No discernible difference
The lifestyles of North Americans who say Jesus Christ is important in their life are virtually indistinguishable from those who make no such claim. This disturbing news is clearly demonstrated in research by George Barna, an evangelical who studies cultural trends related to values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours.
Barna’s studies indicate, for example, that divorce levels are actually higher among Christians in North America (27%) than among non-Christians (25%). He also recently observed that Christian adults spend an average of seven times more hours each week watching television than they do participating in spiritual pursuits such as Bible reading, prayer and worship. Further, they spend roughly twice as much money on entertainment as they donate to their church and more time surfing the Internet than they do conversing with God in prayer.
Indeed, says Barna, “of more than 70 moral behaviours we study, when we compare Christians to non-Christians we rarely find substantial differences.”
What a change from the early days of the church, when the lifestyles of those who claimed to follow Christ so contradicted the spirit of their age that they were accused of “turning the world upside down.” Right now we’re functioning on top of the world. Jesus urged his followers to be “salt” and “light” (Matthew 5:13-16), but Barna’s data suggests that the salt is losing its preserving power and the light is hiding under a basket.
Charles Stanley, 67, is a prominent Christian minister with a vexing personal problem. Pastor of First Baptist Church in Atlanta since 1972, the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention and author of numerous inspirational books has gained a huge international following through his writing, teaching and broadcast ministries. But after 44 years, the Stanley marriage was deemed “irretrievably broken” and formally ended in divorce on May 11.
When the fact that the marriage had serious problems became widely known in the mid-1990s, Stanley relinquished administrative duties at his church but continued to preach and teach. At the time he said, “If my wife divorces me, I will resign immediately.” Five years later, however, the pastor is taking a less legalistic approach. When the divorce was announced at a May 21 service, Stanley’s congregation rose to applaud the news that he would continue to serve as senior pastor.
Stanley’s story illustrates a contemporary dilemma: To acknowledge that divorce is contrary to God’s intention for the human marriage covenant is easy; bringing both grace and biblical integrity to bear on the reality of divorce among Christians–especially pastors–is difficult. The bitter truth is that pastors who fail to model in their own lives the kind of covenant relationship that Scripture champions hinder their careers. They often feel like damaged goods.
These are hard facts to confront. Some pastors with difficult marriages work to hide the problem, bearing private anguish at home in addition to the burdens of their workplaces. Others will walk away from both marriage and ministry while some, like Stanley, carry on in brokenness. Others re-marry and continue to serve, sometimes with impressive results. For the record, the overwhelming majority of pastors are married, and just 13 percent have ever experienced divorce, which is less than half the North American norm. Only three percent of all current senior pastors are divorced and have not remarried. No one knows how many struggle alone in silence.
In the end, the role of Christian ministers–clergy and lay–is to offer the grace and hope of the gospel to people coping with failed or failing marriages, even when those who struggle are vocational pastors. As Christian communities we need to do all we can to care for people and prevent divorce.
But even as we major on grace, we need to keep God’s ideals firmly in sight. As Regent College professor R. Paul Stevens observes: “While we must be realists, we must never accept divorce in a way that erodes the idea of a divorceless covenant. The Christian community is deeply challenged to do this in such a way that the divorced people among us are not made to feel like second-class citizens or marital lepers.”