There is a conversation sitting in the middle of the American church like a piece of furniture nobody will acknowledge. Everybody walks around it. Some people have gotten so good at walking around it they have stopped seeing it. The elders step around it on the way to the budget meeting. The preacher steps around it on the way to the pulpit. The deacons step around it on the way to decide who is and who is not qualified to serve the Lord’s Supper.
The conversation is this.
We need to talk about what we did to the people who left.
Not what the culture did. Not what social media did. Not what declining morality and biblical illiteracy and the general deterioration of Western civilization did. What we did. What the institution did. What the machinery built by the institution did to real human beings who walked in carrying something fragile and walked out carrying something broken, and never came back.
That is the conversation. And the reason it has not happened at any meaningful scale in the American church is not ignorance. Everybody in the room already knows what the conversation is. The reason it has not happened is self-protection.
What They Keep Doing Instead
The church growth industry has been diagnosing empty pews for thirty years. The diagnosis changes with the decade. In the nineties it was relevance — the church needed to be more relevant to the culture. In the two-thousands it was experience — fog machines, production value, coffee bars in the lobby. In the tens it was authenticity — real talk, casual clothes, the preacher in jeans. Now it is community — small groups, life groups, connection groups, groups of every conceivable configuration designed to make the person sitting alone in the third row feel seen.
Every single one of those responses aimed the solution at everything except the actual problem.
The actual problem is not that the building was not comfortable enough or the music was not current enough or the coffee was not good enough. The Pew Research Center surveyed nearly 37,000 American adults about why they left organized religion. Half of them said they did not like religious organizations. Nearly half said they did not trust religious leaders. Those are not people who needed better coffee. Those are people who experienced something inside those buildings that produced in them a settled conviction that the institution could not be trusted.
The institution has had access to that data. It chose a sermon series instead.
The Conversation They Are Not Having
Nathan walked into David’s house with a story about a rich man who stole a poor man’s lamb. David heard the story and his anger burned against the man who did it. Then Nathan looked at the king — the anointed king, the man after God’s own heart, the most powerful man in Israel — and said four words.
You are the man. — 2 Samuel 12:7, ESV.
That is the conversation the institution will not have. Not with the culture. With itself. With the people inside the building who built the machinery, who maintain it, who benefit from the arrangement it protects, who have watched it process person after person and called it discernment.
Jeremiah stood in the gate of the temple in the seventh chapter of his book and said something to the people walking in that they absolutely did not want to hear. Do not trust in these deceptive words — Jeremiah 7:4, ESV — the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord. He was talking to people who had convinced themselves that proximity to the building meant proximity to God. That the institution and the faith were the same thing. That as long as the temple was standing and the rituals were running, everything was fine.
Everything was not fine. It had not been fine for a long time. And nobody in the official religious structure wanted to say so out loud because the official religious structure had a great deal invested in the current arrangement.
Sound familiar.
What It Would Actually Require
The conversation the institution will not have would require the people who run the institution to sit down with the data and ask a question they have not been willing to ask. Not how do we get them back. That is still a programmatic question. It is still aimed outward. The question is — what did we do.
It would require elders who spent decades deciding who was qualified and who was not to look at the people they processed and ask whether the standard they applied was biblical or whether it was cultural and whether those two things are as identical as they told themselves. It would require preachers who gave the machinery theological cover to examine whether what they were protecting was the flock or the arrangement. It would require congregations to sit with the fact that the people who left did not mostly leave because the world was more attractive. Many of them left because the world treated them better.
That is a hard sentence. I know it is a hard sentence. I wrote it anyway because it is true and because the only thing that has ever helped anything is telling the truth about it.
This is not an attack on the church. The ekklesia — the called-out ones, the actual body of Christ — is not the problem. The machinery is the problem. The institution that has wrapped itself around the ekklesia and in many places replaced it is the problem. The people of God scattered across this country who are still praying in living rooms and reading Scripture around kitchen tables and doing the one another commands without a building or a budget or a ministerial staff — they are not the problem and they are not the ones who need to have this conversation.
The people who need to have this conversation know who they are. They step around the furniture every Sunday morning.
The Temple Gate Is Still Open
Jeremiah did not deliver his temple gate sermon and then apologize for it. He did not follow it up with a pastoral letter clarifying that he meant no offense to anyone who found his words uncomfortable. He said what God told him to say, in the place God told him to say it, to the people who most needed to hear it, and then he stood there while they decided what to do with it.
The people in that temple had a choice. They always have a choice.
The American church has a choice right now. It can keep stepping around the furniture. It can keep producing programs and series and initiatives aimed at the symptoms while the cause sits untouched in the middle of the room. It can keep telling itself that the people who left left because of something the culture did.
Or it can have the conversation.
Not the comfortable version. Not the version where the institution acknowledges in general terms that mistakes were made and then moves on to the next slide. The real version. The version where someone with authority in the room looks around and says what Nathan said to David.
Four words. You are the man.
The temple gate is still open. The question is who is willing to stand in it.
Truth Over Comfort. Always.
