Adapt or die

Last month the National Centre for Social Research put out a press release entitled, ‘Record number of Brits with no religion’. It went on to say that, ‘The decline in religious affiliation is hitting the Church of England particularly hard’.

It is true that the proportion of those who claim allegiance to the Church of England has halved since the start of the 21st century and, of those who are still clinging on, more than half are over 65.

True, but not exactly news. The data was published in June. So why the new press release? Because this is not just data. Roger Harding, Head of Public Attitudes at the NCSR, has a message for faith leaders. He finishes the press release by saying: ‘We know from the British Social Attitudes survey that religious people are becoming more socially liberal on issues like same sex relationships and abortion. With falling numbers, some faith leaders might wonder whether they should be doing more to take their congregation’s lead on adapting to how society is changing.’

Old methods don’t work

In short, his warning for faith leaders is, ‘Adapt or Die’. And in many ways, he has got a point. All over the country there are churches of all denominations where an ever-decreasing number of increasingly frail stalwarts are struggling to keep churches open and hold services on a regular basis. Many of these individuals are faithful, prayerful saints who long to reach out to those in their community and who mourn the fact that the younger generations do not seem to be interested. There are also large, seemingly successful churches which are beginning to notice that the methods of outreach which proved so successful in the past are not hitting the buttons in the same way anymore.

I finally read Os Guinness’s book Holy Fools while I was on holiday this summer. In it he summed up something of the struggle that I believe we face: ‘Almost all our witnessing and Christian communication assumes that people are open to what we have to say, or at least are interested, if not in need of what we are saying. Yet most people quite simply are not open, not interested and not needy, and in much of the advanced modern world fewer people are open today than even a generation ago. Indeed, many are more hostile, and their hostility is greater than the Western church has faced for centuries.’

It is that hostility that is driving many in the Church of England either to withdraw into introspective silos or to adapt by conforming to the secular culture. Plenty are being persuaded to change their understanding of the Scriptures, or at the very least remain quiet on issues of morality, because they want to be able to tell people about Jesus. But in so doing they have become chaplains to the secular culture; gathering in beautiful buildings to bless those things which our culture blesses and to condemn those things that our culture despises, in the hope that people will somehow find Jesus through the experience.

Os Guinness takes a different approach. He goes on to say: ‘Our urgent need today is to reunite evangelism and apologetics, to make sure that our best arguments are directed toward winning people and not just winning arguments, and to seek to do all this in a manner that is true to the gospel itself.’

It is not the message we need to adapt but our methods. I was not surprised to find that Os Guinness is an Evangelical Anglican and a member of one of the leading churches in ACNA, a church whose commitment to Christ led them, at great personal cost, to reject the path of being chaplains to a secular culture. But in so doing they have adapted to a new reality and continue to hold out the word of truth in a way that can be heard in a hostile society.