To think that Christianity is thriving in America simply ignores the obvious and overwhelming facts of our times.he church in America today has also drifted from its biblical mission and the result has been a church largely divorced from its kingdom purposes and therefore increasingly irrelevant to people living in the real world. At the heart of our present dilemma is our diminished understanding of the gospel, namely the gospel of the kingdom.

In Scripture there are many different names used to describe God. While all the names of God are important for a variety of reasons, the name “Abba Father” is one of the most significant names in terms of understanding how he relates to his people. The Aramaic word Abba would most closely be translated as “Daddy.” It was a common term that young children would use to address their fathers. It signifies the close, intimate relationship of a father to his child, as well as the childlike trust a young child puts in his daddy.

No longer is there such a thing as “mere Christianity” to borrow C. S. Lewis’s phrase, but Catholic-Christianity, Protestant-Christianity, Orthodox-Christianity—not to mention the countless Protestant denominations and nondenominational representations of Christianity. Universal fellowship centered on the person and work of Jesus Christ is exchanged for tribal commitments to traditions and various nonessential views.

By reducing our conceptions of the church to an institution or organization to be managed, there often follows a decreased expectation of the supernatural in the affairs and activities of the church and, by extension, the individual Christian. Rather than seeking results beyond our human schemes and expectations, we find ourselves managing the church as an enterprise in which results can be forecast and progress measured using metrics common to modern business.

Today, the managerial and therapeutic revolutions of the twentieth century have come to dominate. As a result, the church is less communal, less organic, and more institutional. We have become reliant on marketing techniques and programs and tend to treat the church as a mere organization to be maintained and managed as opposed to a supernatural life to be lived together under the rule and reign of God.

Guns have been a part of Western civilization since the fifteenth century and multi-shot handguns became widely available beginning in 1835. Put simply, guns have been a part of American society since its colonization and yet it is only within the last forty years that we have begun to see these despicable acts of mass and random killing of strangers.

The Christmas season is once again upon us and with it overwhelming encouragement from Madison Avenue to spend what we have not earned to buy what we cannot afford. The day after Thanksgiving, known as Black Friday (indicating the point at which retailers are in the black—or at least hope to be), signaled the start of the “holiday shopping season.” That phrase in and of itself reveals the commercialized emphasis that has unfortunately come to define Christmas for many Americans.

One of the ways we can determine whether or not we are listening to the voice of God versus that other voice is to examine the four foundational relationships in our lives that the gospel is redeeming: our relationship with God, ourselves, others, and creation.

What we often perceive as the biblical way is often nothing more than the worldly way dressed up in piety and justified by familiarity and personal experience. What we often fail to do is listen for and hear the voice of God. Instead, we reason, evaluate, and decide based on what seems right to us but in fact may not be consistent with life lived under the rule and reign of God.

What I believe this report reveals is the growing assimilation of pagan (new-age and deistic) ideas, sprinkled with therapeutic self-interest, finally mingled with a childhood Christian tradition. The result is a highly personalized and therapeutic form of Christian faith and practice, i.e., culturalized Christianity. While it may make us feel better to think that the church is losing ground due to assault by secular forces; it is likely that apathy and heresy are bigger threats to Christianity in America than secularism.