For two decades, I have crisscrossed this country giving my best effort at counseling and guiding churches representing every denominational persuasion, Evangelical, Protestant and Roman Catholic. I have sought to serve churches with one pastoral leader and as small as one to two-hundred attendees to churches with more than 20,000 attendees and professional staffs as large as many congregations.

I have not only tried to bring sound, spiritual counsel to these churches and church leaders but I have sought to be an astute observer, too…a listener. I have observed congregations age, decline, and many even die. I have grieved at how marginalized the Church has become, as people too numerous to count have left or are leaving the Church of their childhood.

I have asked, “Why?”
I have wondered, “What is happening to the Church?”
I have sought to explain, “Why are people walking away from the Church in numbers so staggering that Christian Century now says there are an average of nine church closures every day in America alone.”

I am convinced…
I am solidly sure…
I am unequivocally certain…

There is but one primary explanation for the rapid decline and widespread departure from today’s church and the theologian Matthew Fox nails it in his new book entitled, Meister Eckhart: A Mystic Warrior for Our Times. He writes that today’s spiritual “seekers want less religion and more…spirituality.”

And, what is spirituality?

It isn’t more church attendance.
It isn’t more Bible knowledge.
It isn’t more obedience to a religious leader’s rules.
It isn’t more positive thinking.
It isn’t more praise songs in worship.
It isn’t more belief in creationism.
It isn’t more separation from the LGBT community or people not like “us.”
It isn’t more insistence on the infallibility of scripture.
It isn’t a return to the “old-time religion.”

No, it is one thing and one thing primarily:

Spiritual seekers want to know a profound inner feeling that life itself, including the seeker’s own life, is sacred and inseparably connected to the Source of Life itself – the Eternal, Ineffable Presence of God.

What could be more important than this?
What could any spiritual seeker desire more than this?

When the Church gets it, and willingly gives up the other nonsense that has been its maddening agenda for decades, it will live again.

Until then…if or when…

Well…

Just go visit a Starbucks – if you’ve got the nerve – on any given Sunday morning even, and ask the congregation gathered there…

“Was there ever a time you went to church on Sunday morning?”