August 23, 2016September 7, 2017 Peter Witkowski Apologetics

Does Your Church’s Birthrate Matter?

birth-rate We do often talk about birthrates at church. Well at least not in those terms. We discuss delaying conception until after we accomplish some life goal; we discuss how 1 or 2 kids is our ideal family size; and, we discuss why modern society no longer needs a family to have 12 kids. We examine birthrates through the lens of modern convenience and societal success. And as a result, evangelicals increasingly prize smaller and smaller families. At last check, the birthrate for Southern Baptist couples sits at 1.96, appreciably below the replacement birth rate of 2.1.

As Southern Baptists and as Bible believing Christians, we need to start looking at birthrates through the lens of biblical truth. But we need to do more than just talk. We need to act and act soon.

We need to begin advocating for large families. We need to encourage our young couples to have kids. The Bible commands it (Gen. 1:28). The survival of our churches depends upon it.

Why The Birthrate Matters

Let’s say we decide to be cool and start a new church plant called Last Baptist Church with fifty God fearing couples. Theses couples adhere to the Southern Baptist birth rate and have 98 kids. The couples’ kids grow up in great Christians homes where church attendance is a must. They attend Sunday school, Bible Drill, and Disciple Now weekends. They get baptized. Eventually, most of them go off to college. According to George Barna, somewhere between 30%-40% of these kids will stay Church-retention-rate actively involved in church. We will assume that our Last Baptist church is a really godly church and will go with the higher number, predicting that 40% of the kids stay involved. The next generation is now comprised of 39 people. Thankfully, studies by Steve Parr have shown that about 40% of those church kids who walked away from the faith will decide to come back to church. As time goes on, 24 of the kids who left will return to our church’s pews. The second generation now consists of 63 adults.

These 63 adults get together and start their own families. They have 61 kids. And they grow up, leave and come back. Last Baptist’s third generation now consists of 39 people. In a matter of three generations our Last Baptist Church will see it’s young adult attendance drop from 100 people to 39. After another generation has passed, the church adult attendance goes down to 24 and then 16.

Population Bubble

Now this does not happen immediately. There is a lot of generational overlap. The initial three generations will all attend church together for some time. The church members will think that Last Baptist Church is relevant, expanding, and reaching people. After all it has gone from a 100 people to an average attendance of 202 people in a period of 30 years. Life is good; the Senior Pastor gets invited to speak at church planting conferences. But then the senior adults begin to pass away and the kids begin to leave. The population bubble bursts. As the second generation moves into the leadership roles, the church’s attendance slowly drops from 202 to 1126. Although the church begins to struggle, the sanctuary is still relatively full. After a few more years pass, the third generation moves into leadership. Now the average attendance is down to 79. And then bottom falls out when the fourth generation takes over. Only 56 people are regularly attending. You have 24 senior adults, 16 adults and 16 kids. The leaders of the church wonder what went wrong? They wonder were all the people went. And though the answer is simple, it is a hard one to swallow. The people were never born.

Last-Baptist-Generation-Breakdown Admittedly, no church goes through such a simple, straight forward process as Last Baptist Church. People move off, join other churches, and new members come through conversion. There are a whole host of variables at play.

But in many cases, I believe those variables do not favor the church. Some little towns will see large portions of their second and third generations move away. Of those 63 kids, perhaps only 20-30 of them will actually stay in town. Instead of going up, the birth rate will most likely continue to drop with each succeeding generation. All of these factors will serve to expedite Last Baptist’s decline. Instead of taking 60 to 80 years, the decline I’ve described could happen in matter of 15-20 years. I believe that many little, country churches may be dying today because their previous generations did not have kids. Their bubbles have begun to burst.

I know that the birthrate is not the only thing that determines whether or not a church is about to die. Tom Rainer has written several good little books such as I AM A Church Member and the Autopsy of A Deceased Church that tackle many of the heart attitudes and bad theology that undo a church. I highly recommend them to all who want their church to thrive.

But a church’s birthrate must be considered. I believe that the birthrate is a contributing factor to a church’s decline. According to the book Spiritual Champions, almost 64% of all people embrace Christ by 18. Adults are not nearly as receptive as children. Only around 6% of people over age 19 will be open to the gospel. Can we and should we reach out to adults with the gospel? Yes! I have personally seen God radically transform fifty-year-old men and women. Yet a church that does not have kids will miss its best chance to reach one of the largest and most approachable demographics. As a result, the church that is content will a low birthrate is a church that is content with decline. The SBC is already seeing this phenomenon take place. Membership continues to drop despite our best evangelistic efforts. And unless birthrates change, I predict the decline will continue.

If we want our churches to grow, we must encourage our families to grow. Are you ready to do this?

