A Great Falling Away

In the last few years it has become evident that the true biblical Gospel is no longer being preached in the majority of the mainstream churches because their objective is to be attractional and to draw numbers in. Since the emphasis is on drawing a crowd and building up the numbers in attendance, pragmatism takes precedence over the spiritual, which means that they are no longer concerned about true conversions. This means that many of the attendees in these mainstream churches either are not truly regenerate or have a faith that is so shallow that it will not take much for them to turn away from the Christian faith, particularly if they are not being built up and nurtured by a faithful pastor, the modern worshipper is in very real spiritual danger.

It is no great surprise then that during the Covid-19 pandemic, the majority of churches lost a large percentage of their congregation, in many instances, as many as half of a local church’s congregation failed to return to fellowship. Whilst there may well be other reasons for this decline in attendance one thing is for sure, and that is a substantial falling away has been happening in the British Church over the last few years which has accelerated significantly during the pandemic. How do we make sense of this falling away and why is it happening? These are important questions that need answering and I believe that a deeper study of Scripture will enable us to understand what is happening spiritually in the Church in these times.

Firstly, I believe that the cause behind this great falling away is diagnosed very effectively by the twentieth Century pastor and author Ernest C. Reisinger in his short booklet entitled “What Should We Think of the Carnal Christian?” where he points to the “carnal Christian” teaching. This is the idea that there are three distinct groups of people: unbelievers, “carnal Christians” and “spiritual Christians.” To put this another way, a Christian who is serious about their faith and walking faithfully with Christ will often be described by other lukewarm Christians as being a “radical” or “fundamentalist” Christian. This faithful, follower of Christ is being derided and ridiculed by their so-called fellow Christians for living a life of obedience which makes them feel uncomfortable because it challenges their lukewarm “carnal Christianity.” Reisinger argues that this teaching is a fundamental misunderstanding and misinterpretation of what the apostle Paul says in his first letter to the Corinthians:

“And I, brethren, could not speak to you as to spiritual people but as to carnal, as to babes in Christ. I fed you with milk and not with solid food; for until now you were not able to receive it, and even now you are still not able; for you are still carnal. For where there are envy, strife and divisions among you, are you not carnal and behaving like mere men? For when one says, ‘I am of Paul,’ and another, “I am of Apollos,” are you not carnal?” (1 Corinthians 3:1-4 NKJV)

Reisinger points out that:

“They are rebuked in Chapter 3, not for failing to attain to privileges which some Christians attain to, but for acting, despite their privileges, like babes and like the unregenerate in one area of their lives. This is very different from saying that the Apostle here recognises the existence of a distinct group of Christians who can be called ‘carnal.’ When Paul comes to speak of classes, he knows only two, as is clear in Chapter 2 of this same epistle where he divides men into ‘natural’ and ‘spiritual’ (1 Cor 2:14-15)” [1]

In other words, Paul is not dividing the Corinthian Christians into three separate groups and claiming that a Christian convert can either grow to maturity or stay on spiritual milk. This is a huge fallacy that has led to many professing Christians being under the illusion that they are saved when they are still unregenerate and are not in-dwelt by the Holy Spirit. This is the warning that The Lord Jesus gives in His parable of the Ten Virgins in Matthew 25 where the five foolish virgins took no oil with them on the way to meeting the bridegroom and were unable to keep their lamps burning for the last part of their journey. Commenting on this terrible moment in the parable, the Anglican bishop J.C. Ryle warns:

“We may settle it in our minds, that there will be an entire change of opinion one day as to the necessity of decided Christianity. At present, we must all be aware, the vast majority of professing Christians care nothing at all about it: they have no sense of sin; they have no love towards Christ; they know nothing of being born again. Repentance, and faith, and grace, and holiness, are mere ‘words and names’ to them; they are subjects which they either dislike, or about which they feel no concern. But this state of things shall one day come to an end. Knowledge, conviction, the value of the soul, the need of a Saviour, shall all burst on men’s minds one day like a flash of lightening. But it will be too late! It will be too late to be buying oil, when the Lord returns. The mistakes that are not found out until that day are irretrievable.” [2]

The great danger, as Reisinger points out, of holding to the belief that there is a “carnal Christian” group of professing Christians is that:

“If it can be established that the preponderance of Scripture teaches only two classes or categories of men - regenerate and unregenerate, converted and unconverted, those in Christ and those outside of Christ - the ‘carnal Christian’ teaching would be confronted with an insurmountable objection. It would be to conflict with the whole emphasis of Scripture and of the New Testament in particular.” [3]

That is not to say that there are not some immature Christians who are stuck on spiritual milk, but as the writer to the Hebrews points out, this is a very dangerous place to be spiritually and often becomes the graveyard for apostate believers.

“About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.” (Hebrews 5:11-14 ESV)

A true believer is someone who wants to learn and grow in their faith - that is the outworking of the Gospel in their life, a desire to go deeper into the Word of God and to grow to spiritual maturity to be useful to God in building up others in the faith. A person who is happy just to remain on spiritual milk is the most susceptible to being led astray morally and by false teaching, all it takes to fall away is to drift morally or doctrinally. Time and again I have observed that if a person drifts into a liberal view of God’s Word then they will naturally drift morally into sin, and if a person falls into sin and is unrepentant, then they will naturally adopt a liberal theology to suit. “Progressive Christianity” is the graveyard of professing Christians who did not want to follow the Jesus Christ found in Scripture. The American missionary-preacher Paul Washer argues:

