The Light Is Winning: Why Religion Just Might Bring Us Back to Life

By Zach Hoag

If anyone had good reason to join the league of the “Nones,” the “Dones,” and the deconstructionists, it would be Zach Hoag. After growing up and out of the compound walls of a Texas cult, and becoming a failed church planter in one of the most post-Christian cities in America, Zach was faced with both a crisis and a choice. He loved Jesus, yet questioned: If the church is such a broken system, is it really worth belonging to anymore?

The viral upswing of the “spiritual but not religious” trend has cast religion as going rapidly out of style. Yet even in his own desert of deconstruction, Zach couldn’t shake his desire for a spiritual home. His search ultimately led him to look behind the statistics, where Zach found an astonishing undercurrent subversively at work.

The truth, as Zach discovered, is that we are in a cultural moment of apocalypse. Not an end-of-the-world apocalypse, but in the very literal sense of the word which translates simply, “a revealing.” Perhaps the downtrend of Christian faith in America is just the kind of Great Revealing we need to show us who we really are as American Christians, who Jesus really is in our midst, and how we can step into the flourishing faith he has always intended for us.

For anyone who is anxious about the future of the church and their place in it, The Light Is Winning rallies to an unexpected, unshakeable hope: Could it be that we’ve made religion out to be the culprit when in fact, religion is just what we need to revive us? Could it be that our struggle for relevance must come to a necessary end, so that we can get to the real? After all, isn’t this the essence of the story of God: death paves the way for a resurrected, deeply rooted, flourishing faith. Such faith can be yours. The Light Is Winning will show you how.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zondervan
• Release date: Jun 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9780310348214

Zach Hoag

Zach Hoag is an author, preacher, and creator from New England. Planting a church in one of the least churched cities in the U.S. (Burlington, Vermont), and pursuing ministry beyond that in a variety of spaces, Zach has learned a few things about the power of a deeply rooted life in Christ. Zach has found belonging in Westford, Vermont where he lives with his wife, Kalen, and their three girls. Find him writing at zhoag.com and follow him on Twitter @zhoag.

Book preview

Part 1

Illusion and Revelation

Chapter 1

Apocalypse Now

The worst things often begin with the best intentions. Like that time my family moved to a Texas cult.

I had just reached the age of accountability when we loaded up the family sedan and set off from the sweltering concrete suburbs of Miami for the orange clay fields of a little town called Jasper. I had no idea what a cult is, much less that we were moving to one. I just knew we were on a mission from God. We might as well have been leaving Harran for the land of Canaan like Father Abraham, destined for the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.*

My father was a radical man, drawn to radical men. That’s why he and my mother, along with a faithful remnant from the church they had planted in Miami years earlier, decided to uproot. As the earnest eldest son, my indoctrination was total; I was all in. It wouldn’t be the least bit difficult to forget the worldly friends and relatives we were leaving behind. They just didn’t get it, and neither did the rest of the lukewarm American church.

We were the ones who were on fire for Jesus. We were the ones willing to forsake all and follow him, to ditch the trappings of easy, dead religion for the harder, wilder road of Spirit-filled discipleship. Discipleship—that was the key word in those days. Were you willing to give up everything—all your money, all your relationships, all your time and energy, all your goals—to learn from the divinely ordained, end-times apostles and prophets? In the tiny town of Jasper, Texas, there was the School of the Prophets, a superspiritual sort of Bible college waiting for my father and his Floridian followers. There they would finally rise above the ordinary class of believer and learn from the anointed leaders God had put in place for the perilous last days. Perilous last days—a fitting description of the late 1980s, really.

There was much joy and laughter and unity in the beginning. Our group arrived in waves of Ryder trucks and compact cars, a sprawling modern-day caravan of bedouins migrating to our new Promised Land. Those early shared dinners and church services were electric, as our Miami community excitedly integrated itself with this new Jasper community, all while maintaining our strong ties. We were getting the lay of the land together, urban explorers in a new rural territory, anchored by the church compound and its magnetic, mystical quality. Perhaps our group even exceeded the local members in our singular devotion and irrepressible energy. We had left everything behind, because none of it could ever measure up to the power and revelation emanating from this one church, this one spot on the globe. We were in on the ground floor of something truly life-and world-changing. And we were in it together.

There’s a home video of me on one of those early days in Texas, before our rental was ready for us to move into. I am in the orange-dappled front yard of the house where we are staying, and church bells are ringing in the distance. I have a toy gun, the kind that makes an automatic firing sound, and I am holding down the trigger all the way, growling like Rambo, Let me at that Babylonian church!

I too am a radical, a militant, at ten years old.

I’ll fly away, oh glory, I’ll fly away—in the morning!

