that like these homosexuals are finally able to be accepted, right? And it's it's funny, just like I think like when people originally think of like when I hear homophobic, I think of someone that realizes that homosexuality is a sin and doesn't like it. When they hear homophobic, they think of a crazy person shooting up gay bars. And it's like just these two different extremes where it lost, the church like just wanted to confirm, wanted to warm hearts, wanted to be welcoming, that it lost like its stance and grip to say homosexuality is a sin, period. Yeah. And then follow up with just because you uh I guess you know, you're you call yourself gay doesn't mean you can flee from that. Or you know, just like it it definitely painted as a lot of things. It was all done in the name of love, right?

SPEAKER_00 33:42

Like we have to be loving, and and when we hear that, you know, loving is accepting. And it's just interesting, like Paul talks in First Corinthians 13, he says that love does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. Yeah. And so like what would be the most loving thing in that moment? Well, it's recognizing that we're standing before an image bearer, you know, a fellow image bearer, but but also not condoning, not celebrating, not accepting the sin, but pointing them to Christ and the cross and the life that we're intended to live in relationship with God. I think the least loving thing that you could do is to accept the sin and just allow them to continue to live in it without pointing them a bet pointing to them a better way.

SPEAKER_01 34:26

Yeah, I mean, because if you truly believe in Christianity, yeah, they might have a good life, they might indulge in that sin. So they won't go to heaven. Like that, like their eternity spirit at stake.

SPEAKER_00 34:38

That matters so much more than a good time here on earth. Yeah. But but we'll shy away from those conversations and we'll we'll we'll try to soften the blow by saying it's we're we're we're operating in love because of the virtue, the the niceness virtue. We're afraid to offend, we're afraid to speak with clarity, because it may rub people the wrong way, they may not like us, and and the church has wanted to be liked, you know, and it's like you just have to get past wanting to be liked. Jesus didn't say that we would be liked, right? He said we'd be hated, right? The student is not above the master, right? If they hated him, they're gonna hate us too. But I think now more than ever, like life is too short, ministry is too serious to waste time. I constantly tell myself that. So like we need we need to get past this desire to be liked, and we just need to be truly loving, we need to speak the truth, we need to speak with clarity, and we need boldness, and we need courage, and we need to point people to Christ. Yeah, no matter how hard. Yeah, what we need is we we need discipleship again. We need the the the push to make disciples, not converts, not decisions. Because when when you get into the business of decisions, it there's there's no there's no call, there's no burden, you know, there's no responsibility placed on the person. It's as easy as a a walk down the aisle, a raised hand, or even, you know, we may lose listeners over this, but a a sinner's prayer. But Dietrich Bonhoeffer has this great quote. I think it's in the the introduction to uh his book, uh Life Together on Christian Community. He says, When when Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. That's that's conversion. Dying to the old self and being raised new in Christ and walking in that newness of life, following Jesus, taking up your cross. It's not a decision, it's discipleship, and that's what we need. And when we emphasize discipleship, we're gonna rub people the wrong way. We're going to unintentionally cause offense, but we need to do so not because we're jerks, but because we're speaking the truth in love, we're speaking the truth with clarity, and we're speaking convictions rather than opinions. And the convictions need to be built on God's word.

SPEAKER_01 37:06

Like I truly believe that's like the most selfish thing you can do as a Christian is not share the truth. Yeah. Because, like, again, it doesn't matter what they feel in this world, we're talking about heaven and hell here. You know, like we need we are called to we need possible. And and some people are great at doing that gently, you know, more than others, right? And you know, it it's your job to call a Christ and ask for guidance and ask for strength, but but what is not an option is not doing it.

