Noticed in America #2
America was also striking for the way the Christians are fighting so many of the same battles as we are in Australia, yet with some contextual differences. The big issues are those that the New Testament leads us to expect will be the issues for churches everywhere in the last days—striving to stay true to the biblical gospel, and striving to continue in faithful, prayerful gospel ministry in the face of so many distractions, attacks and alternatives.
The particular form of these distractions and alternatives vary in nature and scale from place to place. We know, for example, about biblically vacuous, feel-good prosperity teaching in Australia, but the scale and reach of this teaching in the US is mind-boggling. In the week that I arrived, Joel Osteen's new book Become a Better You was released in the US, with the largest hardback first print run in the history of American publishing: three million copies. It was in the front window of all the (secular) bookstores.
It was interesting, too, to observe the different struggles that evangelicals are having among themselves in different places. One of our conference themes was ‘the church’, and it was fascinating to observe how a fairly standard ‘Sydney’ biblical theology of church was heard and received. In our context, the Knox-Robinson view of ‘church’ is set against an over-reaching denominationalism and is seen as being very congregational—too congregational for some. In fact, the Knox-Robinson view has been criticized in the past (wrongly in my view) as being more Baptist than Anglican.
However, in the largely Baptist context of our American conference, the background issues were quite different. They continue to be plagued by a high degree of residual nominalism—of people being on official church membership rolls for years with full voting rights, yet without ever attending or showing any vital evidence of conversion. There is also an increasing move among younger American evangelicals to disparage the local church, and to ‘float free’, meeting ad hoc with other Christians as opportunity presents itself, but not belonging to a conventional ‘church’. In the face of these pressures, they were concerned that the ‘Sydney’ view of church wasn't congregational enough—that it didn't draw a tight enough circle around which particular local group of people properly constituted ‘the church’.
Talking these things over with our American brothers over coffee was very fruitful—especially for coming to understand why, for many Reformed-evangelical churches in America (particularly Baptist ones), issues of church membership and polity are such hot topics.