The surviving remnant of the house of Judah will again take root downward and bear fruit upward. For out of Jerusalem will go forth a remnant and out of Mount Zion survivors. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will perform this (Isa. 37:31-32).
By Matthew Bassford
Synopsis: In this issue of Truth Magazine, Matthew Bassford has selected the theme and the writers. Though the faithful are often few, and many drift into apathy and apostasy, God has always preserved a remnant through which He accomplishes His work.
These days, many of God’s people regard the future of the Lord’s church in America with great concern. Time does not appear to be on our side. It’s been many years since the United States saw a generation as irreligious as the millennials. Even though the mainline denominations have suffered most from this, more conservative groups have been graying and shrinking too. We see it in our own congregations.
These demographic problems have been exacerbated by COVID. Few churches have seen their attendance increase or even hold steady. Many have experienced significant decline, and widespread congregational strife over COVID policies hasn’t helped any, either.
It’s easy for us to observe these trends, extrapolate them into the future, and conclude that all is lost. A friend of mine on the progressive side of the churches of Christ recently published a book with the subtitle, “Elegy for a Church on the Edge.” Time to dig the grave and gather the mourners, folks. The churches of Christ are done!
Though I don’t think the time has come to write that obituary just yet, the sign-out-front churches of Christ are not what they were in 1950. Especially among churches that reject human institutions, we may need to begin thinking of ourselves as a remnant. However, both historically and Biblically, a faithful remnant is not such a bad thing to be.
First, let us remember that there is only One who knows the end from the beginning, and we are not He. The educated elites in our society love to make confident predictions about what the future will hold decades from now, but if they were better educated, they would know that humanity’s track record in long-term predictions is terrible. Anybody who thinks he knows what 2050 will be like is deluding himself.
In reality, religious sentiment in any nation seems to rise and fall. People of faith today wring their hands, because, in the pandemic’s aftermath, fewer than half of Americans are members of any religious body. However, as best as researchers have been able to determine, only seventeen percent of Americans in 1776 were church members, a number that had been in steady decline since the Great Awakening some decades earlier.
This unpromising situation led not only to the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century, but also to the Restoration itself. I doubt Thomas Jefferson would have predicted that outcome, and our future is equally unpredictable.
Thus, we should not assume that the progressive ascendancy of our time will be permanent. We have not arrived at the end of history. Indeed, cracks already appear in the edifice.
Most recently, I have been intrigued by the rash of news stories reporting on racist behavior among high-school students. Photographs emerge of teens throwing Heil-Hitler salutes at parties or lying down in the shape of a swastika on gymnasium floors. Journalists screech, high-school administrators are appalled, and investigatory commissions are formed to root out this deplorable behavior.
I condemn racism, as does every other respectable adult. I’m on record as calling it a sin, and all of polite society joins with me in disapproval. That, of course, is the point. If you’re a kid these days, and you want to torque off every authority figure in your life, what do you do? What transgressive acting-out remains?
Coming out as gay or trans won’t do it. The school administration will throw you a party. Declare yourself an atheist? Nobody cares. Act like a neo-Nazi, though, and they’ll push you into counseling. All your friends will think you’re such a rebel!
I don’t think the racist displays will stick around any more than the Satanist teens of the 1980s stayed Satanists. However, they reveal the rise of a generation that has not bought into the ideology of identity politics. I don’t know what form the reaction will take, but there will be one, and a return to traditional religion is as likely a candidate as any.
Because it is reasonable to believe that religion will continue to play a significant role in American society, it’s also worthwhile asking what form religious expression might take. History won’t repeat itself here, but it probably will rhyme. American churches historically have thrived not by going along with the prevailing sentiments of the world, but by taking a strong Bible-based stand against those sentiments.
The history of our own brotherhood provides us with an example of this pattern. Over the latter half of the nineteenth century, a separation emerged among the churches of the Restoration Movement. Some, calling themselves the churches of Christ, rejected missionary societies, instrumental music, political involvement, and liberal theology. Others, calling themselves the Disciples of Christ, embraced all of these.
The two groups divided, and the division was not equal. According to the 1906 Census, 982,701 people identified themselves as belonging to the Disciples, but only 159,658 as belonging to the churches of Christ. A bare remnant remained true to the primitivist ideals of the Restoration. The congregations of the Disciples were large and wealthy; the churches of Christ, small and poor. It wouldn’t have been hard for the trend-extrapolators of 1906 to pick a winner.
However, they would have been wrong. Over the next 100+ years, the Disciples endured another split and shared in the demographic disaster of the mainline denominations. In contrast, the churches of Christ grew and prospered, probably too much for their own good.
Consequently, from 2008 to 2018, the membership of the Disciples shrank from 679,563 to 380,248, with only 124,437 of the latter regularly attending services. By contrast, in 2019, 21st Century Christian estimated that churches of Christ had about 1.11 million members, most of whom attended regularly, down slightly from about 1.25 million in 2008. The pattern is clear, though I expect that all these numbers will be lower post-COVID.
Even among the churches of Christ, more conservative congregations have fared much better than more progressive ones. Noted progressive preacher Rick Atchley explained the problem in a 2013 interview in the journal Wineskins: “The era of the progressive Church of Christ is over,” he said. “. . .we discipled the children of those progressive churches for a whole generation to grow past us Boomers. . . We discipled our children to leave our movement!”
Atchley continued to say that children who have never been taught the importance of distinctive Restoration beliefs (he specifically mentions a-cappella singing, though I also would include baptism for forgiveness of sins and a complementarian view of the role of women) have no reason to attend a Restoration church. If your parents’ church is just like the Baptist church down the street, except that the Baptists have a better band, why not join the Baptists? By contrast, I do not know whether my own children will worship faithfully with God’s people throughout their lives, but they certainly have been taught why they should!
There is a larger issue at work here, too. Fundamentally, the word of God is of a piece. Either it’s all important, or none of it is. Moreover, there’s no principled way to distinguish between important parts and not-important parts. If the word of God does not matter when it comes to form of worship and the use of the church treasury, why should it matter with the resurrection of the Christ and the divine creation of the universe? When honest people seek meaning for their lives in the pages of Scripture, they will find it for the whole of their lives.
Thus, we find reason for optimism about the future of the Lord’s church in history, but all of this overlooks the most important reason: a God who continues to rule the affairs of men. We may glimpse His hand in today’s events, but we see it for certain in the inspired record of the word. The theme section of this issue will examine a few of the triumphant remnants of Scripture, but the lesson is always the same. The prosperous and proud are humbled, but the faithful few are exalted (always, alas, to become prosperous and proud later!). Though we may become few, we may be sure that, if we are faithful, God will exalt us, too.
