Christians Soon to Be a Minority in the USA | by Dan Foster | Backyard Church | Jul, 2023 | Medium

Christians Soon to Be a Minority in the USA | by Dan Foster | Backyard Church | Jul, 2023 | Medium

Medium is an online site that according to one of its principal founders Dan Foster.  It is dedicated to "progressive Christianity".  He describes himself:

I am a recovering evangelical trying to work out what it means to be a Christian now that I’ve walked away from the Church. Yep! I’m deconstructing my faith! I’m breaking it all down into tiny pieces and testing each part of the faith I grew up with for its usefulness and truthfulness.

Obviously with such titles as Why People Lose Their Faith, The Many Things Anti-LGBTQ Christians Don't Think About, Did Jesus Believe In Hell? we would have many disagreements with it.  But neither should it be thought that they do not have some kernel of truth.  Their questioning of traditional evangelical Arminianism, and the definition of the word "church" is correct. Mr. Foster and ourselves would have a basic disagreement on the definition of the word "Christian". 

In this article, he begins by trying to explain why Christians will soon be a minority.  He explains it thusly:

Why is it that the church is apparently in possession of the greatest story ever told — the hope for all of humanity — a life-transforming message, and yet, it is managing to drive more and more people out the door? The way I see it, it can only come down to one of two reasons: Either the church is delivering the wrong message, or it is doing such a poor job of delivering the right message that the message is completely lost. It’s probably a combination of both.

He, of course, does not consider a third option.  Perhaps the Lord, in his infinite wisdom does not wish them to be in a majority? As Old School Baptists, we have been the minority among "Christian" groups for many years, perhaps from the history way back to apostolic times.  The Welsh Tract Old School Baptist Church in Newark Delaware, has a handful of members, and one of our ministers said he saw "Ichabod (forsaken of God) written on the entrance of the meeting house". Another said he became pastor to "but the Beebe Baptists".  This statement was based on the mistaken belief that the church followed any man (Gilbert Beebe).  Interestingly enough, both men have died, and Welsh Tract lives on.

But we are curious as to what Mr. Foster thinks the "right message" is.  He first speaks of what the gospel is not:

Regardless of what the church thinks, the message that a person is born sinful from birth and is destined for eternal conscious torment in a place called Hell without the intervention of God through Jesus Christ is NOT actually good news. The message that the same God who created the universe and set the laws of the universe in motion somehow decided that the wages of sin (even the smallest of sins) had to be death is not good news. The idea that our sinful nature is of such magnitude that it compelled God to subject his son to brutality, torture, and death is far from uplifting. The message that God, who is apparently both all-loving and all-powerful, needs to satisfy his holiness by sending the majority of humankind to eternal conscious torment in hell is not good news. And the message that we have a free choice to accept this message and “be saved” is not good news either.

In saying, this Mr. Foster is right!  Certainly, the Arminian free will message is not only bad news but is not even correct! But the proclamation of hell and that sin will lead to death is NOT the message of the gospel.  These things are true biblically, but left at that they are NOT good news.  He is right.  Where he is deadly wrong is in that he never defines the. gospel as he sees it, except to decry that the "church's message" got "mixed up with the 'gospel' of John Calvin.  He grapples with his problems with the church not realizing that he is really battling Arminianism:

The church is not a place where I can go — just as I am — and safely bear my heart, with all its wounds and scars. In fact, in every sense, it feels like, in a church, you cannot be both fully known and fully loved. To be fully known would only invite rejection based on the invisible and unspoken expectations of performance-based religion — expectations that everyone is struggling to meet. This perpetuates the very problem that harkens back to the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve felt they had to hide their nakedness from God. They believed that if God saw them fully, he would reject them outright. As a result, many who attend churches pick up their fig leaves and cover their own shame and sense of not measuring up. Christians are forced to pretend, repress, deny, or become a hypocrite because nothing they do will ever be good enough. It is not so much that hypocrites join churches but that the evangelical church’s very structures encourage people to act and pretend. At some point, many Christians — finally fed up with the sheer level of energy it takes to play this game — give up and leave the church for good. Do you blame them?

To us, what he is describing is legalism.  He might carry it further, in their lack of support for LBGTQ rights, which we would also not accept.  Many of these professing Christians (perhaps Mr. Foster himself), are not Christians.  So to us, what he is talking about is that mainline false churches are being abandoned by their constituents.  This like everything else, is the Lord's doing.