Don’t play with dead fish! Mom said don’t bring it home thinking we’ll eat it! A dead fish is useless and worthless.

What are we to do with dead faith? Since a fish is a symbol for a Christian, maybe we can see how a dead faith isn’t much different from a dead fish.

Why do we declare a dead fish dead?  Most obvious is that it doesn’t move. Ever poke someone who was still to see if they were still alive? I try poking motionless Christians to see if their faith is alive. They don’t like it.

If our faith has no action, is it faith? James declares that faith with no action is dead (James 2:17). A living faith moves us: moves us to worship and praise our living God, moves us to pray and read his word, moves us to share Christ and bless others for His sake.  A faith without the life-giving Spirit is dead (James 2:26). And a dead faith is as useless as a dead fish because it is not living the aliveness that God intends (James 2:20).

(A faith that is about making ourselves feel good about our righteousness is not faith in Christ. I will cover that in a future article.)

If our motionless faith is just words; an empty lifeless confession that we are a Christian but no swimming in life as a Christian, then our faith is dead. If our faith is just the stripes of ancestors and heritage from days gone by but does not inspire fresh living today, then, well, even dead fish have stripes. Knowing facts about God or Christ is like a dead fish skeleton. You can see the outline, but a skeleton alone does not manifest life. A static dead faith isn’t just infertile and lifeless. Not having a living faith means we lack life-changing love, but rather are full of worry, obligation and tedium.

Why bother having a faith that is dead? Should a dead faith Christian just become an atheist to become dead to God all together?  Should we just drop the farce of faith? NO!

Embrace your dead faith. Yes, you are dead in your faith and also dead in your sins where you stand. But God excels at dealing with the dead. “But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.”(Eph 2:4–5)

You have every privilege as a dead fish Christian to call upon God to make your faith alive. You are baptized. You are baptized into the death of Christ so you can be raised to a new life in Christ. (Rom 6:3-6)

Are you content to be a motionless, dead fish Christian or will you pray for your faith? God promises to give you life. “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.” (Rom 8:11)

So, I invite you to drag your dead faith butt to worship. Sit there in the pew in your grave clothes of this dull, exhausting existence to hear the Word of God. Dead fish Lazarus didn’t come out of the tomb patting himself on the back but rose up because Christ spoke to him (John 11:43-44).  Christ calls you to be alive with faith.

“He died for us so that, whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together with him.” (1 Th 5:10)

Your servant in his Word, Pastor Douglas 

“Keeping an International Perspective While Living in

an Increasingly Secular Culture”

The signs were there, even before this pandemic.  North American culture seems to be moving toward an increasingly secular worldview at breakneck speed.  One particular moment when this sank in for me was the finding, by a large-scale Pew Research Institute survey, that the offspring of Boomers in the U.S. were only half as likely to attend church as when their Boomer parents were young.  That is a dramatic change in just one generation.  And this was before Covid started negatively impacting church attendance across the country.

Consider an illustration — from contemporary media — about how Americans are now living in a truly secular age.  It comes from the HBO drama series “Silicon Valley.”  One tech company employee explains to a co-worker why their company’s chief executive just “outed” another employee as a believer.  “You can be openly polyamorous, and people here will call you brave.  You can put microdoses of LSD in your cereal, and people will call you a pioneer.  But the one thing you cannot be is a Christian.”

Admittedly there are days when I despair that the Body of Christ is at risk of becoming completely inconsequential, a relic of the past.  But that was before I read an article in the most recent issue of the Fuller Seminary quarterly magazine.  The title was The Strange New Habitat of the Global Church, and was written by Professor Veli-Matti Karkkainen, a Finnish (and Lutheran) member of the Fuller faculty.  He shares, in this article, the latest information on the global Body of Christ.  

As you probably already know, the epicenter of the universal church is definitely moving south.  Well, the pace of that movement is only accelerating.  Some details from this article:

a) The current number of Christians worldwide is 2.4 billion. (That’s with a “b.”)

b) The great majority of Christians now live in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

c) By 2050, only about one-fifth of Christians will be non-Hispanic whites.  Karkkainen quotes a book from Oxford University Press, The Coming of Global Christianity: The Next Christendom.  “Even now a typical contemporary Christian is a woman living in a village in Nigeria or in a Brazilian favela or a young, often poor, person anywhere in the megacities of the Global South.”

d) An interesting quote from Karkkainen himself: “With the shift of the majority of Christians to the Global South, with societies and cultures more traditional than those in Europe and North America, conservative and traditional mindsets will be strengthened globally even when theological liberalism and pluralism reign in Western academia.”  (You might want to read that quote again.)

e) Of the over 200 million migrants in the world, about one-half are Christians, with the majority of them in the U.S. and Europe.

f) Among American ethnic group ministries it is Hispanic churches that are experiencing the greatest growth.

g) Black churches in the U.S. continue to grow.

h) From a global perspective, Karkkainen writes, “Secularism has not won the day.  Over against the overwhelming majority of the world’s population self-identifying as adherents to a particular religion, only about 15% label themselves as religiously unaffiliated.”  Fifteen percent.  That is approximately one billion; compared with 2.4 billion Christ followers.

The practical implication of the above information is that foreign mission support by you and your congregation is as vital as ever.  (Many of our Boomer Lutherans currently have significant disposable income and assets; most likely over and above what your congregations needs from them to “make ends meet.”)  Also, here in the U.S. there might be incredible opportunities for your congregation to reach out, in particular, to the Hispanic population; either directly or by financially supporting effective Hispanic ministries.

     So the Body of Christ is, even in this secular age, alive and well.  So take heart!  Millions of people around the world are still responding to the Gospel.