From the TeachingtheWord Bible Knowledgebase

The following is an expanded version of my comments during an hour-long live radio interview on the Janet Mefferd Show on December 15, 2011. The program is heard on 180 stations in the U. S. and worldwide on the web.

Radio host Janet Mefferd opened with this: "Is the Bible becoming 'the Greatest Story Never Read'? Dr. Paul Elliott, President of Teaching the Word Ministries, joins us now to talk about the loss of congregational Bible reading in churches today." Janet noted that there is anecdotal evidence that congregational Bible reading is disappearing from Evangelical churches, and she asked if this is what I have observed.

I responded by saying that we've been doing research on this over the past year. We've found that over 80% of Evangelical churches that we have studied do not have congregational Bible reading during their Sunday services. The only Bible reading in over 80% of Evangelical churches today is the Scripture text that is being used for the sermon -- if there is a text -- and many times that is a mere handful of verses divorced from their context.

Why Has It Happened?

Janet Mefferd asked how this has happened. I responded by putting the answer in terms of American history. The keynote of our history can be summed up in one statement: "As the church goes, so goes the nation." In fact, that's the keynote of the history of every Western nation, and of many nations in other regions of the world.

Our problems as a nation have their roots in a basic problem within the Evangelical church. Our problems as a nation didn't begin in the 1960s when atheists went to court and got prayer and Bible reading thrown out of the schools. Our problems as a nation didn't begin in the 1970s when the Supreme Court invented a so-called constitutional right for a mother to kill her unborn child. Our problems didn't begin in the 1990s when the courts began inventing so-called constitutional rights to sodomy and so-called homosexual "marriage". Our problems began when the groundwork was laid for those things, long before that, by a change in the Evangelical church's attitude toward the Bible.

Dr. Stephen Prothero at Boston University is one of a number of people who have done a lot of very good research on this. He was interviewed on C-SPAN about this, and he made the point that among Evangelicals there was a shift in focus over the course of the 20th century. It was a shift, as he put it, "from Bible reading to feeling - from knowing what Jesus actually had to say to having a "relationship" with a "Jesus" that Evangelicals know little or nothing about - from actually reading the Bible to merely revering the Bible..."

This is the same kind of pattern we've subsequently seen in politics -- for example, going from actually reading and following the United States Constitution to merely revering the Constitution. I believe there is a cause-and-effect relationship between those two things. If we have that kind of an attitude toward the Bible -- the Word of God -- in the church, it's easy to develop that kind of an attitude about human documents such as the Constitution, and about our laws, in the secular realm. We come to think that these are nice things to have, convenient to use when it suits us, but dispensable when they become inconvenient.

The Bible tells us in First Timothy 3:15 that the true Church of Jesus Christ is supposed to be the mainstay of Biblical truth. The church is failing in that role. And when the church fails in that role, it is easy to forget the Biblical basis of law and government.

The great strength of the Protestant Reformation was its rallying cry, "Sola Scriptura" -- Scripture Alone. For the first time in centuries, churchgoers heard the Bible read in their own language. The Scriptures became available in print, and even poorer people made financial sacrifices in order to have their own copy of the Word of God. People came to understand what Scripture actually said, rather than apostate church leaders' spin on what Scripture said. No longer could the church hierarchy get away with making up extra-Biblical doctrines in order to retain power over a Biblically-ignorant populace (and even a Biblically-ignorant clergy).

Today we are seeing a return to the pre-Reformation pattern. In the broad Evangelical church, during the 20th and early 21st centuries we have seen church leaders making up doctrines out of thin air as they go. They have gotten away with it because people don't know their Bibles, and they don't understand that the Bible is the sole authority. A 2009 Barna survey reported that only 46% of Evangelical adults believe in absolute moral truth. That same kind of thinking has spilled over into the secular realm. Governments and businesses at all levels are making up new standards of ethics and public morality as they go.

Fifty years ago, when a governor of New York ran for the Republican nomination for president of the United States but divorced his wife and remarried in the middle of the campaign, his candidacy was doomed. Today a man who divorced his first wife and subsequently married two of his mistresses is leading the Republican polls. It is undeniably true that "as the church goes, so goes the nation" -- and the problems started with the abandonment of the Bible in the church.

In our time the Evangelical church has become the church unplugged -- disconnected from the only source of truth and authority, the Word of God. The church unplugged quickly becomes the church uncertain -- unsure of what it believes, unable to articulate and defend even the core truths of the Christian faith. The church that is unplugged from its authority and uncertain of the truth becomes the church ineffectual -- a church that is unprepared for spiritual battle, and unprepared to carry out ChristÃ??Ã?¡Ã??Ã?¯s Great Commission to evangelize the world and edify the saints.

