Increase the number of Christians

A few months ago, I sat in a worship service and listened one of the most intriguing (notice I did not say, interesting) sermons I have ever heard.

In the sermon, the visiting preacher noted that God had told Adam and Eve, the first known created individuals, to be fruitful and multiply. From this, he affirmed that all good Christian young people should get together and have more children as fast as they could in order to eventually create more Christians in the world, especially in our country. I assumed he was saying that they should get married in the process, but that was not the basis of the main teaching. He said we Christians should "be fruitful and multiply" in order to keep up with the rest of the world's religious population -- this from a man who had lived a number of years in a huge city in Asia with horrendous population problems.

His second point was that anyone who has never served in an overseas mission field really does not have the right to claim they are good Christians and mission-minded. Needless to say, the reaction of the congregation that morning was not favorable.

The Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette recently provided a story about the Southern Baptist Convention and its national convention. Although current figures were not provided, it appears the SBC has lost members during the past several years instead of posting increasing membership numbers like its members are used to seeing. In trying to figure out why this trend was occurring, the Pew Research Center was consulted and its survey of about 3,000 Baptists (not just SBC) showed that about 73 percent of those surveyed were not parents -- this despite that fact that the age group of 30-64 represented 61 percent of the group. The conclusion: Baptists are not having enough children these days to make sure there are young Baptists becoming church members in the future.

The Pew study also showed that the overall Christian population in the United States dropped by almost 8 percent while the number of people identified as agnostic, atheist or "nothing in particular" increased by 6.7 percent from 2007 to 2014. Adherents of non-Christian faiths such as Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus also grew at a rate of 1.2 percent. Another study indicated that while just over half of the Baptists interviewed attended church once a week, 32 percent only went to church a few times each year. In northwest Arkansas, some Baptist churches are losing members and others are gaining in membership.

Most mainline protestant churches have lost memberships over the past decade. It would be easy to name them, but that would divert from my point. Church membership and attendance in the United States is on the decrease, while many other religious groups appear to be growing. It is difficult to assuage the membership issues within the Roman Catholic Church since it has a much different way of computing its membership, but suffice it to say that even with this largest Christian group in the United States there have been significant problems during the past few years.

My experience as a chaplain mirrors the above statistics, but let me narrow the focus a bit. The Christian faith is essentially centered in a Triune God -- God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Over the years, Christians have endured the Death of God theology and the divisiveness of various advocates of the Holy Spirit. Today, the issue is not God nor the Holy Spirit -- it is upon the person of Jesus. Christians, regardless of their denomination or independent stance, believe that Jesus is the Son of God and the only way for anyone to obtain salvation and to reach heaven is through him. The rest of the world disagrees. They are willing to admit that Jesus was a good man who had good teachings, but they could care less about whether He was the Son of God -- this regardless of whether he was resurrected from the grave. True atheists are hard to find in the United States. Almost everyone believes in some kind of God, but a growing number of people also believe there are numerous "paths" to heaven besides through Jesus.

In addition to Jesus, the Bible also has come under intense scrutiny. Christians believe that the Bible is God's written message to mankind and is without error, but with all of the debate between science and religion, various kinds of biblical interpretation, and language difficulties, a growing number of people are throwing the Bible out in favor of whatever the current fad happens to be about good living. Add to this the unwillingness of many Christians themselves to actually emulate what the Bible teaches and you have a real quandary.

Yes, there are a lot of problems interfacing with church membership these days, but the way forward is far more complicated than just having more children in a world struggling with overpopulation. If Christians want to increase the membership in their churches, they will need to reaffirm their basic beliefs and teach them to the rest of society: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit -- and a holy book called the Bible that not only tells God's story, but also provides a world with a way of life worth the living.

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Robert Box is the former chaplain for the Bella Vista Police Department and is currently the Fire Department chaplain. The opinions expressed are those of the author.

Editorial on 07/20/2016