When I was much younger, Sundays were very different from the way they are today. Back in the fifties and sixties, there were rules that a person just did not break. For one thing, you always went to church on Sunday, once in the morning, and again in the evening. In fact, that was about all there was to do. Blue laws made sure that every business in town remained closed on the Sabbath. Although it seems hard to imagine, there was a time when gas stations, super-markets, movie theaters, and shopping centers (there were no malls) did not open on Sundays.

As William Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas have observed in a recent book, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, there was a time when the Church was quite literally "the only show in town." It had little or no competition for people's attention. If you wanted to go anywhere, if you wanted to get out of the house, you went to church or Sunday School. There were few other options.

The Sabbath was sacrosanct. You didn't see people mowing their yards in those days, or even raking their leaves on Sunday. It was a day of rest, and few dared challenge the conventions of the day. Church, home and state worked together in a three way partnership to instill "Christian values" in people. And when most people looked around them, they saw a society that was "good, wholesome, and reasonable." It was as if God was on his throne, and all was right with the world.

But then things began to change. I still remember the day that change first came to Winston-Salem. The manager of a local Zayre store--if my memory serves me correctly--opened his doors on a Sunday. People were outraged and appalled by this act. It was as if Satan had decided to set up shop in town. Pastors protested this profaning of the Sabbath, but ever so slowly other stores extended their hours to Sunday as well.

Slowly, but surely, people began to discover that they had options other than going to Church on Sunday. Restaurants, Movie Theaters, Malls, a whole host of alternatives to the church began to offer themselves to folks. And in surprisingly short order, what had been a day of rest, had became little different from any other day of the week.

The Aging Dowager

A lot of things began to change when that happened, but one thing remained the same. The Church went on as if nothing were different. Willimon and Hauerwas describe this refusal to acknowledge this changed reality with a striking image. They contend that the institutional Church acted very much "like an aging dowager, living in a decaying mansion on the edge of town, bankrupt and penniless, house decaying around her, but acting as if her family still controlled the city. Churches and Church leaders, Willimon and Hauerwas argue, "have continued to think and act as if they were in charge, as if the old arrangements were still valid."

Even today, the church has yet to accept the fact that the world has undergone a profound change. In the fifties and sixties, folks went to church because they were supposed too. That's what you did on Sunday's. But today, people can make choices about how they would like to spend their time, and they do. It no longer works to have a sign out in the front yard announcing services, and then to wait for people to file in dutifully. In the world in which we live, the church has competition for people's time and attention, and they're not going to come just because they're supposed too.

Where Did the American Church Lose Its Way?

From the time of the nineteenth century, from Schleiermacher to the present, the central task of the Church in the United States has been to make the ancient faith understandable to the modern world. Since the Christocentric Liberals, the American Church has sought to make Christianity credible to the modern world. The assumption was that "the intellectual dilemma" facing the Church is so great, "that Christian thought must be translated in order for it to become intelligible to modern people.

In many ways, as Willimon and Hauerwas point out, "Nazi Germany was the supreme test for modern theology. There we experienced 'the modern world,' which we had so labored to understand and to become credible to...It was the theological liberals, those who had spent their theological careers translating the faith into terms that could be understood by modern people...who were unable to say no. Many even said "yes" to the Nazis...Liberal theology had spent decade reassuring us that we did not have to take the Jewishness of Jesus seriously. The particulars of this faith, the limiting, historically contingent...specifics of the faith, such as the Jewishness of Jesus...were impediments for the credibility of modern people and could therefore be removed so that we could get down to the real substance of Christianity. Jesus was not really a Jew, he was the pinnacle of the brightest and best in humanity, the teacher of noble ideals, civilization's very best. It was a short step from the liberal Christ--the highest--in--humanity to the Nazi Superman.

What does any of this have to do with the American Church? If Hitler had simply been an aberration, and the German people simply the victims of a mass hysteria, we would have little problem. But American Liberalism--with it's facile identification of things American with things Christian--did little better. While it is true that American Christianity did not do as the German Church--which bought into Hitler's claim to represent the next step in God's unfolding revelation--it too lacked the spiritual resources to take a stand against a great evil. Few voices in protest were raised when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, underscoring that the American Church lacked "the will and the resources to resist vast evil." (For detailed poll results of contemporary views on the use of the A-bomb from the Gallup organization, click here.) As Willimon and Hauerwas point out, "after the bomb, all sorts of moral compromises were easier--nearly two million abortions a year seemed a mere matter of freedom of choice, and the plight of the poor in the world's richest nation was a matter of economic necessity."

This is a harsh and uncompromising view of the present state of the American Church--I admit--but I don't think it is far from the truth. If the German church could embrace the "ultimate solution" of Auschwitz and the American Church could accept "the bomb," then there is nothing against which the Church is willing to take a stand. The liberal Protestant project--when seen in "the glow of the furnaces at Dachau and the fires of Hiroshima"--seems terribly inadequate. Like that aging dowager--"living in a decaying mansion on the edge of town, bankrupt and penniless, house decaying around her but acting as if her family still controlled the city," the modern American Church continues to "think and act as if " it is in charge, "as if the old arrangements were still valid."

Can the Prodigal Find Its Way Home?

Can the Church recover? There are certainly reasons to despair. Recent surveys show that the majority of persons born after 1960 have never been apart of a church. But there are also reasons to be hopeful.

Willimon and Hauerwas suggest that now that the American Church has lost its place of influence in society, it is now free to focus on reclaiming its integrity. In a culture that continues to believe--despite what we did to Hiroshima--that "it is making progress, that the people are, through their own power and choice, transforming the world into something better than it would be without their power and choice," perhaps the Church can really begin to live and act as if there really is a God. Maybe, the Church needs to become "a place clearly visible to the world, in which people are faithful to their promises, love their enemies, tell the truth, honor the poor, suffer for righteousness, and thereby testify to the...community creating power of God." Instead of trying to make the faith understandable to the modern world, maybe it should be content simply to live the faith: to create "a living, breathing, visible community of faith" in a society of disbelief.

The biggest problem facing the Church today is not translation of the faith into a form that the World will be able to understand. It is to enact the faith in a way that people can see. Perhaps one of the reasons the American Church came to believe it was so important to translate the Christian faith for modernity was that it had become so inept at enacting it. And yet, one cannot escape the fact that for the Church to ever have any real influence again, it must become a community where its actions no longer mock its words.

Of course, that is precisely why many people today say they don't believe in God. They look at the "saints" of the Church, and conclude that they "cannot see anybody who looks very much different from somebody who does not believe." Indeed, someone has said that the best argument against Christianity is Christians themselves. If the Church is to be renewed, it will have to recover its integrity, and craft people who do not just claim to believe in a God, but who actually live out that faith.