History
Before telling you the story of NRCC, we need to rehearse a bit of the larger story of our nation and the American church. It’s against that backdrop that our own little story unfolds.
Introduction : Some Social Context
In the last several decades, there has been a lot of talk in Christian circles about "culture war." The clash between value systems has been fought on fronts like abortion, gay rights, school prayer, etc. The rhetoric of war has energized many devout people and has often creating a mindset of "us (the good people) vs. them (the bad people)."
When we founded NRCC, we looked around at our culture. It appeared to us that the culture wars had already ended. We didn’t see mainstream culture being informed any longer by the traditional Church. Not too long ago in American history, the Christian message had a voice in the affairs of our nation. Today, not so much. The traditional Christian Church has very little influence in how our society does politics, entertainment, economic policy, ethics, sexuality, marriage, or child-rearing. In all these areas, people refer somewhere else to gain their bearings, not to the Church.
We believe this happened because the Church lost the moral authority that earned us the right to influence society. Sadly, we have behaved badly. We have strong-armed money from the weak and elderly to build media empires. We have abandoned our own standards of sexual propriety, but publicly insisted that others abide by them. We’ve abused the young and the innocent in the worst way, and then covered up our shame with deceit and guile. We’ve drifted away from the love and grace that is at the core of Jesus’ message, and somewhere along the way, stopped being helpers in our society, and became harsh critics.
People have rejected our voice as immaterial, and have voted their rejection with their feet. Already ten years ago, pollster and demographic researcher, George Barna highlighted the demise of the Church in America. At that time, there had been a 92% increase of unchurched people and even 10 million Americans who called themselves Christian no longer attended church.
Throughout history, when groups of people have been on the losing side of a major culture clash, they have two choices. They can embrace the dominant values of the culture that defeated them, or they can regroup, reconsider themselves, and rediscover their essential truths.
Our observation of the condition of the church today is that many have chosen the former. The values of American culture are strong and very attractive (consumerism, materialism, pragmatism, hedonism). In the pursuit of success and relevance, many churches have taken on these values as their own, thinking of church more as business than family. Church has become for many, a provider of spiritual services to consumers, offering programs designed to meet the needs and desires of target markets. Motivated by bigger, faster, better, churches often determine their priorities by cost-benefit analysis. As a church, our morality, our heroes, our calendars, often mimic those of our society. We consume the same entertainment, suffer the same stress-related disorders, have adulterous affairs and cheat on our taxes with the same frequency. We live and operate the same way the culture does, all the while claiming the power of God to help us do better. This has earned us a public perception as hypocrites.
Yet, there is a second option for those on the losing side of a culture clash. It is to withdraw for a while, and rediscover their true identities, their true beliefs.
In the ancient histories recorded in the Bible, it was often away from the seat of power, away from the comfort of supremacy and authority that the vanquished hammered out a new, truer, and more authentic spirituality. As they sought for God in their loss, they rediscovered truth, and in the discovering, found freedom, life, and light. They were reenergized by the beliefs, by the truths they recaptured. Truth, wholeness, righteousness, and a renewed experience of the Divine; these become the foundation of their strength. The rediscovery of their true identity as spiritual people first, becomes their motivation to action, their inspiration to move forward again.
> continue : The formation of NRCC