American Churches Were Graded... It's Worse Than An "F"
Matthew 7 Series - Part 2

This is part 2 of the Matthew 7 Series. These articles are concerned with Matthew 7:13-29 and how we are getting it wrong. It is important to read these in order. Each article assumes you have read those that came before.

The title of this article is not an exaggeration, it's shameful. If a child came home with all F's on a report card a parent wouldn't be happy. And they'd also be worried about what is going on. But if the grades weren't just F's but they were grades between 6-9% most parents would flip out. That is just not acceptable. Just turning in assignments with the right name gets a better grade than that. The kid would almost have to deliberately try to get it wrong to get a grade that bad. That's what the churches in America have earned. Something is seriously wrong.

The Barna Group has done a number of surveys which show that while 65% of Americans claim to be Christian, only 4% of Americans have a biblical worldview. Barna only addressed a handful of the basic and indisputable biblical values a Christian must hold if they are following the real God and not some made up fraud. (The list can be found in Part 1 of the Matthew 7 Series.) When looking at just those that claim to be Christian there have been minor variations between surveys, but they all show only 6-9% of self-professed Christians have a biblical worldview. That means at least 91% of people who claim to be Christian do not believe what Jesus Christ taught and what the Holy Spirit put in scripture. If churches were doing nothing at all, more than 10% of people ought to be able to come to a biblical worldview for themselves. However, it appears that churches are actually making things worse than if they were doing nothing. This is not "being held back a grade" bad. It's "close the school" bad.

In scripture there are three main duties of the church. One is to glorify God. Another is to educate and build up believers in God's word to make them disciples of Christ. And the last is to evangelize others. These surveys show American churches as a whole aren't doing any of these. If people do not have a biblical worldview, they do not know the real God. So they can't be glorifying the real God. They are falling for a phony god that agrees with their worldview. Second, since the people of their church do not have a biblical worldview they are not being taught scripture and being brought up to be disciples of Christ. They are disciples of the other side that rules the secular world. And third, since only 4% of Americans in general have a biblical worldview, the churches aren't evangelizing people to Jesus either. (To be clear, the way churches should evangelize is that they train their people in scripture and equip them to go out and evangelize outside the church one-on-one. We cannot just drag people to church and leave it to the pastor.) With these surveys we have clear evidence that our churches are failing, and failing catastrophically.

The question is why are churches failing to do their job? Part of the answer is found in the grade for senior and lead pastors. As a whole the lead pastors also got an F, just not as low of an F as the rest of the "Christians". Only 51% of pastors had a biblical worldview, with 53% of male pastors and only 15% of female pastors having a biblical worldview. (Maybe the Apostle Paul was literal and not cultural with his prohibitions.) Regardless, half of lead pastors not having a biblical worldview explains half of the problem. People can't lead others to a Christian worldview if they don't have one themselves. It is clear that at least half of churches are glorifying a phony God, teaching secular anti-scriptural values, and failing to lead people to the real Christ. But that doesn't explain the half of lead pastors that do have a biblical worldview but aren't teaching it to their churches.

To be fair, there are churches that are making disciples of Jesus, the real Jesus. They are fulfilling their duty to build up their congregation. They are teaching scripture with conviction. And they are teaching that it must result in action as Jesus told us in Matthew 7. When people get foundational biblical principles inside them and make them a part of their everyday thinking their behavior changes. In other words, they bear good fruit. But those churches are a tiny minority. Half of churches are teaching a fake Christianity, and almost all of the other half are messing up somehow.

What is clear is that what we have been doing for decades isn't working. "Churches" and "Christians" have taken a marshmallow approach to how to do church, lead people to Christ, and train them up. By that I mean instead of following clear commands and guidance in scripture, they have created a fake commandment that they hold higher than scripture, "thou shalt not have any conflict". That is so unbiblical it's as if they've never even read the Bible. It sure seems even the pastors with a biblical worldview abandon the Bible in favor of a worldly "don't offend anyone" approach.

Jude 1:3 Beloved, while I was making every effort to write you about our common salvation, I felt the necessity to write to you appealing that you contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints. For certain persons have crept in unnoticed, those who were long beforehand marked out for this condemnation, ungodly persons who turn the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.

Contend, epagonizomai in Greek, means to exert extreme effort to win against an adversary. It is to strive against opponents. There is a strong emphasis that the purpose is for good. Paul put it that we are to correct each other in love. But we have to correct each other. Leaving someone on the path that leads to sin and death is the opposite of love. It's selfish to avoid conflict when that means letting someone go to Hell. It's actually siding with Satan.

