Threats to the church

Seen on the Internet....

The four greatest current threats to the church: 

(1) Wokeness and the continued secularization of culture. 
(2) A far-right, anti-Semitic counter movement that resorts to the flesh not the Scriptures. 
(3) The advance of Islam in the West. 
(4) Pragmatism within the church.

It's not necessary to critique everything mistaken you find on the Internet. :-)

However, the above reflects a mindset. It's not a list that I think actually tells us anything about the greatest threats that the Western (or perhaps just American) church (which is equated with "the church") really faces. It does tell us something about how the author sees the Christian faith, politics, culture - and, I'd guess in a high number of cases where people say things like this, his own inner fear as he sees what he thought was a reasonably comfortable life "The Christian West" slipping away from him.

According to such lists, the church mainly is threatened by the winds of culture and politics. To that, I can only say "I suggest you read the New Testament carefully. Try to understand the mindset of the apostles, and note carefully all the things that they saw as threats to the church, and then rank all those things in terms of stated or implied importance. And then at the end, note where things that resemble your own list of fears ranked, and ask why there's a difference."

Just a moment's thought along these lines will show us that the sort of mind-set that can write a list like the above is far, far, from the mind of God revealed in Scripture. Is the main requirement for shepherding a church in the West today skill in reading and navigating the external political/cultural winds in society? No, whatever importance that does or doesn't have, there are many things that are much higher priorities.

And if the church's health *did* depend upon successfully ranking what could be gleaned from cultural and political analysis in such a fashion, then we'd be doomed, because we're not omniscient. This list is an implied claim to know far, far more than we do. 

Or in short: "four contemporary cultural/political challenges for the Western church" and "the four greatest threats the church faces" are two very different claims. Someone who thinks that they're the same claim is mainly communicating something about himself, not about reality. Ironically, the sort of worldly mindset that can confuse these two claims is itself one of the significant challenges the church, in every age, faces.