NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE O ver the weekend, the Atlantic published a piece on the decline of American church attendance. I expected to find a criticism of Evangelical voting patterns and the Church’s unwillingness to conform to today’s cultural trends. Instead, Jake Meador, editor in chief of the journal of Christian thought Mere Orthodoxy, offers a thoughtful reflection on the struggles of the Church in America to live up to the Great Commission and the dedication required to “observe all things whatsoever” that Christ commanded (Matthew 28:20).

Meador presents the challenge of the Church in the modern West: “a vibrant, life-giving church requires more, not less, time and energy from its members.”

It is hard to get people to commit more time to just about anything today. Most people are working mightily to get ahead, or at least to keep up with the Joneses. But the very things that keep us from church — busyness, isolation, fear — are the same things it offers a reprieve from. We often are too jealous of our time to properly observe the Sabbath, and then we find ourselves on Monday wishing for the rest we previously declined.

The most important point Meador raises is not merely the existence of this problem, or even that church attendance is connected with secondary goods such as “better health outcomes and longer life, higher financial generosity, and more stable families.” While presenting the church as a place to invest one’s time in exchange for community and purpose is better than attempting to make it as unobtrusive as possible in the lives of the faithful, we can do better still. That vision makes living the Christian life a self-centered act and leaves it less appealing than the panoply of distractions that keep us from it.

The real message of the article is its biblically grounded, positive vision for the Church as “a community marked by sincere love,” one whose members practice “eating together regularly, generously serving neighbors, and living lives of quiet virtue and prayer.” It is a body that demands that each of its members shape their lives around the command to love God and love thy neighbor as thyself.

Meador focuses on the role of the faithful in addressing poverty, overwork, and spiritual decay in their communities. This does not mean that the faithful should retreat from political life, as Russell Moore, an evangelical pastor and the editor in chief of Christianity Today, recently suggested in condemning “culture-war politics” and the “coalitions and power structures” that Evangelicals build to wage them. The faith has political implications; Christians living in a democracy should push the government to act justly. Moore is correct, however, in warning against allowing political advocacy to replace an earnest pursuit of sanctification.

Indeed, it is an illuminating irony that some of the Christian communities growing fastest today are those in nations where they have the least political power. They “rejoice, inasmuch as [they] are partakers of Christ’s sufferings” (1 Peter 4:13). But I do not think this is a specifically national difference. Americans are not permanently condemned to lukewarmness on account of our material prosperity.

We must show the same fortitude against temptation that our brethren abroad display in the face of oppression. Many American Christians — myself often included — need to be reminded of the message to the Church of the Laodiceans in the Book of Revelation, which could just as easily have been written to us:

I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked: I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear; and anoint thine eyes with eyesalve, that thou mayest see. As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent.

Church attendance has declined not because we asked too much of one another but too little. It should be no surprise that people are not invested in something that hasn’t asked for much investment from them in the first place. The silver lining here is that many people are still hungry for more. When we are ready to offer our countrymen a robust vision of the Christian life — one that models itself more completely on the lives of Christ and the Apostles — America may well be ripe for revival.