Beyond Reformation to Resurrection

Who needs revival when you have resurrection?

"Can these bones live?" O Lord God, you know.

-Ezekiel 37:3

Today’s visiting priest stood at the altar reading John 20, and something struck me that had never registered before in my Baptist upbringing. Everyone knows about Jesus giving the disciples authority to forgive sins, but few talk about what comes next: the authority to retain sins for those who refuse to repent.

It changes everything about the church's holy relationship to calling out sin, forgiving sin, and holding people accountable when they won't repent. This isn't just about individual confession to a priest—it's about the church's divine authority to either release people from sin through forgiveness OR to retain accountability when they refuse to acknowledge their need for healing.

Then the priest did something that revealed the deeper crisis. He explained why Kenyan priests are being sent to American parishes—not as missionaries to the unreached, but as life support for dying congregations. The Western church has become so spiritually anemic that it requires fresh blood from churches that still understand God as promise, not premise.

The Mary and Martha Church

Western Christianity has become Mary and Martha at Lazarus's tomb. The remnant has grown angry at Jesus for not arriving when we expected, demanding to know why He didn't prevent the decline we're witnessing. "Lord, if you had been here, our brother would not have died."

But what if Jesus has a different plan? What if He's not coming to heal a sick church, but to resurrect a dead one?

The statistics tell a story of complete collapse masquerading as a manageable decline.

Western Christianity is hemorrhaging beyond repair. US church membership fell below 50% for the first time in 2020, down from 76% in 1947 (Gallup, 2021). Weekly church attendance dropped from 36% in 2014 to just 20% by 2024 (Gallup, 2024). Ireland saw Christianity decline from 92.9% to 42.5% between 1992-2022 (Wikipedia, 2024). In much of Europe, only 12% of Catholics regularly attend church (Pew Research, 2022). The United Methodist Church experienced a 25% membership drop from 2000-2020 (Pew Research, 2021).

Meanwhile, Christianity explodes in the Global South. Africa grew from 8.7 million Christians in 1900 to 734 million in 2020, expanding at 2.64% annually (World Christian Encyclopedia, 2024). By 2050, 38% of the world's Christians will live in Sub-Saharan Africa (Pew Research, 2015). Nigeria is projected to have 95 million Christians by 2050 (Global Christian Relief, 2025). Nigeria now has more Protestants than Germany, the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation (Pew Research, 2011). Two-thirds of Latin American Christians and 90% of African Christians attend church regularly (Pew Research, 2018).

In 1900, 82% of all Christians lived in Europe and North America. By 2020, this dropped to just 33% (Lausanne Movement, 2024). The center of Christianity hasn't shifted, it has relocated entirely.

When Norse Gods Replace Christ

I see John 20 as a path forward for what I call the Sanctuary Church—churches that understand they don't have to violate scripture to create space for acting out their faith. They don't have to treat God as an algorithm, creating boxes instead of hospitals, and empty pouches instead of wine vessels.

God doesn't crush the sweet grape unless He's aiming for the bitter intoxication of the spiritual life.

The Western church has abandoned this biblical authority and become something else entirely. They are Norse gods rather than Christ, dying institutions clinging to past glory while real spiritual vitality flows elsewhere. They are seeking Valhalla through a good life.

Rome doesn't fall to barbarians. It becomes lax, decadent, and compromising. The barbarians become our superiors because we make them so. We delegate moral superiority to the same systems of governance that killed 100 million people. The German church did the same with the Nazi party. We do the same when we allow our government to act evil while surrendering our prophetic voice.

We made Christianity intellectually bankrupt by giving up ground on Biblical hermeneutics, history, and theology.

On hermeneutics, prominent theologians like Marcus Borg taught that Genesis 1-11 should be understood as myth rather than history. Borg advocated seeing the Bible as "a true myth" and encouraged Christians to understand "the Christian story as a true myth" rather than historical fact (The Contemplative Life, 2018). He recalled that he once believed in the Christmas story as literally involving a virgin birth, a "magic star," and Wise Men, when he lacked the "mental equipment" to think otherwise (Juicy Ecumenism, 2015). This isn't just academic theorizing - it directly undermines biblical authority by treating Scripture as cultural storytelling rather than God's revealed Word.