February 23, 2016February 22, 2016 Peter Witkowski Discipleship

The Evangelical Problem With Sin

blog sin problem It only happened once in my life. But it happened. I threw away a Bible. Just moments earlier, I had been wearing rubber gloves, a surgical mask and a hospital gown. When the very sick and very contagious patient asked to flip through my Bible, I let him. We had a great time together, discussing our Lord and savior. As I prepared to leave the room, he did the unexpected. He gave me back the Bible. Talk about being in a bind. When I looked at that Bible all I could see was germs, sickness, and my impending death. So…as I prepared to leave, I quietly placed the Bible into the toxic bin with my gloves and all. There was no way, I was going to risk death. Sadly though, we evangelicals are far more flippant about our spiritual health.

This weekend, Deadpool grossed $55 million dollars. Risen grossed 11.8 million. As Dr. Albert Mohler recently noted, Deadpool can only be such a big success (grossing over 296 million over the last few weeks) because church goers are being entertained by the very sins they supposedly denounce. And this past Saturday, 1/3 of the evangelicals in South Carolina supported a presidential candidate who regularly contradicts the scriptures in both lifestyle and policy. So while we give Jesus a nod on Sunday, we Christians are increasingly going against him on Monday – Saturday. We are increasingly ok with sin if it promises entertainment, wealth, or security. We are increasingly comfortable with death.

I think we find ourselves willing to risk spiritual death because we don’t really believe that sin is all that bad. Sure, It’s an annoyance; it’s a distraction; perhaps, it’s even a stinging paper cut. But it’s not deadly; it’s not something we need to put on masks and gloves to encounter. We excuse sin as an enjoyable albeit slightly tainted endeavor that brings minimal harm. And sure, we will try to improve upon our vices at some point. But until then, we are content to watch the sexual explicit movies on Saturday before worshiping Jesus on Sundays. After all it’s the secular culture that’s destroying America. We are not as bad as them.

The solution? We need view our sin as death. Yes, God is concerned about divorce and homosexuality. But, He is equally concerned with our secret sins whether they be pornography, pride, racism, stealing, etc. To be a friend of the world (even a secret one) means you are an enemy of God.

In Mark 1:40, Jesus encounters a leper, a man who has been kicked out of his family and community because he is physically beyond help. He is also highly contagious. In short, he is unclean. To encounter him, one risks becoming unclean. One risks physical death.

Friends, this is us. We are not Jesus. We are the leper. Our sin in not little, insignificant, or minor. Our sin destroys our lives, families, and communities. As Romans 8:13 say, if “you live according to the flesh you will die.” Don’t miss this. If left unchecked, our sins will kill us. Instead of entertaining them, we need to flee from it, screaming.

But we can’t. We are already infected with the deadly virus. We can’t make ourselves clean. And that latest five step program or legalistic rubric won’t do the trick. At the end of the day, we are all lepers incapable of healing ourselves.

We have to call out to Jesus. The leper did just this. He asked Jesus to take away his uncleanness. And, Jesus did. He touched the leper. Instantly, the man was made clean. The way we overcome sin is to call out to Jesus for salvation. And when Jesus saves us he makes us eternally clean; we are justified. He cleanses us from all sin.

But we are not yet perfected. We still struggle with sin. Every day, we need to continue to cry out to Jesus. We need to continually remember that all sin, even the whitest white lie brings death. We need to daily stand out the foot of the cross.

To be a holy people all seven days of the week, we have to understand sin. We have to get just how bad we are. Only then, we will see the need to depend daily upon our great God.

October 13, 2015November 8, 2024 Peter Witkowski Apologetics

Mom, are Christians Nazis?

The word Nazi became part of America’s political and cultural discourse. If one group can convince the culture that it’s opponent’s position are nothing more than a new manifestation Nazi platform intent on human suffering, it will essential win its argument. No one wants to side with Hitler, war, and the mass extermination of minorities.

Of late, the defenders of LGBTQ+ movement have begun to claim that conservative Christians are nothing more than modern day Nazis. Just like the Nazi’s, the evangelical church demonizes and abuses all whole mass of people as sinners condemned to hell. Not only do such claim make rhetorical sense, they also have some historical backing. As many a history book rightfully notes, Hitler did at times appeal to the sanctity of the German Church to justify his abuse and murder of the Jews.

So are those trying to redefine marriage and sexuality correct? Are conservative, Bible believing Christians nothing more than modern day Nazis? Let’s take a look.

Hitler, The Bible and Church

A noted above, Hitler did make use of the church. Unlike the American church, the German protestant church of the 1930s was funded by German tax dollars and was an government agency. Being a pragmatic man, Hitler used all government agencies including the German church to advance Nazism.

But historical, evangelical Christianity’s focus on forgiveness and the promise that God would once against extend mercy to the Jews proved incompatible with Nazism. To make the church useful, Hitler had to divorce it from its adherence to Scripture so that its end would not be the glory of God but the glory of the German Volk.

