The creed, attributed to the earliest missionary followers of Jesus, distills the basic outline of what it means to be a Christian into a short summation that belies the depth and richness of what it proclaims.

If we are to reach our culture with the truth of the gospel, we must deal with these troubling trends that have crept into many of our churches.

Brothers and sisters, we ought to recover the roots of real Christianity before those who care are too few to do anything useful about it. Part of that recovery will involve identifying some of the factors that contribute to the problem. Some of these will be difficult to consider, but we ought to consider them anyway. Some of the problems we might explore are these: