“If the current decline in church attendance were the medical case history of a hospital patient, the diagnosis would read: “Chronically ill; resistant to change; on life support; likely terminal.” The church itself is the one institution most in need of the very thing it proclaims to the world — salvation.”

That’s an excerpt from “The Enoch Factor: The Sacred Art of Knowing God“. There’s more. 34 million Americans have given up on organized religion. Yet, for many of these dropouts from churches, synagogues, temples and so on, spirituality is still a vital part of their lives.

As for me, I grew up in the church, the son of a Southern Baptist minister. When I graduated from college, I went to seminary, and after several years of study, I began my career as a professional minister. It wasn’t long, however, before I discovered that the church was more lost than the world it was trying to save.

Go into many churches today, for example, and, instead of finding an institution interested in saving the world, what you will likely find is an institution vastly more interested in saving itself.

Without question, the church is desperately ill. I should know. I have worked in literally hundreds of them for the last two decades — everything from Baptist to Lutheran to Presbyterian to Episcopalian to Methodist to Roman Catholic… you name it. I’ve been there. What gives some reassurance is that, here and there, I see glimmers of hope like single lights on a string of burned out tree lights, still burning.

The grim fact remains, however, that the overwhelming majority of churches in America are in a major decline mode. In the US alone, more than 35 million people, many former churchgoers, want nothing to do with the church anymore. Yet, if you listen to church leaders, as of course I do, you get a very different interpretation and explanation for the church’s decline. The most frequent explanation for the decline is the “secularization” of our culture.

Here’s the reality, however. Most people have left or are leaving because of one or all of the following reasons:

1. They are so beyond being told that science is evil and suspect and that things like the Genesis account of creation are to be taken, not as a spiritual explanation for the origin of the universe, but as a scientific explanation. They’re also beyond being told what to think, how to live, the choices they must make, and the beliefs they must subscribe to in order to be approved.

2. Many churches are trapped in traditions that have died or are dying along with their aging populations. Traditions are good but, when traditions harden into institutions, as of course they almost always do, the traditions die with the people who cling to them. What’s left are like pyramids of what used to be, mere objects to admire for their magnificence and beauty, but hardly for their relevance.

3. Others have left the church, or are leaving, because they’ve had it with the conflict, the almost incessant bickering, backbiting, disagreements, debates, and, as a consequence, the division that is church life in most congregations today.

4. The church has created a world of make-believe enemies and so has blinded itself to the fact that the church is its own worst enemy. Churches are patently disconnected to reality. It’s as if they are no longer “in the world but not of it,” as Jesus instructed. Instead, the church is increasingly obsessed with its-self — its collective ego — as well as its own survival. In many churches, worship has become the declining weekly gathering of prejudiced, narrow-minded, frightened people who seek temporary solace in their increasingly neurotic preoccupation with matters of little or no consequence. The sane are leaving this insanity.

5. In many respects, the church is still the most segregated place in America. Where I grew up, some 40 or so years ago, most of my neighbors attended, or said they did, the Baptist church my father served. That is, if they were white Baptists; the black Baptists attended their own church. Even though the civil rights movement made a difference in America, it has made little difference still in most churches in America. This, in spite of the fact that, today, your neighbor is just as likely to be black as white or Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or atheist, as Christian. Such is the real world and it’s increasingly the-place-of-the-work world, too. So, my suspicion is, people are leaving the church because they’ve rightly decided it makes more sense to live in the real world — a desegregated one.

Of course, there are a plethora of other reasons people have left or are leaving the church — greedy, materialistic leaders, leaders who are sex offenders, leadership that glosses over wrongdoing by church leaders, and the preoccupation of many churches with the end of the world. Unbelievably, there are many churches that are actually praying for and seeking to elect political leaders who wish to usher in the end of the world and hasten the return of Jesus. You’ve likely noticed the wags on religious television with their endless predictions of the end of the world. I’ve always found this curious thing and have wanted to ask these people, “if you actually know when the world is going to end and you truly believe it’s going to occur at any moment, why would you keep asking people to send you their offerings? Wouldn’t you instead be giving away everything in preparation for the end?”

If people used to go to church to find hope, they’re leaving the church because many of them are tired of worshiping with neurotic and, in some cases, even psychotic people who have, for all practical purposes, given up on the world. Since their evangelistic efforts have failed to convert the world to Christianity, leaving it is easier. So, while many are leaving the church in hopes of making a difference in the world, many within the church are looking to simply leave the world. What kind of twisted insanity is this?

