Marketing the Apocalypse: The High Cost of Using Fear to Fill Pews (p1)

I just finished writing a 3 part blog series titled, “Why the Church Keeps Losing Young People—and Why Our Hardest Efforts Aren’t Stopping It”.

In that series, I argued that an increasingly relevant factor in the “youth-disengagement” problem today isn't young people being less spiritual, less committed, or less interested in the church and its mission. Instead the problem is increasingly a lack of "placeness" in the world. I won’t repeat the entire argument here. You can read the last 3 blogs if you need the full picture.

But here’s my best shot at a summary: The “Golden Era” of church engagement, growth, and activity was the 1950’s. But these high levels of religious engagement did not happen because people were “more committed” or “more spiritual”. It happened because the economy of that era (Fordist economy) created a world where housing and cost of living were so affordable that people were “anchored” or “placed” in communities. Because they were placed, they knew their neighbors, had a very simple rhythm to life, and had lots of financial and emotional bandwidth left over. That bandwidth could then be applied to volunteer organizations like the church.

Fast forward to our post-Fordist era and the economy no longer functions this way. Instead, younger generations are living in the midst of an economic and housing crisis that drains all of their financial and emotional bandwidth. They literally have next to nothing left to give because the experience of trying to survive exhausts the nervous system. In short, younger generations do not experience the placeness of older generations. They are “non-placed” and live in a state of constant anxiety and struggle. As a result, volunteer organizations like the church experience a drop in engagement.

I then argued that this is not something that can be fixed with better church programs. Instead, if the church is to offer any solution it must be to become the social location that gives younger generations a sense of “relational placeness” even if they lack “economic placeness”. We then explored what this relational placeness could look like and what changes the local church must make in order to nurture it.

However, after releasing that series I’ve had several people comment that the vision I’ve painted only works if the church is “placed in Christ” first. Because if we are not placed in Christ, we cannot create a sense of placeness for others. And I mostly agree! (I’ll talk about the part I don't fully agree with next time.) But if this is true, even partly, then it brings up a massive question: What does it actually mean in practice?

We need tangible solutions, not poetic ones. We need a path forward that answers the question: What do I do next?

Let’s Go Backwards Before We Go Forward

To find that path, we have to look at why so many of our SDA local churches aren’t "placed in Christ" to begin with. This is where it gets complicated. We could go back to the 1888 General Conference and the way righteousness-by-faith was resisted, or the fundamentalist currents of the 1920s, or the rise of Last Generation Theology. All of those moments poisoned the well.

But tracing a century of history is beyond the scope of a blog. So I want to focus on something a bit closer to home: Our Evangelistic Model.

For decades, our primary model of growth has been what George Knight referred to as "Beastly Evangelism." This model doesn’t primarily offer community; it offers explanations, certainty, and urgency — and it often leans on fear as the attention-grabber. By leading through the Mark of the Beast, end-times crisis, and “hidden forces” narratives (whether you call that secret societies, the New World Order, or just “what’s really going on behind the curtain”), we have taught people a very specific starting point for faith.

And here’s the important part: the first way someone learns to relate to God often becomes the way they continue to relate to Him.

If someone first encounters Adventism through warning, decoding the world, and identifying deception, they naturally learn to experience faith as vigilance. Christianity becomes something you guard, analyze, and protect. Being right feels central. Boundaries feel safe. Being “in the know” feels like spiritual maturity.

So over time, churches shaped by this model tend to revolve around information, correction, and identifying error. Sermons feel incomplete unless something is being exposed. New ideas feel suspicious. And unfamiliar approaches feel dangerous. This isn’t because people are bad. It’s because people practice the kind of faith they were first taught.

And this shouldn’t surprise us. When urgency and fear function as the doorway into faith, they often remain the default lens through which faith is lived. If someone was taught to watch for deception, they will keep watching for deception. If faith began as a warning message, the church culture often stays in warning mode.

Which is why you can’t simply walk in and say “let's be placed in Jesus!” Because you’re not just changing sermon topics — you’re changing the way people learned to experience God. And that is much harder than it sounds.

Why “Just Preach Jesus” Isn't Enough

The truth is God loves all of us despite our messiness. We are all welcome to the table and invited to the banquet. The problem isn’t that beastly evangelism brings “bad people” into the church. The problem is that (whether intentional or unintentional) beastly evangelism often forms people around fear and urgency first — and then doesn’t disciple them beyond that starting point. It doesn’t consistently take the anxieties, assumptions, and threat-detection mindset that got activated at the front door and heal it into trust, love, and maturity.

So we agitate anxieties about the world to get people into the pews, and then we pop them into the membership roll and give them leadership positions with minimal discipleship. And now, in positions of influence and authority, that same fear-first starting point becomes the culture. It shapes what gets celebrated, what gets resisted, what gets preached, and what gets labeled as “dangerous.” Not because people are bad — but because people tend to lead out of whatever version of Christianity first made sense to them.

Then, along comes a pastor or a leader or a young person with lots of enthusiasm and they want to "place" the church in the relational grace of Jesus. They want to talk about belonging, justice, and the healing work of the Spirit. They want to create a space that is warm, welcoming, and empowering. They want to invite their unchurched friends and serve the community and be the hands and feet of Jesus. They want to nurture an environment that cultivates disciples who make disciples.

And that’s when the war begins.

Because many of the established folk who run the show — they didn’t first encounter Adventism as an invitation into Jesus, community, and service. They encountered it as an explanation of the world: the end is near, everyone else is wrong, and we finally have the “correct doctrine” no one else has. They signed up because we had the true Sabbath that everyone else was wrong about, and the mark of the beast stuff, and the conspiracies. The sad reality then is that for many people, Adventism was first experienced not as a relational “love God, love neighbor” movement, but as a system that explained the world and defined who was right and who was wrong. It was hardline, absolutist, and strict. It flexed its high-control, dogmatic muscles. It had rigorously policed rules about cheese, drums, skirts, jewelry and wedding bands that functioned like tests of belonging—you either kept them, or you were out.

When you try to flip that table and focus on the character of Christ, these same folk don’t feel inspired—they feel threatened. They feel like you are taking away the very reason this whole thing made sense to them in the first place. You are diluting their identity, destroying the very thing that gave them meaning. You are taking away the clean boundaries, the certainty, the superiority story that made them feel safe. Because for them, the rules weren’t just a side issue, they were the structure. And the end-times urgency wasn’t bad or toxic; it was… and is… the “truth”.

This is why "poetic" solutions fail. Because in many local SDA churches you aren't just dealing with a lack of gospel preaching or some “salvation doctrine forgetfulness”; you’re dealing with a deeply ingrained identity formed around certainty and vigilance. And if we are going to build a church that places our young people relationally and “in Jesus” we have to be honest about why that isn’t already happening.

So, What Do We Do Next?

We have to stop pretending that "placing a church in Jesus" is a simple matter of changing the sermon topics. We are dealing with a culture shaped by a particular way of learning to experience faith, and cultures don’t shift just because we preach different sermons.

If we want to reach the young people who are currently fleeing the institution, we have to address this honestly. We have to wrestle with what it means to do the hard, messy work of building a relational home and patiently reshaping how we practice life with God together.

In my next article, I’m going to offer some practical, "boots-on-the-ground" steps for how we can navigate this. But for now, I want to hear from you:

• Have you experienced this "clash of identities" in your local church?

• Does the "Beast-Driven" model help explain some of the tensions you've encountered?

• What practical solutions have you seen shift an unhealthy local church culture toward a healthier one?

Drop your comment below and lets explore together.