SPEAKER_00 37:35

Yeah, exactly. I think it was Pen Gillette, you know, like Penn and Teller. Were they magicians, illusionists? I don't even know. I don't know either. Yeah, but Pen Gillette, I mean, they were they're not popular anymore. I may be showing my age. But um, but they were pretty big magicians, illusionists, I believe. You know, somebody could correct me, but Pen Gillette, very staunch atheist, very staunch atheist, uh, rejects organized religion, rejects the faith. But he had this quote, and it was really big when he said it. Like it really, I think, woke up some pastors, some Christians in this regard. And I'll paraphrase it because I don't have in front of me to give you a word-for-word quote, but essentially came down to like if you tr really truly in your heart of hearts believe that if somebody doesn't trust in Christ for salvation and follow him, and by not trusting in Christ and following him, they will spend all of eternity in eternal torment in hell. If you really believe that, how much do you have to hate somebody to not tell them the good news of the gospel? You know, like an atheist said that? Yeah. It was it was this crazy thing. I'm sure it was probably every sermon the following Sunday as a sermon illustration. But it really what like opened eyes. Like, if we really believe that people who die apart from Christ are going to spend eternity in eternal hormon uh torment, you know, in hell, apart from from from Christ, apart from God, you gotta check your heart if that doesn't move you for the lost at least a little bit. You know, or to to put it in Pentel, like how much do you have to hate them to not share with them the the the the thing, the person that offers eternal life to sinners. But in order to have those conversations, you have to get past the desire to be liked. You have to get past the desire to have comfort and security and not enter into some risky conversations where you may be called a bigot or homophobic or any one of the other phobics, you know? There's a lot nowadays, but you have to get past that. You have to be okay being hated, and you have to ask the Lord for endurance and perseverance. And so I think that's what the church has lost. Like we've just had this desire to attract as many people as possible and to be liked by the world, and that has opened the door to all kinds of small compromises and small little retreats that over time creates big compromises and big retreats. And when the church retreats from the public sphere, you know, it's not like the public sphere just remains neutral. You know, something's going to fill that void. And what filled that void was secular humanism, where everyone does that which is right in their own eyes. And so the question then is like for us as Christians, uh, you know, listening to this podcast, and for for churches, with the reality of the moment that we live in, like, where do we go from here? You know, like what do we do? And I think the first step is just repentance, right? It's acknowledging where we've failed, where we've taken missed steps as a church and as Christians, both individually and also corporately. Like we need to repent, we need to turn around, we need to change our mind. Um, because repentance is always the doorway that we walk through to reformation and renewal. And so we need to repent, we need to acknowledge our mistakes. We've we need to acknowledge, you know, that that the church has has not really lived up to her role in the public sphere and in society here in America in the last 50 years. But additionally, in in light of that, we need to recover the authority of Scripture, you know, not as a slogan and a statement of faith, but as a functional reality in the life of the church. The way we operate. Yeah, like the Bible has to become the foundation of all preaching and teaching. Uh, it needs to be the lens through which we view for cultural engagement. It needs to be our authority, our objective authority and standard in terms of ethics and morality and politics. And it needs to be the thing that anchors our identity. It can't be ourselves, it can't be culture, it needs to be God's word. So we need to recover the authority of scripture. I think secondly, we also need to rebuild a robe, like robust discipleship in the church. We need catechesis, we need to be teaching people doctrine. Preaching should be doctrinal preaching. Uh, we need uh, you know, theological precision, we need spiritual disciplines, we need intergenerational mentorship and discipleship where the old are are pouring into the young and the young are also refueling the old. We we need that kind of intergenerational fellowship that seems to be lacking in some churches. We need real accountability. We need we need men who are willing to put a finger in another man's chest. And we need men who are wanting to have another man's finger put on their chest, because we need responsibility and accountability in the church. So we need robust discipleship again, not just decision making. Uh I think we also need to reclaim the public sphere. You know, we need to reclaim the public square. Christians need to re-enter education. We can't we can't just give it over. We need to re-enter the arts, we need to re-enter media, we need to re-enter law, science, local government. We we need to get back into the public square, and it's not to take it over, right? Like, though, Lord willing, we do. But it's not to take it over. It's just to be a faithful presence in the public square again, right? We need to be salt, we need to be light in the places that we, in a large part, have abandoned and allowed, you know, Satan to have its way in the public space. So we need to reclaim the public square. And then fourthly, I think for pastors, I'm speaking as a pastor, speaking to pastors, we need restored courage in the pulpit. We need pastors to start preaching with clarity and conviction and compassion, yes, but also courage. Right. We don't need more anger. We don't need fear. We don't need compromise. We need courage. We need clarity. We need truth. And so I think pastors, especially at this particular moment in history, need to be preaching not with attendance numbers in mind, like what's going to happen if I preach on this. Uh, you know, people are going to vote with their feet. If they do, then so be it. Yeah. Uh, and we need to stop preaching with our budgets in mind. Right? I think that's that's one of the problems. We preach with attendance and budgets, like in our purview. Like we we like that's that's what helps us formulate our sermons, you know. But we need to not do that. We need to preach truth. We need to speak the truth in love, and honestly, truth spoken in love is still truth at the end of the day. And I think that's what we need more of today in the 21st century. Pastors who will get up in that pulpit with courage, armed with the authority of God's word, and who will preach the unadulterated word of God with clarity and conviction and courage for an audience of one, and that's Christ. Not for the audience that's in those seats. Because at the end of the day, we're going to be held accountable for how we have handled the word of God and how we have shepherded the flock of God and what we have communicated to the world that's desperately in need of the gospel. And so, as we've said on the podcast before, I think God always works through, you know, faithful remnants. You know, cultural drift isn't the end of the story. It's not the end of the story. I would say, as it has been in every kind of historical period, it is the precursor to reformation and renewal. And I think that's where we're at right now. There's been cultural drift, uh, the church has drifted uh a little bit away from their mission, and I think that that's not a catastrophe. I don't think it's the end of the story. I think it's just we're right on the cusp of reformation and renewal in this in this country. And I don't think the church's missteps cancel God's faithfulness, right? I don't think our compromises erase his sovereignty. Um, the drift that we've seen in this country doesn't negate his ability to restore our country. God is still active, he's still sovereign, he's still building his church and working through his church. We just need to be faithful. And so the question isn't can America come back? You know, and I'm tempted to use another slogan, you know, like, you know, make America great again. Yes. Can America be made great again? No, I think the real question is at this point in time, will the church come back to faithfulness? Faithfulness to God, faithfulness to Christ, faithfulness to discipleship, faithfulness to God's word. And if we return, he will use the church again in this country. I guarantee it. Any last words, Jake?

