What If Losing Cultural Power Is the Best Thing That Could Happen to the Church?
The question before us isn't "how do we get people back to church?" It's something far more demanding: how do we form resilient, truthful, non-anxious disciples in a fragmented world?
We are worried about attendance numbers, cultural influence, institutional trust, the next generation, and the rising tide of the religiously unaffiliated. We debate strategy, rebrand our ministries, launch new series, and study demographic trends with the urgency of a struggling startup. And underneath all of it runs a quiet fear: that we are losing.
What if we are asking the wrong questions?
My heritage is Persian. I am keenly interested in what is happening in Iran. I have good friends who are intimately involved in the church in Iran. Christians, especially Muslim-background converts, often gather through house churches, online discipleship, and quiet networks. USCIRF reports at least 143 Christians arrested across 24 Iranian cities in 2025, and Open Doors says converts face severe pressure from government, society, and family.
I am sure somewhere in Tehran, a young woman is memorizing Scripture in a house church that has no name, and no website. That same woman is worshipping in secret, knowing that the wrong conversation could cost her everything.
These brothers and sisters are not anxious about relevance. They are learning to be faithful. They have something to teach us. Before we can learn what that is, we have to see clearly. In my research, it is becoming apparent that Christianity is not simply declining. It is relocating.
Pew Research tells us that Christians remain the world's largest religious group—but from 2010 to 2020, Christianity grew more slowly than the global population, dropping from roughly 31% to 29% of humanity. Meanwhile, Gordon-Conwell and the World Christian Database report that the Global South now accounts for approximately 69% of the world's Christians, a share that may reach 78% by 2050. The Lausanne Movement's State of the Great Commission report confirms the pattern: the vitality, growth, and missionary energy of global Christianity is increasingly outside the West.
In other words, the center of gravity has shifted—not because the faith is dying, but because it is alive in places we rarely look.
The Western church, particularly in the United States of America, faces a different reality: deepening distrust of religious institutions and accelerating secularisation. Barna Group's research shows genuine spiritual hunger, especially among younger generations, but notes that fundamental practices like prayer, church attendance, and bible study remain weak.
Gen Z reports anxiety, loneliness, identity confusion, and emotional pain at alarming rates.
Here is the uncomfortable truth the American church must confront: we have built our faith on a foundation of freedom and privilege that most of the global church has never known, and we have often confused that privilege with the building itself.
We have assumed that the church requires buildings, brands, political protection, and cultural respectability. We have measured health in attendance metrics and square footage. We have outsourced discipleship to programs and platforms. We have, in many cases, built institutions that depend heavily on cultural comfort to function freely and without any disruption from the government.
The persecuted church in Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, North Korea never had that option. And so they developed something different: prayer that is not performative, discipleship that happens organically, community that bonds together under threat, and courage that doesn't require a congregation.
The question for anyone in the American Church is not whether we are grateful for religious freedom. We should be! The question is: have we used freedom to build resilience, or to build comfort?
My Iranian pastor friend said this to me in a conversation: ‘Freedom, he said, can make the church soft. And the persecuted church is holding up a mirror.’ I argue the central issue is not primarily a numerical problem. It is a formation problem.
How do we form disciples who are resilient enough to hold their faith when the [church] culture stops rewarding it? Can we be truthful enough to resist the seductive lure of political tribalism and online outrage? And be people who are non-anxious enough to be a calming, healing presence in a fragmented, fearful world?
The persecuted church has been working on this problem for centuries, by necessity. I propose several lessons that can create the calming and healing presence.
The American church also faces a distinctly Western formation crisis: we are saturated with information and starving for truth.
Barna emphasizes that Christian media wields significant influence over its audience, yet it can also foster division. In an era marked by unprecedented distrust in institutions, media, and expertise, the church has not been spared from the damaging effects of misinformation, outrage, and political tribalism. Christians are increasingly drawn to conspiracy theories, which heighten anxiety and breed contempt.
