America has had an explosion of megachurches in the past decade. The term “megachurch” is generally applied to congregations that average 2,000 or more in worship, but many of these megachurches have attendance in the tens of thousands. We also have Christian colleges rapidly expanding in size, some with up to 100,000 students. Some Christian books sell in the millions, and there are Christian radio and television networks worth billions of dollars. We have never seen anything like this.
Yet all these visible indicators are misleading; something else is also going on that tells a very different story. Respected sources such as Lifeway, George Barna and Duke University report that although the number of megachurches has increased at a brisk rate (from 600 in 2000 to 1,642 in 2017), at the same time, national church attendance is steadily falling (from 41 percent to 36 percent), and the median size of all churches is only 70 congregants.
So the growth of megachurches is a false positive. And although some Christian colleges are rapidly growing, many have become so secular it is not unusual for kids who attend them to abandon the faith. In fact, a coalition of approximately 200 Christian colleges and universities has experienced loss of its members because they can no longer agree on things as simple as the Biblical definition of marriage and acceptable sexual behavior.
It is our understanding that this organization offered associate membership status for those so-called “Christian” schools that, in direct opposition to plain Biblical teachings, affirmed homosexuality and homosexual “marriage.” Several authentically Biblical colleges appropriately left the organization in protest. At that point, the two anti-Biblical colleges left the organization, but the once stellar reputation of the coalition was tarnished.
The same is true for the other seemingly positive measurements. Many simply are not accurate portrayals of the Christian landscape. We speak in many conferences, addressing numerous pastors each year. When we ask local pastors how many of them pastor in communities measurably more righteous today than a generation ago, no one has ever raised a hand. So, despite the billions of dollars spent and millions of hours expended in Christian ministry, the nation is less reflective of Christian values than ever before. To be blunt, the nation is going to hell.
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Source: Christian Post
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