BISHOP JOHN SHELBY SPONG'S THOUGHT ON A DYING CHURCH  AND THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY (excerpt):

"The reason I believe Christianity is in a steep decline is that it cannot bring itsel to face  self-consciously the fact that the pre-suppositions on which our faith story was erected in the past are today no longer self-evidently true or even believable.
 
To say today there is no God who lives above the sky and is ready to come to our aid, as most of the language and prayer assumes to be a reality.That God could be imagined only when we believed that the earth was the center of a three-tiered universe and that God not only watched over and judged the world from a heavenly throne above the sky, but also intervened regularly to answer our prayers or to assert the divine will. To please this heavenly parent and ultimate judge was what we thought would assure our eternal destiny. This concept of God began to die with  the revolution in thought started by Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo in the 16th and 17th centuries, but it has grown as we have become citizens of a space age and we are now beginning to embrace the enormity of the size of the universe. Our planet earth is only not the center of the universe, it is not even the center of our galaxy that includes some 200 billion other stars, most of which are bigger than our star that we call the sun.

"This God, traditionally defined as supernatural in power, we assumed was capable of miracles in a wide variety of circumstances. When Isaac Newton began to publish his work in the latter years of the 17th century, introducing us to natural law and to cause and effect, both miracles and magic were squeezed out from our consciousness. Elie Wiesel's book NIGHT on his experience in the Holocaust was the most powerful articulation of how this idea of God died. The God of the Bible, who had intervened in human history in the cause of freedom by sending plagues  upon the Egyptians and by splitting the Red Sea to enable "the chosen people" to escape from slavery at the time of the Exodus, was nowhere to be found when this God was so desperately needed to free "the chosen people" from death in the prison camps of Nazi Germany in the 20th century. Belief in such an intervening God became simply no longer credible.

"Next, the entire way we tell the Jesus story was challenged and, though many Christians cannot admit it, actually set aside as no longer believable by the work of Charles Darwin. The primary Christian myth assumes the original perfect creation from which human life has somehow fallen. That idea makes no sense when we embrace the fact that we have actually evolved over billions of years from single cell organisms to complex self-conscious creatures. There was no fall from an original perfection since there was no original perfection. The concept of "original sin" is largely regarded as nonsense today. Yet the fall from which Jesus has rescued us is the way we continue to tell the Jesus story. Our churches and clergy still parrot that incredibly negative Christian idea that we have been "saved by the blood of Christ." Protestants still shout their guilt-producing mantra "Jesus died for my sins," and Catholics still refer to "the sacrifice of the Mass" as reenacting  the moment when salvation was procured. These concepts fill our hymns, our liturgies and our sermons despite the fact that they make no sense outside the parameters of the pre-suppositions that are culturally no longer believed. How can one be saved if one has not fallen? How can one be restored to a status that one has never possessed? How can God be worshiped if this God requires death to the divine son in order to have our sins forgiven? If there is no payoff, no benefit to be gained from faithful worship and righteous living, then many ask today "why bother?" These are the things the Christian is up against today in this post-Christian age. None of them will be solved by inviting people to listen once again to the "old, old story" or by joining in the singing of "The Old Rugged Cross."

"The problems facing institutional Christianity today in the Western world cannot be addressed by tinkering around the edges of our theological formularies or structures. As important as they have been making good parish profiles will not do it nor will even making wise choices in the selection of our clergy. We are not today in a temporary status of watching the tide go out with confidence that in time the tide will come back in. We are rather living through a cataclysmic transition from the presuppositions by which we once lived and having no idea how to tell our faith story in terms of the emerging worldview for which our religion yesterday has no relevance. So churches are dying, vast anger, rising out of our cultural depression at the loss of yesterday's meaning and unstoppable changes, are now our daily bread.

"The consensus of the past is breaking up. The consensus of the future has not yet been formed. We live in  interesting times and dangerous times also. Political shell games and pious rhetoric will no longer suffice.

"Before we can move to address these issues we must understand them. I see little present indication that either church leaders or political leaders understand the depth of the problem we face. Time alone will tell."