Obviously the Tearfund Media Team is scraping the bottom of the news barrel, trying to put a positive spin on the unbelievably weak—almost non-existent—church attendance in the United Kingdom. We lived in the UK for quite a few years and it was our experience that the average attendance for an evangelical church is twenty-five people, eighty percent of whom are over the age of sixty years old. In a few more years, the institutional church in the UK may not exist at all.

You know, it’s one thing to sing songs like “Great is Thy Faithfulness” or “In Christ Alone,” because they are composed of realities that are rooted deep within the pages of Scripture. I can sing them even when life sucks and even when I don’t “feel” particularly like worshiping God at the moment, simply because I’m singing Truth. The Apostle Paul said, “Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from good will.…whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice” (Philippians 1:15, 18).

But I just despise being forced to sing about my faithfulness and piety and passion for God expressed in so many contemporary Christian songs. For example, how many of us can honestly sing, “Jesus, I will never let you go” (from Jesus Lover of My Soul, by Hillsongs), especially these lines:

I love You, I need You
Though my world may fall, I’ll never let You go
My Savior, my closest friend
I will worship You until the very end

Talk about singing way above our experience. The song’s completely bassackward! He’ll never let us go, not the other way around. And this is supposed to be praise and worship? Of whom? Us, no doubt.

I can’t wait to be delivered from these things! Thankfully, I’m not the pastor of this local church, but I do get tapped to preach from time to time. For some time now, I have been looking for a way to transition out of the “Sunday morning religious club,” as Wayne Jacobsen puts it, to living a simple Christian life alongside other passionate followers of Jesus Christ. There are extenuating circumstances that prevent me from making the break sooner; otherwise, I think I would have left the “institutional church” a long time ago.