I made the mistake of watching the news before I poured my second cup of coffee. Then, after I poured my second cup, I scrolled through my social media feeds and saw posts by folks like Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffress, and Josh Howerton that are just bathed in Christian nationalism and terrible theology. As I watched and scrolled, I found myself thinking about the influence of American Christianity…the good, the bad, and the ugly. So, I started typing…and if I’m being honest, I’ve taken a trip to negative town. But, there is some hope sprinkled in too!

There are some questions the American Church needs to be willing to ask itself: Why should anyone be surprised when people outside the church want nothing to do with us? Why should we be surprised when people who once sat in our pews, served on our committees, taught our Sunday school classes, and gave generously to our ministries decide they can no longer remain part of the institution?

Seriously, we shouldn’t be shocked when people who still love Jesus, still read his words, still want to follow his teachings, and still hunger for a deeper spiritual life choose to do so somewhere beyond the walls of the church. Before we start another campaign to get people back into church, we ought to ask ourselves what they experienced that made them leave in the first place. Before we lament the decline of Christianity’s cultural influence in America, we ought to consider what kind of Christianity we have been offering the world. Because if we’re just inviting people who have walked away the same thing they walked away from…well…

Church, we have a PR problem and it’s time we take responsibility for our problems.

When prominent Christian leaders repeatedly choose the powerful over the powerless, the institution over the injured, and the reputation of the church over the well-being of the people it has wounded, we should not be surprised when people stop trusting us.

When people who claim the name of Jesus defend abusers while questioning the abused, belittle the marginalized while elevating those who created the margins, and offer endless grace to those who cause harm while demanding endless patience from those who suffer it, we should not be surprised when the world looks at us and wonders whether we have ever really understood the gospel we proclaim.

When we align ourselves with the very people Jesus consistently challenged, while ignoring the people Jesus consistently welcomed, we should not be surprised when people begin to question whether the church is actually following him at all.

When the Church responds to these concerns by defending itself rather than examining itself, we should not be surprised when the distance between Jesus and his institutional representatives continues to grow.

At some point, we have to stop asking why people are walking away and start asking what, exactly, they are walking away from.

Maybe we should read the Gospels again. Not just the verses we have embroidered on pillows or printed on coffee mugs. Not just the passages we use to reinforce what we already believe. Read the whole story.

Look at the people Jesus confronts. He confronts religious leaders who use their authority to burden others while protecting themselves. He challenges people who obsess over religious appearances while neglecting justice, mercy, and faithfulness. He tells stories in which the religiously respectable are the ones who fail to recognize their neighbor. He welcomes people whom respectable society has rejected. He touches those others will not touch. He shares meals with people others consider unworthy of a seat at the table.

When Jesus speaks about judgment, he repeatedly directs our attention to how we have treated the vulnerable. In Matthew 25:31–46, Jesus identifies himself with the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned. His words are startling in their simplicity: our response to people who are vulnerable is inseparable from our response to him.

He doesn’t focus on our political affiliations, the size of our congregations, the beauty of our sanctuaries, the respectability of our reputations, or our ability to say all the right religious things.

He invites us to consider how we treat the people who need us? Do we feed the hungry? Welcome the stranger? Care for the sick? Visit the imprisoned? Do we recognize the image of Christ in people who could offer us nothing in return?

These are not peripheral questions for Christians. Jesus places them remarkably close to the center of what it means to be faithful.

And yet, too often, the Church seems more concerned with protecting the comfort of the powerful than with embodying the compassion of Christ.

We defend leaders because they are influential, successful, charismatic, or useful to our cause. We minimize the suffering of victims because acknowledging their pain might threaten the institution. We question the motives of people who speak up while extending the benefit of the doubt to those whose actions have caused harm. We ask the wounded to be patient. We ask the marginalized to be quiet. We ask the abused to consider the consequences of speaking out.

And we call it protecting the Church. We call it protecting Christian values. But protecting the Church from accountability is not the same thing as protecting the Church’s witness. In fact, it may be destroying it.

We shouldn’t abandon due process, refuse forgiveness, or assume every allegation is automatically proven. But we should refuse to let someone’s status, influence, or religious credentials determine whether their actions will be taken seriously. The safety and dignity of those who have been harmed cannot be treated as secondary to the preservation of an institution or the protection of our political agendas.

