In the first episode of this season, we looked at the reconstruction of Notre Dame after the fire, the painstaking work of refashioning and rebuilding a place that took centuries to construct. Rebuilding requires sacrifice… a dogged commitment to seeing the task through. If this is the case for churches, it’s also the case for families of churches, for networks, partnerships, conventions, and denominations. In episode two, we looked at the trend of “dechurching.” But the other big story is about the shifting landscape of those who do belong to a church. I’m talking about the decline of most denominations in America, and the rise of non-denominational churches in Protestant Christianity.

The iconic family scenes we see in classic TV are not the norm for most people in American society today. Divorce has disrupted more families than ever before in our history. And the ripple effects go beyond the obvious heartache and loss, affecting even the banalities of annual rituals and traditions. Challenges to family life aren’t new. But the challenges in our day have multiplied. And these problems aren’t unrelated to the difficulties we face as God’s people, especially since we see in the New Testament how the church is to be the family of God. On this episode of Reconstructing Faith, join Trevin Wax as he considers the church’s responsibility in the era of family breakdown.

In the latter decades of the 20th century, many churches across the country shifted from a formal style of worship, with traditional and classical music, to a more informal style of worship, with praise choruses and rock-influenced instrumentation. These changes in worship didn’t happen without conflict. In the 1980’s and 1990’s, controversies became so heated in some churches that some observers began calling them “The Worship Wars.” Today, we may be well past the worst of the worship wars, but we’re never going to be in a season where discussions over what we do as gathered members of the body of Christ go away.

For the past few years, sociologists and journalists have been describing millennials as “the burnout generation.” Now, there are reports that burnout and stress are on the rise with Gen Z as well. And then there’s the reality of spiritual burnout, the inability to feel the presence and power of God, a loss of desire for spiritual things. Burnout isn’t just a pastor problem. It isn’t just a workplace problem. It’s a spiritual problem, and this challenge affects the church.

We’ve entered a new era in terms of technology. AI is the most powerful predictive tool we’ve ever created. It’s really good at analyzing and predicting human behavior… like, scary good. And the new world of AI is leading to ethical dilemmas previous generations would have found unimaginable. What will happen when in the future, it becomes even harder to discern truth from falsehood, human fingerprints from AI creations, when we no longer agree on common narratives because we’re living in parallel online AI-influenced universes? What does unity and division look like in the church when these problems arise? And how will we address some of the ethical questions that arise?

There will be no avoiding conversation about sex and gender in the days ahead, and as Christians, the starting place must be our convictions about reality. All our choices must flow from those convictions. Strong convictions are the prerequisite for true conversations. And convictions and compassion aren’t in opposition. When the world is falling en masse for a bold and terrible lie, the most important and compassionate thing the church can do is uphold the courageous and irrepressible truth.

More and more commentators speak openly about the social and mental health consequences of porn: the degrading nature of warped expectations, the ever-more transgressive practices, the normalization of violence, and the dark underside of human trafficking. But most of the time, they stop short of pronouncing moral judgment about pornography in general. As people who follow Jesus Christ, we go further. We don’t oppose pornography merely because of bad outcomes. We oppose pornography because we know, deep down, our hearts are to be pointed in a different direction. But we fool ourselves if we think porn is something only out there, in the world.

Across the spectrum, commentators chatter away on the crisis of manhood in the wake of gender confusion, the denigration of men traditionally involved in “men’s work,” and the quest for significance. What happens when markers of manhood are obscured as men stagger forward without community? What happens when we pathologize competition, achievement, roughness, and the aggression required to protect the weak or pursue good? How can we push back against toxic expressions of masculinity without clarity on actual manliness, one that shatters caricatures? On this episode of Reconstructing Faith, join Trevin Wax as he considers how the church can respond wisely to the challenges facing men today.

In the United States, we are experiencing the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country. Recent research shows about 15 percent of American adults — that’s 40 million people — have stopped going to church, and all of this, within the past 25 years. You might look at the data and assume that we’re headed for a non-religious, non-spiritual kind of culture in the next thirty years. But the religiously unaffiliated—the fastest-growing religious demographic in the United States—are often still religious in personal and privatized senses, only that their religious identities are in flux, mixing and matching various practices.

The continuing decline of institutional trust represents a seismic shift in our culture and society today. Some of that distrust is warranted. In season one, we looked at the credibility crisis facing the church on several fronts. We’ve looked at some of the rot that’s in the church--rot that needs to be removed. But some of our institutional distrust comes from an overly idealistic expectation of what institutions can provide, and from the acids seeping into all areas of our culture, slowly dissolving the structures that people in the past built and blessed us with.