On history, liberal theologians systematically denied the bodily resurrection of Christ. Harry Emerson Fosdick, the most prominent liberal theologian of the early 1900s, said "I believe in the persistence of personality through death, but I do not believe in the resurrection of the flesh" (AFA.net, 2024). Serene Jones, president of Union Theological Seminary, told the New York Times there is "no cross on which Jesus died for sin, there is no Father who sent the Son to pay our ransom, there is no bodily resurrection of Christ from the dead" (Albert Mohler, 2019). When the central historical claim of Christianity is dismissed by its theological leaders, what foundation remains?

On theology, even supposed conservatives like N.T. Wright recently declared that abortion was "absolutely clear for the mental health" of a mother facing potential fetal deformity, saying "the best thing to do is as soon as possible to terminate this pregnancy" in cases of rape, incest, or severe mental health concerns (Church Leaders, 2025). Wright has also stated "I have friends who I am quite sure are Christians who do not believe in the bodily resurrection," calling his heretical friend Marcus Borg merely "muddled" rather than apostate (Protestia, 2025). This isn't just theological disagreement—it's the abandonment of core Christian doctrine by prominent evangelical voices.

This is like telling a person they can get a hamburger at Chick-fil-A. This is saying, that Chick-fil-A is the Lord’s Chicken.

Meanwhile, we made our faith—which teaches that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit—inferior to people willing to cut up their bodies to follow their new old gods. Sacrifice preborn babies for Stem cells and mutilate your body with every pagan ritual to Ishtar. How many pastors are willing to defy the Cult of Death in our culture anymore? Even if they don’t embrace it, they apologize to it. #sorryGodwantsyourbodytobeatemple #WeAreKidding “Follow the church on X for our latest events.” #dontcancelus

The Ouroboros Church

The Protestant church is dead without ever realizing it's a corpse. It's harvesting rotten flesh and feeding it to itself as the new sacrament. It's become Jormungandr—the world-serpent that brings Ragnarök [end of the world] by consuming itself.

We're eating our future. Protestant churches are consuming their spiritual children—anyone who shows authentic faith gets disciplined, marginalized, or driven out. We've created an inescapable sinkhole. We demand that our leaders be products of our seminaries, reflect our cultural values, speak our language, and validate our assumptions. Then we wonder why they have no prophetic voice or spiritual authority.

The trajectory of collapse follows a predictable pattern.

First comes academic capture. We desperately wanted intellectual respectability, so we started treating Scripture as just another text to be deconstructed rather than the living Word of God. We traded prophetic authority for academic credibility. We needed credentialing more than the cross.

Then comes moral compromise. Once we accepted that the Bible wasn't uniquely authoritative, we had no foundation to resist cultural pressure on sexuality, marriage, gender, or any other moral issue. We became echo chambers for whatever the culture was already saying.

Finally comes inward persecution. We started policing our people who tried to live biblically. Anyone who took Scripture seriously became the enemy. We made biblical fidelity the real sin and cultural accommodation the highest virtue.

The result? Sanatorium Christianity produces anemic leaders who reflect the world's dying values instead of God's life-giving truth. You can’t get the crucifixion without iron nails or an iron spear and you can’t get faithful shepherds who don’t have any iron in their faith, even if it was put there by suffering. We've been ordaining cultural Christians to lead actual Christians, and wondering why the church is spiritually bankrupt.

In our churches, we have more Wiccans than Christians, more sinners than saints, and more blasphemers than prophets. If we were calling them to repent and to Christ as redeemer, we could survive their infiltration among us. Instead, we celebrate them as the heroes of the faith. They become martyrs without sacrifice and saints without new robes. They eat the lambs and spray the blood of innocents across us as the priest sprinkles holy water on his parishioners. In a Protestant church, they will use the blood of the innocent to smear others with their crimes.

We don’t even recognize them as Wiccan for example. I talked to a pastor from a church in Maryville who knew his parishioner was practicing Wiccan beliefs in her business and personal life, but he wouldn’t call her out. We argued for an hour over this one issue, but at the end of the day, he settled on Mammon rather than Christ. As for me, I was unchristlike and he followed Christian principles even if they weren’t from the Bible. We would rather protect the people who destroy the faith than ever say, “Witch,” again.

We won’t be burning witches in the public square in the near future. We will be burning “unchristians.” Do you feel Love is Love yet?

God Speaks to Corpses

But here's what Mary and Martha didn't understand when they confronted Christ. This is what the remnant forgets too,“O, ye of little faith.” God specializes in resurrection, not renovation.

When God asked Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones, "Can these bones live?", Ezekiel wisely answered, "O Lord God, you know." Because only God knows when death has gone deep enough for resurrection to be unmistakably divine.

The pattern is consistent throughout Scripture. Abraham's body was "as good as dead" before Isaac was born (Romans 4:19). Israel had to become slaves for 400 years before the Exodus. Jesus had to be fully dead for three days before resurrection. Lazarus was decomposing for four days, stinking, beyond any natural recovery.

The rot must reach total decay before God acts precisely so no one can claim credit for the revival. When God raises the dead, there's no mistaking human effort for divine power.

The Western church may need to become a complete corpse—lose all cultural power, all financial influence, all social respectability—before God speaks life into it. The sanatorium must burn completely so that what emerges is unmistakably sanctuary.

The Catholic Exception

Why does the Catholic Church, despite its faults, get so many things right? Institutional continuity. They've preserved practices and doctrines across centuries, even when individual leaders failed. They maintain sacramental realism—treating confession, communion, and church authority as real spiritual realities, not just symbols.

Most importantly, the Catholic Church has institutional humility. It can recognize when its leadership has become corrupted or anemic and receive fresh spiritual authority from outside its cultural bubble. They can receive priests from Kenya, Nigeria, the Philippines who bring actual spiritual vitality formed by churches that still see God as promise, not premise.

Protestant churches can't do this because we've made cultural compatibility the highest qualification for ministry. We want pastors who went to our schools, understand our context, speak to our felt needs. We've made theological education about cultural assimilation rather than spiritual formation. How dare we form pastors into something resembling Christ when we can form them into something resembling heretical Harvard’s School of Divinity (just reformed we tell ourselves.)

So we keep producing leaders who are just slightly more religious versions of the culture that's dying around us.

The Kenyan Prophets

The priest in his homily reframed giving as a noble act rather than nice or kind. He spoke of how the Kenyan church is full of joy, while the American church has lost its spirit. Because so few men are entering the vocation of priesthood anymore, the Kenyan church is sending its priests to us to let us continue to live through their joy and love.

Our money should be given nobly because one day it may be returned to us as new wine skins—new priests who will enrich our church that is bursting in old wine skins that keep trying to contain new wine.

The American church has been building monuments to itself while the Kenyan church has been building actual disciples who carry joy and authentic calling. In God's beautiful irony, our money, usually earmarked for Mammon, can be transformed into noble giving that supports their joy and obedience. Then that very joy and obedience returns to us in the form of priests who can actually minister to our spiritual poverty.

We built sanatoriums. They built sanctuaries. Now their sanctuary-formed priests are coming to teach us how to be spiritually alive again.

The Lost Testament of South Korea

We are no longer a nation capable of raising men who could go to a foreign country and act as missionaries while serving the Nation’s role of soldier. South Korea is a testament to the work of Christian men and women who served more than Western Civilization to nation build. They served Christ to build a church.

I witnessed this truth as a child. In 1984, my father was stationed in South Korea for 13 months as an Army soldier. In his spare time, he worked with orphanages. The pictures he sent home showed something I could see even at that young age: the importance of Christ in the faces of South Korean children and families. There was joy there, authentic transformation, spiritual life that radiated through photographs sent halfway around the world. That was American Christianity when it still carried promises instead of premises. That was an American Christianity that held its VBS at parks instead of churches: occupy, not retreat.

Has any other nation been capable of that in human history? To supplant a religion thousands of years old with simple Christian caring through its soldiers? South Korea stands as a testament of the American church before it gave up its rightful moral authority to the old Canaanite gods of convenience and avarice.

Today, 29% of South Koreans are Christian - transformed from a Buddhist and Confucian society into one of the world's most vibrant Christian nations through the witness of American soldiers and missionaries who understood that they served Christ first, America second. These men built churches, not just bases. They demonstrated love, not just power.

But between 1984 and 1991, something died. We married our faith irrevocably to the party. And the party delivered premises, but never promises.

The church didn't die in the 80s and 90s, but it was gasping for air in the 70s, suffocating under intellectual rigor without reason and religious feeling that lacked Christ. The Hippies for Jesus brought emotion without transformation, while liberal theology brought sophistication without power. Then the church drank greedily from the unholy chalice of the Moral Majority thinking it would free the American church from its own spiritual poverties and it consumed the flesh of Bush and Cheney rather than moving toward redemption and the calling of Christ.

The church that could produce soldier-missionaries was replaced by a church that produces spiritual consumers—we used to call spiritual consumers soul sucking banshees. We lost the true names and replaced them with Moral Double Speak.

Men like Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity, and even Rush Limbaugh gave us principles that weren't tied to Christian beliefs, but what could be tolerated by their intellectual betters. These men could never accept that their faith was more important than acceptance from the Academy.

They were gasoline on the fire of our decline rather than a moral majority. These false prophets prepared the way for gremlins and goblins like Roy Blunt and John Ashcroft. They produced American politicians who could speak Christian language while wearing the flesh of Mammon.

We can no longer export authentic Christianity because we no longer possess it. Instead of transforming other nations through the Gospel, we import priests from other nations to keep our own churches alive.

George Bush the Lesser, talked about nation building in Iraq, but today, Iraqi Christians are one of the most persecuted Christian churches in the world. Iraq's Christian population collapsed from 1.5 million in 2003 to just 150,000 today—a 90% decline under American "liberation" (ECLJ, 2024; University of Notre Dame, 2021). Christians were tolerated under the secular regime of Saddam Hussein, but since the 2003 Iraq War, Iraqi Christians have fled from the country and their population has collapsed under the democratic government (Wikipedia, 2024).

Bush, for all of his faith-based initiatives, diminished the one group that could have really turned Iraq into a new civilization. The same America that created Christian South Korea destroyed Christian Iraq. Why? Because by the time of the Iraq War, American Christianity had already surrendered its moral authority to the gods of convenience and avarice.

Sometimes the barbarians protect the church in ways Christians fail to do for “niceness” and “Christian tolerance.” During the years of Saddam Hussein's government, paradoxically, the situation for Christians seemed at least partially stabilized, while American democracy unleashed sectarian violence that decimated ancient Christian communities dating back to the apostles (La Civiltà Cattolica, 2022).

The very nation we birthed politically is a harbinger of what is coming to our churches. What we did to their church, God will do to ours. “Give back to her as she has given; pay her back double for what she has done” (Revelation 18:6).

The very nation we helped birth spiritually now sends missionaries back to us. Korean Christians are planting churches in America while American churches close their doors. The disciple has become the apostle because the apostle forgot what it meant to serve Christ above empire.

We don't need reformation for Western Christianity. We need resurrection. Reformation assumes the patient is sick. Resurrection requires the patient to be dead.

The Western church is past the point where Luther's 95 Theses could help. We're not dealing with corrupted doctrine that needs correction—we're dealing with spiritual death that needs divine intervention. You can't reform a corpse. You can only bury it and wait for God to breathe in life.

God will obliterate the memories of death and while many in the West are like Mary and Martha, demanding of Christ, "Why did you not come?" Christ has an answer. He is coming. He will arrive at the timing that most honors Him and not when the remnant expects it, because we're faithless too.

Even we doubt. We're expecting God to work on our timeline, through our methods, in ways we can understand and control. But Jesus wasn't coming to Bethany to heal Lazarus—He was coming to resurrect him.

He let Lazarus die completely. He waited until hope was gone, until the smell of death was undeniable, until everyone knew this was beyond human solution. He wasn't coming to heal but to resurrect.

How long must the rot continue? Until every mask has been stripped away, every pretense has collapsed, every false foundation has crumbled. Until the church is so obviously dead that only God could raise it.

If the remnant is called up too soon, then Joel Osteen will take credit for God's work. God will not share glory with the false teachers of Christianity. He will not share credit with wolves. The sanatoriums must be emptied before God will act because they continue to lie that they are the true church and Western Civilization continues to praise them.

But Western Civilization will abandon them, turning on them, and round them up. It will not distinguish between sanctuaries and sanatoriums when it decides it has the power to act finally against the threat to its total domination. The church has stood as a beacon of light and refuge against the satanic Dragon with the Ten Horns, but the Dragon [the State] is constantly waiting to devour the child.

When God finally speaks "COME FORTH" over Western Christianity, it won't be a reformation but a resurrection. And no one will be able to say "we turned things around." They'll only be able to say "God did this."

The Coming Resurrection

Maybe we're not witnessing the death of Christianity but the necessary death that precedes the greatest resurrection the church has ever seen.

The Kenyan priests aren't the resurrection but the reminder that God is still in the resurrection business. They're showing us what spiritual life looks like while our corpse decomposes, maintaining the witness that God can speak life into dead things.