In a large field on the compound, I joined a group of friends from the church school for a hay ride. It was fall, and we reached for hoodies and blankets to fight the nighttime chill. The older kids led the song, one that I’d never heard before, having been raised in a church born in the aftermath of the charismatic Jesus Movement of the 1970s. We proudly stood in the hippie tradition of bucking tradition, preferring ’80s Christian rock and kickdancing near the altar to classic hymns or organ music.

It didn’t matter much because the older kids were singing the song ironically: at the church in East Texas, we didn’t believe in flying away. We didn’t believe in the rapture. The doctrine taught by Brother Dawson and the elders was part of the Latter Rain or Manifest Sons of God school of thought. We believed in a progressive manifestation of the kingdom of God in the last days through divinely appointed apostles and prophets. In the midst of troubled times for everyone else, the true church would experience unprecedented levels of spiritual power with many signs and wonders ushering in a great revival and widespread dominion in the days leading up to the second coming of Christ.

Brother Dawson was one such apostle and prophet. (He claimed both titles.) A former regular on Christian TV who had been exiled for misbehavior, he had both the popularity and the rebel edge befitting a charismatic end-times guru. People just like us from all over the country had descended on this tiny East Texas town to learn from him, drawn primarily by his teaching tape ministry and his one published book. My father had become a disciple of Brother Dawson’s long before in Miami; he disappeared into his bedroom to devour every puffy case of audio or video tapes that arrived in the mail, filling stacks of spiral-bound notebooks with scrawled notes. These teachings were for him a source of unparalleled revelation from God. When we arrived in Jasper, he enrolled in the School of the Prophets to get the training necessary to be numbered among the Manifest Sons of God and, perhaps more important, among the inner circle of Brother Dawson’s elders.

Despite this somewhat novel view of the last days, the urgency of the end surrounded everything we did at the church. It was the secret of the church’s success. The multibuilding compound became the hub of my life, a perpetual-motion machine of school and worship services and home group meetings. Many of the worship services were called on unscheduled weeknights by the elders, seemingly on a whim, with mandatory attendance. The schedule for home group meetings was constantly changing or stopping or restarting to coincide with the elders’ latest instructions, corrections, and revelations for the congregation. Brother Dawson often directed everything from the seclusion of his enormous ranch on the other side of town, disappearing for weeks to seek out the next series of visions and messages while being served by women, whom he called his handmaidens, handpicked from the congregation. In all of this motion, obligation, and orchestration, we were inundated by urgency: the prophet of God possessed the word of the Lord for this desperate hour, and our adherence to it would make the difference between eternal life and lukewarm death when the end came.

And for all I knew, the end was coming soon, and very soon.

A Great Revealing

As a militant ten-year-old in Jasper, Texas, I could not have foreseen any future in which the Manifest Sons of God were not on the move, releasing revelation, working miracles, sparking revival, and exercising dominion. I wanted to be among them, living out a call to ministry that had gripped me back in Miami: to walk in all the powerful potential of an end-times apostle or prophet.

I certainly could not have foreseen the future that awaited me: one of rejecting the end-times doctrine of my youth and ending up a thirty-three-year-old failed church-planter in the least religious state in the US. I couldn’t have anticipated the cultural shift that would take place at that time—a shift not toward greater power and dominion for the church but toward an increasingly post-Christian reality.

Not in a million years.

That American Christianity is in significant decline is no longer news. The numbers, at least, are undeniable: all streams of Christianity in the US—Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, mainline Protestant, and evangelical—are shrinking as a share or percentage of the US population. And the rate of the decline has only accelerated since the turn of the century.¹

At the same time, the share of those who practice non-Christian faiths or who claim no religious affiliation is on the rise. The latter group has been referred to colloquially as the nones because they check the none box when asked to name their religious affiliation. In a groundbreaking study, the Pew Research Forum has tracked this rise from less than 15 percent of the population in the early aughts to nearly a quarter of the population now, and it’s still climbing.² (For reference, in 1972 the percentage of folks checking that none box was in the single digits.)³ The share of people practicing non-Christian religions has also risen.

And we see this trend in our communities, don’t we? Kids from the youth group go off to college and disengage from church; friends and family lose interest in things related to faith or find church attendance irrelevant, if not impossible to work into their schedules; we have doubts about whether church makes sense or adds anything to our lives. All of us are caught up in a current that seems to be pulling us away from Christian faith, not toward it.

Despite the external stability of some Christian churches, denominations, or groups, the dramatic rise of the religiously unaffiliated signals a stark generational shift, with millennials and other young adults in the rising majority of the nones. Fewer millennials (around 27 percent) attend religious services than any other demographic group.⁴ And the nones themselves are also becoming more secular.⁵ To put this into perspective, author and journalist Jonathan Merritt warns all Christian groups against taking comfort in momentarily placing toward the top of a race to the bottom.⁶ And no single category (like conservative or progressive) can be directly linked to increase or decrease, as all kinds of denominations and movements have experienced this decline.