Now, if you were to conclude from this brief analysis that I’ve totally given up on the church… well, let me set the record straight. I have not. At least, not yet. I actually hold membership in several churches. I’m a Baptist by upbringing and training and I’m a member of Highland Baptist Church, in Louisville, Kentucky. It’s one of those rare — and I do mean rare — bright lights. It’s a Baptist church that truly seeks to live out the teachings of Jesus. And, because the church does, it has become, among other things, an LGBT friendly church. It is known and respect across the city as truly a Christ-honoring church. What makes it so rare is that the congregation truly seeks to “love enemies,” “to do good to those who are evil” and so forth.

I’m also a Roman Catholic by choice, an associate member of the Episcopal church, as well as a member of a local Unity congregation. As I find a light, I seek to unite. I realize how unconventional it is, but it’s my way of encouraging them to keep shining, to continue modeling the hard teachings of Jesus. For example, I like the Unity Church’s emphasis on spirituality and their positive affirmation of all people regardless of the spiritual path they’ve chosen to follow.

Yes, I hold out some hope for the church — a hope that the church will move beyond its collective insanity — where the interest is only in what separates it from others; where the obsession is, as I describe with The Enoch Factor, the madness of insisting, “We’re right! You’re wrong!” “We’re the chosen ones; you’re not!” or “We’re in; you’re out!” And, instead, affirm and defend all people, whoever they are, whatever spiritual path they’ve chosen to follow as they seek to discover themselves, connect with Transcendence, know and spread peace and happiness, and live an ethical life.

In the end, what could possibly matter more than this?

Really? Like this is surprising? It is only surprising to the Evangelical leaders who have been pretending for years that their churches were gaining more people than they were actually losing.

For decades now, Evangelical leaders have gathered annually at church growth conferences where the few mega-churches that were actually growing were showcased, as well as their leaders, like sideshows in a city circus. What they were not telling the younger Evangelical leaders who enviously observed the ministerial stars with an almost desperate aspiration of being just like them one day, is that it was all an illusion. The few mega-churches that were growing experienced their numerical successes from two sources primarily, one source from those who desired a more entertaining worship experience (and, of course, mega-churches could afford the best talent in town); and the other from among the disgruntled or disillusioned members of other churches nearby.

But, this illusion appears to be finally ending for Evangelical leaders. They now appear more willing to be honest about what everyone else has known for a long time: the church is not only declining, so is its influence, along with the influence of its leaders.

But why? There are likely many reasons for the declining influence of the church. What’s certain it is not the cause of liberalism in Christian seminaries or secularism in the American culture, the two most commonly identified causes by Evangelical leaders themselves. Here’s a reason worth contemplating that comes immediately to my mind …

Evangelical leaders and their followers have made the same mistake that Billy Graham once made when he pitched his tent, so to speak, on the White House lawn under the shadow of the infamous Richard Nixon. When Nixon publicly disgraced himself and left office, Graham was so embarrassed by the debacle that he purportedly said something to the effect, “I’ll never get that close to another president.” As far as I know, he never did. The difference between Billy Graham, however, and most other Evangelical leaders is that Graham learned from his mistake.

Evangelical leaders have used the political process, as well as politicians looking for votes, in order to promote their religious and social agenda for as long as I can remember. And, in my own opinion, it is a gross error in judgment, as the history of failed organizations like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition clearly demonstrate.

Many of these leaders mistakenly believe that Jesus’ command that they “go” and “make disciples” of all nations means that they are to convert everyone to Christianity and the western version of Christianity at that! This is not only a misreading of Jesus’ words in Matthew 28:19-20 but a misapplication of their meaning as well.

Here’s how.

Jesus was not commissioning the church with these words. At the time he uttered these words, there was no church to commission. At best, he spoke to a handful of disillusioned friends whom he had every right to feel were his enemies, since they had all deserted him just days before. And, why did they desert him? It is precisely because he turned out to be a big disappointment to them. They wanted a leader who would launch a rebellion against Rome. Instead, he compassionately submitted himself to service and suffering. The way of submission has never been too popular to the church at any time in its history.

