How to Take Christ Out of Christianity

The Bible is clear that there will be a GREAT falling away in the very last days.  Falling away from what?  Falling away from the True Gospel of Jesus Christ. Of course the folks who have never had anything to do with the Church can't fall away....because they were never there.  So this can only refer to people who are hanging around the Church and maybe even call themselves "Christians" when asked by someone conducting a survey.

The Bible also says that in the Last Days men will have a form of godliness but it won't be real and will have no power.  Power for what?  Power to save.

Now let's think of all the people sitting in churches on Sunday morning across America.  How many are simply "ChrEasters?"  (go to church only at Christmas and Easter)  How many are sitting in Catholic churches believing that God takes attendance and if you have enough checks by your name then St Peter allows you to pass by the pearly gates?  How many believe that putting $10 in the offering plate a few times per year buys them admission to heaven when it's combined with their believe that "I'm a pretty good person."  How many of these churches preach homilies and never open their Bibles?  How many of these churches tell their congregants that all paths lead to God?

You get the idea....

Today we find this article in the Washington Post by an atheist who still wants to be part of a church...for 'community' reasons.

When I tell my socially progressive, atheist friends that I’m “culturally Christian,” they’re momentarily concerned that I have a latent preoccupation with guns and the Pledge of Allegiance. Using the term with devout believers gets me instructions that I just need to read more sophisticated theology to come around. I’ve tried hard to accept my fully secular identity, and at other times I’ve tried to read myself into theistic belief, going all the way through divinity school as part of the effort. Still, I remain unable to will myself into any belief in God or gods — but also unable to abandon my relationship to the Episcopalian faith into which I was born and to the ancient stories from which it came.

And though I am without a god, I am not alone.

The group of nonbelievers dubbed “Nones” in the media — because they don’t mark a religious affiliation on demographic surveys — grew from 15 percent of the U.S. population to 20 percent between 2007 and 2012; almost a third of them are under 30. These are the people who identify with ambivalent, ambiguous statements like “I’m spiritual, but not religious”; “I’m kind of agnostic”; “Now I’m an atheist, but I grew up Catholic”; or “I believe in something, but I don’t know if it’s God.” There are those of us, too, who still feel a profound connection to the Christianity we grew up with but who can no longer — or never could — connect those feelings to theistic belief. Some miss the ritual of singing in unison or wishing peace to their neighbors in a pew. Others miss feeling grounded in a community where they can celebrate life’s milestones and heartbreaks. Some find secular life lacking in sufficient ethical frameworks and systems of accountability to reinforce them. For many, it is a combination of all three.

All those severed connections, though, mean a new opportunity to create spaces for the “culturally Christian” nonbeliever and to examine how churches lost them in the first place.

Christianity is the dominant religion in the United States, but the cultural experience of Christianity here varies at least as widely as its practice does across denominations, families and individuals. Despite the persistence of Catholic guilt, only a third of people who identified as Catholic in a General Social Survey in 2014 were actually practicing the faith. Polls conducted by the evangelical research firm Barna Group found that young people leave because of factors such as the church’s views on sexuality and science, and its failure to acknowledge “the problems of the real world.”

Their liberal counterparts don’t fare much better: “Liberal Protestant churches, which have famously lax requirements about praxis, belief, and personal investment, therefore often end up having a lot of half-committed believers in their pews,” writes Connor Wood, a PhD candidate in religious studies at Boston University. “The parishioners sitting next to them can sense that the social fabric of their church isn’t particularly robust, which deters them from investing further in the collective.”

But not belonging to a religious institution doesn't mean you don’t have a cultural attachment to your religious history. Just look at the more familiar concept of cultural Judaism. Among younger American Jews, cultural ties are increasingly the basis of their connection to their faith; 32 percent of Jewish American millennials told a Pew survey in 2013 that their Jewish identity is based on ancestral, ethnic and cultural connections rather than religious ones. Rabbi Miriam Jerris of the Society of Humanistic Judaism says cultural Jews and cultural Christians who celebrate their religious traditions have a lot in common (though they’re not completely analogous, because Judaism has a long history as both a religion and an ethnicity): “These people are looking for communities and for memories from their background, but they want to do it in an intellectually consistent way.”

Here;  http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-to-take-christ-out-of-christianity/2015/05/01/a4e28430-eebc-11e4-8666-a1d756d0218e_story.html

Friends, it's hard to look at the state of the Church in America and not realize that we are fulfilling a lot what the Bible said would happen in the Last Days.  Thousands of churches are already boarded up across the country or have been sold and "re purposed" into apartment buildings, office space or Muslim mosques.

1 Timothy 4
The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. 

Revelation 3
15 I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! 16 So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. 17 You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. 18 I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see.