Billy Graham's advice to Christians

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Billy Graham seldom leaves his home in the mountains of North Carolina these days.

At age 92, the legendary evangelist struggles with multiple physical ailments. He makes no secret of how deeply he feels the absence of Ruth, his wife of nearly 64 years, who died in 2007. He misses many lifelong friends who have departed this world.

“We’ve come to look on old age as something to be dreaded, and it’s true that it isn’t easy,” Graham admitted in a recent interview with Christianity Today magazine. “I can’t honestly say that I like being old — not being able to do most of the things I used to do, for example, and being more dependent on others, and facing physical challenges that I know will only get worse. Old age can be a lonely time also — children scattered, spouse and friends gone.”

But long life is a gift of God, Graham added. He advises learning the secret of daily contentment in the Lord — and of looking toward heaven. “I know it won't be long before I’ll be going there, and I look forward to that day,” he said. “Heaven gives us hope and makes our present burdens easier to bear.”

What would he change about his own life if he could do it again? He would spend more time with family and less time on the road. He would study the Word of God more and speak less. He also would “steer clear of politics,” though he doesn’t regret the opportunities God has given him to “minister to people in high places.”

One thing Graham wouldn’t change is his life’s mission: to preach the Gospel to all nations. The most urgent challenges of our time aren’t political or economic, he stressed. They are moral and spiritual.

Evangelical Christianity has experienced huge global growth since World War II. However, “we need to be alert and avoid becoming the victims of our own success,” warned Graham. “Will we influence the world for Christ, or will the world influence us?”

Success doesn’t just tempt us to the sins of pride, arrogance and complacency. It pressures us to conform, to be quiet about uncomfortable truth — such as the truth that Christ is the only way to reconciliation with God. It makes us forget (or reject) the truth ourselves, if we ever learn it. Numerous surveys reveal that American evangelicals are increasingly ignorant of the Bible’s basic teachings, increasingly self-centered, increasingly reluctant to say anything that might offend others in a pluralistic society.

The Christian Gospel is guaranteed to offend. Read the New Testament and see how it went over in the pagan Roman and Greek worlds. The blood of believers flowed freely. But that didn’t stop them from boldly preaching the Good News.

The tenor of our time, on the other hand, is perfectly captured by columnist Kathleen Parker: “Pray there’s a heaven, but do pray quietly. It can’t be a mystery any longer that the God urge has a disquieting effect on certain members of the human tribe. I share the urge, but have found ways of communing that don’t require converting others, invading countries or shedding infidels of their heads.”

Got it? You can love God inside your head and inside your church walls, but keep your mouth shut in public. If you try to “convert others,” better-mannered folks will put you into the same category as religious terrorists. A disturbing number of self-professed Christians quietly or openly agree with Parker’s smug dismissal of both the Bible’s command to evangelize and the American ideal of free religious expression.

Billy Graham, who has never shied away from respectfully but unashamedly declaring the simple Gospel anytime, anywhere, begs to disagree.

“The most important issue we face today is the same the church has faced in every century: Will we reach our world for Christ?” he told Christianity Today. “In other words, will we give priority to Christ’s command to go into all the world and preach the Gospel? Or will we turn increasingly inward, caught up in our own internal affairs or controversies, or simply becoming more and more comfortable with the status quo? …

“[O]ur calling is to declare Christ’s forgiveness and hope and transforming power to a world that does not know Him or follow Him. May we never forget this.”

The modern church needs to come to grips with this reality: A faith that isn’t worth sharing with the world isn’t worth having.

(Read Christianity Today’s interview with Billy Graham at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/januaryweb-only/qabillygraham.html)

Three 'evangelical lies' about reaching Muslims

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Karim* grew up in an Arab Christian family in a Middle Eastern country — part of the “1 percent of Christians among the 99 percent Muslims,” as he describes it.

When you’re part of a tiny, historically persecuted minority, you tend to keep your head down and your mouth closed. You also tend to believe what your elders tell you about the majority, whether it’s true or not. Karim did — for a time.

Now an evangelical pastor in the Middle East, Karim fervently believes the Christians of the region “are responsible for reaching the 99 percent.” But too many still accept three “evangelical lies” that prevent them from sharing Jesus with their Muslim neighbors:

* A spirit of fear. “Most Christians are afraid to go and reach Muslims because of fear,” Karim declares. “We [Christians] say, ‘They will kill us. They will kill our family, our children.’”

* Muslims won’t believe. “Many, many Christians say that Muslims will not follow Christ” — ever. End of story.

* Christians lack the resources to evangelize Muslims. “We say we don’t have the money,” Karim says. “This is another lie, because if I have the heart to reach Muslims, I can go out and reach 1,000 people and share Christ with them. Maybe I need $5 to put gas in my car. If I go walking, I don’t need any money at all.”

But it took Karim a long time to reject the lies.

As a young man he wandered in the spiritual wilderness. He worked in a nightclub (“I was a big sinner,” he confesses). Weary of cultural Christianity, he even converted to Islam for several years. When he returned to Christ with his whole heart, a Muslim friend quickly noticed the change in his life.

“I was so excited about what happened to me, so the first thing I did was to share it with one of my best friends,” Karim recounts. “He said, ‘Karim, if Jesus did that in your life, I want to follow Him.’ I said, ‘No, no, no.’ You see, the fear is there inside us. He said, ‘But I want to follow Christ as you did because it is very good.’ I said, ‘OK, think about it, and we can talk tomorrow.’ The next morning at 8:30 he came to me and said, ‘I decided to give my life to Jesus and to follow Him with no conditions.’”

