America is not a Christian nation
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Al Fadi is an former Muslim from Saudi Arabia, and he now works as a Christian apologist.
He recently gave his testimony on a YouTube video with fellow apologist David Wood, and he made an interesting comment about the Saudi perception of America.
He said the people of Saudi Arabia hate America, because they hate Christians, and they think of the United States as a Christian nation.
Then, they see our movies and television, and they hear our music, and conclude that Christians, and Christian doctrine, are immoral.
Obviously they’re wrong.
Not about the immorality — all Christians are sinners — it’s a prerequisite to being one.
They’re wrong about the United States being a Christian nation, but they can’t be faulted.
Even American believers can fall into the trap of believing we live in a Christian nation.
We can argue about our nation’s origins all day long, but it's clear where we are now. If we judge our nation the way the rest of the world does, we must either conclude that all Christians are immoral, or that we do not live in a Christian nation.
The Oxford University Press reports that Christians in other parts of the world are sending missionaries to the United States because they see it as the modern-day Rome — the furthest thing I can imagine from a Christian nation.
Maybe you look at things happening elsewhere in the country, and conclude that while we do not live a Christian nation, at least we live in a Christian town, nestled safely in the Bible belt.
If so, you’d be wrong again. San Angelo is not a Christian town any more than the United States is a Christian nation.
I will grant that we have lots of churches. Google returns 67 results when I searched “churches in San Angelo.” Looking through the list, I noticed several churches were missing, so let’s assume there are twice that number in San Angelo.
According to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, the median church congregation size in the United States is 75 members. In that case, we can safely bet that 10,050 people regularly attend church in San Angelo.
The US Census Bureau’s estimate San Angelo's current population is100,450 people, which means only 10 percent of San Angeloans regularly gather as believers in Jesus.
That is not what a Christian town looks like.
Or look at the jail bookings the Standard-Times publishes every day at gosanangelo.com — that’s not what a Christian town looks like, either.
It is important that the church in San Angelo stops thinking of our town as Christian.
If you go to the mall and ask ten people what the gospel is, you might get two who know.
Our town is starving for the gospel, but we are busy huddled in our churches thinking the town outside is doing fine. If we believed there were a need for the gospel outside our walls, we’d go out into our town and share it, wouldn’t we?
We do not live in a Christian town, but I want to.
I want San Angelo to be a Christian town. I’d like to invite you to join me and others in making that happen. If you do that math, you’ll notice that if every person attending church were truly saved, each believer would only need to reach 10 people before the whole town heard the gospel.
If each believer only shared the gospel once a week, we’d be done evangelizing San Angelo before summer is over. Assuming God does an amazing miracle, and every person in San Angelo believed the gospel and then shared with another 10 people outside San Angelo, one per week, and every person who believed did the same, we would reach a population equivalent to California, Texas, Florida, New York and Connecticut combined before the end of the year.
Not only could we live in a Christian town, but we could become a truly Christian nation.