Should we really expect Christianity to be popular?

Should we really expect Christianity to be popular? That’s the question I have been thinking about. For many years now we all hear the stats, see articles, hear people talk about the “decline of the church.” The decline has to do with the membership in the institutional church — an organizational metric. Some might even say that this extends to the decline of the influence that the institutional church has on the wider culture.

And while numbers show the decline to be real in terms of membership, I still have to wonder — are we making a false assumption. Are we assuming that just because the church has had larger membership rolls and a large influence on the culture at large in the last 100 or so years, that this is the norm over the course of the last 2000 years? Or are we succumbing to a common human error — that we assume what we have experienced in our own lifetimes is the norm that we measure everything else against.

Are we forgetting that most churches in the US were small in membership numbers in the early 1900’s before the two world wars? The spike in membership happened in response to the World Wars and the devastation they wrought, the uncertainty they created, the search for meaning in the midst of death, etc.

Are we assuming that because entire towns in certain places had everyone as a member of the local church (this was certainly the case in Medieval Europe) that all those people were there because they cared about faith? There are literally stories about…