A second friend believed, and a third, and a fourth. All were Muslims. Not all decided to follow Christ as quickly as the first, but Karim could no longer deny Muslims wanted the priceless gift he had to share.

He began to sense what a Saudi friend later put into words: “We Muslims are beloved people, but we are cheated” — cheated out of knowing about the One who loves them because other followers of Christ are too timid or indifferent to tell them about Him.

“You know the difference between leading a Christian-background person to Christ or a Muslim?” Karim asks. “The first is like a tree planted in your backyard, and in six months you start to get fruit. But to lead a Muslim to Christ, you are digging in a mine. You may spend years, but what you find there is not fruit. It is diamonds!”

What keeps him digging? Every day he hears about — or personally witnesses — a Muslim coming to Christ.

“This is the fuel I’m getting from the Lord.”

*(Name changed)

The rise of the "nones"

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Dear pastor: I’ve been praying for you.

As if your 24/7 ministry weren’t challenging enough, the economic crisis has you working hard to reassure church folks who have lost jobs and homes — or fear losing them. You might be wondering where your own job will be this time next year.

You’re probably not in the mood for yet another report on the rise of American secularism. Even so, I recommend two new perspectives on the changing American scene. They contain some enlightening information about the potential future hurtling toward your church.

The “American Religious Identification Survey 2008” (ARIS), released in March, was conducted by the Program on Public Values at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. (Read more at www.americanreligionsurvey-aris.org/). The national survey found the percentage of Americans claiming no religion has nearly doubled since 1990 to 15 percent of the adult population. Those claiming “none” as a religious preference increased in every state, every race and every ethnic group.

The “nones” aren’t necessarily atheists or agnostics; only 1.6 percent of Americans specifically chose those categories to describe themselves. Many “nones” consider themselves personally religious or spiritual, but they tend to shun denominations and organized religion generally.

Self-identified “Christians” of all varieties still comprise 76 percent of the adult population, according to the ARIS report. But that percentage has fallen more than 10 points since 1990. Most of the recent decline (since 2001) has come among the dwindling “mainline” Protestant denominations. Roman Catholic numbers also fell nationwide. Baptists of all varieties, the largest non-Catholic American faith group, have grown by 2 million since 2001, but continue to decline as a percentage of the population.

The numerical growth that has occurred among American religious believers has come primarily among people identifying themselves generically as “Christian,” “Evangelical/Born Again,” or “nondenominational Christian” (more than 8 million Americans now put themselves in the third category). These three groups have expanded from 5 percent of the population in 1990 to 11.8 percent in 2008.

“(T)he alleged decline of Christianity is largely occurring within mainline denominations, while many of the theologically conservative and Pentecostal churches are thriving,” writes Konstantin Petrenko in the online magazine Religion Dispatches. “If this trend continues, American society may find itself increasingly polarized between evangelical Christians and the ‘nones,’ creating a fascinating, albeit potentially explosive, cultural dynamic.”

So, the pundits waving the ARIS report around as more evidence of the imminent demise of U.S. evangelical churches are wrong — at least for now. But what about the future?

In a much-discussed piece published March 10 in The Christian Science Monitor, Michael Spencer predicts a “major collapse of evangelical Christianity” within 10 years that “will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.” (Read it at http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0310/p09s01-coop.html).

Spencer, a graduate of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, writes the InternetMonk.com blog. He warns that this supposed evangelical collapse “will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the opponent of the common good.

“Millions of evangelicals will quit. Thousands of ministries will end. Christian media will be reduced, if not eliminated. Many Christian schools will go into rapid decline. I’m convinced the grace and mission of God will reach to the ends of the earth. But the end of evangelicalism as we know it is close.”

Hysterical alarmism? Quite possibly. Spencer offers little evidence for his assertions. At the very least, his 10-year timetable for doom contradicts the slower religious and cultural shifts in the United States indicated by the ARIS report and other recent studies.

As to outward opponents of evangelical faith, there’s no shortage of them in America — and many of them would love to silence the church’s voice in the public square altogether. But this isn’t the Middle East or the communist world, or even secularized Europe. We still have a Constitution and a vibrant tradition of freedom of speech and religion.

Spencer, however, eloquently diagnoses one self-inflicted wound that could kill us. In his words:

“We evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we’ve spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing and media have produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey Scripture, the essentials of theology or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures. ... Even in areas where evangelicals imagine themselves strong (like the Bible Belt), we will find a great inability to pass on to our children a vital evangelical confidence in the Bible and the importance of the faith.”

Christian pollsters have been telling us essentially the same thing for years. Are we listening?

If we fail to make disciples, biblical disciples, of our own children, will we be able to transform an increasingly pagan culture at home — or continue taking the Gospel to unreached cultures across the world, as God commands? Unlikely.

Collectively, we should seize on these hard times to take a long, Lenten look inward. Let us ask God how we can become more faithful disciples, how we can share our faith more authentically with our own families, how we can become a brighter, purer light amid the gathering darkness of our times.

“Despite all of these challenges, it is impossible not to be hopeful,” Spencer writes. “We need new evangelicalism that learns from the past and listens more carefully to what God says about being His people in the midst of a powerful, idolatrous culture.”