Satan loses in the end, why are we so scared?

When did Americans, a people blessed by God with far greater freedom and prosperity than any other who have gone before us, become afraid of the future?  When did the Church of Jesus Christ, the institution that has overcome and withstood for two thousand years, and that Jesus promised would be victorious over the very Gates of Hell, become convinced that evil is more powerful than good?  I ask these questions because I often notice a disturbing trend of negativity and pessimism that infects both Americans in general and Christian Americans in particular.  Are there serious challenges to our nation and our Church?  Of course there are, but these are nothing new under the sun, history is full of such challenges, both ancient and recent.  Is evil trying to win; are there truly bad things that could happen?  Of course there are, but there are also righteous men and women willing to stand in the gap and fight.  The character of Tauriel in the second Hobbit movie, the Desolation of Smaug, asked just such a question of Legolas (I know it’s not from the book, relax), “When did we let Evil become stronger than us?”  That question was in response to the hide behind a moat mentality of her king, Thranduil, who is more interested in protecting his own kingdom than engaging and defeating the evil that exists in his world.

I live and serve a church in a small town in Western Pennsylvania.  There are over fifty churches within ten miles of my church, and yet rather than seeing this as a massive blessing from God, an opportunity to utilize our resources to make a big difference in our county, too many local Christians are stuck in a defensive posture that assumes that the Church is failing.

In recent weeks I have heard a variety of doom and gloom predictions, one of them from a local pastor who was told such by his bishop, and all of them ranging from unlikely to nearly impossible, yet all of them held as serious threats to our immediate future.  In no particular order: Churches will lose their 501(c)(3) status if they don’t perform gay weddings, the US government is about to give control over the internet to the UN, and Christians will soon be a minority in America because a growing population of Muslims will institute Shiara Law.  I can’t think of any reason to believe that any of these things will happen, in my lifetime or otherwise, in the United States, yet many of the people in our churches believe things very much like this.  The common thread in most unfounded fears on the part of American Christians is an intense distrust of the government (where unknown and unnamed forces are the usual bad guy, especially when it also involves the UN) and a firm belief that the future will be worse than the present.

There are too many causes for those intertwined fears to explain here, but suffice it to say that such fears assume that there are virtually no Christians working within our government, that the same things hold true of the judiciary, and that everybody at the UN is working against God.  Of course that isn’t true, but anecdotal fears outweigh evidence, and convincing people to trust that the freedom we’ve enjoyed in this nation wouldn’t be given away by a President or a Congress that they dislike is no small task.

Why are we so afraid?  Whatever happened to us to make such doom and gloom predictions feel inevitable?

I’m not participating in the pessimism party, not just because it’s an oxymoron.  I don’t believe that God just gives up on a people because of one court ruling, or one new law.  I don’t believe that decline is inevitable, and I’m certainly not going to drink that Kool-Aid based on anyone theory about the onset of the End Times.  God is more than capable of causing revival in America; he’s done it before, more than once, he can do it again.  Even if America’s best days were behind her, America is not the Church.  The Church of Jesus Christ is growing faster, more vibrant and alive, in South America, Africa, and South East Asia, today than ever before.  If we don’t want to be a part of the victory of Christ’s Church anymore, God will work with those willing to serve him still.  I, for one, am not about to give up, God is still doing marvelous things amongst his people here; the future is, as always, in his hands.