The Silent Church

There is a common assumption among Christians in America: that the greatest threat to the church is hostility from the outside. That if the culture would just stop attacking us, everything would be fine. That the problem is "them."

That assumption is wrong. The greatest threat to the church in America is not the world's hostility. It is the church's silence. It is the fact that too many Christians have decided that the price of speaking the truth is too high, and that the safest course is to say nothing.

A hostile world can be resisted. A silent church has already surrendered. And surrender is not a strategy. It is a defeat.

The silence did not come all at once. It came in stages, and each stage was understandable on its own.

First, the church accepted the premise. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the intellectual classes began to treat religion as a private matter, and many Christians accepted that framing. Faith became something you did on Sunday, not something that shaped how you thought about Monday.

Then, the church retreated from the public square. Having accepted that faith was private, Christians began to believe that they should not bring their convictions into public debates. Politics became "dirty," and the church decided to stay clean by staying silent.

Then, the church began to accommodate. Once the church had retreated, it found itself without a public voice. And when the culture changed, the church had no way to push back. So it began to adapt. It softened its message. It stopped using words that might offend. It tried to be nice.

And finally, the church became indistinguishable. In trying so hard not to offend the culture, the church lost the thing that made it the church. It lost its saltiness. It lost its edge. It lost its voice.

Dennis Prager has argued that this is the central crisis of our time. He asks: "Every society has to answer a few basic questions in order to succeed and even in order to survive. One of them is, 'How do we make good men?'"[reference:13]. The silent church has stopped asking that question. It has stopped answering it. And in the absence of an answer, the culture has supplied its own — an answer that is destroying the men it was meant to form.

The cost of a silent church is not abstract. It is measured in families and children and communities.

When the church stops teaching men what it means to be a man, the culture teaches them instead. And the culture's message is this: masculinity is a problem. Strength is toxic. Fatherhood is optional. Marriage is a constraint.

And the men who grow up absorbing that message do not become better men. They become lost men. They become men who do not know what they are for. They become men who drift.

The statistics are the proof. Consider the fatherlessness crisis cited earlier on this site: "18.2 million children, 1 in 4, live without a biological, step, or adoptive father in the home"[reference:14]. Consider the suicide rates: men commit suicide at four times the rate of women. Consider the labor force data: men's participation has declined for fifty years.

These are not political statistics. They are pastoral statistics. They describe a generation of men who we're told by the culture that they did not matter, and who we're not told by the church that they did.

What does a church that is not silent look like? Not a church that is angry. Not a church that is political for its own sake. Not a church that turns every sermon into a culture-war speech.

A church that is not silent looks like this:

• It teaches men. Specifically. Directly. About what it means to be a man, a husband, a father, a worker, a citizen.
• It disciplines. It holds its members accountable. It does not pretend that sin is not sin.
• It speaks truth in love. Not with cruelty, but not with cowardice either. It says the hard thing, and it says it gently.
• It serves its community. It is not a building. It is a body. It feeds the hungry, visits the prisoner, cares for the widow, and trains the young.
• It worships. Not as a performance, but as an act of obedience. It takes God seriously. It takes Scripture seriously. It takes the sacraments seriously.
• It endures. It does not fold when the culture pushes back. It does not soften when the world calls it a bigot. It stands.

This is not a new model. It is the old model. It is what the church has always been when it has been faithful. And it is available to every church, in every town, in every generation. The only thing required is for the men in the pews to decide that silence is not an option.

This page has described a problem. But a problem described is not a problem solved. And so here is what a man should do:

• Join a church that is not silent. If your church is silent, find one that is not. If you cannot find one, pray about whether God is calling you to help make yours into one.
• Be a man in your church. Not a passive attendee. Not a consumer. A member of the body, with a role, a responsibility, and a calling.
• Teach the young men around you. The church does not need more programs. It needs more older men who will take younger men under their wing and show them what faithfulness looks like.
• Speak up when it costs you. In your small group, in your Bible study, in your conversations with other men. Say the thing that needs to be said.
• Pray for your church leadership. They are under enormous pressure. They need your prayers, your encouragement, and your willingness to stand with them.

This is what it looks like to refuse to be silent. Not to become a loudmouth. Not to become a culture warrior. To become a man who simply refuses to pretend that the truth does not matter.

The church in America is not dead. It is not dying. It is being purified. And purification is not a pleasant process, but it is not a fatal one either.

What is happening is that the nominal Christians — the people who we're Christians because it was the thing to do, the people who showed up on Christmas and Easter and went through the motions — are leaving. And what is left is smaller, but it is realer.

That is not a defeat. That is a calling. A smaller, purer, more committed church is not a weaker church. It is a stronger one. It is a church that can actually do what a church is supposed to do: make disciples, hold men accountable, speak truth, serve the poor, and stand firm in a world that has lost its way.

You are part of that church. Not because you are perfect. Not because you have all the answers. Because you are still here. And because you have decided that silence is not an option.

So do not be silent. And do not be afraid. The gates of hell shall not prevail.