THINK ABOUT IT 2-7-23
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Ignorance of the Bible isn’t just a problem in our culture. It’s a problem in the church, and it’s scandalous.
How bad is it? Researchers tell us that it’s worse than most could imagine.
We would not expect secularized Americans to be knowledgeable about the Bible. A Barna poll once indicated that at least 12 percent of adults believe that Joan of Arc might be Noah’s wife. Another survey of graduating high school seniors revealed that over 50 percent thought that Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife. A considerable number of respondents to one poll indicated that Billy Graham preached the Sermon on the Mount.
The larger scandal is biblical ignorance among Christians. Choose whichever statistic or survey you like, the general pattern is the same among professing Christians. America’s Christians know less and less about the Bible. It shows.
How can a generation be biblically shaped in its understanding of human sexuality when it believes Sodom and Gomorrah to be a married couple? No wonder our culture has so quickly embraced the normality of same-sex marriage. And it’s little wonder that Christians show a growing tendency to compromise on such issues.
Youth ministries are asked to fix problems, provide entertainment, and keep kids busy. But how many local church youth programs actually substantially increase their Bible knowledge during the critical junior high and high school years?
Even the pulpit has been sidelined in many congregations. Preaching has taken a back seat to other concerns in corporate worship. The centrality of biblical preaching to the formation of disciples is lost, and Christian ignorance leads to Christian indolence and worse.
Churches must recover the centrality and urgency of biblical teaching and preaching, and refuse to sideline the teaching ministry of the preacher. Pastors and churches too busy—or too distracted—to make biblical knowledge a central aim of ministry will produce believers who simply do not know enough to be faithful disciples. (Worse, they will fail to pass down a clear understanding of the gospel to the next generation sitting in the pews.)
We will not believe more than we know, and we will not live higher than our beliefs. The many fronts of Christian compromise in this generation can be directly traced to biblical illiteracy in the pews and the absence of biblical preaching and teaching in our homes and churches.
This generation of Christian parents and pastors must get deadly serious about the problem of biblical illiteracy, or a frighteningly large number of Americans—Christians included—will go on thinking that Sodom and Gomorrah lived happily ever after.
David Stone
Lakeway Baptist Church
Humble, Tx.