The Church does not honor Jesus by protecting people who harm others. It honors Jesus by telling the truth, protecting the vulnerable, pursuing accountability, and refusing to confuse power with righteousness.

If our theology of grace makes it easier for powerful people to avoid accountability than for wounded people to find healing, we need to revisit our theology.

If our understanding of unity requires victims to remain silent so that everyone else can get along, we need to revisit our understanding of unity.

If our commitment to the Church requires us to abandon the way of Jesus, then we have confused the institution with the One the institution exists to serve.

One of the things I love about the Bible is that it refuses to let religious people get too comfortable. The prophets of the Hebrew scriptures were not hired to protect the reputations of the powerful. They were called to speak uncomfortable truths to people who had become comfortable with injustice. They challenged rulers, confronted religious hypocrisy, and reminded God’s people that worship divorced from righteousness was an offense to God.

Consider Micah 6:8: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?”

If we look at what God requires, it’s not a bigger building, a more impressive worship service, a stronger grip on cultural influence, or a seat at the table of the powerful. God requires justice, kindness and humility.

Consider Isaiah 1:17, which calls God’s people to learn to do good, seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, and plead for the widow. Or Amos 5:21–24, in which God rejects religious festivals and songs when the people’s lives are characterized by injustice, demanding instead that justice roll down like waters.

The point is not that worship, tradition, doctrine, or the life of the church are unimportant. The point is that none of these things can substitute for the faithful practice of justice and mercy.

The prophet Amos does not suggest that Israel needs to improve its worship production. He suggests that the people need to repent. Micah does not tell the people to become better at looking religious. He reminds them what God actually requires.

Maybe the American Church needs to hear these prophets again. We need to hear them not as ancient voices addressing someone else’s religious failures, but as living witnesses asking whether we have mistaken the maintenance of our institutions for faithfulness to God.

If our churches can preach endlessly about personal morality while remaining remarkably quiet about injustice, something is out of balance. If we can identify the sins of people who are different from us while refusing to confront the sins committed by people who share our values, something is out of balance. If we can speak passionately about the authority of Scripture while ignoring the biblical commands to defend the vulnerable, something is out of balance. If we believe that our religious convictions excuse us from the difficult work of loving our neighbors, we have misunderstood those convictions.

The prophets would not be impressed by our ability to quote Scripture if our lives contradict its demands.

I suspect Paul would have a few things to say, too. His letters to the early churches were not always gentle. He confronted division, hypocrisy, arrogance, exploitation, and the ways Christian communities failed to embody the unity they proclaimed. He was willing to challenge churches he loved because their faithfulness mattered more than their comfort.

We seem to have developed a Christianity that is eager to correct outsiders but reluctant to correct insiders. We have become experts at identifying the speck in someone else’s eye while explaining away the log in our own. That is not spiritual maturity. It is spiritual self-deception.

Progressive and liberation theologians have spent generations challenging the church to take seriously the relationship between the gospel and the lived experiences of people who are oppressed, excluded, or wounded by systems of power. Their work is not simply about adding a few social concerns to an otherwise unchanged Christianity. It asks whether we have understood the gospel correctly if our faith leaves us indifferent to suffering.

What does it mean to proclaim a liberating Savior while defending arrangements that keep people oppressed? What does it mean to worship Jesus, who was executed by the combined forces of political and religious power, while reflexively siding with powerful people when they harm the vulnerable? What does it mean to celebrate the cross while refusing to stand beside those who suffer?

These are not abstract theological questions. They are questions about what our faith looks like when it encounters real people with real wounds.

Christian love is not a command for victims to make their abusers comfortable. Forgiveness is not a mechanism for avoiding accountability. Reconciliation is not a demand that people return to unsafe relationships or pretend that harm never occurred. Grace is not the absence of consequences. Unity is not the silencing of people whose pain makes the rest of us uncomfortable.

If we are serious about reconciliation, we must be serious about truth. If we are serious about forgiveness, we must be serious about repentance. If we are serious about healing, we must be willing to acknowledge the wounds.

The church should be the place where people who have been hurt discover that their stories matter, their dignity is protected, and their suffering will not be minimized to preserve someone else’s reputation.

