158: Why You Might Be Stuck in Anemic Christianity (And Not Even Know It)

Christ's Kingship and the Local Church

To the Ruled Church Podcast. This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased. He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?

You see that one in Pechote, Mexico? Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres, down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

The church is not a democracy, it's a monarchy.

Christ is king. You can't be Christian without a local church.

You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible-believing church, and spend your life serving Jesus.

In a local, visible congregation. Somebody sent me a reel the other day of David Miller. Brother David Miller is the last brother that you hear in the podcast intro. The local, visible congregation there, and then we come in.

Well, that's Brother David Miller, and I was just thinking, man, how I miss that brother. He was a dear brother. I got to be friends with him over the years. I wish I could have been closer, but got to know him, talk with him.

Dear brother, may the Lord raise up more and more like Brother David Miller. Well, welcome to the Rural Church Podcast. I am your host, Allen Nelson. I'm one of the pastors of Providence Baptist Church.

We are a confessionally-reformed Baptist church in central Arkansas. We're just west of Conway, south of Interstate 40, I don't know, 15 minutes, exit 108, Moralton. Go down another 15, south 15 minutes, that's Perryville.

We have been on a journey. I've been a pastor here just over 10 years, but a little over three years ago, about three and a half years ago, we adopted the 1689 as our official confession of faith. We called another elder, gone through a great journey of reformation.

Maybe one of these days, I'll podcast about that whole, that whole ordeal, which God brought us through and turned out to be for our good and his glory. Today on the episode, I want to talk about anemic Christianity.

Saul's Conversion and the Threat of Real Christianity

And really the idea comes from, well, I'll tell you first and foremost, the idea comes from when I'm preaching through Acts right now and when we were in Acts chapter nine, of course, you know it as the conversion of Saul, but in Acts chapter nine, verse one, Luke writes, but Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.

And so the thought, I didn't really develop this so much so in the sermon, I mean a little bit, but not to the extent we're going to deal with today. The thought is, at least Paul hated Christianity. At least he understood what he was up against.

At least he understood that if Christianity were true, it would mean the eradication of his entire worldview. It would spin him around. Some would say, turn him upside down. We would probably articulate more rightly, turn him right side up.

But all that he lived for, all that he thought, all that he saw, all that he knew, all that he had worked toward, would be undone by what the apostles and disciples were preaching and the way that they were living.

The issue is that today, so many are comfortable, they just seem so indifferent to the claims of Christianity and that is because we live, I'm talking about in Arkansas and surrounding areas, we live in a place that is very, very comfortable with anemic Christianity.

Defining Anemic Christianity

So before we go further, it'd probably be helpful, let's define, what do I mean by anemic Christianity? Well, in one way, I would talk about, by what you don't know. So anemic Christianity is the place where you can, you don't know what the means of grace are.

If you hear means of grace, you're like, what does that mean? You don't really understand what church discipline is. Maybe you can't define the word propitiation. Maybe you are a struggle. If someone says, what is the gospel?

And people would say, well, it's the Bible or something like that or Jesus died for my sins, which by the way, we're getting somewhere with Jesus died for my sins, right? But what I mean is with anemic Christianity, it's just, it's sort of like, okay, but what does that mean?

And sort of the end result is kind of like, well, he died for my sins so I could have a better life type thing. So that's sort of the negative way to define it. Maybe the more formal way is that it's a form of professed Christian faith.

With anemic Christianity is a form of professed Christian faith that will keep the outward language. So we're gonna talk about Jesus. We're gonna talk about Trinity. We're gonna talk about church. We're gonna talk about forgiveness.

So you've got the outward language. You've got the forms. You've got the church. You've even got, in many places still, you've got membership. You have the pastor. You have baptism. You have Lord's Supper.

So anemic Christianity keeps the outward language in forms of Christianity, but it lacks the spiritual vitality. It's really surface level. It lacks the transforming power. It lacks the doctrinal robustness, the costly discipleship of genuine biblical faith.

It's what has been said before, something like squishy evangelicalism, right? Soft, it would call itself. So I'm still talking about, so when I talk about anemic Christianity, I'm not talking about the liberalism.

I'm still talking about it's got a veneer of conservatism. So it would call itself maybe a complimentarian in the sense that they would at least outwardly confess that a man is the leader of the home and men should be leaders in the church.

But I mean, practically, practically it's really heavily influenced, if not outright led by women. It's low cost. It's more about maybe affirmation than transformation. I mean, it looks like Christianity on the outside, but it has very little, perhaps if any, of the blood of the real substance running through it, right?