How Did We Get Here?

How did the Evangelical church get into this kind of sad shape? What we find is that this didn't happen overnight. It is a historical problem.

The problem began in the colleges and seminaries that train Evangelical pastors. We find the seeds of that problem all the way back in the middle 1800s. At that time, the colleges and seminaries began gradually adopting the philosophy of postmodernism that had begun to develop in Europe as far back as the late 1700s. The keynote of postmodernism is the idea that there is no absolute truth, that each of us has his own reality and his own truth.

With this came acceptance of the philosophy of higher criticism of the Bible that originated in Germany in the early 1800s -- man's mind in authority over the text of Scripture, and man deciding on a philosophical basis what Scripture should and should not say. Many of the colleges and seminaries that trained Evangelical men in the later 1800s began to adopt these ways of thinking -- subtly at first, more openly as the decades went on.

The first thing this did was to inculcate a diminished view of the Bible, and an elevated view of fallen man's opinions about the Bible. Fast-forwarding from that beginning to the state of the Evangelical church today, we find that to a large degree the Bible is viewed as just another religious book. Not the inspired, infallible, inerrant Word of God, but the words of men -- something that may in some vague way have a Divine stamp of approval on it, but certainly not the sole and final authority of the Christian and the church.

The vast array of popular books that line the shelves of religious bookstores today are the de facto written authority of the Evangelical church -- those books, and not the Bible. For several years now, surveys have shown that the most influential book among Evangelical pastors is not the Bible. Two of Rick Warren's books top the list -- The Purpose-Driven Life and The Purpose-Driven Church. The majority of Evangelical pastors say that those two books are the main ones that are shaping and influencing their ministries -- not the Bible.

As the pastor goes, so goes the church. As the church goes, so goes the nation. The role of the pastor is a key role -- for good or for evil.

And so in our services, we're seeing the fruits of a change of attitude among pastors toward the Bible. In any church service, the things that are done are the things that the pastor and the leadership think are important. The things that are not done are the things they deem less important or unimportant. When they leave out the Bible, it speaks volumes about their attitude toward it.

This is the growing pattern: The Word of God no longer occupies first place in the church service -- the central position, the place of supreme and uncontested authority. Today in many Evangelical churches, Bible reading literally occupies no more than two minutes of the entire service -- sometimes zero minutes. Accompanying this is a decline of expositional preaching of the Bible.

If people see that the Bible isn't important in the church, isn't important to the pastor and the leadership, what are they going to think about the Bible outside of church? They're not going to think that the Bible is important in their individual lives and in their homes. Once again, "As the church goes, so goes the nation." The nation has gone in the wrong direction because the church first -- long ago -- went in the wrong direction.

How Do We Get Back?

This is a long-term problem, and it is going to require a long-term solution. Christians and churches are going to have to be willing to stay the course and see it through.

The solution is rooted in what the Bible says about itself -- Hebrews chapter 4, verse 12: "The Word of God is alive, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner" -- in the original language, a critic -- "of the thought and intents of the heart."

If Evangelical Christians in 2012, and in the years beyond, would make a priority of putting aside all the popular books and turn to simply reading the Word of God from beginning to end, it would make more of a difference in the condition of the church and the nation than any other single thing we could do.

We have an example of that in the account of the Israelites' return from captivity in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. The people, young and old, stood in a great assembly over the course of many days, as the elders of Israel read the Word of God to them and explained what it meant. They reintroduced the people to the Word of God. That is what the church, and the nation, needs today.

And it had an immediate effect on the people. They realized that they had been worshipping false gods, and that they needed to worship the one true God, and Him alone. They realized that they had entered into relationships and practices that were displeasing God and causing God to withhold his blessing. And so they abandoned those things. Some of the decisions they had to make were very difficult and costly ones. Tears were shed. But they responded to their new understanding of the Word of God, and they did what it said. God came and dwelled among them once again, and blessed them.

The great need of this country is not economic or political reform, or even ethical and moral reform. The great need of this country is for the people of the true church of Jesus Christ to return to His Word, in repentance and submission. The church of Jesus Christ must once again be the Scripture-driven church. God's inspired, inerrant word must be our sole authority, and our infallible critic, in every area of life and ministry. That is what will bring the blessings of God to His church once again. And as the church is blessed, the nation will be blessed.

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