What Jesus was instructing this group of deserters to do was to learn from their debacle and then go about teaching and preaching his path to knowing God, living compassionately, and pursuing a Divine and ethical life. It would be decades later, even centuries, before Jesus’ teachings would be institutionalized by a Church that all too quickly became more interested in preserving itself and canonizing its doctrines, dogmas, and demands or, better, controls over people.

I’m not suggesting that, with the birth and development of the institutionalized church, everything about it has been wrong or misguided. It has not. While it is true the Church has done much harm throughout the centuries, it is equally true the church has done much good. Just try to imagine this country without the benevolence and generosity that has motivated countless people and congregations to compassionate activity here and abroad. The church’s concern for the well-being of people, for example, has given birth to many of the hospitals in this country, as well as abroad. Furthermore, virtually every great educational institution in this country owes its gratitude to Christian ministers and Christian people.

Some readers of my blogs mistakenly conclude I’m a disgruntled former churchgoer whose only interest is pointing out the problems within the Christian Church. Well, I do that, of course. But it is because I’m qualified to do so. I love the church and I remain hopeful for comprehensive change within it.

I’m also quick to remember not only the good the church has done but to remind others of it, too. And whenever I do, I intentionally remind the critics of the church, particularly educated ones who received their degrees from the likes of Harvard, Princeton, Yale and other such notable institutions of higher learning, that there’s a good chance none of them would be in existence today were it not for Christian ministers and benevolent Christian people committed to educating the masses.

So it is highly disingenuous for any critic of Christianity to fail to exercise respectful restraint when the inclination wells up inside them to bite the proverbial hand that’s fed them — or, at a minimum, made possible their dining at some of the finest educational tables in the world.

The church has done much good. Only a fool would say otherwise. It seems also clear to me that, throughout history, the church has been at its best, not when it has mistakenly thought Jesus’ mandate was to convert the world to Christianity, but when it has simply gone about, as Jesus did, doing good to and for all people (Matt. 9:35).

The good Jesus went about doing was preaching and teaching that all people are loved by God, welcomed into her family, and deserve the opportunity to live a joyful, peace-filled, and abundant life.

What Evangelical leaders have preached, however, has often been the very opposite: that everyone is wicked and deserving of suffering in an eternal inferno. Furthermore, had it not been for the cosmic Superman named Jesus, they would. He showed up to take the wrath of his psychotic Father whose rage was so out-of-control it had to be vented on something or someone.

What’s good about this? Not a thing. Yet, it is this narrow-minded misreading of scripture and the consequential theology that grows out of this kind of mindset that has contributed to the declining influence of Evangelical leaders and churches. It is also this theology that, when carried to its extreme — and it always does — gives birth to radical fundamentalist thinking, whether Christian or Muslim, as demonstrated in persons like Anders Behring Breivik and Osama bin Laden.

So again, I say, the church is at its best whenever it is behaving like Jesus … when it is caring for the sick and infirm, founding and funding educational institutions, providing clean water and purification technologies, creating more sanitary living conditions for all, teaching people to farm and improve their living conditions, serving meals to hungry and displaced people, speaking out against the political and social structures that dehumanize, demoralize, or discriminate against people, and, ultimately, modeling for all what it means to walk with God and live a compassionate, ethical, and joyful life.

Now, when Evangelical leaders and their congregations decide to return to preaching and teaching Jesus’ real mandate — that of learning, living, and loving — then you’ll see the church and its leaders restored to a place of influence.

You’d have thought I just made off with the Mona Lisa from the Louvre.

I promised to protect it, to handle it with as much care as a paleographer would an ancient text—no bending of the edges, no underlining, circling, or writing in the margins—things I typically do with my own books.

Negotiations failed, however. “Put it back,” she ordered, “and get your own.”

So, I did. Wasn’t expecting much, either. “What could Eat, Pray, Love contain,” I asked myself, “that would cause her to guard it like it was the Holy Grail?”

I barely arrived at the first scene, however–the one where Gilbert is sleepless, sprawled across a cold bathroom floor at 2AM–and I was hooked. In a failed marriage, she cries out to God, the first of many conversations the author, Elizabeth Gilbert, has with God.  From there, she acts as a guide on a journey the two of you take through Italy, then India and Indonesia, in search of her soul, in search of a life that matters. There’s no pretense with Gilbert, which is why I like her. You’re invited to peer into her soul, and your own as well.

