Resumo de The Decline Of Christianity

Why is it happening?

The English Church Attendance Survey revealed that the rate of decline in church going has accelerated with a loss of around 22% over the past decade. It also showed that congregations are aging with the age group 15-30 being the least represented. Fewer than 8% of the population now go to Sunday services, a figure that will, on present trends, drop to 2% by 2020.
Some observations on the reasons for this are as follows:

Anti-christian spirit in our schools
Back in the early 1970s when I first became a Christian I worked in a school in Brixton, an inner city area of London. I taught Religious Education and had a fairly free hand and so most of my lessons were based on the Bible. A number of boys made professions of faith in Jesus and we had a lively Christian Union going. Today it would be impossible to operate in the way I did then. At a similar school where I was teaching in the 1980s I was told that to teach that Jesus is the one way to God is a racist view (and therefore totally unacceptable). As our children are indoctrinated with the multi-faith view of religion, Jesus has become one of many options, all or none of which may be true.

Assault on family values
Along with the attack on the uniqueness of the Lord Jesus has come the attack on the biblical order of the family. Things have reached such a pass that we have now reached a state where children are taught that 'heterosexism' is a form of oppression 'institutionalised in the family, culture and law' (Avon Health Promotion Service video, 'Beyond a Phase. A Practical Guide to Challenging Homophobia in Schools.') The Grampian Health Board publishes guidelines on sex education for schools that teach homosexual liaisons as equal to sexual relationships within marriage. It also rejects strongly the idea that Aids can be prevented by sexual fidelity: 'Resources which advocate monogamy / marriage as a solution to HIV should be avoided.'

Media attacks on the Christian faith
Positive testimony to Christianity is generally censored out of the media. A member of our church who had been a drug addict and was set free from her addiction through her faith in the Lord Jesus was invited to speak on a radio programme on drugs. But she was told not to say anything about God helping her. I was invited to take part in a documentary about Christian beliefs on the Second Coming. I gave what I considered to be a reasoned presentation of this subject and the person interviewing me was pleased with the content. However my contribution was not used. When the programme was shown all those whose contributions were chosen were extremely weird and made to look idiotic. I realised that the purpose of the programme was to ridicule the idea of the Second Coming and so they did not want any contributions which made it look reasonable. Before Christmas Channel 4 produced a programme called 'The Real Jesus' which was an attempt to undermine the historic basis of Christianity based on speculation with no real evidence at all. I wrote a reply and sent it to Channel 4 with a request for the opportunity to answer the points made by the programme, but with no success. (This article is available on our website).

The Unbelief of Christian leaders
A.N. Wilson, who writes regularly in newspapers and is a fierce critic of Christianity, observed in an article in 'The Express' (21/10/99) that 'Christianity will decline yet further in the next thousand years - decline I would predict to the point of near extinction because Christians no longer believe it to be true.' Sadly we have to agree that he has a point when he says that in most places where the clergy are trained 'you would find only a minority of these scholars professing old-fashioned, orthodox Christian belief.' He cites liberal theology and Darwin's 'Origin of the Species' as the main reasons for the collapse of faith. When future Christian leaders are taught to disbelieve the Bible it is no wonder ththe assault on Christian values in society is generally such a pathetic compromise. (
Conclusions
The challenge for the true church in these last days is to hold firm to the truth as delivered to us once by the Apostles and not to be swayed by the opinions of men or dismayed by negative statistics.

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