The church is dead. Long live the church!

Just in time for our annual Good Friday observance, Newsweek writes up the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey and prophesies the death of Christianity in America. To be sure, the numbers are frightening. Self-identified Christians are decreasing as a portion of the population, the number of people who claim no affiliation with religion has nearly doubled in the last two decades.

I say, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:25)

Now, I agree, the problem is real. If anything, it is understated. Even among the vast majority of Americans who claim the Christian name, there is an ever declining population of regular church-goers and committed servants. Secreted beneath the glittering appeal of immense mega-churches is the unspoken family secret of thousands upon thousands of dying churches in small towns and city neighborhoods. And even among the remnant that clings to the church are a quiet many who have given up in spirit but not in name, who still sit in the pews, going through the motions of devotion, hardly moved and barely incarnate in the Spirit.

But I say that the problem in American is not the death of Christianity. It is the death of the church.

And it may be just in time.

I don’t accept that souls have changed, that humans have dramatically evolved into some new form of being in these last generations. Our innate desire to seek the divine, to find the elusive qualities of hope and grace and joy beyond the confines of this world is the same now as it was the first time our earliest ancestors stood on two legs and gazed at the stars above. The human need for faith transcends time and technology and cannot be delineated in National surveys. Those who believe least in the church in America voted the most in the last election for – wait for it – hope. We will always chafe against death and evil and always quest for their end. There will always be a Savior because there will always need to be.

But the church – she is a human and worldly thing, and her frailties and her sins are easily diagnosed and her days are always marked. Though her blessing and mission is to be the instrument by which God’s Word is channeled unto our striving, she is to many a hindrance to faith. The harder the church seeks to matter in the world, to sit among the powerful and share their influence, to use the channels of politics and law to advance her work, the more she becomes of the world. And the more the church becomes a part of this world the less she becomes of God, until finally God’s Word is mute and the church dies. And so she has.

That is what this survey and many others like it are telling us. The church of this age has failed. We have come to a new Babylonian Captivity, to borrow a phrase from Dr. Luther. The church has come to covet the role of the Pharisees and Chief Priests in the Passion drama, far too captivated by the sturm und drang of the blood and death of Good Friday to ever make it to Easter. In her legalisms and grasping for power, the church has closed the doors of the kingdom to those few, fervent believers who associate with her narrow dogma and so has driven away masses of the lost, of those seeking something greater, something more life-giving, you know, grace.

The church is dead. Long live the church!

We are brought to Good Friday to see God’s work in its purest form: the death of what cannot be for the sake of what must be. The cross is not just a horror picture to bring us to our knees in guilt and trepidation for some approaching day of Judgment. This is a saving work, a breaking down of broken and sinful human forms and human institutions so that something right may take their place. This is the great mystery of God, that every seed must fall to the earth and die, so that it might bear much fruit.

And so the promise beckons us. Easter is coming! Somewhere, beneath the facade of the church of this world is the hidden reality of grace. Like an Easter Egg well placed, it evades our first glance and calls us to seek in diligence and faithfulness. Even as the church passes from this form, God is fashioning a new creation, a new being, a new instrument of Grace and salvation and calling the faithful to His work. I do not write these words because I hate the church – no, I love the church. I pray that it may once again rise and become again God’s Word of Redemption in the world, that we may leave our anger and judgment and worldly lust for power in the tomb behind us and come out into the world where we are desperately needed.

Let this be the Easter that the church rises again. Hallelujah!