You cannot find any biblical command, guidance, or example of this anti-biblical marshmallow approach. It is only by twisting verses into meaning something they are not can you even make up that nonsense. We are absolutely commanded to confront each other's sin and bad theology. Don't believe me? Let's look as just the big guys of our faith. Number one is Jesus, God become man. Jesus called fake religious people vipers, sons of Satan, and so on. He confronted bad behavior in the house of God with a whip. He called His own disciple Peter "Satan" when Peter tried to assert his own will against the will of God. Jesus was so harsh the crowds of thousands couldn't handle it and abruptly left. Jesus didn't try to get them back. He turned to his disciples and asked if they were leaving too, forcing them to admit they couldn't leave because there was no alternative to following Him. Paul called out Peter for his sin in front of the whole church. It wasn't private. It wasn't just in front of the leadership. It was public because Peter's sin was public and leading people away from the commands of Jesus. Paul's letters to churches other than Rome were mostly calling them out for not being Christian in their behavior and theology. He was mad as a hornet through the entire letter to the Galatians. When some were trying to insist that circumcision was required, Paul said those teaching that ought to not stop at the tip on themselves but cut the whole thing off, (emasculate themselves.) Yet it was Paul who more than anyone other than Jesus who caused Christianity to spread like wildfire, real Christianity. When Moses found the Israelites dancing naked worshipping a golden idol of a calf he burned the idol, ground it up, put it in water and made them drink it. There were no marshmallow approaches in any of these. These were harsh, in-your-face, calling out the false and insisting on following the true God. Why aren't we doing that today?

In a church I left a pastor was way more upset that I questioned the Christianity of a staff member that had been blatantly un-Christian in their behavior for the better part of a year than about the sin of this person. The staffer in question was a bald-faced liar, blamed others for him not doing his job, accused others of crimes that didn't even happen to cover for his own neglect and/or laziness, not to mention he even violated secular standards on how to treat subordinates. This pastor was aware of all of that. But what got him to react was that I called out this staffer for the consistent and repeated bad behavior where he demonstrated it was not believable he was a Christian. In this pastor's worldview you can never even question another person's Christianity. I merely quoted Christ to him, we"judge them by their fruits." His reaction made me question his Christianity as well. But worse, the unbiblical worldview of a majority of the pastors of the church demonstrated this was no longer a Christian church. The biblical ignorance was common among the pastors there. I was walking with a pastor so I could help her out. I was very busy that day and when she asked how I was doing I replied with some biblical quotes about being not of this world. She had no idea what I was talking about and just thought I was being weird. I question the integrity of someone that takes the title of pastor and is so ignorant of scripture and biblical concepts. In the youth group of my teenage years even casual attendees knew these things. But that's a big part of the problem. We have fake Christian pastors teaching people to be fake Christians. And more, even the pastors with a biblical worldview follow the false commandment "don't offend anyone." It's no wonder people can't tell the difference between "Christians" and non-Christians.

Don't get me wrong. The statistics show there are about thirteen million people in American that have a biblical worldview. That sounds like a lot, but that's out of 221,000,000 who claim to be Christian and 340,000,000 in the country. That only 6-9% of "Christians" and 4% of Americans. It's a shameful result. American churches as a whole are doing worse than failing. It's so bad it's almost unbelievable. The marshmallow approach isn't working. They are leading people to worship a fake god and teaching them about a fake Jesus that cannot save them. Or they are failing to stand up for the real Jesus and real biblical values and letting their congregations follow the wide path that leads to destruction unchallenged. There are denominations in this country that actually brag that a core value is not confronting people, a "can't we all just get along" approach. This is a direct violation of the command in 1 Corinthians 14:29 where others are supposed to pass judgement on the ones who speak. Judging by the fruits as Jesus commanded, this marshmallow philosophy is absolutely demonic. Let me repeat, this strategy is from the Devil. The results make that undeniably clear. It's working against God's plans, and it's working for Satan's plans.

It's time to stop emulating the Pharisees and start to emulate Jesus, John the Baptist, Paul and Moses. It's time to stop doing what fails and do what works. It's time to go back to the biblical commands, instructions, and examples. It's time to call out sin and false teaching. It's time to be like Jesus, Paul, Moses, and John the Baptist, holding God's morality as our standard and God's word as our marching orders.

The articles in this series that follow this one are not marshmallow articles. That doesn't work. That is anti-biblical. These articles are addressing some really, really, really bad problems in the church today. To be honest, if people would read 1st and 2nd Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians, 1st and 2nd Thessalonians as if they were directly addressed to their church, it wouldn't be necessary for people like me to call this out. But at least 91% of Christians reject the Bible in favor of their fake religion. So it's time to be frank, be tough, be real, and be biblical.