Short Take #2: How Should the Church Respond to Cultural Opposition?

Here is another short take from The Christian Worldview with David Wheaton.

Ken Ham with us today on The Christian Worldview, the founder and president of Answers in Genesis. You mentioned the church in your last answer, Ken, about the church's response to what's going on. What should the response be by the church with regards to meeting this opposition today? The bottom line is the church, by and large, is a big mess out there.

And there's a lot of lukewarm churches. And really what has happened, I think, is that in this particular era, and I keep harping on this, but we've got to look at what happened in this era. Something began to happen in the 1800s. And I would call this era from the 1800s to the present. We are now looking at the logical consequence of what started to happen.

And that was in the 1800s. You know, there were atheists who didn't obviously don't believe the Bible and don't believe in God's Word, who wanted to explain everything by natural processes. And so they said the fossil record was laid down over millions of years. Now, we got to understand the idea of millions of years in our modern world came out of naturalism, the religion of atheism. And so then what happened was there were Christian leaders who said, oh, we'll take the millions of years and put in a gap between Genesis one, one and one, two. And so the gap theory, oh, we'll put in the days of creation, the day age theory long comes down and we'll take Darwin and say, God used evolution and the Big Bang. I will say God used the Big Bang and right through the churches today and our Christian colleges and Bible colleges are all these different positions on Genesis.

Now, why is that relevant? Well, this has been happening, particularly since the 1800s. And much of the church has abandoned teaching Genesis one to eleven. But Genesis one to eleven is the foundation for marriage, for gender, for why you wear clothes, for the gospel. In fact, it's the foundation for every doctrine. It's a foundation for the rest of the Bible. It's a foundation for your whole world view. And if you think back to Genesis chapter three, when the devil came to Eve and said, did God really say the Apostle Paul in second Corinthians eleven three says, beware, the devil is going to use the same method on us as he did on Eve to get us to position and not believing the things of God.

What was the method he used? The Genesis three attack was to create doubt in regard to the word of God. In other words, there's always going to be an attack on the word of God. And what's happened in this era is that much of the church has succumbed to the attack on Genesis one to eleven, abandon that, as most of the kids from church homes are gone to the public schools and taught an atheistic view now because they've ripped the veneer of Christianity out. And it's basically just atheism and LGBT worldview and Marxism, critical race theory, all that sort of stuff is forced on them. They come to our churches and a lot of our churches responded by saying, let's have a lot more music and let's have more entertainment and trust in Jesus and, you know, touchy feely stuff.

We haven't taken the stand. We should have on God's word from the beginning, taught them a truly Christian worldview, equipped them with answers, apologetics to defend the Christian faith. And much of the church has not also been taught to understand there's no neutrality. You know, people have the idea today that, oh, if you're not a Christian, you're neutral. But the Bible says the heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. We are depraved as human beings.

We are sinful people. And we've got this idea that, oh, if you don't believe in God, you're not religious. I mean, atheists have arbitrarily said, oh, if you believe in God and go to church, that's religion. They don't believe in God. That's not religion.

That's not true. Everyone has a worldview. Everyone has a religion. And I think in even trying to deal with these issues like abortion and gay marriage and the gender issues and and racism and so on, many Christians have the idea, if I bring up the Bible, that means I'm religious and biased. So I'm not going to bring up the Bible.

I'm going to try to deal with these another way. But the problem is, if you don't stand on God's word as the foundation for your worldview, you've already lost the battle. And so I believe there's been a great lack of training in our churches to stand on God's word from the beginning to have a truly Christian worldview, be equipped to defend the Christian faith. And much of the church has resorted to a lot of entertainment and music focused features in their churches.

I see that I've spoken in all 50 states in America, spoken in hundreds of churches, and I see the patterns. And one of the patterns is decrease the teaching of the word of God, increase music entertainment from the front. But they're not teaching apologetics. They're not teaching foundations. They're not teaching Christian worldview, which is what we do at Answers in Genesis through the I Can Counter the Creation Museum through our curricula and so on. And as a result, we have generations who started to realize, the younger generations, you know, if the Bible is not true in Genesis, how can be true anywhere else?

I'm not getting answers to my questions. Can you really trust Christianity? I mean, how can there be a loving God with all the death and suffering in the world? Hasn't science disproved the Bible? And as those generations have then left the church and church attendance for the younger generations is down to about 11%. Whereas for the older generations, you know, those born before 1928, 56% of them went to church. And so down through the ages, we've seen this generational loss from the church. So we have to ask ourselves, how has the church failed in that way? Now, don't get me wrong, there are thousands of churches that use Answers in Genesis material, but they're a minority. And the majority of our churches and the majority of our Christian colleges and seminaries have in a way paved the way for this change that has occurred because they have allowed generations to be captured by the world and tried to add some sort of Christian ideas into their thinking instead of taking a stand on God's word from the beginning to raise them up as we should have filled with biblical salt to be able to be witnesses for the Lord out there. This has been a short take from the Christian worldview with David Wheaton. To find out more about the Christian worldview, order resources, make a donation, become a monthly partner or contact us. Visit the Christian worldview.org. You can also call us at toll free 1-888-646-2233 or write to us at box 401 Excelsior, Minnesota 55331. That's box 401 Excelsior, Minnesota 55331.