The Loss of Mature Believers in Christian Institutions

This is a lengthy comment I left on a Substack article that is too involved to quickly summarize. If you want to check it out, you can take the link. I may get roasted over there, but I was willing to take that chance for the sake of the people who will will feel heard by what I wrote.

So here it is (with a couple of paragraph breaks fixed and links added where appropriate).

I think people are missing something important in some of the recent articles here. Here are my observations from the past 20 years and especially the most recent 3 or 4. To be clear, these are my observations and I’m not interested in defending any of these views (which I may or may not agree with).

The bottom line is that many of the strongest Christians have left the institutions and that’s one of the key reasons why they are collapsing. Wolves and theologically-weak, milk-drinking babes in Christ have moved in. It has been a slow and steady drain of those who would have led the institutions in the past.

A friend told me recently they are having more and more difficultly finding teachers for their Christian school. Why? Many of the women who would have held those positions in the past (both to make money and enroll their children at a greatly reduced rate or for free) are homeschooling their children. Many of the best teachers are no longer available. They have opted out of the institution.

In the church area, you have the Dones – committed and involved Christians who walked away from the institutional church but not their faith.

You have those who were influenced by books such as Pagan Christianity and moved to organic and home churches.

There are homeschool families who realized organic or home church makes more sense as it fits with their beliefs about community and relationships.

More recently, there are people who find Tom Wadsworth’s work on the first century church to resonate. They, also, are moving to home and organic gatherings because they want the mutual edification and community shown in the Bible when they gather. They are sick of being expected to show up and sit quietly in a pew. They don’t see that model in the Bible. (See also Pagan Christianity.) There are other channels such as Revolution of the Ordinaries who are training people to start home churches. I could list many others.

In another area, you have the couples who do not consider themselves patriarchal, complementarian, or egalitarian. There is no place they fit in. After studying the Bible for themselves, they don’t believe the NT teaches patriarchy. They don’t consider themselves egalitarians. And complementarianism is the maddening middle that is inconsistently applied and produces great frustration and alienation. So they are left with very few options. Many just leave the institutional church for home or organic church. Or they show up for their kids at the least offensive conservative church they can find and then deprogram their children against what they hear at church. But they don’t get involved because their heart isn’t in it and so their gifts are wasted.

(And, let’s be honest, some of the above demographics simply stop attending gatherings/church because there is no good option for them or they are exhausted/broken from the battle that led up to them leaving.)

Re: Calvinism. I’m not on Twitter/X so I don’t know what has happened there. But many people have moved away from Calvinism out of a conviction that it is not consistent with what the Bible teaches. It’s not because of tickling ears or not being willing to “do and believe hard things” because they are weak. It’s because they have spent considerable time studying it out and realized they don’t believe it is correct. The impact of men like Leighton Flowers and others is significant. No matter what Spurgeon and MacArthur might have said, Calvinism does not equal the Gospel in the minds of a growing number of people. So add in the Christians who leave their now-divided church due to stealth Calvinism taking over and you lose more of your strong believers.

Lastly, the thing to watch for the next 5-10 years is preterism. The number of people who are openly partial preterists is growing steadily. Not just amil or postmil (which are closely related to partial preterism), but people who specifically say they are a partial-preterists. The number of Christians who have become convinced of full preterism or fulfilled eschatology continues to grow. (I’ve been tracking this closely for the past two years.) It’s gone from the Moscow gang deflecting questions by making jokes about the 5 preterists in a basement in Arkansas to multiple preterism conferences in a year. Small conferences? Yes. But they are growing steadily. It is a highly-engaged group of committed Christians interacting online around this aspect of theology. I’m convinced that there are MANY preterists among the public “Christian leaders” who will not publicly acknowledge it until it is “safe” to do so. They have too much to lose (ordination, denomination, etc.) so they stay silent.

Why does the growth of preterism matter? Because one of the first things that comes up in conversations among partial and full preterists is what to do about church. They no longer fit in, often even as partial preterists. When they press their pastor about understanding these passages, they don’t get satisfactory answers. They also see public Christian leaders side-stepping the issue.

Of all the things I’m tracking related to the body of Christ, I’m very curious to see how this plays out in the coming decade. Given the move away from Israel-centered eschatology and the vacuum that is creating, if one high-profile Christian leader comes out as a preterist then all bets are off as to how much this could impact the church in America. It is bubbling up and most Christian leaders are completely unaware and unprepared to discuss these topics on the level the preterists will bring to the conversation. And Christians labeling them heretics isn’t going to work. It means about as much as racist does now.

So, yes, the Christian and “Christian” institutions are in trouble. But I think many people are missing how the slow and steady loss of strong believers for almost 20 years has contributed to it. The past few years has just accelerated things.