This is no time for despair. We don’t need to reinvent the church but to rediscover it, for the church is God’s creation. This is no time to abandon theology but to drill down deeper to take every thought, and every social imaginary, captive to Christ. The local church is the place to cultivate biblical literacy, to learn what every Christian needs to know to represent Christ and his kingdom.

Karl Marx once complained that philosophy has “only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” What about theology? Does it have a better track record with effecting change?

Some today blithely dismiss theology as having long passed its use-by date. That view is short-sighted. The truth is that pastor-theologians are the ascended Christ’s gifts to the church (Eph. 4:8). Informed by the Word and empowered by the Spirit, Christ uses pastor-theologians both to interpret the world and to transform it. Like first responders, they enter the crisis of our post-Christian world and train disciples to address its most dire needs.

Disaster in the Making

We’re not in a Christian Kansas anymore. Tell-tale signs of our post-Christian world include Christianity’s declining influence, declining church attendance numbers, a decline in respect for the church, and the diminishing Christian influence on the main ingredients of our culture—its beliefs, values, and practices. In our post-Christian world, there’s also been a shift in how people understand and react to “Christian” as an identifier.

Sometime in the 20th century, the Western world awoke, like the minister in John Updike’s novel In the Beauty of the Lilies, to find it had lost its faith. The speed at which the “post” has staked its qualifying claim on Christianity is mind-boggling. What just happened?

No single argument or scientific discovery is responsible for the end of the Christian era. Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age suggests the revolution was interior, in the way society images the world and humanity’s place in it. The reasons are complex, but the result is palpable: we inhabit a world where God’s existence isn’t felt to be obvious, intuitively correct, or plausible. The world feels this-worldly.

One of the many consequences of our post-Christian culture stands out: post-literacy. From the beginning, and even more so after the Reformation and the printing press, Christianity has been word-centered. In a post-literate culture, however, people communicate through a variety of multimedia platforms; the written word no longer holds pride of place. In a culture saturated by TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, attention spans need to be only a few minutes long (sorry, long-winded preachers).

Read More