The Official Site of Andy Boucher

In the last 6 months I’ve read the online commentary of the Internet Monk on what he calls “The Coming Evangelical Collapse” (this is the first of 3 blogs on this subject).  I recommend reading it and would love to discuss his ideas and its implications for youth ministry and especially for Christian education. Here is my summary of his three bogs. I’d love for comments to my summary and forthcoming analysis.

The Christian education response to “The Coming Evangelical Collapse”.

Big points:

• Evangelical Christianity’s association with the right-wing, republican, conservative culture war.
• Need for more intentional Gospel and ecclesiology training of our young people

The theme that captured my attention in this series of blocks/articles was the idea of the training of young people. To me, this appears to be both the problem that leads us to this predicted collapse and the solution to the reshaping of Christianity through this process. Repeatedly, IM mentions his concerns about the teaching and training of our youth.

1. “Massive majorities of evangelicals can’t articulate the Gospel with coherence and are believing in a cause more than a faith.” (blog 1, point 1)
2. “Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people the evangelical Christian faith in an orthodox form that can take root and survive the secular onslaught.” (blog 1, point 2)
3. Our “evangelical culture …has spent billions…. [and] has produced an entire…culture of young Christian who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it.”
4. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey Scripture, the essentials of theology or the experience of spiritual discipline and community.” (blog 1, point 2)
5. “Christian education has not produced a product that can hold the line in the rising tide of secularism.” (blog 1, point 2)
6. “….evangelicalism has used its educational system primarily to staff its own needs and talk to itself.” (blog 1, point 4)
7. “A strong core of evangelical beliefs is not present in most of our young people, and will be less present in the future.” (blog 1, point 2)
8. “At the core of this collapse will be the inability to pass on, to our children, a vital evangelical confidence in the Bible and the importance of the faith.” (blog 1, point 6)

• Ultimately the question is: how do we teach our students to follow Christ and “do church” in a post-Christian, post-evangelical America?

What the church will look like (which poses the question, if we’re training kids to be involved in church as lay or vocational participants, how do we train them?):

• “expect evangelicalism as a whole to look more and more like the pragmatic, therapeutic, church growth oriented megachurches that have defined success….the result will be, in the main, a departure from doctrine to more and more emphasis on relevance, motivation and personal success…with the result being churches further compromised and weakened in their ability to pass on their faith.” (blog 2, point a)
• “An evangelicalized Catholicism and Orthodoxy….I expect the reviews of the influence of evangelicalism in these communions to be decidedly mixed.” (blog 2, point b)
• “I believe the emerging church will largely vanish from the evangelical landscape, become part of the small segment of progressive mainline Protestants that remain true to the liberal vision.” (blog 2, point d)
• “A small portion of evangelicalism will continue down the path of theological re-construction and recovery….a small, but active and vocal portion of evangelicalism will work hard to rescue the evangelical movement from its demise by way of theological renewal. …I do believe many evangelical churches and schools will benefit from this segment of evangelicalism, and I believe it will contribute far beyond its size to the cause of world missions.” (blog 2, point b)
• “Aggressively evangelistic fundamentalist churches [like the SBC] will begin to disappear…” (blog 2, point e)
• charismatic-Pentecostal Christianity will become the majority report in evangelicalism…who must decide whether their tradition will sink into the quicksand of heresy, relativism and confusion, or whether charismatic-Pentecostalism can experience a reformation and renewal around Biblical authority, responsibility leadership and a re-emergence of orthodoxy.”

•  “the key issue of leadership and the preparation of leaders leaves me with little hope that charismatic-Pentecostal Christianity can put its house in order…I see and hear little from this community’s younger leadership that indicates there is anything close to a real recognition of the problems they face.” (blog 2, point f)

Para-church ministries:

• “…parachurch ministries are going to become far less influential, and many will vanish…the same will likely be true…of Christian media to publishing.” (blog 2, point h)
• “I believe that the missionary sending agencies of evangelicalism will survive…but will be greatly weakened.” (blog 2, point i)

Predictions:

• “… the most basic calling of the church: the preservation and communication of the essentials of the Gospel in the church itself.” (blog 3)
• …innovative, missionally minded, historically and confessionally orthodox churches to “Emerge” in the place of the traditional church…developing new and culturally appropriate churches.” (blog 3)
• “…a unity where the cleavage between doctrine and spiritual gifts isn’t’ assumed.” (blog 3)
• “the ascendency of charismatic-Pentecostal influenced worship…if that development is joined with the calling, training and mentoring of leaders…and more…influence of the movement of the Spirit in Africa and Asia.”
• “Coming to terms with the economic implications of the Gospel [which has] proven particularly difficult for evangelicals. Perhaps the time is coming that this entanglement [of theology and personal affluence and success] will be challenged, especially in the lives of younger Christians.”
• “Christianity has flourished when it should have been exterminated.”
• “…new forms of Christian vitality and ministry will be born. New kinds of church structure, new uses of gifts, new ways to develop leaders and do the mission…will appear.”
• I expect to see a substantial abandonment of the seminary system…to church based seminaries to internet schools to mentoring and apprenticing arrangements.”