Salt

The fastest growing segment of the U. S. population are people who do not affiliate or attend church. They are called the “Nones”. The number has grown from 14 million in 1990 to almost one fourth of the U.S. population in 2014. If they were a denomination they would be second largest behind the Evangelicals which are made up of several groups. Catholics would be third and Baptist fourth.

To make the story even more impactful eighty percent of the millennials, who represent the future, have never been inside of a church.

The gravity of those figures is hard for us to grasp. Almost every city has a mega church that makes it look like everybody goes to church, but those crowds are not new converts they are the migration from smaller, less exciting churches. We are Walmarting the church. Killing off the small ones and putting everyone in the big ones. Someone said instead of being fishers of men we are keepers of the aquarium and we spend most of our time swapping fish.

After spending thirty years as pastor in Southern Baptist churches and ten years as an unpaid worship leader in some experimental efforts at making the church relevant, I am stunned by those figures. I keep wondering what happened to us. What did we do or what didn’t we do to stop the bleeding away of our influence and significance? The only answer I can come up with is wrapped up in the word salt.

After Jesus explained the attitudes He considered most important He said, “You are the salt of the earth.” Talk about dreaming the impossible dream. This little group were to be the salt and the light of the world?

In those days salt was extremely valuable. It was even used as currency. It is still vital to our lives today. We cannot live without salt, plus it gives taste to our food and is a powerful preservative to keep things from rotting.

Jesus went on to say that if salt lost its flavor it was good for nothing and thrown on the dung heap. Wonder if He was being prophetic. Wonder if that is where we are.

The church was at its zenith in the days after the Second World War. We were booming, building churches on every mile and filling them with ease. We were the unofficial official religion of America. Honored and revered on every corner from the late forties through the early nineties. At the same time our world and its problems were almost ignored. Social issues and justice were not our problem. Racial hatred was considered normal. Polarization of folks was of no concern. The fact that Jesus left the care of widows and orphans and the needs of the poor to us was ignored. We got so busy growing churches we forgot all about being salt to the world we were trying to win.

The history of Christianity in America is one of standing by in silence while the very foundations were being destroyed. To a great degree the white church stood silent while slavery oppressed a people and almost destroyed us. To a great degree we stood silent or even cheered the ethnic cleansing of the native Americans. And in the last sixty years our silence watched the civil rights movement and racial hatred become a cancer on our society. The black churches were certainly involved and there were, and are, other exceptions of course and they should be honored but no one can claim that the church was the instigator or the leader in the issues we faced then or face now. We forgot to be salt.

Now since I was part of that I must at least try to understand what caused us to not see or accept our role. I was a Southern Baptist, so I can only speak for what I think happened to us and I can only speak in hindsight.

I think the major problem with my group was that we found us a super text to define who and what we were to be. We called it “The Great Commission” Jesus never called it that, but we put all of our eggs in that basket. At some point He said, “Go into all the word and preach the gospel.” Now He could have meant that as a challenge to touch everybody, but we took it to be the outline of our total task on earth. All we were to do is preach the gospel. Anything else was what we called “the social gospel,” which we looked upon with scorn. We were to get us a set plan of salvation to hammer at folks and ignore the pain, the poor, the needs, the suffering, the hatred, the lynching of humans because of the color of their skin, just preach the gospel and our task is done.

Preaching became primary and attending church became the way to serve God. Somehow gathering in some lofty place with stained glass, singing some songs, saying some prayers, and listening to a lecture was making God happy? We gradually turned from a faith that demanded action and became spectators watching religious entertainment.

There are some remarkable exceptions of course but in general we lost our relevance and now when we are needed so desperately, our only voice seems to be the supporting of a political party who promises to hate people with a different sexual orientation and outlaw abortion.

The question is, how can we become salt again and my idea for an answer may be far too radical. I am not sure there is an institutional answer. I am not sure Jesus was thinking of the church being salt. Maybe He meant for each individual to take on that responsibility for themselves.

We dare not sit and wait for the institutional church to suddenly change course. I spent forty years trying to change the church and have decided the answer is individual responsibility and action. Our problem is not getting more people into the church, it is getting folks out of it. Breaking the bonds of church-anity. Not that they stop attending necessarily, but what would happen if every Christian would commit themselves to just go do random acts of kindness? What if we simply gave at least a portion of our tithe individually to help someone? What if we spent our time, like Jesus did, just being interrupted by people who needed our touch? We could transform our world and give relevance to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

In the time of Christ, salt did not come in little blue boxes. It came in a large block of earth that happened to possess salt that could be washed out and dried into usable salt. When the blob of earth no longer could produce salt, it was thrown on the dung heap. That is the picture of each of us. The Church can never do salt for us, we must produce it from our own hearts, minds and actions. Individual Christians assuming responsibility to respond to their individual world with the kind of love Jesus modeled is the future of the Christian church and of our nation. Jesus said, “If salt loses its flavor it will be thrown out and trodden under foot of men.”