God can make rocks and bones come to life. God may be dealing with a dead corpse, but when has that stopped Him?

Western Christianity is in the tomb. The stone is rolled over it. It's been dead for days. The stench is obvious. But Christ's answer is the same. "I am the resurrection and the life." Not "I am the reformation and the improvement." Not "I am the cultural restoration and the institutional repair."

He's coming at the timing that will most honor Him when the resurrection is so impossible, so beyond human achievement, that only God gets the glory. When no seminary, no movement, no strategy can claim credit.

God obliterates the memory of death with the reality of resurrection.

The celebrated barbarians aren't our enemies but revelations of which churches are already spiritually bankrupt beneath their impressive facades. They're God's threshing floor, separating wheat from chaff, revealing which branches were truly connected to the vine versus which ones were just performing the appearance of life.

As Isaiah 5:24 warned, "Therefore, as tongues of fire lick up straw and as dry grass sinks down in the flames, so their roots will decay and their flowers blow away like dust; for they have rejected the law of the Lord Almighty and spurned the word of the Holy One of Israel."

As Jesus declared in John 15:6, "If anyone does not abide in me he is thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned."

The fire is coming not from barbarians, but from God's judgment on fruitless vines. But the divine fire that destroys dead branches is the same fire that purifies living gold.

The question isn't whether God can resurrect the Western church. The question is whether we're willing to let it die completely enough for the resurrection to be unmistakably divine.

When God calls us to retain sins in John 20, he’s not calling for us to name witches and burn them. He is calling us to separate those who will seek Christ from those that will seek false Gods. Our duty and responsibility isn’t to seek confession to destroy the faithful, but to be a hospital to the sick, refuge for the persecuted, and hope for the dead.

Our resurrection is coming, but it will come at a greater cost if we don’t recognize we have died. As long as we continue to drape rotten flesh onto our dry bones to be the Bride of Frankenstein instead of the Bride of Christ, we will never hear Christ say, “Come Forth.”

"And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, O my people, and bring you up from your graves. And I will put my Spirit in you and you will live."

-Ezekiel 37:13-14

The Western church stands at Lazarus's tomb. Christ is coming not when we expect, but when His glory will be most clearly displayed. The smell of death will give way to the breath of life. The corpse will rise. And all will know that this was God's work alone.

Bibliography - The Resurrection of Christianity

Statistical and Demographic Sources

European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ). "Iraq: Christians Persecuted and Forgotten." 2024.

Gallup. "U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time." 2021.

Gallup. "What Percentage of Americans Go to Church?" 2024.

Global Christian Relief. "Christianity in Nigeria: Growth Projections to 2050." 2025.

Lausanne Movement. "The Changing Demographics of Global Christianity." 2024.

Pew Research Center. "The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050." 2015.

Pew Research Center. "In America, Does More Education Equal Less Religion?" 2011.

Pew Research Center. "Church Attendance Patterns in Latin America and Africa." 2018.

Pew Research Center. "Religious Practice and Observance in Europe." 2022.

University of Notre Dame. "Under Caesar's Sword: How Christians Respond to Persecution." 2021.

Wikipedia. "Religion in Ireland." 2024.

Wikipedia. "Christianity in Iraq." 2024.

World Christian Encyclopedia. "Status of Global Christianity, 2024."

Theological and Religious Sources

AFA.net. "The Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy and Harry Emerson Fosdick." 2024.

Albert Mohler. "The Theology of Serene Jones: When Christianity Becomes Something Else Entirely." 2019.

Borg, Marcus. The Contemplative Life: Nine Ways of Seeing. 2018.

Church Leaders. "N.T. Wright on Abortion and Mental Health." 2025.

Juicy Ecumenism. "Marcus Borg's View of Biblical Literalism." 2015.

La Civiltà Cattolica. "Christians in Iraq: From Protection to Persecution." 2022.

Protestia. "N.T. Wright's Comments on Marcus Borg and Bodily Resurrection." 2025.

Biblical References

Ezekiel 37:1-14 (Valley of Dry Bones)

John 11:43 ("Lazarus, come forth!")

John 20:23 (Authority to forgive and retain sins)

1 Corinthians 6:19 (Body as temple of the Holy Spirit)

Matthew 7:2 (The measure you use will be measured to you)

Revelation 18:6 ("Give back to her as she has given; pay her back double for what she has done")

Revelation 12:3 (The great red dragon with seven heads and ten horns)