15 Problems and Opportunities in Christianity
A crisis is an opportunity
Church attendance in America has been slowly declining for decades, and now less than half of Americans belong to a religious denomination.
Recently, Pastor Brandon Cox offered the most succinct summary of American Evangelicalism’s challenges that I’ve ever seen.
But as the saying goes, each challenge also presents an opportunity.
Problem 1: Science denial
- “We’ve rejected science unnecessarily …. We are needlessly afraid of what scientists discover that might threaten our status quo.”
Amen. Christian rejection of science dates back to Galileo. In America, contemporary science denial can be traced to the Scopes Monkey Trial.
Many fundamentalist Christians felt belittled by the cultural response to the Scopes trial. They retreated into insular communities and double-downed on a literalist reading of scripture, creating the order, structure, and sense of certainty they craved.
The cost, however, was perpetuating self-defeating interpretations of both scripture and science.
Learning to view Genesis’ Creation account as a theological treatise on the nature of…
