When the Sand Castle Crumbles

their eyebrows as if to say, “You’re wearing a suit? On a Sunday morning?!”

The world has changed.

I don’t know what that does to you but it tends to make me anxious, and I must confess that the anxiety I feel is an institutional anxiety. I think of my own church, which appears to be thriving, but I wonder where it will be in twenty years.

What will happen when that faithful generation of tithers dies off? Will I begin to see those pews and offering plates emptying out? Will I preside over the decline and fall of Richmond’s First Baptist Church? I was talking to my daughter in New York recently and shared some of those frightening percentages—how church attendance in America has been dropping from 41% to 31% to 22%—and she said, “Dad, you better start looking for another job!” She may be right about that, but even if she is I want to say this, and I want to say it loud and clear: Jesus did not come to found an institution; Jesus came to start a revolution, and to the extent the church which gathers in his name has lost its revolutionary character it has lost its way.

I felt this most strongly on my first trip to Israel as I stood, looking out over the Sea of Galilee, while someone read the 23