A chameleon’s survival lies in its ability to mimick certain colors and “vanish” into its background.      

That works for a lizard.  

It doesn’t work so well for the church.  

Though a progressive drift has been occurring in certain mainstream denominations going all the way back to the 1930’s, now the same  blight is showing up in young evangelical churches planted in urban areas.   After a relatively short period of existence, some of them have begun to look like the fallen cities they occupy, rather than the other way around.    

That means syncretization of values and beliefs have taken place.  Whether it is church leaders who make misguided attempts to win the hearts and minds of sinners, or church members who passively absorb cultural trends, it is proving difficult to hold a consistent biblical worldview among believers.

Consider the words of the psalmist:

“O God, the nations have come into your inheritance;
    they have defiled your holy temple;
    they have laid Jerusalem in ruins” (Ps. 79:1).

The nations have come in.  That should have been an opportunity for the church.  After all, Jesus told us to “make disciples of all nations” (Mt. 28:19).  But in this verse from Psalms, it looks as though the nations did some “discipling” of their own among the people of God.  They entered, they defiled, and they laid waste.  And now, like the trashed holy land that the Psalmist laments, many congregations (and entire denominations) have recently been ruined.  

The preachers of political correctness have left plenty of spiritual casualties in their wake:  

“They have given the bodies of your servants
    to the birds of the heavens for food,
    the flesh of your faithful to the beasts of the earth” (Ps. 79:2).

As surely as Christians “go” into all the world, the servants of darkness look for opportunities to enter the church.  They use terms like love, and justice, to leverage their approach among the faithful.  Truly, these folks teach as vigorously as servants of the Lord, but get the finer points of theology wrong, and advocate grossly unnatural  things (c.f. 1 Tim. 4:1-3).  They feign moral outrage over a great many causes, giving the impression of superior sensitivity and righteousness, but “Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness” (2 Cor. 11:14-15).  Yes, these people otherwise refer to themselves as Christians, but come freighted with radical social dogma.

I’m afraid our response to them has actually helped facilitate the problem.  We’ve erroneously accepted the thought that alignment to the sins of the world endears us to the unsaved.  It proves to sinners the church isn’t so bad after all, and is actually a part of the cool kids club.  

There’s a term missiologists love (and I love it, too) called “incarnational.”  It refers to the principle of God becoming human in Christ, reaching people in time and culture in ways that made Him receivable, and approachable.  

The Apostle Paul had a corresponding thought when he wrote “I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some” (1 Cor. 9:22).  This is most commendable when making adjustments to amoral things like food, etc. But the apostle would have recoiled in horror to see the lengths to which we have gone in becoming whatever today’s culture deems appropriate.  At any rate, “incarnational” should not include a compromise of spiritual faithfulness (see my post “Hang Out with Sinners, But Still be a Saint”).   

Ironically, our present secular generation (which does not recognize the authority of Scripture) has recently begun a long swing away from nonsensical woke positions.  This “turn” is not based on repentance, only rehabilitation for the sake of fitting into a new conservative age.  All it took was the national political tide to change. 

On the other hand, some Christian groups (who claim to respect Scripture) have continued a suicidal plummet into darkness.  They don’t seem to have noticed how foolish worldly philosophies have proven to be.  Or that even the world itself is discarding them much the same as they did the Hula-Hoop.  Besides, a screed of ideologies that pervert sex, gender, family, and race certainly don’t come from faithfulness to the Bible.  The tired old chameleon approach will  cause churches to blend in until they look more like mud than salt, or light.       

The only viable long range strategy to resist the “discipleship” efforts of the world is with the “r” word—revival—but not the kind that finds its way onto the cover of Christian magazines.  The saints need a revival of the elements in Psalm 79, a love of holiness, an adoration of God’s glory, a respect for His legacy of truth (His inheritance), and a passion for His eternal purpose (the temple).   

Not only outreach is needed now, but a generous helping of in-reach.