This report on the state of the Church in the UK and the reasons people give for leaving it contains a number of lessons for the Church in the U.S. would do well to heed (Emphasis is ours thoughout):
With Christian moral values and legal protections under assault on all sides, it is commonly said that the reason pews are emptying is that traditional religion is not relevant. A new survey of thousands of churchgoers in the United Kingdom says the opposite however, and indicates that the emptying of the churches has been caused mainly by preaching and pastoral care that has been emptied of moral or doctrinal Christian content. The survey addressed questions about why church attendance was falling so dramatically in the UK but growing elsewhere, even though two-thirds of the British population believes in God.
The results of the year-long survey of 14,000 UK residents by the interdenominational Ecumenical Research Committee has been called 'surprising' by mainstream secular and Christian media. The overwhelming response is to call on churches "to robustly defend moral values with conviction and courage and cease being 'silent' and 'lukewarm' in the face of moral and social collapse."
In an introduction, Lord Bromley Betchworth said "Those who spoke, did so with one voice...an alarming indication that there are multitudes of people across Britain and Ireland who feel that their views are not being heard or represented." The vast majority of the people in Britain and Ireland, he says, are still morally conservative. "They are appalled that moral values and treasured beliefs are being stood on their head and want churches to play a leading role in standing up for these things."
The survey itself asked four simple questions and avoided 'tick-box' responses in favor of written letters. The huge response was a surprise in itself and reflected a growing frustration and anger felt by many ordinary people about the direction of churches and society in general....Many gave variations on the response, "Why hasn't a survey like this been done before, so we can speak?" "At last, someone is listening, thank you so much." "Thank you for the chance to express our beliefs without fear."
Several 'traditionalist' Anglican clerics said that they had "to keep their own views to themselves in case their bishop, who held opposing beliefs, would remove them from their diocese." Many Catholics in North America have written that a similar situation exists there in which the churches are controlled exclusively by bishops and lay administrators who receive no Christian opposition to their officially sanctioned left-liberal dissent from the faith.
Over 90 percent of responses followed a uniform theme that the decline in traditional Christian moral and doctrinal teaching has caused the outflux of congregations. They listed the lack of apologetics, the reasoned defence and explanation of Christian doctrine, as one of the main reasons for the collapse. "It's a myth today that the people of this country have rejected Christianity; they simply haven't been told enough about it to either accept or reject it," wrote one respondent.
Thousands of letters also cited the lack of emphasis on the holiness of God and the need for personal moral conversion. The desire for teaching on holiness, was prevalent and has been influenced, said the authors, by Mel Gibson's film, the Passion of the Christ. Many responded that the churches now teach easy forgiveness; an attitude that 'God loves me anyway,' and that there is no need to attend church or live a morally demanding Christian life.
The overwhelming majority of respondents were vehemently opposed to ordaining homosexuals and blamed the churches for the rise in pedophilia scandals because of the prevalence of homosexuals in the clergy. Some celibate homosexuals wrote saying that the prevalence of support for homosexuality in the churches is undermining their efforts to live chastely. One young man wrote, "For sections of the Church to suddenly say that my struggle (to remain chaste)... was for nothing and that it would have been OK to have given in, would be to deny my personal cross for Christ and mock the faithfulness I have shown Him."
Two thousand letters asked for a return to traditional liturgy and pointed out that attempts to attract younger people with jazzed-up offerings had failed and had alienated older parishioners. Over 450 said they drove vast distances to attend a traditional liturgical celebration. 1,500 letters complained that the modern liturgies "bordered on entertainment rather than worship."
The survey supports what many Christians have been saying for decades: there is little point in attending a church whose message is no different from that of the materialistic secular world.
It is a mystery to us why it is a mystery to the mainline churches that their memberships are plummeting. Services in which the ministers and priests seem bored with what they do and give every appearance of not really believing what they say, do not incline people to return to the pew on the following Sunday. Services in which sermons seem dry, lifeless, uninspired, disorganized, superficial, and pointless, where there is no enthusiasm for the Gospel or for bringing truth to the larger culture, are simply not going to compete with those of churches which offer the opposites of these things.
Churches which have abandoned hundreds, or even thousands, of years of traditional moral and theological teaching in order to embrace the fashion of the times will hold on, perhaps, to their elderly but will find their middle-aged and younger parishioners looking elsewhere for spiritual nourishment. Why bother attending a church, after all, that's just floating along on the current of political, social, and cultural popular opinion and remains tethered to traditional Christianity by only the most nominal and tenuous attachments?
Many mainline churches in the U.S. have forgotten what they are and why they exist. Having long ago abandoned the Bible as the final authority in matters of faith and practice, they've convinced themselves that they're fulfilling their calling by undermining every moral and theological conviction in the Christian tradition. They suffer from a kind of institutional Alzheimer's disease and can look forward in their dementia to nothing more hopeful than continued decline until they eventually surrender up their last ecclesiastic breath.
If they wish to see the future they need only look at the Church in Europe.