The persecuted church cannot afford this. When faith costs something, there is greater care and consideration for what is actually believed and why. A casual relationship with truth is dangerous when untruth can get you killed.
The American church must urgently renew its unwavering commitment to truthfulness, moving beyond merely dismissing falsehoods as ‘fake news’ and instead fostering a deeply rooted, theologically informed dedication to honesty, discernment, humility, and intellectual courage. Jesus proclaimed that the truth will set us free, a principle that remains vital today. However, contemporary culture has warped the concept of freedom into the right to believe whatever aligns with and alleviates personal anxieties and biases. It is a moral imperative for the church to recognize this distortion and to assume its leadership role in guiding society back toward genuine integrity, authenticity, and moral clarity.
None of this means the American church should romanticize suffering or go overboard with spiritual self-punishment about our freedoms. Religious liberty is a real gift, worth defending and sharing with others around the world. But freedom is a resource. The question is what we build with it.
The persecuted church builds resilience, because it has no other choice. We, as the American church, have the extraordinary opportunity to build resilience by choosing the disciplines of prayer, the intimacy of small communities, the rigours of genuine discipleship, and the humility of learning from brothers and sisters who have far less and often know far more about what it means to follow Jesus. The days of platforming the successful pastor who has a sizeable church need to be limited. Let us hear from those who understand suffering and can teach us resilience. Again, this is not to minimize anyone who has suffered heartbreak, setback, and challenges.
Humble servants are not formed by comfort. They are formed by encounters with the living God, with those with whom they have differences, and with the global body of Christ in all its suffering, beauty, and stubborn, joyful faithfulness.
The church in Iran gathers in secret and grows. I am reminded of Bishop Haik Hovsepian-Mehr, who served as a pastor and Superintendent of the Assemblies of God in Iran. He was killed in 1993 for his faith. In a letter he wrote a day before he vanished, he expressed his mission in Iran:
“The reason for writing these things is that if those enemies of the Cross continue their new strategy of persecution, we may lose all our converts…I know it is playing with fire but I am ready to die for the cause of the church so that others will be able to worship their Lord peacefully and without so much fear”.
The American church has resources, freedom, and opportunity. What we often lack is the formation that makes those resources spiritually dangerous in the best possible sense. The global church is not asking us to suffer. It is asking us to grow up.
The research is clear on what the church needs to address: belonging and mental health, trust and truthfulness, discipleship that actually forms people, engagement with a world that is spiritually hungry but institutionally skeptical. These are not marketing problems. They are formation problems.
And the good news is that the global church has been working on formation under pressure for two thousand years. The Spirit has not abandoned the places where the church grows without privilege. The wisdom is available to us, if we are humble enough to receive it.
This begins with listening. Not to the next leadership conference or ministry growth strategy, but to the voices of those who have learned to follow Jesus when following Jesus costs something, if not everything. It begins with prayer, not as a prelude to ministry but as the centre of it. It begins with choosing the small and vulnerable forms of community that the persecuted church knows by necessity and has largely been abandoned by the American Church because it may not get us noticed.
The question before the American church is not how to regain cultural influence. It is about becoming the kind of people who don't need it. That is a more demanding question. And I believe it is also a more hopeful one.
We are worried about attendance numbers, cultural influence, institutional trust, the next generation, and the rising tide of the religiously unaffiliated. We debate strategy, rebrand our ministries, launch new series, and study demographic trends with the urgency of a struggling startup. And underneath all of it runs a quiet fear: that we are losing.
What if we are asking the wrong questions?
My heritage is Persian. I am keenly interested in what is happening in Iran. I have good friends who are intimately involved in the church in Iran. Christians, especially Muslim-background converts, often gather through house churches, online discipleship, and quiet networks. USCIRF reports at least 143 Christians arrested across 24 Iranian cities in 2025, and Open Doors says converts face severe pressure from government, society, and family.
