The Empty Church

By Mark Bohaichuk

The Empty Church is a street-level discussion that explores the modern-day Christian Church attendance and why it seems to be dwindling. Mark Bohaichuk walks the reader through logical and clear ways of thinking about Christianity and the decline in church attendance. Is it a coincidence that as people leave the Christian faith for materialism that our world is slowly being submerged in chaos and an out-of-control politically correct movement? Is the waning of the world's moral barometer related to the weakening of our faith? The Empty Church begins an informal discussion on why we may be seeing these declines. The author takes us on an explorative journey to the forces that continue to relentlessly pressure and push people out of the Christian Church. A society of materialism and fast-food-like gratifications lure the gentle sheep of the church out into a world of ravenous wolves. The Empty Church is a great place to start a dialogue with your friends and fellow believers about the condition and health of our modern society and how it may tie in with the decline in our church attendance. Has our faith in God been lost in the stampede of atheistic pleasures of our fast and furious society? Can we reclaim the faith and refill the churches with followers of the truth and the life and once again become the change agents that our society so desperately needs? The Empty Church looks at possible reasons there exists a decline in our faith and looks at the ways we can once again become the salt and the light to the nations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781641912235

Book preview

Preface

We have wandered far from God; and if we wish to return to our Father’s home, this world must be used, not enjoyed, that so the invisible things of God may be clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, that is, that by means of what is material and temporary we may lay hold upon that which is spiritual and eternal.

—St. Augustine

As I slowly opened the creaking doors of the old church that I once attended, I noticed the door skins at the bottom of each door were buckled and peeling. The door squawked in protest as I opened it just enough to get into the church.

Stagnant air gushed over my face as if it were finally freed from its prison within. The old stained red carpet was still there and still led the way to the front of the church to the raised platform. It was still trying to invite me to the front pews of which I, as a young man, refused to sit.

As I walked deeper into the cold church, a chill ran down my back, and I shivered. It felt like the good spirit that used to live here had finally departed and only a cold, musty stench remained. It was like the carpet was oozing up the old incense that once filled the gaily lit sanctuary. The windows were now boarded over, and the stained glass no longer gleamed with the hope and promise they once did.

As I looked down, I could see wax stains on the carpet and on the old wood strip floor. Candles that once burned the light of unity and hope were long ago doused for good. I cleared my throat and could hear the echo fill the space around me. The resonating power of voice that the room had was always something that fascinated me. It was as though God amplified our love and good words that we spoke here in the times past.

The lectern was gone, but the small ceremony table remained. It was covered in dust and mouse droppings. I almost wept when I realized that where we once held communion the mice now scurry. I looked up into the dome that represented our heavens above. The ceiling that once had small sparkles of stars was darkened and stained from creeping moisture. The surface was peeling and, in some places, had dropped to the floor in small chunks.

When I realized that the small silver stars in the ceiling were falling, I couldn’t help but remember the words from the Bible that said, And the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken (Mark 13:25).

I took a seat in a dusty pew right up in the front. I hated this spot as a child because I feared the priest would ask me up to help with something of which I was sure I would make a fool of myself. As I sat there, it felt that soon someone would be taking the stage and start singing the old hymns and prayers that once filled this room with sounds of worship and hope.

Nothing came. The only sound I could hear was the whistle of the wind blowing through the old soffits on the rotting eaves.

I prayed a silent prayer. As I prayed, I felt a warm gush of air fill the room around me. I looked about to see if a window, door, or something had caused the air to move and make it feel so warm. Christ hadn’t left; we did.

I left the church, locked the door, and made my way down the crumbling concrete steps that I remember I once posed on with my new wife thirty-three years ago. I could feel a tear the size of a grape fill my eye as I knew this church had died.

With the church slowly getting smaller in my rearview mirror, I drove home. It was then that I asked myself, why was the church empty? I had no answer right then, but as I thought about it more and looked at the shaken world around me, the answer became clearer than ever. And so I write.

This book is merely an introduction to the world of apologetics and the current condition of the Christian Church. Christianity is on life support and desperately needs to be revived. If it does not get the spiritual transfusion it desperately needs, it may die. It would be a nasty throwback to the time before Christianity where the hedonistic and totalitarianism of Romanism ruled with an iron fist. It is not inconceivable that we could easily slip and backslide to the same type of world government that Christianity overthrew.

It is commonly spoken that Christianity is merely a religion (or belief) that everyone is entitled to follow (in the Western world). I cannot agree with that conclusion. It is the only religion that had the power and real truth to be able to revolutionize the entire world. It changed governing ideologies, changed the way we see each other, and changed the entire fabric of our modern culture. It permeated almost every aspect of our lives, our governments and states of authority. It was taught in schools, churches, and other institutions.

