June 24, 2010

Since writing "The Faith of George W. Bush" and "The Faith of Barack Obama," New York Times bestselling author Stephen Mansfield has encountered people throughout the world who – often without any prompting – told him they had been hurt by the church.

Mansfield, a popular speaker and a pastor for two decades, says he later learned from pollster George Barna there is an "astonishingly large group of people out there who have tried church, been hurt or offended, and left."

"I do not mean to overstate, but it did not take me long to see this religious offense syndrome as a plague," Mansfield wrote in his new book, "ReChurch." "I was stunned by what had been lost to the Christian church through offended people slipping away. When my friend George Barna told me that in fifteen years, present trends continuing, church attendance in America will be half of what it is today, I knew immediately that much of this had to be as much due to offense and wounding as it was to other factors Barna identifies so well. This is happening at a time when the gospel in America is under vicious attack and when the state of the world cries out for a vibrant, whole, passionate church to tend to its woes and lead it to truth."

The release of Mansfield's book comes as a new study by The Barna Group found millions of "unchurched adults" are actually Christians who say they have been hurt by churches. The study found nearly four out of 10 non-churchgoing Americans – 37 percent – said they avoid churches because of negative past experiences in churches or with church people.

"The fact is it's easy to think in really simplistic terms about the unchurched when in fact many of the unchurched are former churchgoers and Christians on some level," says David Kinnaman, president of The Barna Group. "A lot of people who are unchurched today have actually experienced a lot of disenchantment with the church."

Whether the issue is the judgment rendered against them by churched people, perceived hypocrisy in the lives of the churched, or outright incivility or meanness suffered at the hands of other church members, some 25 to 30 million adults stay away from churches because of the past treatment they have experienced, Barna wrote in the forward to Mansfield's book.

"Too many adults have contracted ecclesia exitus because of how they were treated by the church community during difficult times – after a divorce or sexual affair, in response to rebellious children, because of substance abuse, due to living an unbiblical lifestyle, and the like," Barna wrote.
 As one who has been wounded by past church behavior, Mansfield says there is no denying that many churchgoers get hurt by the actions of others in the church. These incidents range from the trivial to the severe.

"The trivial is, 'They built a new parking lot and I wanted to use the money for the mission field,' or, 'They won't let the worship team wear jeans' or 'I don't like the pastor's wife' – that kind of thing," Mansfield says. "And then it gets to the more serious – sexual abuse of staff members."

In recent years, a spate of highly-publicized sex and financial scandals in Catholic and Protestant churches has revealed how devastating church misconduct can be to people. The media has devoted the most attention to the Catholic clergy sexual abuse scandal, which first erupted in 2002 when allegations were made that bishops across the United States had shuffled accused abusers from parish to parish without informing the public or police. In recent months, media reports have focused on allegations that the pope abetted the cover-up of abusive priests in his native Germany and elsewhere.

But Catholic churches aren't alone in these scandals. In recent years, evangelical, charismatic and Pentecostal churches have also experienced a flurry of moral failures among their leaders, including Colorado pastor Ted Haggard's affair with a gay man.

In his new book, "The Holy Spirit Is Not For Sale," former Charisma magazine editor Lee Grady exposes and confronts the financial scandals and faulty theology plaguing charismatic and Pentecostal churches – including abuse, showmanship, manipulation, greed and an infatuation with the "Prosperity Gospel.

"Greed has actually morphed into a virtue in some charismatic circles, where pastors take hour-long offerings and guest speakers require limousines and five-figure honorariums to maintain their celebrity lifestyles," Grady wrote. "It's especially bad on some Christian TV channels, where spiritual extortionists sell medieval-style indulgences disguised as 'Day of Atonement offerings' and use other ridiculous ploys to rob Christians."

As a result of these and other scandals, Grady wrote some people may give up on church and "join the growing ranks of Christians bitter and disenfranchised over just such scandals."

Dallas Willard, a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California and the bestselling author of "Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge" and other books, says many people today have a low opinion of the church and view it as a "negative institution." The deeper problem, however, is not the scandals, the hurts people have experienced or even the low opinions many hold of the church – issues that are merely symptoms of the larger malady.

Rather, one of the underlying causes is that churches rarely focus on discipleship of believers – teaching Christians how to live their lives in the kingdom of God as Jesus would live their lives if he were they, Willard says.

"The main problem is simply that the church does not focus on the transformation of life into Christ-likeness and on learning how to live in one's job, in one's community and in one's home in an admirable way," Willard says.

Anytime people gather and interact, there is always the potential for people to get hurt regardless of whether it's in a church or another venue. But instead of "getting their feelings hurt and quitting," Willard says the Bible teaches Christians to do the exact opposite.

"Christ intended that we'd grow to the point where we would find another way and we would be able to love the person that offended us and grow through that," Willard says. "But that's the problem. The churches are not focused on the spiritual transformation of people. They talk a lot about it. But when you look at what they do, this is not what they are focused on. Very often, especially in this economic downturn, they are just focused on survival. That has become the uppermost goal on the minds of many of our church – how to get enough money to survive."

In "The Great Commission" in Matthew 28: 19-21, Jesus explained to his disciples how to build his church, directing believers to "make disciples" – or students and apprentices - of all kinds of people throughout the world and teach them to "obey everything I have commanded you."

"If we taught people to do that in mass, our world would be different, our churches would be different and our lives would be different, not to mention we wouldn't be off doing drugs and raping children," Willard says. "That's the low end of the continuum, but what you see Christians doing is a result of them not being taught in such a way that they would do what Jesus said."

Barna's findings are also symptomatic of an even larger issue, the cultural distortion that has taken place in recent centuries as society has placed a greater emphasis on subjective feelings rather than the objective knowledge presented in God's word.

Since the 1700s, Christian spiritual truths – a body of objective knowledge that is more than just personal opinion or belief as mere preference –has been undermined by a progression of modern ideas, Willard says.

In his upcoming book, "The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge," Willard argues the educational system no longer attempts to teach students about moral knowledge, but rather is committed to the idea that morality, or character, is subjective.

"People from our churches go to the universities where this is taught and then they come back to church and are apt to hear the same thing from their preacher," Willard says. "There are many churches that don't say these things, but when you look at how they behave you wonder if they don't really believe it."

As a result, the idea of sin has disappeared from culture and the language. People rarely talk about sin anymore and even the concept of evil is rarely raised.

"The basic problem, even if they are Christians, is by the time they get through high school almost everyone believes good and evil is subjective – what might be good for you might not be good for me," Willard says. "That's the way young people usually put it."

As a consequence, many people make important decisions based on their feelings rather than the objective truth of Scripture, which calls on people to love their enemies as themselves and when attacked not to decide, "I'm out of here, but rather I'll stay and love this person," Willard says.

In his book, Mansfield wrote the church has faced similar problems for thousands of years. In Galatians, the Apostle Paul wrote human beings in their lesser selves are given to factions and discord, jealousy and selfish ambition and dissensions and hate.

From the moment of its birth, the church has experienced crises, fights and scandals. But while some would say these conflicts are evidence that Christianity isn't true, Mansfield believes the opposite.

"If Christianity teaches anything, it is that men are deeply flawed and need rescue," he wrote. "If fact, Christianity teaches that once we become Christians, we are still merely works in progress. The Bible confirms this when it insists that we were saved, we are being saved, and we will one day ultimately be saved. In other words, the salvation Jesus brings to our lives is a progression."