Many say it’s been a tough decade for us evangelical Christians. The media say that Christianity is in great decline. We hear that most young adults dropped out of evangelical churches and that everyone hates us. The actual numbers tell a different story. The American Religious Identification Survey pointed to an overall decline of self-identified Christians. But although those numbers show a steep decline among mainline Christians, they also show a growth pattern for evangelicals Even so, these are evangelical challenges that call for reassessment.
5 Urgent Evangelical Challenges in the Coming Years
1. A clear understanding of the Gospel.
The Gospel is not you do, it’s Jesus did. People don’t need to be taught to turn over a new leaf — they need to receive and live out a new life. That new life is from Jesus’ death on the cross, for our sin and in our place. Don’t build a message that would still be true if Jesus had not died on the cross.
2. A stronger focus on discipleship.
God grows us as we are in a position to receive that growth. This can only happen through intentional awareness and leadership on the part of both leaders and church members. In LifeWay Research’s Transformational Discipleship project, the largest statistical study of its kind, we found that discipleship was both lacking and simple — we just needed to remind people to live out who God has made us in Christ.
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3. A greater passion for mission.
We need to stand up against the clergification in the modern-day church — the tendency to look at those who are professional ministers and say that they are the ones who are called to the mission, while the people in the pews are merely consumers of religious goods and services. We need to see all of God’s people engaged in God’s mission, from their respective neighborhoods all the way to the nations.