We heavily relied on its moral teachings as the straight-edge standard for our modern-day laws and legislations. In fact, most of our civil laws are based on scriptural standards. In contrast, if atheism was at the root of the formation of moral justice and equality in our world from the start, we would be doomed inside a glass bubble of unreality and an Anything goes mentality.

You see, atheism offers no moral yardstick. No standards securely concreted in a set of guidelines, rules, or purposeful proscriptions. How can complete nothingness be the base for anything material? What could an atheist use as his or her guide for consistent and correct moral fairness and justice? They have nothing.

Yet Christianity, the largest change agent in human history, appears to be diminishing under the gravity of an unreal atheist ideology, and perhaps its own pillars are weakening due to a lack of spiritual maintenance. It took 1,800 years for many Christians to figure out the direction and intent of God’s Word. Yes, history is replete with mistakes, misdirection, and confusion from the church and Christian leaders.

However, the nuggets of truth did shine brightly under the shroud of human darkness. By reason of greed alone, man has sought for centuries the magic formula for changing lead into gold. Yet because of our fallen nature, we have a stronger tendency of constantly taking the pure and turning it into corruption. In other words, we have an innate nature to turn gold into lead. We are very good at that since we are indeed a sinful and fallen race. We are the race that can take the beautiful word of God and contort it until it fits our personal greed and nefarious motives.

History is filled with examples of people taking God’s Word for their own vanity and misguided ventures. God himself (within the commandments) warned us about taking his hallowed name for reasons of vanity. People and organizations like the Joel Osteens and Joyce Meyers of this world do exactly that! They take the greatness of God and the miracles of the creation and twist it, contort it, squeeze it, and strangle it for their own gain and vanity. Many people have made great amounts of money on the broken back of the truth, and therefore, the church is blemished and rendered insignificant.

In fact, the church has become more and more irrelevant in a feel-good society of unreality and personal subjectivism. People like Osteen and others use God as a means to their ends and totally disregard the real meaning and intent of the scriptures. As sad and obvious these schemes are, people fall for it hook, line, and sinker. As sheep, we rarely question something that looks good, sounds good, and feels good. Why would we? We live in a world of fast junk food spirituality and a growing soul cancer called atheism, Islam, and paganism. Add to that the growing number of liberal globalists and cultural Marxists dominating the minds of impressionable children, with their own twisted brand of rubbish fuels the fires of sin, resulting in a disintegrating truth and an emptying church.

It is my hope you read this book to the end with an open mind and an open heart. It is only a basic introduction of the woeful condition of our modern world, our backsliding society, and our precious church. If you think about any one thing I have penned here, then my intention of making you think about this subject is accomplished.

I wish to inspire open dialogue and critical thinking about a variety of things relating to the real objective truths of our post-Christian era and invoke some inward thought. I don’t need to be correct in all aspects and topics discussed here; rather, I just wish to learn and discover the truth, as I am sure you wish as well.

Join me in peaceful discussion and a thought-sharing in what I consider some of the most critical and important topics and issues facing humanity today. Remember, we can debate and argue all things that are important to us, but we should never divide and split on anything. As aspiring apologists, we need to communicate with openness, kindness, gentleness, and with a great deal of mutual respect. If we embroil in an argument of contradictions and opposing views, we have lost the discussion before it bears any fruit.

If you are not a Christian and are considering obedience to Christ, or you are an unchanging atheist just reading for whatever personal reason, join me in exploring the world of beliefs and worldviews. All I ask is for you to keep an open mind and open heart to all possibilities in our reality.

With God’s guidance, let’s begin the discussion.

Chapter 1

A Reality Check

We are all sheep. We follow the shepherd not entirely knowing our own destiny or where it is that we might be headed. We trust the shepherd without question or concern. We may be heading to green lush pasture under a warm, soft morning sun as the dew slowly drifts off the blades of grass. In contrast, we may be off to the slaughterhouse to be killed for food and for our wool, without mercy. We are sheep; we do not always know our fate since it is in the trusted hands of the shepherd.

Throughout all epochs of time, people tend to follow the shepherd of their choice and do not necessarily ask where it is that he leads. They often do not care.

You clearly witness this phenomenon today in the extreme left-leaning society of North America. Celebrities such as Madonna and others voice their worldviews and ideologies on an open unabated platform. People follow with chants and shouts of joy in a ritualistic tribal manner without much thought or regard to the message being delivered. The rhetoric from Madonna and personalities like her does not even need to be true. People desire to stand with someone or something.