We are at least witnessing an overall trend toward pluralism (religious diversity) and secularism (religious nonadherence) similar to what other Western countries have already experienced. A post-Christian⁷ cultural reality is setting in, and in many areas of the country, such as where I live in New England, it is already well entrenched.

But there is something unique about the American trend because of the central role Christianity has played in our nation’s history. This decline is being felt by Christians of all stripes—and perhaps especially by evangelicals and mainline Protestants—as a deep and lamentable loss. A loss of culture, a loss of tradition, a loss of institutions, a loss of influence.

And with each denominational downsizing, church closure, and failed startup attempt, the picture becomes a little more grim. Many of the faithful fail to see anything good or hopeful about it. Some prominent Christians view this at best as an encroaching period of exile for the church⁸ or at worst as an escalating collapse.⁹

But I prefer to view it as something else.

I see it as an apocalypse.

I know what you’re thinking. What could blood moons, the rapture, and the end of the world possibly have to do with the decline of Christian faith in the US? Is this trend in church attendance signaling the end of days?

No area of Christian theology is more intriguing to the popular imagination than the end times, especially fearful predictions of the great tribulation playing out on the world stage. The bestselling Left Behind series has become a full-length movie franchise, an HBO series chronicles the lives of The Leftovers, and the rapture has even formed the backdrop of a James Franco and Seth Rogen buddy comedy. Whenever a lunar eclipse approaches on the calendar, blood moon evangelists make the viral video rotation on Facebook. And the zombie apocalypse has never been more popular, with numerous films and television series representing its grim and grotesque vision of great tribulation.

While in that Texas cult we roundly rejected the rapture as an escapist fantasy of the worldly Babylonian church, we expected the great tribulation, which would, along with the great revival, lead us to the end. We were thoroughly apocalyptic in our orientation, fixated on the full stop to human history that was coming soon, and very soon.

But we, like so many people, misunderstood what the word apocalypse means. We were misguided in our association of the apocalyptic Scriptures with the end of human history.

The primary biblical source for all things end times is, of course, the book of Revelation. The book’s name comes from the first verse of the first chapter, where the apostle John writes, The revelation from Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. The Greek word for revelation here is apokalypsis. Apocalypse!

For this reason, some traditions even call the book the Apocalypse of John.

According to New Testament scholar Michael Gorman, the word apocalypse does not mean ‘destruction,’ ‘end of the world,’ or anything similar.¹⁰ Apocalypse literally means revealing. It means unveiling or disclosure. And John’s apocalypse is revealing much more than information about the end of human history. Here’s Gorman again: Revelation is (primarily) good news about Christ, the Lamb of God—who shares God’s throne and who is the key to the past, present, and future—and therefore also about uncompromising faithfulness leading to undying hope, even in the midst of unrelenting evil and oppressive empire.¹¹

While the final hope of the world is certainly an important part of John’s strange and powerful letter, it is not a roadmap to the end times. There are no coded geopolitical events and cataclysmic cultural timelines to be uncovered, no raptures or blood moons (not to mention beasts, battles of Armageddon, or foreheads tattooed 666). Instead, there is a pattern that applies first to the believers in John’s time, which is why the apostle says these insights must soon take place for his original readers. And that pattern applies second to believers throughout all time, giving us a template for what worshiping and following Jesus, the Lamb who is King, mean at personal, cultural, and even political levels.

This apocalyptic pattern always deals with ends and beginnings, anticipating the final end and the new age that begins thereafter. For John’s original readers, an ending indeed was taking place. You might say his apocalypse was a great revealing anticipating a necessary ending for the church in his day, one brought about both by intensifying oppression and persecution from the empire, and by compromise and failure in the churches themselves. And that ending was leading to a brilliant new beginning, when the church would revive, root down, and find true flourishing.

The sharp decline we are witnessing today invites all kinds of reactions, from denial to ambivalence to acquiescence to outright panic. But if we take a cue from Scripture, and particularly Revelation, and view this decline through the lens of apocalypse, we might have a different reaction altogether.

We might see an opportunity to reflect on what is being revealed, embrace the change that is needed, and move forward in newness of life. After all, isn’t that how the story goes? Life to death, death to resurrection.

After the Apocalypse

Perhaps the connection I’m making between apocalypse and the decline of Christianity in the US seems grandiose. That’s understandable. But what I’m doing, at the basic level, is making a suggestion and an observation. First, I’m suggesting that whenever the church faces significant difficulty, decline, or suffering, it is an opportunity for churchwide reflection that might lead to reformation, and the biblical vision of apocalypse helps us to frame this. Second, I’m observing trends and events not from a distance but from the front lines of various segments of the American church, including my experiences planting a church in a thoroughly post-Christian part of the country (New England).

But perhaps that doesn’t go deep enough either.

Because really, this book is a story.

The story of my apocalypse. And no matter what, it’s the story of what happens—what has to happen—after the apocalypse.

In 2008, when we were only in our late twenties, my