SPEAKER_01 47:07

Pretty pretty crystal clear. Nice and short. To the punch. 47 minutes. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_00 47:14

I guess it was a little longer, a little bit longer than I expected.

SPEAKER_01 47:17

Yeah, that's no shock with you.

SPEAKER_00 47:19

Yeah, yeah. I think I'm gonna give you 10 minutes and then it ends up being 40, but whatever. Well, that's all we got for you. I want to thank you for joining us on the Green Dragon podcast. Don't forget to subscribe so that you don't miss future episodes that will hopefully, Lord willing, two weeks come out from now. Uh we've we've painted a picture of the drift in our country. We've painted the picture of our country's history, and today we talked just briefly on how the church took some missteps along the way with some movements and trends that have occurred over the last you know few decades. So we've done our introductions, we've had our table talk, so to speak, and now it's uh it's time to step into the streets and face the world. And so in the episodes that'll be coming up, we're gonna talk specifically about engaging culture, we're gonna be talking about specific issues and how we can be equipped to uh retake, you know, return and retake the public square without losing our soul. And so that's where we'll be going on future episodes. We've diagnosed the problem. Now let's get into the nitty-gritty as I like to say it. And uh and we look forward to diving into those issues and subjects with you with the prayer that you will be equipped as a Christian to re-enter the public square, live out your faith boldly, courageously, and publicly. And if you're a non-Christian who happens to be listening to us, to hear the good news of the gospel, to hear how the Bible informs every area of our life, and hopefully give you some nuggets to chew on and consider. But uh, that's where we're going with the Dream uh Green Dragon podcast from here on out. And again, the Green Dragon podcast is where conviction meets action and the faithful few stand together. God bless you. Lord willing, we'll see you in two weeks.