Spiritual development in our churches can be gauged by the extent
to which their members have become genuine Christians. But as this
article will show, most Christians or members of these churches are just
nominal Christians.
According to current statistics there are
more or less 2 billion Christians in the world. That is one third of the
world's population. These belong to different churches, denominations
or religious groups. If all of these were genuine Christians we would
not be in a mess of so much poverty, crimes, violence and environmental
degradation.
The problem is that most of these so-called
Christians are only nominal, not genuine. They have not even begun so
much as an inch in their spiritual development.
They are nominal
because they are Christians in name only. A majority of them are called
Christians because they were christened or baptized. Others consider
themselves Christians because they were born of Christian parents and/or
were dedicated by their parents in the church. Still others think that
they are Christians because besides having been baptized they go to a
Christian church for worship and have prayed the prayer to accept Jesus
Christ as their personal Lord and Savior.
They are also nominal
Christians because their leaders may not have realized that they
themselves are also nominal Christians. Thinking that they are real
Christians, they think that their followers are also real Christians.
There
have been many attempts to make these nominal Christians into genuine
Christians but the effectiveness of these attempts have been very
minimal.
Why? Why are the results minimal?
I give three reasons for this state of affairs. There may be more.
Reason
1 is that most Christians are satisfied with nominal Christianity. This
kind of Christianity is enough for their classification in the census
of their government, in their day to day lives, in getting their
marriage license and contract, in enrolling their children in school, in
applying for a job, in dying and getting burial services in the church.
Since they are already satisfied with this kind of Christianity, they
do not see the need of improving upon it or of making it genuine.
Reason
2 is that the Christian leaders who realize that most Christians are
only nominal do not fully know how genuine Christians are formed and how
different they are from nominal Christians. They just keep on hoping
that by their homilies or preaching, by Sunday schools or catechism
classes or seminars before the administration of the sacraments or by
their theology or religious studies subjects in school (now called
mostly values education), by small group Bible studies or in their
various church related organizations, their followers will become
genuine Christians. They think that nominal Christianity and genuine
Christianity exist in a continuum, from the most nominal Christianity to
the most genuine Christianity with intermediary grades or levels
between these extremes of the continuum.
These leaders do not
realize that the difference between nominal and genuine Christianity is
not one of degree but of kind. The one is not real, it is zero. The
other is real, it has a positive content, at least 1, so to speak.
Reason
3 is that most who desire to lead others to genuine Christianity do not
know how this is effectively done, in a way that there are substantial
and lasting results. Look at this example.
A crusade is organized
in a nominally Christian locality. The leaders and followers of
different cooperating churches and denominations work out the whole
crusade, from the scheduling, the choice of and invitation to an
evangelist, the preparation for the venue, etc., up to the publicity of
the crusade and daily prayers for the success of the crusade.
The
crusade is done on schedule. Hundreds profess to receive Christ as Lord
and Savior and are channeled to local churches for baptism and
discipleship training. The newly professed now populate the local
churches and they remain there or go back to their former churches or
just drop from both.
For a while the locality experiences a
positive change. Fewer people get drunk at night, more attendance in
churches is observed, fewer acts of criminality occur. After several
months or a year or two conditions become "normal" again: increasing
number of crimes and stable or declining numbers in church attendance.
Genuine
Christianity has not really invaded that locality. There was only a
facelift of nominal Christianity. Sure, some lives here and there are
drastically changed. A former gambler now becomes a student of the Bible
and he will become a preacher soon. A prostitute now stops her trade
and becomes a choir member. But the impact on the society as a whole is
minimal.
Jesus came to give us genuine Christianity, not nominal Christianity.
When
we have a constantly increasing number of spiritually developed
Christians, we will have genuine Christianity. Spiritual development is
our need as Christians.
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