Our Present Church Decline: Diagnosing and Prescribing

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Special to United Methodist Insight | March 26, 2025

No one reading this article would question the fact that the church in the West is in decline and has been declining for a long time. Not only is it losing members, but the church’s influence on its culture has declined. For instance, during the middle of the 20th century, one could find Christian leaders, like Reinhold Niebuhr, giving considered opinions on national and world matters. writing articles for popular magazines and newspapers. How seriously are Christian leaders taken in today’s world?

Let us first use an article in Ecclesial Futures by two leaders in the Church of the Netherlands, Marten Van der Meulen and, Jonna van den Berge-Bakker, to diagnose the problem and then turn to two missionary/theologians, British and South African, to suggest a prescription.*

Ecclesial Futures is free digital journal provided by a group called The International Consultation on Ecclesial Futures. In its 5th volume (https://ecclesialfutures.org/article/view/18728) they write:

We distinguish two crises of the Church. Crisis 1 is the decline of the Church. Crisis 2 is that churches forget what they are called to. Both are related, but it is important to distinguish them. Crisis 1 is the crisis in which we “happen” to find ourselves. It is the situation of many churches in recent decades, in most Western societies, including the Netherlands.  Crisis 2 is in fact a permanent crisis because, as sinful human beings, we constantly forget, ignore and frustrate our calling in ever new and ingenious ways. We should not be surprised that as a church, we do the same.

The authors spell out three trends:

1. The first, major trend for Dutch churches is decline.

2. This trend is expected to continue, partly due to an ageing membership base of the mainline churches.

3. The third trend we notice is that of a shyness, awkwardness or embarrassment in living out and talking  about faith.

This embarrassment, certainly among theologians, but also among church members, has to do with the fact that we are much more secularised than we realise ourselves.We no longer think from the reality of God, as the First. People sense that the crisis is not just about decline, nor do they believe that new initiatives of being church will magically help.

Efforts to turn the decline around, such as the church growth movement or Fresh Expressions or new church planting, may provide some relief in some places to the decline. But it fails to confront the crisis 2 of numberless congregations that “forget what they are called to”, a perennial problem.

Prescription

When I began my project several years ago of finding resources for the future of the church, I had no idea of where this would lead. I just set about reading books to find those who had some idea or ideas that would affect a positive future for the church. At the outset, I had no idea of who might have a vision for the future. I would make no judgements, but simply put together a “library” of resources and let those who visited the library make their own evaluations.

What changed me from that neutral position was the discovery of two authors who seemed to be head and shoulders above the rest. In fact, their writings influenced quite a few of the other books that I had located. These two are David Bosch, a South African theologian and missionary, and Bishop Lesslie Newbigin, a British missionary and theologian, but also a world church leader as director for a time of the International Missionary Society.

Bosch’s major contribution was his book "Transforming Mission," the text used in most courses taught on missions since its publication in 1991. Newbigin’s two major books, "Foolishness to the Greeks" and "The Gospel in a Pluralist Society," helped initiate what is called The Gospel and Our Culture Network (GOCN) which in its North American and British parts has produced several books and resources with visions of the church’s future.

Both Bosch and Newbigin write about what churches are to do over against what they now do, but on this issue, I am going to focus more on Bosch’s thoughts. I will focus more on Newbigin when dealing with the next issue, the relation of the Gospel to its Western culture.

“Transforming Mission” is over 650 pages long. Chapter 12 alone is more than 120 pages long. Ten pages of this chapter are devoted to what Bosch calls missio Dei.* In the last few years, those who are academics who study missions have developed this term. During the past half a century or so there has been a subtle but nevertheless decisive shift toward understanding mission as God's mission.

Prior to this, missions were seen as one of several programs of the church, along with other emphases like worship, education, social action, etc. At the first World Mission Conference in Edinburgh in 1910 under the theme "The Evangelization of the World in This Generation." Quite a goal! There followed the recruiting of thousands of missionaries sent out basically from the Western Culture in Europe and North America to the countries considered dark and pagan. The main point of this being that mission was viewed as the task of the churches.

"In the new image mission is not primarily an activity of the church, but an attribute of God. God is a missionary God. “It is not the church that has a mission of salvation to fulfil in the world; it is the mission of the Son and the Spirit through the Father that includes the church” (Moltmann 1977:64). Mission is thereby seen as a movement from God to the world; the church is viewed as an instrument for that mission. There is church because there is mission, not vice versa. To participate in mission is to participate in the movement of God's love toward people, since God is a fountain of sending love." " –Bosch, "Transforming Mission" pg 200.

It seems to me that the idea of missio Dei is a current term for the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom was the central teaching of Jesus. (The term is not found in the Old Testament). It was the goal toward which Jesus and the church of the first centuries preached and moved. That continued until the time of Constantine, when the faith came under the umbrella of the Roman Empire and subtly the focus of the Christian community shifted from Kingdom being central to the church being central. The churches “forgot what they [were] called to,” and that shift continued for the next 1,600 years.

“To understand the emergence of the missio Dei, it is important to understand the background of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: mission was considered to be primarily a work of the church. The optimism and anthropocentrism of the Enlightenment infected the missionary movement. This human-centered confidence was dealt a number of blows in the twentieth century that called for a new understanding of mission…This language makes clear in the strongest possible way four things: the church’s mission must be distinguished from God’s mission; God’s mission has priority; it is the mission of the Triune God; and God’s mission determines exactly the what and how of the church’s mission.” – Goheen, Michael W. "The Church and Its Vocation: Lesslie Newbigin's Missionary Ecclesiology" (p. 68).

Much of what I will be exploring in future writing upon this topic will be spelling out what this would look like practically and the drastic difference this would make if churches and congregations shifted to embodying missio Dei in place of what they now do.

The Rev. H. A. "Bud" Tillinghast is a retired clergy member of the California-Nevada Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church, currently residing in Oxford, England.