Imagine what it would mean for the church to become known for that. Imagine what it would mean for people to say, “I went to the church because I knew they would believe that my life mattered. I knew they would stand with me. I knew they would tell the truth, even when the truth was costly.” That would be a powerful witness to the gospel.

Instead, too many people have experienced the opposite. We should not be surprised that they have difficulty trusting us.

Here is where I think the American Church needs to pay particular attention. We often talk about people leaving the church as though they have simply abandoned their faith. We assume that declining participation means declining spirituality, that leaving a congregation means leaving Jesus, or that questioning the institution means rejecting Christianity altogether. But those assumptions can obscure what is actually happening.

Some people are walking away from faith. Others are walking away from a particular congregation, denomination, or expression of Christianity. Others are trying to hold on to Jesus while creating distance from the institution that taught them about him.

Some are exhausted by hypocrisy. Some have been wounded by spiritual abuse. Some are tired of watching the church defend people whose actions contradict its teachings. Some have watched the church become entangled in the pursuit of political or cultural power and no longer recognize the Jesus they encounter in the Gospels. Some simply cannot reconcile the love of God they have experienced with the judgment, exclusion, or indifference they have encountered in God’s people.

We should listen to these stories before we presume to explain them. Not everyone who leaves the church does so for the same reason, and not everyone who remains in the church is complicit in its failures. There are faithful congregations, courageous pastors, compassionate laypeople, and communities doing extraordinary work in the name of Jesus.

But the existence of faithful churches does not absolve the broader institution of the responsibility to examine its failures.

Nor should we assume that everyone who walks away has stopped caring about spiritual things. Some of the people who have the most profound questions about the church are asking those questions precisely because they take Jesus seriously. They have read the Sermon on the Mount. They have encountered the Jesus who blesses the poor in spirit, calls peacemakers children of God, commands his followers to love their enemies, and warns against the seduction of wealth and power. They have heard Jesus insist that the greatest among his followers must become servants.

Then they look at the church. They see leaders who demand loyalty but resist accountability. They see institutions that protect their public image at the expense of wounded people. They see Christians who speak passionately about biblical values while displaying remarkably little compassion for people whose lives are complicated, whose circumstances are difficult, or whose experiences challenge their assumptions. They see a church that sometimes seems more interested in winning than in loving, more concerned with influence than with integrity, and more committed to protecting its own than to embodying the grace it proclaims.

Understandably, they wonder whether they can follow Jesus without continuing to participate in that contradiction.

We should not be so quick to condemn their questions. Maybe some of them are not walking away from Jesus at all. Maybe they are walking away from the distance between Jesus and the church. Maybe the most faithful response is not to insist that they come back, but to ask what the church would need to become for them to recognize Jesus among us again.

I believe the church desperately needs revival. But I am not talking about revival as a temporary surge in attendance, an emotional worship experience, or a campaign designed to restore Christianity’s influence in American society.

I am talking about a revival that gets us back to the way of Jesus. A revival that begins with repentance rather than defensiveness. A revival that makes us more concerned with faithfulness than popularity, more committed to truth than convenience, and more willing to surrender our privilege than to protect it. A revival that reminds us that the church does not exist to make powerful people more powerful. It exists to bear witness to the kingdom of God. A revival that leads us to take Jesus seriously enough to let his teachings challenge our assumptions, our loyalties, our prejudices, and our practices. A revival that moves us beyond simply believing the right things about Jesus to actually doing the things Jesus told us to do.

Jesus did not tell his followers that the world would recognize them by the size of their buildings, the influence of their leaders, or the effectiveness of their political strategies. He said people would recognize his disciples by their love for one another (John 13:35).

That love, however, is not sentimental. It is not merely a warm feeling toward people who look like us, think like us, vote like us, or make us comfortable. It is a love that tells the truth. It is a love that protects the vulnerable. It is a love that confronts injustice. It is a love that refuses to abandon people when standing beside them becomes costly. It is a love that does not confuse the preservation of the institution with the fulfillment of its mission. It is a love that is willing to change.

A revived church would not simply preach about the poor; it would rearrange its priorities around the needs of its neighbors. It would not simply welcome marginalized people into its buildings; it would examine the practices and assumptions that marginalized them in the first place. It would not merely issue statements about compassion; it would demonstrate compassion when doing so requires sacrifice.