I am sure somewhere in Tehran, a young woman is memorizing Scripture in a house church that has no name, and no website. That same woman is worshipping in secret, knowing that the wrong conversation could cost her everything.
These brothers and sisters are not anxious about relevance. They are learning to be faithful. They have something to teach us. Before we can learn what that is, we have to see clearly. In my research, it is becoming apparent that Christianity is not simply declining. It is relocating.
Pew Research tells us that Christians remain the world's largest religious group—but from 2010 to 2020, Christianity grew more slowly than the global population, dropping from roughly 31% to 29% of humanity. Meanwhile, Gordon-Conwell and the World Christian Database report that the Global South now accounts for approximately 69% of the world's Christians, a share that may reach 78% by 2050. The Lausanne Movement's State of the Great Commission report confirms the pattern: the vitality, growth, and missionary energy of global Christianity is increasingly outside the West.
In other words, the center of gravity has shifted—not because the faith is dying, but because it is alive in places we rarely look.
The Western church, particularly in the United States of America, faces a different reality: deepening distrust of religious institutions and accelerating secularisation. Barna Group's research shows genuine spiritual hunger, especially among younger generations, but notes that fundamental practices like prayer, church attendance, and bible study remain weak.
Gen Z reports anxiety, loneliness, identity confusion, and emotional pain at alarming rates.
Here is the uncomfortable truth the American church must confront: we have built our faith on a foundation of freedom and privilege that most of the global church has never known, and we have often confused that privilege with the building itself.
We have assumed that the church requires buildings, brands, political protection, and cultural respectability. We have measured health in attendance metrics and square footage. We have outsourced discipleship to programs and platforms. We have, in many cases, built institutions that depend heavily on cultural comfort to function freely and without any disruption from the government.
The persecuted church in Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, North Korea never had that option. And so they developed something different: prayer that is not performative, discipleship that happens organically, community that bonds together under threat, and courage that doesn't require a congregation.
The question for anyone in the American Church is not whether we are grateful for religious freedom. We should be! The question is: have we used freedom to build resilience, or to build comfort?
My Iranian pastor friend said this to me in a conversation: ‘Freedom, he said, can make the church soft. And the persecuted church is holding up a mirror.’ I argue the central issue is not primarily a numerical problem. It is a formation problem.
How do we form disciples who are resilient enough to hold their faith when the [church] culture stops rewarding it? Can we be truthful enough to resist the seductive lure of political tribalism and online outrage? And be people who are non-anxious enough to be a calming, healing presence in a fragmented, fearful world?
The persecuted church has been working on this problem for centuries, by necessity. I propose several lessons that can create the calming and healing presence.
- Faith travels inward when it cannot be external. When there are no public gatherings, no social rewards for being a Christian, no institutional buildings to gather in, faith has nowhere to live except in the heart and the community. This is actually formation at its most demanding and most durable. The American church needs to ask what it would look like to form people whose faith does not depend on the comforts we have grown accustomed to.
- Prayer becomes essential, not performative. In contexts of persecution, prayer is not a warm-up to the real program. It is the program. It is the infrastructure. The Western church has largely inverted this: prayer is often the least attractive, least attended, most abbreviated element of church life. The global church offers something wholly different: communities that pray together, desperately and regularly, develop a kind of spiritual resilience that any Sunday service or church programming cannot manufacture.
- The small gathering is not a lesser church. The house church and table groups are not lesser forms of church waiting to grow up into something real. They are, in many contexts, the most vital expressions of the body of Christ on earth. I contend that the American Church’s obsession with large gatherings and impressive campuses should be interrogated in light of what God is clearly doing in smaller, more vulnerable, and more intimate forms of community. This is not to say that larger churches are doing something wrong. It is healthy to interrogate the why of any church’s mission and being.