So anemia, right? Lack of blood, weakness, lack of vitality. That's what we mean, anemic Christianity. And so going back to the Apostle Paul, it was like he was not responding to anemic Christianity. He was responding to the fully leaded, real deal, pure truth.

Not that there was an error in the early church, of course, at times. I mean, Paul wrote to the church at Corinth. So even early on, we know that there's things that we have to contend with. And no such thing as, quote unquote, a perfect church.

Even at the very onset, you have Ananias and Sapphira. You have Simon, the sorcerer, and these sorts of things. But the point is, his response is not to this weak, sort of anemic Christianity we see today, but his response was to the full-throated gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The redemption that we have through him, the righteousness we need that he has accomplished in his life, the forgiveness of sins that he has achieved by his propitiatory death, his substitutionary death, his wrath-satisfying death, his resurrection from the grave for our sins.

That's what Paul is responding to. And so why today are there so many places where people can just kind of slip in, feel comfortable? Actually, what happens is the church gathering, it becomes about either like just you kind of feel this spiritual high every week, even if you come every week, or it's about performance.

You know, people want to get up on stage and perform or whatever, and it makes them feel better. Or just attenders are like, well, I should go to church. And so they go, but even in, so here's the thing too, within anemic Christianity, there can be true believers.

And in fact, if you're part of a healthy church, a robustly doctrinal, Christ-centered, Christ-preaching, fellowship of the saints, serious about membership, if you're part of a church like that, there's probably a time in your life that you were part of anemic Christianity.

So I want to go through some reasons why people stay in sort of this comfortable, thin Christianity versus what Saul is responding to, the high-octane, Christ-centered, biblical preaching, church membership, church discipline, means of grace, sound doctrine Christianity.

Cultural Christianity Feels Normal

And the first is, and this is a problem, but the first is that cultural Christianity just feels normal. I mean, there are genuine believers within the anemic church. And by the way, some of these anemic churches you would call true churches.

They're just weak and they're on life support, but they remain true churches. Not all of them do, but you'd have true believers within some of these movements. And they literally just don't know anything else.

I remember being like that myself. You just, I like, well, this is Christianity, right? And you're like, you try to challenge people and you try to, you say, okay, well, we need to, you know, have sweeter fellowship.

And, but it's like, it just never really, I mean, you know, you have groups, by the way, getting together in life groups and getting together with people. It's good, by the way, it's good. But that in and of itself, like for some people, like that's the definition of, oh yeah, we're in a serious church because we have life groups or whatever, but there's all sorts.

I mean, people used to get together to play Dungeon and Dragons, right? So like just getting together, it does not necessarily mean that the church is healthy or that it's strong. But the whole point is that cultural Christianity, this anemia, it just feels normal.

For the true Christian, it's like, I think there is something within us that's like, okay, isn't there something more? But it's like, you don't see it. I'll give you an example from my own life. Like 15, man, over 15 years ago, is one of the first times I really, really got to see it.

So I went to a conference with Richard Owen Roberts. It was a local church conference. And it was at Christ Church, New Albany with Pastor John Snyder. And they had another elder, I believe his name was Laney.

He's passed on since then. But that was the first time I can remember in my life seeing a church with healthy membership and thinking to myself like, these people, I mean, my first reaction was, these people are weird.

They were so hospitable, so holy, so concerned about doctrine, so in love with the Lord and one another that it was like, I've stepped into a foreign country. And I was, I mean, I was a believer. I was a pastor at that time.

But it was like, I've never seen this. Because I was stuck in this rut of anemic Christianity. It's like, it just, this is what it is. There's nothing else. And so I think there's a lot of people out there and they go and they listen to the 25-minute sermon and they sing all the songs.

And by the way, some of the songs are so weak, you know? Like, I'll just give you an example. This is a song we sing. We have sang before at our church. And we don't sing it that much anymore. But I give you, it may surprise some people that I'm not against the song.

And we could sing it Sunday at our church. And I would be fine with it so far as it paired with others. But songs like How Great Is Our God. So what's the problem with How Great Is Our God? Well, nothing like formally is problematic.

It's just, it doesn't have anything weighty in it. It doesn't have anything, you know, how great is our God and you just sing it. I mean, amen, how great is God, how great is our God, amen. And again, like I said, I'm not trying to knock on the song.