Viewing the Bible to be overtly Jewish and an excessively feminine work, Hitler created false version of Christian that contained little Scripture. As one Nazi theologians noted,

The Devil values the printed page and stretches it out to demand signatures, while God reaches out his hand. Whereas the Jews were the first to write out their faith, Jesus never did so.

Driven by nationalistic furor, the Nazis began chopping apart the Bible. Nazi’s lead their congregations to chant, “Down with Paul and the Old Testament” (Evidently, Jesus was Jew hating Aryan.). They removed all references to sin, the supernatural, and Judaism. Such things were deemed to be Jewish perversions and unloving doctrines weakness. Hitler and his followers wanted a nationalistic Christianity free from the dogma and the doctrine of the biblical text.

At the end of the day, Hitler vehemently opposed biblical, conservative Christianity. As early as 1933, the Nazi party began prohibiting soldiers and statesmen from being involved in church life. By 1939, the superintendent of military chaplains boasted that, “no one understood” confessional Christianity “anymore.” Historic Christianity opposed Hitler’s murderous policies of Nazi superiority. And despite his early propaganda speeches, the dictator knew it. He wanted to rid Germany of the faith. Historian Doris L. Bergen noted that, “hard-core Nazi leaders…as well as Adolf Hitler himself, considered Nazism and Christianity irreconcilable antagonists.” Nazis were not yesterday’s fundamentalist.

The Conservative Christian View

Unlike the Nazis, conservative Christians champion the Bible’s teachings. Breaking with western culture which views the Bible as intolerant, conservative Christians view the Bible to be the living word of God. They cling to passages such as 2 Timothy 3:16 which states:

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.

Today’s fundamentalist believe that the Bible directly conveys God’s message to humanity. They are driven by the conviction that Scripture is God’s word and must be obeyed.

Conservative Christians condemn homosexuality not because they hate “brown” people and minorities as the Nazi did. They condemn homosexuality and all sex outside of biblical marriage because such actions as pastor Sam Allberry writes, “Contradict sound doctrine and the gospel.” Unlike the Nazis, conservative Christians stand with the printed page of God’s word. Though unpopular, they cling to the Jesus of the Bible. As the Apostle Peter says in John 6:38, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

Who Has Abandoned the Gospel?

In the modern world, it is not conservative evangelical Christians but the LGBTQ+ theologians that have abandoned the gospel. As Timothy Johnson notes:

I think it important to state clearly that we do, in fact, reject the straightforward commands of Scripture, and appeal instead to another authority when we declare that same-sex unions can be holy and good. And what exactly is that authority? We appeal explicitly to the weight of our own experience and the experience thousands of others have witnessed to, which tells us that to claim our own sexual orientation is in fact to accept the way in which God has created us. By doing so, we explicitly reject as well the premises of the scriptural statements condemning homosexuality

Just like the Nazi church and countless theological liberals before them, today’s liberals have once again rejected the Scripture. They look to the human experience for meaning and truth. And, they have no other choice. Commenting on the above quote, David Platt wrote:

If someone wants to advocate for homosexual activity, he or she must maintain that the Bible is irrelevant to modern humanity, inconsistent with our experience, and thus insufficient as a source of truth and guidance for our lives.

To arrive at a positive, sexualized Christianity free from the dogma, one must reject the Scriptures.

Are We Nazis?

The answer is “No.” Conservative, evangelical Christianity has always affirmed scripture and has been at odds with Nazism. Take a closer look at the likes of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the other members of the Confessing Church and the contrast will become even clearer.

I also do not believe that homosexual theologians are Nazis. They are not advocating for the death of millions of Jews. The homosexual agenda is not the Nazi agenda. In short, we can safely conclude that neither conservative Christians nor homosexuals represent the rebirth of Nazism.

But homosexual theologians do share an intellectual pragmatism with the Nazi party. Both groups attempted to escape the authority of the written text of scripture. As Dr. Albert Mohler wrote a few months ago:

Once biblical inerrancy is abandoned, there is no brake on theological and moral revisionism. The Bible’s authority becomes relative, and there is no anchor to hold the church to the words of Scripture and 2,000 years of Christian witness.

The results of the Nazi and the homosexual theological experiments have been very different. One encouraged a culture to embrace Aryanism and the Holocaust. The other is leading the west to redefine sex. But, they share a methodology. They both believe the Christian faith can and should be unanchored from the Bible and made into something new.

Final Thoughts

The quotes are true. Hitler did embrace a form of Christianity. But the similarities between the Christianity of Hitler and the Christianity of modern day conservative, evangelicals begins and ends with the word, “Christian.” Hitler championed a Christianity divorced from scripture, while conservatives champion the written word. So the answer to the question at the beginning of this blog is a resounding, “No, we are not Nazis.”