Sitting in a corner cafe; sipping the finest wine made of the Sangiovese grape; sharing secrets and disappointments, readers feel like they’re best friends with Gilbert. That’s because it’s easy to believe in her. When she describes her marital failings, not those of her spouse, she’s brutally transparent. When she talks about her love affair with David, even before her own divorce is final, she hides nothing. It is this honesty that makes what she says about faith, about God, just as believable.

In an era of religious dishonesty, corruption, and cover-up, where the morning news is as likely to reveal the latest religious scandal as it does the political or economic ones, it is understandable why westerners are weary of the dishonesty in much of organized religion today.

Weary enough to leave, that is. According to the American Religious Survey, thirty-four million Americans  want nothing to do with religion, a system that has repeatedly demonstrated a far greater interest in saving itself than in saving the world.

Still, there are many spiritual seekers. All they really want is an uncomplicated relationship with Transcendence. What you call God is irrelevant to them. So are the doctrines and distinctions that divide instead of unite people.

What’s most amazing is that religious leaders still don’t get it. Instead of softening their rhetoric, their endless dogmas, doctrines, and distinctions, they become more fixed, rigid, separated and exclusivist. Meanwhile, scores are leaving this insanity, perhaps to protect what little remains.  In exchange, they read Eat, Pray, Love, where insanity meets Sanity, where respect and inclusiveness are actually practiced, where they can relax, take off their shoes, enjoy themselves, others, and God.

That’s why this book, now a major motion picture, is so popular. In the end, it matters not whose religion is right, especially if it doesn’t guide you to live in this world, or with yourself, or help you to get along with others.

It is away from this kind of religious madness that seekers of the Sacred are walking.  Today, their paths are taking them toward something real, toward that which connects them to others and to God, and away from the labels and differences that have divided people for eons.  To many, Gilbert and writers like her have become unique spiritual gurus on this path toward what I think of as “the sacred art of knowing God.”

Jesus said, “The way to life is narrow…and few there will be who find it.” If that’s true, Eat, Pray, Love is the quintessential promise that seekers of the Sacred will find the narrow way–even though it’s off the beaten path.

For example, what difference do you see between the values on Wall Street and those on Church Street?  There is no difference.  In both, there’s an obsession with money, wealth, and the symbols of power and success – they go by different names, but it’s the same obsessions.

There is a surplus of preachers today defending and preaching a gospel of prosperity. While they live in palaces themselves, their subjects, known as church members and television audiences, make personal sacrifices to enable them to do so.  It is madness but it’s happening in spite of the fact that their spiritual leader said, “Foxes have holes, birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Explain that anomaly to me. Further, in the last decade alone, churches in America have spent billions and billions on buildings even as 400 million people have starved to death.

And, what of the sex scandals?  Almost daily now, you’ll read or hear about the church condemning gays and lesbians and doing everything within their legal power to drive them back into a closet. And this while hiding clergy pedophiles in their own closets.

But, there’s more. In the last several decades, the church has become insanely obsessed with what I call the “We’re right, you’re wrong” syndrome.  Listen to almost any Christian or church leader and about all you hear anymore is that “We’re different,” by which, they really mean, “We’re right, everyone else is wrong.”   “We’re in, they’re out!”  “We’re God’s chosen ones, they’re not!”

The consequence of this madness has been disagreement, debate, and eventual division. Wouldn’t that describe much of Christian history? Today, for instance, there are more than 20,000 different Christian groups, each obsessed with its version of truth, believing that its beliefs are just a little more “right” than the beliefs of 19,999 others. Tell me this is not madness!

What the church has forgotten is that its purpose is not unlike the purpose in any religion – and, that purpose is to make God known.  That’s it. Nothing more; nothing less. But, instead of staying with this purpose, the history of the church has been to argue, debate, defend, and, until recently when laws were enacted to limit the powers of the church, it was not uncommon for the church to persecute and kill anyone who disagreed with its doctrines, dogmas, and declarations.  In this regard, the history of Christianity is not entirely unlike the radical fundamentalism we encounter in some Islamic groups today.

So, the bottom line is this: Until the church and indeed all religions, return to their central purpose—to make God known, the church will continue to be marginalized and eventually disregarded and ignored altogether.  Many churches have achieved that status already.  And, strangely, the only people who don’t seem to know this are Christians themselves. They think they’re still a vital voice across the cultural landscape. What they do not know is that today, the church is little more than a faint whimper in an urban forest.