WHY ARE SO MANY AMERICANS 'FORMERLY-CHURCHED'?

At our annual session of the Harvest Conference (Free Methodist Church), our new bishop, Kaye Kolde painfully acknowledged that our American membership has dropped from 99,000 in 2015, to 62,000 in 2022.  Her acknowledgement pointed out that when we look at our world today, we have to recognize that many people are not 'unchurched', but 'formerly churched'.  

This leaves us wondering: Why the exodus from the church?

There are two primary reasons why people bail out and leave the faith.

       I.  God doesn’t conform to our expectations.  We want a God that we can control.  Many of us want faith to be a power that moves God in a direction that we prescribe.  We want faith to be a code that unlocks the door to God’s unlimited resources – so that we can use them at our discretion.  Essentially, we want faith to be a way for us to get what we want from God. 

This attitude is especially prevalent in American culture where we are used to getting our own way.  When God doesn’t cooperate with us the way we think He should we tend to give up on Him!  We use the spoiled logic that if God doesn’t give us what we want, then He must not really be good and He must not really love me. 

How do we arrive at these unbiblical conclusions?  How can we become so distanced from the biblical concept of a sovereign God.   God is God and there is no other.  

We must get our thinking and beliefs right about God.  There is no better way to do that than by getting involved in a good, thorough Bible study with a godly, reliable teacher.  We must also engage our logic and reasoning capacity.  Think about it.  If God can be manipulated and controlled by me – then who is really god?  If we would simply think seriously for a moment, we would all realize that we want a God who operates on a different level than we do.

^{Isaiah 55:8-9}    “For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

neither are your ways my ways,”

declares the LORD.

    “As the heavens are higher than the earth,

so are my ways higher than your ways

and my thoughts than your thoughts.

This is the kind of a God that we want in control of the universe and in control 

of my life.  Especially when we know that he is good and loving and cares for us. 

       II.  The second main reason that people leave their beliefs in God is that He allows bad things to happen in their lives.  To be blunt, we become disappointed with God and even angry with Him because He fails to protect us from evil people, things, or circumstances. 

Unexplainable tragedy tends to undermine our faith.  Painful or adverse circumstances don’t fit our understanding of the character of God or the Christian faith.  We ask: “How could a good God allow this to happen?  Why didn’t He stop it?” 

Let’s take a closer look at this:

A father is carrying a four-year-old into a doctor’s office to receive a tetanus shot.  When the doctor pulls out the needle, ask him if his father loves him.  In that moment, he will have doubts.  But ask him after some years pass.  He will have a completely different perspective.  He will know that his father showed his love by caring enough to protect his son’s health. 

Just as a child cannot correctly judge his parent’s character based upon one scary trip to the doctor, so we cannot draw conclusions about God’s goodness based upon the immediate circumstances of life. 

Judging the significance of current events can only be justly done by examining them in the context of a lifetime.  Many of us have a hard time seeing past our immediate surroundings.  If God doesn’t answer our prayer immediately, we wonder if He exists.  We begin to lose confidence in our belief that God loves and cares for us. 

     Here’s the key point:  Authentic faith looks at the whole picture!

     Consider a couple of biblical examples:

•      Joseph spent 15 years as a slave in Egypt after his brothers sold him to a traveling caravan.  Yet his “tragedy” was part of a beautiful tapestry that God was weaving behind the scenes to save an entire region from famine!
•      Then there was Moses, who spent 40 years in the wilderness before God sent him back to Egypt – freeing a nation from slavery and unfolding a wonderful purpose in his seemingly purposeless existence.

We must get our theology right!  God has not promised to keep bad things from happening to us.  God has not promised to heal every illness.  He has not promised to reverse the consequences of sin. 

Yet there are occasions when God intervenes and does all of these things.  Why?  Because He is a good God who loves to give good gifts to His children. 

But these are not promises.  He is under no obligation.  The fact that divorce occurs and people die and plans don’t work out is no reflection on the goodness or the presence of our heavenly Father. 

Just look at the Apostles.  They were certainly men of great faith.  Yet their lives were not free of difficulty;  all of them but one, died as martyrs!!!!  God didn’t always intervene to save them.  But an answer of “no” did not undermine their faith.  They didn’t have to get everything they wanted to keep their faith intact.  Their faith was grounded in Jesus and His resurrection – not on how their lives went or what happened to them.

I can almost hear you thinking.  But what are we to do when tough times come?  How are we to handle the unexplainable tragedies that occur in our lives?  What should our response be when it feels like God has let us down or abandoned us?  Good questions!

The answer to these questions is also found in some key verses of the book of Hebrews. 

^4:15-16  For  we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin.  Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

Here’s the best news you’re going to hear today.  Because you have Jesus as your High Priest, you can draw near to God with confidence!  Some might say, “Confidence in what?  I already know that He may not give me what I want.  He might say no to my prayers.  How can I ask for anything with confidence?” 

But you can have confidence because God will always give you two things that are critical in your times of need. 

The first thing He will give you is mercy.  Our Savior, Jesus, knows far more about what you are experiencing than you may think.  Jesus is able to enter into your pain and understand how you feel because he also knew:

Temptation.  He experienced temptation at the hand of Satan himself.

Rejection.  He was rejected by both friends and family members.

Failure.  He saw everything He had lived for and worked for crumble around Him.

Fear.  In the Garden of Gethsemane, He spent an entire night dreading the events of the next day.

Abandonment.  His friends ran away when He needed them most.

Loneliness.  He even faced death alone. 

Jesus understands your pain and/or sorrow.  You can come boldly to Him with total transparency and openness, confident that He will never mock or ridicule you.  He is a mercy-giving God because He knows from experience what it is like to need mercy.  Mercy is the assurance that God will never allow the pressures or heartbreaks of life to overwhelm you.  He will ALWAYS be there to help or carry you!

The second thing He will give you is grace.  Grace in this context means the strength to endure or the ability to carry on.  Remember, He has not promised to deliver you from your circumstances;  but He has promised to deliver you through them.  You can ask Him to change your circumstances, but we’ve already stated that God rarely intervenes to do so.  However, He has promised to give you the grace to endure in the meantime. 

Even the great Apostle Paul experienced this painful reality.  In II Corinthians 12 he tells about what seems to be a physical problem that had plagued him for many years.  Now this is a man who had the spiritual gift of healing, but he struggled with a personal malady.  He tells us that he asked God three times to deliver him from this problem.  Each time God said no.  Paul accepted his consequences and came to realize that there was a reason for God’s unwillingness to heal him.  It was to keep him humble.  He was a man who had experienced phenomenal spiritual privileges – including a supernatural glimpse into heaven where “He heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell.”  (12:4).  Anyone experiencing this kind of privilege would certainly be vulnerable to spiritual pride.  Consequently, God left this godly man – who had the gift of healing others – with a physical malady to keep him appropriately humble and to remind him of his dependence on God.  God’s actual answer to Paul on his third request was:  “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”  (12:9). 

So there it is – the evidence that you can trust God with every area of your life!  Let’s review it:

1)   Authentic faith is properly grounded in Christ!

2)  Authentic faith recognizes the sovereignty of God.

3)  Authentic faith looks at the whole picture.

4)  Authentic faith anticipates the mercy and grace of God when the going gets tough!