By Tim Harlow
The front page of USA Today said, “Protestants lose majority status in the US” (October 9, 2012). It just happened to catch my eye as I walked past a newsstand. I thought to myself, OK, but what could have taken its place? Catholicism is dying””is this about Mormonism?
The article explained that Protestant numbers are down from 53 percent in 2007 to 48 percent today. But these Protestants didn”t switch to a new religious brand. They just let go of any faith affiliation or label. According to the Pew Forum, one in five Americans now claims no religious identity. None. That means there are now more “nones” in the U.S. than any other Protestant denomination.
Warren Bird of Leadership Network concludes: “More than one out of every three adults (33 percent) in America is unchurched. This means they haven”t attended a religious service of any type during the past year. This represents some 125 million Americans. That number alone would be the 10th largest country in the world!” (leadnet.org, 9 September 2012).
One might ask, does that mean the U.S. is now a mission field? But I think the more appropriate question is, WHEN WAS IT NOT?
The Easiest Target
In Acts 1, Jesus charged the first disciples with the responsibility of first reaching out to people in Jerusalem and then moving outward. This doesn”t mean the people in Indonesia are less important than the people in Indiana. It just means the church is missing its easiest target. It”s like the shoemaker”s children having no shoes!
These people live next door. We don”t have to get on a plane. In most cases, we don”t even have to learn a new language. Sometimes for effective ministry, though, one may need to learn a new language, since 13 percent of people who are living in the U.S. are foreign-born.
Maybe you heard about the couple from (fill in the blank with the state you want to make fun of) who had nine children and went to the doctor to get “fixed?” The doc asked, “Why now?” and they explained they had read somewhere that one in 10 children born in the U.S. today is Mexican. They didn”t want to take the chance of having another baby because they didn”t speak Spanish.
Make no mistake about it. Judea and Samaria and the uttermost parts of the world are right here in Jerusalem, too!
So if 13 percent of Americans are foreign born, and 33 percent of them are unchurched, and the fastest-growing religious group is those who believe in nothing, I feel it”s safe to say we live in a mission field. For some reason, we”ve bought into a church culture of “sending” missionaries and waiting for them to report back to us at “home base.” If we”re not extremely careful, we run the risk of simply paying for mission instead of engaging in mission. Clearly, we can”t afford to do that anymore. We”re losing ground.
In the old days, many churches had signs as you left the property that said, “You are now entering the mission field.” Maybe we need to bring those back because it”s true.
At our church, we recently started a ministry to “sex workers,” thinking this would be great outreach in the Chicago area. When I announced it, we quickly found out we already had five strippers attending our church! Following our very first meeting, one of these young women left the church, went to her strip club, cleaned out her locker, returned to church the next day, and was baptized. We”re still reaching out to the ladies at the clubs, but she was already here!
We didn”t have to go to Samaria for this life-change to happen. We didn”t have to “go” very far at all.
I”m not one of those guys who likes to spend a lot of time decrying the post-Christian era in which we live. I realize our nation was founded on biblical principles and that our founding fathers were Christians. I”m proud of that. But honestly, I think the church has always been more productive as an outsider than an insider.
Personally, I like living in a place where I”m needed. I like being a missionary 24/7. But I have to constantly think like one.
Purposeful Decisions
For our family, that resulted in making purposeful decisions like not living in a parsonage, putting our kids into public school (it was a good one), working out at a local health club with nonchurch people, and having small group with our neighbors in a neighborhood where we”ve now lived for 16 years. The new word for this in church circles is incarnational. Jesus was “God with us,” and we are called to be “God with them.”
To be honest, I”m not living incarnationally in the Jesus definition. Jesus didn”t even have a house. Jesus” neighbors were total outcasts from society. I can”t pat myself on the back. But I already live where I live, and if I want to be even remotely like Jesus””I”d better fully move in. Salt does no good in the shaker.
Luke 10:2 tells us, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”
It”s great to ask the Lord to send workers. We should keep doing that. But we should also remember that each one of us is to be counted among those workers. So we shouldn”t just ask the Lord to send. We should also ask him to help us be. We should be looking around every day and reaching out to the “nones” in our own backyards.
Because if the fields were plentiful then, what are they now?
Tim Harlow serves as senior pastor at Parkview Christian Church in Orland Park, Illinois.
The mission of the church is to be the incarnation of the passion of God for His creation. When we honestly decide, when we really make the choice to become the disciple of Jesus we enter the realm of life challenging questions. We can no longer allow ourselves the satisfaction of defining our relationship with God by a checklist. Went to church today, check. Wrote my check for church, check. Participated in a small group or Bible class, check. Prayed before my meals today, check. Those items on the check list are not wrong, but they cease to be our justification of our faith and become a few (among many) demonstrations of a life increasingly defined by God’s heart.
A congregation, small group, class, committee or individual that is truly committed to the mission of God ignores neither the local not the world needs in preference of the other. God’s heart shapes the heart of the disciple. We cannot claim the passion of God for “mission” if we ignore the needs of those nearby. Sending a significant portion of personal or congregational income to the needs of the lost thousands of miles away is never justification for ignoring the lost along the path of our daily commute to work or the church building. Neither can we simply decide to focus our resources on those along the path of our daily commute, leaving the needs of those far away to some other congregation. God’s mission is to all and so must be our mission.
A recent Barna Study for the American Bible Society named Knoxville, Tennessee (my city) as the most Bible minded city in the USA. We have just over 50% of our population interested in the Bible. Hopefully, no one took that study for comfort. What are we to do about the nearly 50% who care nothing about God’s love for them? How many of us who are “Bible-minded” are seeking discipleship and how many are seeking self-justification for commonly held beliefs and presuppositions? Thanks for provoking us to thought and change so we may truly live out God’s passion!
A few thoughts:
Catholicism isn’t “dying” – in fact global excitement about Pope Francis suggests a renewed Catholicism.
“Nones” are not people who “believe in nothing.” They’re people who check the “none” box on a question about religious affiliation.
Your language about nones as “targets” is revealing. It suggests that “they” have everything to learn from “us” and “we” have nothing to learn from “them.” Which is precisely why many of them checked “none” in the first place. Incarnation might also mean living w them sympathetically in their experience of a godforsaken world.