Building

Christians have every reason to be thankful for the work of Peter Brierley and Christian Research.  I hope that he'll excuse me picking some holes - some important holes, I think - in his recently-reported research reported to the Pentecost Festival.  Peter's strong point has always been collecting data and delivering it in understandable ways.  Interpreting it is tougher.

Let's take just one glaring statistic because I think it teaches alot more than it appears to teach: in 1990, there were (allegedly) 120,000 conversions and (definitely) 60,000 deaths, in 2009 there were (apparently) only 80,000 conversions and (definitely) 120,000 deaths of Church attendees.

Does this, as Peter deduced, show a lack of evangelism?

A conversion is only a conversion for sure when the pilgrim reaches the end of the journey.  Be faithful to the point of death and I will give you a crown of life.  Professions, not conversions then.  But are they even professions?  Aren't there still here the formal additions of automated confirmations, of aspirational declarations for other purposes such as getting the kids into the local faith school?  Ironically the deaths - those who have died in the body of believers - are more accurately described as converted.

And who does what here?  Instinctively we feel that the Church does conversions and God does deaths.  Yet with modern medicine we can hold death off quite significantly.  We cannot by our knowledge add a single soul by conversion.  Are these statistics a picture of what we are doing or of what God is doing?  If God is doing less converting do we do more evangelism or do we do more praying?   Is our hurt about numerical decline of the visible church more about gospel passion or our own pride and influence?

The Church is a building.  That's all it is.  A building, never a declining.  Added to, never subtracted from.  Every new believer one new living stone that will never die, not an inadequate shoring up of a wall that once had many more stones in. 

We are too earthbound.  Biblically, eternally, heaven-perspectively we belong to a number that cannot be counted but every day is added to until every last one of God's children is home and everyone left outside has to confess they never wanted in.

It is not the Church that is declining.

The statistics show that what is declining is the spiritual state of the country and the culture.