This is a desperate grasp for achieving a sense of belonging in a world of exclusive groups and lost generations. It rarely matters if what they cling to is ethical or vetted as truth or exposed as a fallacy. It matters not to them; they need to belong at almost any personal cost. The leftist society rarely cares about objective truth or reality because they simply want inclusion in something that is popular and in the now. It is the pop culture wanting fashion statements and trendy political statements more than truth itself. They tend to live in a feel-good world of instant gratification and subjective feelings.

Their subjective feelings attempt to redefine the reality around them and give little consideration for logic, truth, and reality itself. To them, it’s simply not fair to be enclosed and encapsulated in a bubble of reality that they did not define nor choose for themselves. To them, it is considered abuse to not allow them the freedom to rebel from truth and ethical morality.

Often, they read, see, and hear only those things that fit their position on life and censor, distort, or totally ignore anything that opposes their desire for an alternate plastic reality. You clearly see this in many current events and hot topics in today’s newspapers and on television. Issues such as gender dysphoria and same-sex marriage (marriage redefinition). In the minds of our lost youth, if you don’t like the current reality, you simply redefine it and alter its level of truth. You hack away at it until it drops down to a level that works for you and fits your definition of your own subjective reality. Acumen and discernment are mere inconveniences to this process and shall become the first casualty of their truth war.

However, truth shall always remain the truth. Truth can never change, for it is a stark and static reality of our existence. It is unchangeable and unmalleable. But it can be denied, concealed, masked, fogged over, and disguised. The despising and denial of truth is the only tool the left-wing person has in their toolbox that can alter their reality. And when someone of authority—be it a scientist, an educator, a politician, a celebrity, or a Facebook-post meme—supports their view, they feel they are one step closer to winning and convincing the world that they are correct and the world of objective reality is simply wrong and needs to be changed.

Reality needs to be changed to fit within the scope of their subjective and made-up reality because to them it is the only sensible reality that exists. To deny their claims is to deny their reality, an action which in turn is to deny their truth. You are therefore incomprehensible, nonsensical, deplorable, and, often, irredeemable.

One prominent and embarrassing event in recent USA history was the disruptive campaigns and protests by the left-wing millennials. They hated the idea that someone with a different reality than theirs was about to take power as the president of the United States of America—that being, of course, Donald J. Trump.

In 2016, Donald Trump won the USA presidential election, ripping it out of the hands of Hillary R. Clinton. Hillary assumed (with a perpetual smug smirk upon her face) that she was a hands-down winner of this election. Her left-wing supporters also thought that the election was a hands-down victory.

But once the trippy Donald Trump was announced the winner, their fake glass subjective reality of a world came crashing down upon them with sharp shards of true reality. They cried for days and weeks over the devastating defeat that Hillary Clinton tasted like a large dose of bitter vinegar.

Soon, that simple hurt-feelings syndrome was not enough. They poured out onto the streets and started to smash public and private property in their defiance of the right-wing Trump victory. They started fires and vandalized vehicles, storefronts, and private property. They spat upon anyone who may have supported Trump and often started street brawls to showcase their anger and sadness. They did not want conventional democracy, nor did they want anything that did not fit into their subjective and ideologically flawed reality. When it was cracked, they cracked with it.

This went on for weeks upon weeks after the election win by Trump was confirmed. During his inauguration, there were more fires, more protests, and soon, the left-wing anarchists destroyed more property that is estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. And why? Because someone else’s reality did not align with their plastic and fragile reality.

Soon after, the alt-right side woke up from their silent slumber. They saw the anarchy the left-wing millennials were sparking and thought they might as well speak their own minds and spew their own ideological rhetoric. Taking Trump as their special gratuitously offered leader and as an iconic symbol of their belief systems, they began to needle and push back at the left-wing world.

Although Donald Trump could hardly be called a white supremacist or a misogynist by any common standard, he was used as an icon by the alt-right to support their ideological platform. The left-wing radicals falsely built up the image of Trump in their own fake reality as a dictator from the extreme right wing, and the alt-right capitalized on that image to build upon their own ideology. They needled and jostled with their left-wing opponent by the very weapon the left side had created.

The left-wing millennials, in essence, are the root causes of the alt-right coming out of hiding and promoting their antithesis ideology. The left-wing components in the USA were the most divisive and hate-propagating force the USA has ever seen in decades, all the while thinking they had the upper hand with moral understanding and an acute awareness of what is right and what is wrong.

The left-wingers of the USA can only blame themselves for Donald Trump’s win as president of the USA. You can force and prod people just so long before the nasty vipers strike back at you. That is exactly what happened in the USA during the 2016 presidential election. The left-wing millennials cut the very branch on which they sat upon. What’s worse, they haven’t a clue that they had done this to themselves.

Now,