Help! The wrong type of person is turning up at church!

The wrong type of people are turning up at our churches. The wrong type of non-Christian people.

Not convinced? Let me explain.

The quiet revival – in which young men in particular are turning up at churches – is presenting something of a problem for evangelical churches of a certain stripe. And the recent death of Charlie Kirk has cast this problem into sharper relief.

What’s the problem? I hear you ask. Well it’s this:

Many of our more middle class, evangelical churches – especially in urban areas –  have been prepping themselves for a certain type of non-Christian to come through their doors. Yet in the wake of Kirk’s murder they are less prepped for another type of non-Christian altogether – the type that actually is coming through their doors!

It’s not as simple as “the wrong type” of inquirer coming to our churches. There’s no such thing.

But our evangelical churches, especially in our big cities, are more unsure about what to do with a Jordan Peterson reading/Charlie Kirk socials-watching young bloke turning up, than they are about a gender-fluid university student with all the progressive boxes ticked, turning up.

Why is this the case? Partly because of the conditions we are used to. We are well-trained with the tactics required to engage with the progressive, suspicious young person; what their hostile questions might be; what their defeater beliefs are;  and how to get to the “sin behind the sin” – in this case radical sexual practices.

We have a whole handbook either written or memorised (and a bunch of best-selling books on our shelves) that show us how to engage with such types. And how is that? Gently and kindly apparently.

Yet the actual young people turning up? We are a little flummoxed. We suspect we owe it to them to be a bit more gruff. We suspect we should school them a bit more.

So we owe it to “gospel clarity” to warn them off  “hard-right” types such as Peterson who clearly isn’t a Christian. We worry they may have gone so far down the YouTube right wing rabbit-hole so as to be unreachable with the pure unadulterated gospel that has little or nothing to say about politics. In short we are a bit sterner with them.

It’s almost as if we have a feminised approach to presenting Christianity to progressives, and a masculinised approach to presenting Christianity to conservatives. Oh the irony!  In short, what do we do with the person who doesn’t want to read the excellent Is God Anti-Gay? because their first natural response is “I sure hope he is.”?

Why have we been caught out by this surprising turn of events? Because the culture has been caught out by this surprising turn of events. And we have followed the culture’s lead.

We assumed too, like the secular culture did,  that the triumph of the progressive framework was inevitable. So we shaped our tactics accordingly. But if history is any indication, inevitability is the one thing that is not inevitable.

Ross Douthat, of The New York Times, has been outlining his observations about the shaky nature of the progressive vision for several years, but he believes the shift away from this vision was accelerated by Kirk’s murder.

Douthat believes that the almost religious quality of the left’s claims, and its self-confidence that no alternative could challenge it, meant that it never had a Plan B when Black Swan events such as Trump’s second election, or Kirk’s murder, occurred.

And, to an extent, the very churches that were feeling the most heat from that confident progressive hegemony (churches that are theologically and biblical orthodox matters of faith, sexual ethics etc), didn’t expect the situation to change much either. We were geared up t0 abide the long defeat by the post-Christian West.

And when I say West, I mean across the Anglophone West. That’s where the progressive narrative has been most compelling and most compelled.

Sure, we in Australia are not the USA. But we are not not the USA either, in some significant ways. Truth be told, if Australia is the USA, then it is the USA of 2020, particularly when it comes to our political framing, and end-stage gatekeeping of transgender ideology.

Yet just as music and fashion shifts always arrived in Australia last of all, so too the vibe shift will turn up on our shores late. But arrive it will. In fact, arrive it has – even if it’s been sotto voce! Those who had never heard of Charlie Kirk, or believed that his murder had no significance to younger Aussies, may have belonged technologically to the Information Age, but politically and culturally they still belonged to the the Industrial Age.

The Industrial Age arrived at our ports in boxes and containers. And it took a while to wend its way here.  The Information Age has arrived at our portals, – and it does so in real time.

