Kodak had dominated the film and camera industry for decades, but its unwillingness to transform its business model led to its extinction. Kodak made billions of dollars selling analog cameras and film cartridges, but when digital photography came along, they ignored the new technology and continued to focus on printing photos as the company’s main revenue driver.
Even when smartphones transformed the way people shared photos – through social media rather than physical prints – Kodak stubbornly stuck to the outdated method of print photography. When digital photography first became popular in 1981, Kodak’s sales exceeded $10 billion, but their refusal to recognize the cultural shift led them to bankruptcy in 2012.
Just as choosing to ignore social change is a death sentence for a business, unwillingness to adapt to generational disruption will assure the Church’s ruination. Claiming to be “right” will only ensure that the Church will become inconsequential in our lifetime. A seismic shift has occurred in the spiritual world, but the church is still hanging on to ancient Middle Eastern cultural norms.
The church is busily telling people that it is right, but the world is waiting for it to demonstrate the love of Jesus. We are more worried about our reputation rather than the reputation of Jesus. God is not love when people of God only show hate. The church has become irrelevant to entire generations of Busters, Gen X, Gen Z, but also to the Millennials.
Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and the United Methodists are divided over an outdated cultural issue. We forget that young people believe that biology rules the day, not old, outdated social views of thousands of years ago. The church is fighting over an issue that has been settled in the young people’s minds.
Denying science only makes the Christian faith a superstition and spiritual disciplines meaningless rituals. The Bible becomes old wives’ tales, and faith becomes a waste of time. The religious become fools, and the faithful become suckers. In a world where science is rejected because we don’t like it, then truth becomes subjective preferences, and God’s truths become fanciful fables.
The fundamental problem with conservative NOT-christian cultural institutional religiosity is that it is not based on facts, science, or truth. Its rejection of modern science is because it reveals shortcomings of the 2000-year-old Judean cultural stigma, making the modern church a cultural laughing stock. The younger generation value education and the rejection of the truth by the church has led them to reject the church.
The conservative cultural anti-Jesus religiosity in the name of Jesus is an absolute abomination to God. We need to defend our faith in Jesus by upholding science and God’s creative truth.
Pastor Sunny