Why is it that America has descended into such a mess morally? Why do nearly 28% of Americans identify as nones (no religious affiliation)? Why are 66% of kids raised in Christian homes and churches walking away from the church when they graduate from high school, and most will never return?
In his excellent short book An Introduction to Worldview, Dr. David Closson, director of the Center for Biblical Worldview at the Family Research Council, highlights George Barna’s recent research on the church in America. It reveals that only 21% of evangelical Christians and only 37% of pastors have a truly biblical worldview.
What can and should pastors do to counteract these trends? I would encourage pastors who believe Genesis to consider three things.
Teach Your Congregation About Worldview.
It is critical that you teach adults and youth in your church what a worldview is. For example, is there a God or not? If so, what is he like, and what is his relationship to the physical universe? What is the universe (an accident or purposefully created, infinite and eternal or not, etc.)? What is man (just an animal, unique from animals, related to God or not, basically good or inherently sinful, etc.)? Is there such a thing as absolute truth? Can we know truth, and if so, how can we know it? Is there right and wrong in an absolute sense, or is all morality a matter of opinion or majority vote?
Biblical Christianity answers these questions one way. The evolutionary view—which dominates our culture and public education and is humanistic and atheistic—answers these questions in a very different way. For the Christian, his or her answers should come from the Bible. Unfortunately, as the studies noted above show, many people in the church live their daily lives unconscious of the fact that they are actually influenced by the evolutionary humanist worldview more than they are by the worldview they profess to believe at church. So we must inform people about what a worldview is and how it affects our decisions and relationships.
Teach Your Congregation the Biblical Worldview.
Pastor, you must clearly teach your people what the biblical worldview is because as Barna has shown, most Christians including most pastors don’t have a truly biblical worldview. I would add, on the basis of my reading and experience in seminary and at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, that most seminary professors don’t have one either. It is far more than just believing that God created the world, that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior, and that the Bible is God’s inerrant Word.
A truly biblical worldview must start with taking Genesis 1–11 as literal history. Those chapters reveal very important truths about the nature of God, the nature of the creation, the nature of man, and how they relate to each other. They also teach how and when the world came into existence and in what order God made things. They explain the origin of plants, animals, and people, the origin of the earth, the sun, moon, and stars, the origin of marriage, sin, and death, and the origin of languages and people groups.
Those chapters also tell us that the world is not now the way it was originally created. The whole creation, not just humans, has been ruined by sin and death. Those early chapters of the Bible also begin to reveal the solution to sin and death that would eventually be provided by Jesus Christ, the Messiah of Israel.
If the early chapters of Genesis are not giving us true history (if those chapters are mythology or symbolic poetry), as many Christian students, lay people, pastors, and seminary professors believe, then the whole foundation of the biblical worldview is false. Christians cannot compromise with evolution or with millions of years. If the foundation is destroyed, what can the righteous do (Psalm 11:3)? The superstructure of the gospel and the Bible’s teaching about how we are to live and what we should expect for the future collapses into nothing more than wishful thinking. Jesus and the apostles all took Genesis 1–11 as literal history, and so must we.
Pastor, have you preached through Genesis 1–11, not simply to teach spiritual, moral, and gospel truths? Have you connected those truths to the teaching of evolution and millions of years and their influence on the moral issues of the day (LGBTQ+, abortion, racism, euthanasia, etc.)? Have you helped your people to see that Genesis 1–11 is absolutely foundational to the whole rest of the Bible?
Equip Your Congregation to Defend the Biblical Worldview.
Pastor, you also need to equip your people to defend the biblical worldview. That means teaching them apologetics—preparing them to give reasons for why they believe what they believe, to give a humble defense of the biblical worldview and the gospel on which it is built when they are confronted with objections (1 Peter 3:15). Many Christians know what they believe, but they don’t know why, and they can’t explain to a nonbeliever why he should believe the Bible and turn from his sin and trust in Christ.
Christians, especially young people, need to be able to answer many apologetic questions, such as how we know the Bible is the Word of God, why it is very reasonable to believe that Jesus rose from the dead, and that miracles in the Bible really happened.
But the greatest apologetic challenge facing the church today is evolution and the idea of millions of years. Christians all over the world are confronted with the evolutionary brainwashing in the schools, media, museums, and national parks. Every Christian needs to have answers for questions like how do you fit dinosaurs into the Bible? Don’t natural selection and mutations prove evolution? Who was Cain’s wife? What about radiometric dating and the claimed geological evidence that the earth is millions of years old? Can we fit the big bang theory into Genesis? Was Noah’s flood global? Were the days of creation literal days? Were Adam and Eve really the first humans and supernaturally created?
Good answers for these questions exist: True science confirms the biblical teaching regarding each answer. And Christians don’t need a science degree to understand and learn the answers. But most Christians, especially youth, don’t know the answers. And Christian youth who are superficially taught to believe in young-earth creation but are given no biblical and scientific apologetics to defend that belief are sitting ducks for deception, whether they go to a secular or a Christian university (as most of the latter are compromised with evolution or at least with millions of years).
We are in a battle for the truth and Peter tells us in 1 Peter 3:15 that we need to be ready to give an answer to the unbeliever. Apologetics is absolutely essential to produce strong Christians who can stand in the relentless evolutionary assault and who can effectively witness to people who have been brainwashed with the lie of evolution. The literal history of the early chapters of Genesis is absolutely foundational to a Christian worldview. To ignore them and compromise with evolutionary thinking is to have a less-than-fully-biblical worldview.