But back to church. In the face of the inevitability of progressivism’s march,  much of our pastoral energy was directed towards how to help our people navigate the weird and wacky world of progessivism’s and sexuality’s defeater beliefs, all of which have an inbuilt hostility to the Christian message.

Much of our evangelistic energy, meanwhile, was designed to figure out a way to smooth out the pathway to church and faith for those who, although committed to this progressive framework in their ideas and practices, had become Christian-curious.

Yet are such types Christian-curious? If they are, it’s not an inquisitive curiosity as much as a hostile one.They are not generally the people turning up in numbers at our churches asking: “I’m super worried about what is going on in the world, and in my life. What have you got for me?”

And the reason is simple: The progressive narrative provides an amazing salvation story of its own that can take you a long way. Sure, it’s an immanently framed salvation story, but it is very compelling. And  is imbibed like mother’s milk from the very first days of our public education.  It has captured all of our institutions. It is legislated.

This narrative has, like Christianity, a list of saints and sinners, values and ideals, mantras and liturgies, stories and poets, communities and celebrations and – most importantly – a telos – an eschatological goal towards which it is headed. The arc of history bends towards its peculiar vision of justice.

Now while this is an earthbound eschatology, it is infused with hope for a heaven. And it is confident that we will arrive at the pearly gates of this heaven, only to find the gatekeeper holding the keys is a bearded man dressed in drag parodying the Last Supper.

So much for the culture’s expectations. Wha about us? How has the church been shaped in its reflexive thinking around such matters?

For one, we assumed we were abiding the long defeat. Sure we knew that Jesus was coming back at some stage. But a more conservative culture which would dial back some of these progressive excesses that hd been challenging us was a thing of the past. And if that were the case then our apologetics and evangelistic strategies had to be prepared.

So, for example, I saw a video the other way from a church leader that was evangelistic in its thrust and leaned into the world-wide interest raised by Kirk’s death. Yet it made a set of assumptions about those who might be curious about the Christian faith in the wake of his murder.

The argument began by stating that whilst you might have concerns with Kirk’s politics and his views on gender, you should at least lean into what Kirk said about Jesus. It was concessive in its approach.

Clear the political and sexual clutter and see the jewel at the centre of Kirk’s beliefs obscured by his other more “awkie” viewpoints. Now I didn’t agree with everything he said about politics. Yet this much is clear: people are not turning up to church in the wake of his murder despite his beliefs about politics and gender, but because of them!

From conversations that I have had with newcomers, and with increasing evidence from many church pastors and leaders,  people have been turning up unannounced at church not because they disagreed with him, but because they agreed with him. And if they agreed with him about those things and had concerns that he had, then maybe the Christian stuff he believed has some substance too.

So his violent death was the last straw for many. They’d long held silent concerns about the almost rabid anti-Christian framework in the modern West, particularly as it aligned itself with an extreme anthropology ideology that required them to either jettison common sense or lie in order to keep the peace in the workplace or with their peers at university.

And then, once they saw the glee online from those who had announced themselves as the gatekeepers to a world of peace and love and diversity, the penny finally dropped. The red-pill was finally swallowed.

No longer could they unsee what they had been told to unsee. No longer would they pretend to believe that pure evil did not exist, or that if it did it was merely a social blight imposed by the cultural right. No longer would they pretend to believe that words were violence and that “consequences” such as Kirk’s death were on him. The Progressive Emperor’s nakedness is being called out.

And of course they are coming will all sorts of misaligned and misjudged positions, perspectives and practices around politics and sex that they gospel will have to challenge in them. But one thing they are not coming with is a committed progressive perspective on politics and sexuality. In fact, quite the opposite.

They’re not coming to ask questions about Jesus despite Kirk’s politics and sexuality, they’re coming because of it. And we need to get ready for them. We need to treat them with the same level of gentleness and kindness we have reserved for those we had expected to turn up, who we had framed our questions for, and our defences towards, but who, stubbornly, aren’t.

Turns out, the wrong type of people are turning up at our churches.