"We have been filled with grief as we have witnessed the decline of the North American Church that was once filled with missionary zeal and yet now seems determined to bury itself in a deadly embrace with the spirit of the age"

A lament sounds beneath the words, the sorrow of a shepherd who believes he has watched not merely institutional decline but spiritual erosion. The grief is corporate and historical: a community once animated by a sending impulse, willing to cross oceans and cultures with a confident proclamation, now seen as listless or turned inward. “Missionary zeal” evokes discipline, sacrifice, and a sense of transcendent purpose; its perceived absence suggests a church that has lost the reason for its existence.

The sharper edge lies in the diagnosis. The decline is not framed as an accident of demographics or the inevitabilities of secularization but as a deliberate convergence with the culture’s prevailing currents. A “deadly embrace” is intimate and voluntary; it implies infatuation with approval, relevance, or comfort, a clasp that suffocates distinctiveness. The “spirit of the age” names the shifting orthodoxies of any given moment, consumerism, expressive individualism, moral relativism, political tribalism, forces that promise vitality yet often corrode depth, discipline, and doctrinal coherence.

Beneath the rhetoric sits a classic tension in Christian witness: contextualization versus capitulation. Engagement requires translation; capitulation abandons the grammar of faith altogether. The lament claims that the line has been crossed, that accommodation has become identity. When holiness, truth claims, and costly discipleship are muted to secure cultural standing, missionary clarity inevitably dims; if there is little difference to announce, there is little mission to pursue.

The critique is therefore also a summons: recover the sources of life, Scripture’s authority, creedal clarity, catechesis that forms resilient disciples, prayer and sacrament as the church’s heartbeat, and a courage willing to be out of step with the zeitgeist. Paradoxically, the path to credible public witness may run through renewed distinctiveness, not mimicry. The grief, then, functions as a prophetic mercy, urging repentance and reorientation so that mission might again flow from a people set apart yet sent into the world.