We could sing it here Sunday and we'd be fine and our people would sing it and we would love it. But if that's like, if that's the pinnacle, like if that song is the ceiling of your doctrinal singing instead of the floor, well, that's a problem because it doesn't really have much substance to it.

It doesn't have much doctrinal weight. And what I'm saying is for some churches, if you sang that song, that's like the best. That's like the most weighty doctrine that you would ever get. And then they're singing a lot of songs that are much worse than that or not really even, shouldn't even be sang at all.

And it's tolerated because music is very powerful, by the way, I know it's kind of getting off the top, but it's tolerated because the way it makes people feel and it's just like, it just feels normal.

The Weak and Incomplete Gospel of Anemic Christianity

So it's a low cost. It's socially acceptable in our area. No one ever raises questions. If you do get together in groups, you're not asking serious questions. How's your time in the word? Have you struggled with pornography?

Have you, you know, like we're in each other's lives, we're fighting sin, we're walking together. Like it's just staying surface level, you know, it's not, how's your prayer life? Nope. How's your marriage?

Nope. Nothing doctrinally weighty. It's just this anemic Christianity and it just feels normal. Another problem, this is a big one too. So first, why do people just stay in anemic Christianity? First, it just feels normal.

They don't know anything else. That's all they've seen. Secondly, all they've heard is either a weak or maybe an incomplete gospel. So the gospel is, turns into, you know, affirmation of who you are. Like you hear this kind of songs on K-Love a lot, but it's like basically, you know, you need God because without him, you know, your life is incomplete and you're more than you think you are.

And you don't have to listen to the negativity of the world and God loves you. And so you just, that's all you're hearing. Like that's all, Jesus died on the cross for your sin so that you can be free from your drugs and you can be free from your past change or whatever.

And it's hard to discern because like, there's truth in that, right? There's truth in that. But the problem is that's all you're hearing. And if that's all you're hearing, that's a very watered down gospel.

Or the other part I would say is like, it's an incomplete gospel. Because you know that I'm afraid, I was thinking about this this morning. I saw my kids, prayed with them as they were starting homeschool.

And my son was doing a chemistry work. And one of my daughters was talking was, you know, how kids just jaw back and forth. But basically she was like, I've already taken chemistry and stuff like that.

Well, I was just thinking about chemistry. And I was thinking about the definitions and the work that you have to do with chemistry and the words that you have to know. And the thought crossed my mind that's like, but when you come to the church and you talk about big words, it can really turn people off.

And so one of the words that I'm afraid we don't actually know is the word justification. We don't understand the doctrine of justification by faith alone. And Luther said, that is the doctrine on which the church stands or falls.

And we don't even know, we don't even know the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Why? Because we have heard weak and incomplete gospel our whole lives in these anemic churches. Last year in 2025, in May of 2025, I debated a Roman Catholic priest.

And the thesis was Rome has abandoned the gospel or something like that. Rome has forsaken the gospel. And I had a lot of people, a lot of evangelicals, a lot of professing Christians who said, you know, didn't understand the debate.

So it was just mean to even have a debate. Like it doesn't even matter. And I'm just thinking our Baptist forefathers, our evangelical forefathers are proverbially rolling in their graves right now We don't, there are people who don't even understand the differences between Christianity and Roman Catholicism.

Okay, so what is justification? Let's teach it to our kids. Justified, to be justified is just as if I'd always obeyed the law of God. Why? Because a foreign and alien righteousness, the righteousness of Christ by His active and passive obedience to the law has been imputed to me, has been credited to me, has been applied to my account so that legally speaking, when God looks upon me, He sees the righteousness of His Son.

There is no entering into heaven without a perfect righteousness. And the only way that that is achievable is not you and God working together, but the righteousness of Christ that has been applied to your account, credited to you by the work of Jesus.

And it's received only by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. And this is the only way any person, Old Testament, New Testament, beyond has ever been justified. We don't understand justification.

We're not hearing the gospel. We're either hearing a weak gospel, a watered down version, or we're only hearing part of the gospel, or we're not seeing the fullness of the gospel on and on and on. That's why many stay in anemic Christianity.

Self-Righteousness and Moral Performance

Thirdly, I would say, why do we stay in anemic Christianity? And the answer would be because we like the self -righteousness and moral performance that it produces, like a mask, if you will. So you think about, well, Paul talks about it, right?

Paul talks about that he was a Hebrew of Hebrews. And it's interesting, isn't it, that a lot of these churches would be known for preaching, maybe against legalism. Don't be traditionalists. Don't be legalistic.