A revived church would not measure its success solely by attendance, budgets, buildings, or institutional longevity. It would ask whether people are becoming more like Jesus and whether the communities around it are experiencing more justice, mercy, hope, and love because the church is there.

When a revived church fails, and it will fail because churches are made up of human beings, it will respond with humility, confession, accountability, and a willingness to make things right.

That is the kind of revival I long for. Not a revival that makes the church look powerful again, but one that makes the church look like Jesus again.

The most important question is not whether the American church can regain the trust it has lost. The question is whether we are willing to become the kind of church that deserves to be trusted.

That begins with repentance. Not the kind of repentance that simply acknowledges that we are imperfect people. Not the kind that offers a vague apology before returning to business as usual. Not the kind that asks those who have been harmed to forgive quickly so that the rest of us can move on.

Real repentance tells the truth about what has happened. It acknowledges the people who have been hurt. It accepts responsibility. It changes behavior. It makes restitution where possible. It creates safeguards to prevent future harm.

Real repentance is more concerned with the well-being of the wounded than with the comfort of the institution. Real repentance requires humility and the willingness to admit that we may have confused our traditions with the gospel, our preferences with God’s will, and our institutional survival with faithfulness.

It requires us to return to the Scriptures, not to find ammunition for defending ourselves, but to allow the living Word of God to examine us. It requires us to read Micah 6:8 and take justice seriously. It requires us to read Matthew 25 and recognize that our treatment of vulnerable people matters to Jesus. It requires us to read the Gospels and pay attention to whom Jesus welcomes, whom he challenges, and what he says about the dangers of religious hypocrisy.

It requires us to remember that Jesus reserved some of his sharpest criticism for religious people who were convinced they were getting everything right.

The church does not need to be perfect to be faithful. But it does need to be honest about its failures and willing to change.

We need pastors who are courageous enough to speak truth when silence would be easier. We need congregations that value people more than reputations. We need leaders who understand that accountability is not a threat to healthy leadership but a necessary expression of it.

We need Christians who are willing to ask if the way we live, lead, worship, serve, and treat our neighbors actually resemble Jesus? If the answer is no, then we have work to do. Not work to make ourselves look better but to become more faithful.

Despite all of this, I have not given up on the church. I believe the church can still be a place of extraordinary grace, meaningful community, spiritual formation, healing, and hope. I believe congregations can become communities where people encounter the love of God in tangible ways. I believe the church can stand beside people in their suffering, challenge the forces that diminish human dignity, and help build communities where all people have the opportunity to flourish.

I believe the church can be good news. But it will not happen simply because we insist that it is.  It will happen when our lives make the gospel believable.

When people who have been wounded discover that the church will stand with them. When people on the margins discover that they are not projects to be managed or problems to be solved, but beloved children of God whose gifts, stories, and dignity matter. When people who have been excluded discover that the church is willing to examine its own practices rather than blaming them for feeling unwelcome. When the powerful discover that Christian leadership means service and accountability, not entitlement. When our neighbors experience the church as a community that feeds the hungry, welcomes the stranger, cares for the sick, advocates for the vulnerable, and loves without calculating what it will receive in return. When the people around us see a community whose commitments are not merely spoken from pulpits but embodied in ordinary, everyday acts of courage, generosity, mercy, and justice.

Then perhaps people will begin to see something worth trusting. Not because the church has perfected its public image, but because it has returned to its purpose. Not because we have reclaimed cultural power, but because we have learned to use whatever power we have in service to others. Not because we have finally figured out how to get everyone back into our buildings, but because we have become more faithful to the One who sent us into the world.

That is the revival I hope for. That is the church I want to be part of. That is the witness I believe the world desperately needs.

The American church should not be surprised when people reject it if we continue to choose the powerful over the powerless, the abuser over the abused, and institutional preservation over the way of Jesus.

I still believe we can become something different. We can repent. We can change. We can rediscover the radical, costly, liberating love at the heart of the gospel. We can stop asking the world to come back to church and start asking the church to come back to Jesus.

The world does not need a church that is simply more influential. The world needs a church that looks, loves, serves, and lives like Jesus.