“This idea of the carnal Christian has destroyed more lives and sent more people to hell than you can imagine! Do Christians struggle with sin? Yes. Can a Christian fall into sin? Absolutely. Can a Christian live in a continuous state of carnality all the days of his life, not bearing fruit, and truly be Christian? Absolutely not, or every promise in the Old Testament regarding the New Testament covenant of preservation has failed, and everything God said about discipline in Hebrews is a lie (Heb 12:6). A tree is known by its fruit (Luke 6:44). [4]

This is the great problem with shallow professing Christians, if they have not discovered the beauty and wonder of The Cross of Jesus Christ and deeply desire to grow in their knowledge of God and their relationship with Him, then they are going to be easy prey for the enemy. I have lost count of the number of professing Christians who have fallen away from the faith after being content to wallow in the shallow end of Christianity because they had no desire or hunger for spiritual things. The writer to the Hebrews goes on to warn of this apostasy:

“For it is impossible, in the case of those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, to restore them again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt. For land that has drunk the rain that often falls on it, and produces a crop useful to those for whose sake it is cultivated, receives a blessing from God. But if it bears thorns and thistles, it is worthless and near to being cursed, and its end is to be burned.” (Hebrews 6:4-8 ESV)

The Puritan John Owen describing this falling away in the Letter to the Hebrews says that it is “a voluntary and resolved renouncing and an apostasy from the Gospel, the faith, rule and obedience thereof which is not without casting the highest reproach and insult imaginable onto the person of Christ Himself.” [5]

So to summarise this part of the argument, a true follower of Christ is not going to be willing to remain on spiritual milk, they would respond positively to the kind of warning and rebuke that the apostle Paul and the writer to the Hebrews were giving to their respective congregations. But a professing Christian who is willing to remain on spiritual milk and sees nothing wrong with being lukewarm, like the Church in Laodicea, is ultimately a false convert who is almost certain to fall away from the faith.

The American author and pastor Dean Inserra in his book “The Unsaved Christian” reflects on the cultural Christianity that has become so common in the modern church and particularly how a member-driven rather than a discipleship-driven model of church has led to this cultural Christianity. Commenting within the context of an American Southern Baptist Church context he says:

“What does it mean to be a member of a church? For us, as I look back to our early years, it only meant we were the church you said you were going to come to on Sunday morning until you decided to go someplace else. As I considered the Cultural Christian climate of the city we had set out to reach, I came to the humbling realisation that I had been unaware that our model of church membership was the very type of church practice that allows Cultural Christianity to flourish. We had it in place because we thought we were supposed to, I guess, but we couldn’t really describe why it mattered. Unsaved Christians thrive where church membership means nothing and is available to all, without anything changing the day after you “sign up.” [6]

Reflecting on this as an ordained Anglican minister myself, this is an even more acute problem in a parish system where any parishioner who lives within the parish boundaries can consider a particular church to be their local church. This is why so many unbelieving families will request to have their child baptised in their local Anglican church because the Canon Law of the Church of England allows them the right to infant baptism. This then leads to unbelieving couples making a mockery of the sacrament of baptism as they stand in the house of God, making promises to bring up their child in the Christian faith that they have no intention or means to be able to keep since they are not true believers themselves. Even more disturbing is the fact that many Anglican parishioners believe that by merely attending a Holy Communion service on a Sunday morning and taking communion, they have done enough for salvation.

But this frivolous approach to taking Holy Communion in the Anglican church is putting a great many people in grave spiritual danger. The apostle Paul warns the Corinthian church: “Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgement on himself.” (1 Cor 11:28-29 ESV)

In Article 82 of the Heidelberg Catechism, the severity of abusing the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is made abundantly clear, with a call for church discipline for those who abuse the sacrament:

“Should those be admitted to the Lord’s Supper who show by what they profess and how they live that they are unbelieving and ungodly?

No, that would dishonour God’s covenant and bring down God’s wrath up on the entire congregation. Therefore, according to the instruction of Christ and His apostles, the Christian church is duty-bound to exclude such people, by the official use of the keys of the kingdom, until they reform their lives.” [7]

However, whilst this “Church Country Club” is particularly prevalent in the Anglican church, with its historic parish system, the cultural Christianity of our day is much more widespread and a look across several different denominations will lead us towards the same conclusion: a member-driven approach to discipleship so often produces consumers and attendees rather than disciples.

The bottom line is that Churches have been full of unsaved, nominal Christians for years, I know this for a fact because I was a lifelong church attender before coming to faith in my early twenties. But nobody really noticed until after the pandemic when it became more noticeable when large numbers of church attendees failed to return to their churches. So whilst the deeper problem of a consumer-driven approach to Church has already been diagnosed well before the Covid pandemic, it does now appear that the ‘stable door is being closed long after the horse has bolted,’ the damage has already been done and we are now seeing a great falling away.

Footnotes:

[1] Ernest C. Reisinger “What Should We Think of the Carnal Christian?” (Banner of Truth, 1978) p13

[2] J.C. Ryle “Matthew: Expository Thoughts on The Gospels” (Banner of Truth, 2012) pp266-267

[3] Ernest C. Reisinger “What Should We Think of the Carnal Christian?” (Banner of Truth, 1978) p10

[4] Paul Washer “Ten Indictments Against The Modern Church” (Reformation Heritage, 2018) p39

[5] John Owen “Hebrews Vol 5” (Banner of Truth, 2010) p87

[6] Dean Inserra “The Unsaved Christian” (Moody Press, 2019) p73

[7] The Heidelberg Catechism, Article 82, Chad Van Dixhoorn “Creeds, Confessions & Catechisms” (Crossway, 2022) p316