Why are so many of our churches small and dying? Why do we baptize so few new believers? Why don’t we have more large churches welcoming thousands of new members? Why does so much of our supposed growth come from church transfers? More importantly, what’s our solution?

 I don’t know what has incited the latest incriminations against Calvinists. We’re mostly hearing rehashed arguments already thoroughly refuted. Calvinism isn’t the “traditional Southern Baptist” view on soteriology. Calvinists are angry bloggers living in our parents’ basements who box up God and don’t evangelize. Even some prominent Calvinists argue the latter, so we’re certainly not surprised by such criticism. Yet it’s still a little surprising to learn we’re intellectual snobs killing the church by building wells, preaching a social gospel, and preying upon young believers around the world by fostering skinny-jeans laziness because we don’t care about people going to hell. Responding to such ugliness with more ugliness would only please Satan and embolden our critics.

I wonder, though, if these recent attacks reflect an underlying insecurity about our standing as Christians in the world, especially in America. By nearly every numeric metric you care to cite, the church is treading water or even falling behind. For a long time we Americans looked at Europe and thanked God for our relative position of strength and influence. For a long time we evangelicals looked at the Roman Catholic Church and Protestant mainline and thanked God for our relative vibrancy, largely gained by poaching their ranks. But we’re under no such illusions today.

Much of the recent criticism of Calvinism comes from within the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant denomination and a rare 20th-century success story for reversing the devastating effects of theological liberalism. Problem is, according to Lifeway Research president Ed Stetzer, “membership in the SBC is now on a multi-year decline. Our ‘growth’ trend is now negative and our membership is decreasing.” Baptisms have decreased 20 percent since 1999. More than a decade of passionate calls to reverse this worrisome trend with a renewed commitment to evangelism has not been able to stop the slump.

When things go bad, we look for someone to blame. The rise of Calvinism among evangelicals happens to correspond to this decade-plus of decline. Might correlation actually be causation? Would the church be in better shape if everyone agreed that God “endows each person with actual free will (the ability to choose between two options), which must be exercised in accepting or rejecting God’s gracious call to salvation by the Holy Spirit through the gospel”? As a Calvinist, I say no, but then I disagree that you must affirm this statement in order to find motivation to share the gospel of Jesus Christ and see more than a handful of hell-bound sinners transformed by grace.

So how does a Calvinist diagnose our problem?  

Read More