PRIORITIZING VOCATION AND STEPPING OUT IN FAITH

There are still people going to church regularly. I am one, and every Sunday there are about a thousand people who join me in the church I attend in a small city in Manitoba. More than 50 of our teenagers are serving in the church. Last Sunday I sat with my grandkids in an area for families with young children. There are lots of these families. There are lots of grey heads too. On Sunday our worship leader asked people who need a breakthrough from God to raise their hands. Lots of hands went up and we laid hands on each other while she prayed.

This picture holds true throughout Canada. I recently attended a megachurch in the Toronto area which has 5,000 attendees spread across various satellite locations each weekend. There are other large churches in many of the major cities in Canada. It’s encouraging to see healthy churches of such size, although obviously they are exceptional. Most Canadians attend churches which number in the low hundreds, and there also thousands of even smaller churches with attendance numbers in the dozens scattered from sea to sea to sea.

The data regarding church attendance and people who affiliate with the Christian faith can be disheartening. People have not just left the Church, they have left the faith. Census and polling data do not lie. The Church overall is losing ground when it comes to attendance, and Christian affiliation continues to decline.

How should those who still attend respond? My thoughts are those of a New Testament professor and president of a Christian university and seminary, which may colour them to some degree.

We need to take to heart the main purpose of the gathered church in the New Testament, which is to pass on the gospel. God sent the Spirit to the apostles so they would

have the truth of the gospel (John 14:25–26; 16:12–13). They were given the task to pass on this gospel tradition to faithful people who would pass it on to the next generation (2 Timothy 2:2).

This means we are not looking for or devising new truth. The old, old story is our story. Paul said the gospel is the power of God for salvation (Romans 1:16–17). “Jews ask for signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified – a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:22–24).

Saying the story is unchanging does not mean, however, that we must pass on the tradition in the same way we learned it. The best communication methods should be devised and employed. Perhaps the traditional Sunday School format is no longer the best way, although it still seems to work in a lot of churches. Packaging may change, but the content must stay the same. We need to live a Christian life

before the watching world. Rodney Stark, in The Rise of Christianity (Princeton University Press, 1996), shows the growth of the Church in the Roman Empire owes a lot to the way Christians cared for the marginalized, both inside and outside the Church. We certainly need to stand up against systemic injustice, but we also need to care in tangible ways for those who are suffering.

Francis Schaeffer spoke of love as the great Christian apologetic, for example in The Mark of the Christian (InterVarsity Press, 1970). Though I am dating myself by mentioning Schaeffer, I recently saw the truth of his words in Myanmar where Christians are serving internally displaced people with tangible acts of caring. Who wouldn’t want to be part of a community where they were truly loved and cared for, and where their alienation and loneliness can be alleviated?

This is a matter of priorities. We in the West live with schedules crowded with so many activities and distractions that it is hard to make time to really live the Christian life. Maybe we need to reduce and simplify our lives so we have time to grow in faith and put faith into practice through acts of kindness. We should also encourage young

people to step out in faith, as many of us stepped out during our early years. In the Hemorrhaging Faith and Renegotiating Faith surveys, sponsored in part by The Evangelical

Fellowship of Canada, we learned young people who attend and work at Christian camps have a greater propensity to persevere in the faith. My guess is that short-term mission trips have the same effect.

The Renegotiating Faith survey also showed that attendees of Christian postsecondary institutions remain in the Church at a far higher rate than those who attend a secular university or no university at all. Christian colleges and universities are not spiritual bubbles. They do not offer an inferior education. They expose students to a wide variety of ideas, but they also provide tools to think critically and Christianly about those ideas. These students learn Christianity is a viable alternative

to secular worldviews. They meet God in their peer group and make faith their own.

We need to revive talk about a vocational approach to life. As Steven Garber notes in Visions of Vocation: Common Grace for the Common Good (IVP Books, 2014), students need to recognize God is calling them. They should not merely take a job or pursue a career. They should learn to listen to God’s voice as it comes to them through a deep understanding of Scripture, concerted prayer and the discernment of the Christian community. They should understand what it means to commit themselves to follow God’s call to serve, whatever profession or career they choose.

We should learn from Christians in the Majority World where the Church is growing. Every month another Pentecost-like spurt of growth occurs somewhere in the world. Thousands of people are coming to Christ. But not here. What is their secret? How do they do it? Can we catch some of their boldness, some of their commitment, some of their heart for evangelism and discipleship?

Finally, we need to recognize God is sovereign in the outworking of Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. “Leaders make their plans, but it is the purposes of God that will stand” (Proverbs 19:21). The sovereignty of God does not mean we should not plan and work. It means we must pray, put all our plans and work into the hand of God, and ask Him to guide us and use us to accomplish His will, not our own.

Perhaps there is another spiritual revival deep in the recesses of God’s will for Canada. It will only be brought out as Christians pray. /FT

We certainly need to stand up against systemic injustice, but we also need to care in tangible ways for those who are suffering.