Feet Voting | thebereancall.org

TBC Staff

Voting with their feet
 
Churchgoing in Britain is in freefall in the "mainline" denominations. Membership of the Church of England declined 27% between 1980 and 2000. This realization led to a survey in 2003/2004 to find out why. In all, 14,000 people in Britain and Ireland responded to the widely-advertised invitation to say why they were giving up on church. People wrote responses, rather than answering multiple-choice questions.
 
Astonishingly, 91% gave very similar reasons for disenchantment with church, which can be summarized in the words of one person: "The church needs to give a more robust defense of the reasons for believing." People pleaded for the churches to answer the skeptics and defend the faith.
Many respondents had joined house churches to get teaching that built their faith. Several websites were frequently listed as providing the sort of teaching that people wanted; one was the Answers in Genesis website. Respondents wanted evidence for their faith and teaching that upheld the authority of the Bible.
 
The second reason for disillusionment was frustration with church leaders not teaching the holiness of God and moral standards. A huge number of respondents grieved over the ordination of homosexuals by the Anglican Church. But then if you discard the Genesis account of creation, with its straightforward history of the first marriage of a man and a woman ordained by God, why not have a man and a man? And why stop at denying Genesis? So they reject the Bible's clear condemnations of homosexual acts (such as Genesis 19; Leviticus:18:22; Romans:1:26–27; 1 Corinthians:6:9; 1 Timothy:1:10).
 
Research in Australia also shows that issues of truth and moral standards are very important in people seeing church as irrelevant. Even a secular commentator, Andrew Bolt, pleaded for church leaders to stand up and be counted on moral issues, particularly the sanctity of life in regard to the high rate of abortion.
 
One liberal archbishop in Australia, commenting on the hemorrhage of members from his denomination, blamed "fundamentalist" (i.e., Bible-centred) churches for "sheep stealing"! He can't see that starving sheep will look for pasture elsewhere (sadly, many just starve to death).
 
If church leaders do not uphold the authority of the Bible from the very first verse and do not emphasize teaching that shows the truthfulness of Scripture, people will increasingly see the churches as irrelevant . . . and vote with their feet (http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v28/i1/voting.asp).