- Discipleship happens in relationship, not in pews or rows. Persecuted believers disciple each other in kitchens and living rooms, over shared meals and whispered prayers. They cannot outsource formation to a professional pastor delivering content to a less interested audience. They have to do it themselves, which means they actually do it! I realise this next sentence may raise some eyebrows. This is a rebuke to the consumer model of church that has dominated Western Christianity for decades. As I study the early church, there was nothing consumer-oriented about it. They shared, prayed, ate, and listened to teaching and preaching. That was the structure.
The American church also faces a distinctly Western formation crisis: we are saturated with information and starving for truth.
Barna emphasizes that Christian media wields significant influence over its audience, yet it can also foster division. In an era marked by unprecedented distrust in institutions, media, and expertise, the church has not been spared from the damaging effects of misinformation, outrage, and political tribalism. Christians are increasingly drawn to conspiracy theories, which heighten anxiety and breed contempt.
The persecuted church cannot afford this. When faith costs something, there is greater care and consideration for what is actually believed and why. A casual relationship with truth is dangerous when untruth can get you killed.
The American church must urgently renew its unwavering commitment to truthfulness, moving beyond merely dismissing falsehoods as ‘fake news’ and instead fostering a deeply rooted, theologically informed dedication to honesty, discernment, humility, and intellectual courage. Jesus proclaimed that the truth will set us free, a principle that remains vital today. However, contemporary culture has warped the concept of freedom into the right to believe whatever aligns with and alleviates personal anxieties and biases. It is a moral imperative for the church to recognize this distortion and to assume its leadership role in guiding society back toward genuine integrity, authenticity, and moral clarity.
None of this means the American church should romanticize suffering or go overboard with spiritual self-punishment about our freedoms. Religious liberty is a real gift, worth defending and sharing with others around the world. But freedom is a resource. The question is what we build with it.
The persecuted church builds resilience, because it has no other choice. We, as the American church, have the extraordinary opportunity to build resilience by choosing the disciplines of prayer, the intimacy of small communities, the rigours of genuine discipleship, and the humility of learning from brothers and sisters who have far less and often know far more about what it means to follow Jesus. The days of platforming the successful pastor who has a sizeable church need to be limited. Let us hear from those who understand suffering and can teach us resilience. Again, this is not to minimize anyone who has suffered heartbreak, setback, and challenges.
Humble servants are not formed by comfort. They are formed by encounters with the living God, with those with whom they have differences, and with the global body of Christ in all its suffering, beauty, and stubborn, joyful faithfulness.
The church in Iran gathers in secret and grows. I am reminded of Bishop Haik Hovsepian-Mehr, who served as a pastor and Superintendent of the Assemblies of God in Iran. He was killed in 1993 for his faith. In a letter he wrote a day before he vanished, he expressed his mission in Iran:
“The reason for writing these things is that if those enemies of the Cross continue their new strategy of persecution, we may lose all our converts…I know it is playing with fire but I am ready to die for the cause of the church so that others will be able to worship their Lord peacefully and without so much fear”.
The American church has resources, freedom, and opportunity. What we often lack is the formation that makes those resources spiritually dangerous in the best possible sense. The global church is not asking us to suffer. It is asking us to grow up.
The research is clear on what the church needs to address: belonging and mental health, trust and truthfulness, discipleship that actually forms people, engagement with a world that is spiritually hungry but institutionally skeptical. These are not marketing problems. They are formation problems.
And the good news is that the global church has been working on formation under pressure for two thousand years. The Spirit has not abandoned the places where the church grows without privilege. The wisdom is available to us, if we are humble enough to receive it.
This begins with listening. Not to the next leadership conference or ministry growth strategy, but to the voices of those who have learned to follow Jesus when following Jesus costs something, if not everything. It begins with prayer, not as a prelude to ministry but as the centre of it. It begins with choosing the small and vulnerable forms of community that the persecuted church knows by necessity and has largely been abandoned by the American Church because it may not get us noticed.
The question before the American church is not how to regain cultural influence. It is about becoming the kind of people who don't need it. That is a more demanding question. And I believe it is also a more hopeful one.
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