Don't be religious, even, they might say that. But they can be some of the most legalistic places that you could find yourself. So what I mean is like they feel good about being tangentially associated, maybe with the church.

They go every few weeks, maybe, sometimes now, even a few months. But it makes them feel, hey, look, I'm right before God. And they try to do the Dave Ramsey financial plan. Like, hey, look, I'm a moral person.

And my kids are, well, we're talking about public school and homeschool. That's different. I mean, anemic Christianity, by the way, let me say this. You, it's not that if you homeschool, you're righteous.

Absolutely not. Because in a lot of places, homeschool is, it's about just being done with the government, whatever. There's a lot of bad reasons that people homeschool. But in these anemic circles, the concept of homeschooling is just weird and foreign because they don't even understand the responsibility that they have before God to raise their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

And I'll set that aside. The point that I was just making is, my kids are doing good in school. Like all these things bolster sort of this measuring by comparison. So we've got the money in the bank, kids are doing good in school, they're playing sports.

We have these religious habits. And so all of this breeds, believe it or not, all this breeds like this self-righteous, moral performance-based Christianity that I feel good about myself because I've met this very low standard that I've set for myself.

By the way, when you reject God's law, you're gonna replace it with something else, but which man's law. Anyway, the point is that you kind of have this feeling better about yourself. That's why you stay.

The Loss of Church-World Distinction

And then the fourth reason is, it goes together. Why do people stay in anemic Christianity? But there's no clear distinction between the church and the world. So it's kind of weird that I would say, I mean, how could you say on one side it's like a moral booster for you, but on the other side, there's no distinction?

Well, what I mean is, membership is not really taken seriously. So it's not, there's not real accountability. There's not real discipline. By the way, we've said this before on the podcast, but a true church, a true church, not a healthy church, but just a true church, an actual church has three characteristics or this historically has been defined having three characteristics.

First, it preaches the right gospel. Secondly, it observes the two ordinances. And thirdly, it practices church discipline. So the way we try to talk about it here is, there are churches on the path to recovering church discipline.

They're working through those things. Amen, praise God. We should support them and help them. But there are also churches who would scoff at, have forsaken, turn their back on, run away from church discipline.

And when you deal with a place like that, you're really dealing with borderline situation if that place is even a church at all. But what I'm saying is, there's no clear distinction between the church and the world.

So discipline's out the window. Membership's not taken all that seriously. People can attend the services and they could even serve. But I mean, they're really, you're gonna find them watching the same movies that the world watches.

You're gonna find them in love with the same things that the world's in love with. You wanna talk about reading the Puritans together or whatever, they ain't into that, but they'll go watch the new Spider-Man, which I'm not saying.

Watching the new Spider-Man is wrong. That's not the point. But the point is they can find agreement in all these things that the world finds agreement in, but so little substance of Christ, of strong doctrine, of sound doctrine, of robust ecclesiology.

That is the doctrine of the church. So there's not a clear demarcation. Their life essentially looks almost no different than an upstanding citizen who doesn't go to church, maybe doesn't even profess Christ.

There's a, the only difference is one of them goes to church periodically or even regularly and the other doesn't. All right, fifthly, the apathy is comfortable. And it's similar to the first point. You don't see anything different, but it's just comfortable.

Apathy, Family Worship, and Therapeutic Christianity

And these next two are really gonna kind of tie in together, but it's just easy to be apathetic, like to just not care, to just be indifferent. Nothing makes the claims of Christ feel urgent. I mean, yeah, okay, look, you're gonna have classes in these churches of like, yeah, there's gonna have a marriage class and a financial class and a teaching your kids class.

But as far as like an urgency to be faithful in church and in family worship, right, to faithfully gather your family around during the week, around the word of God, to pray together, to sing together, to read the Bible together, like that's not there.

It's just all these, you know, and then I've been to some of the marriage conferences and all that, which they turn out to be in name complementarian, but really kind of egalitarian. You know, it's the headship of the husband in the home is not actually practiced.

He's more of just considered the servant leader. And yes, husbands should certainly serve their wives. You know, Christ serves the church. We should serve our wives. But at the end of the day, husbands have to lead.

Even when a wife disagrees, she needs to submit. Even if, like even if she disagrees in so far as the husband's not sinning or leading her to sin or leading her to violate her conscience. Anyway, that's not the point.

But the point is, it's just really, really easy to be apathetic towards really, really changing and really being challenged. And the next one, the sixth one kind of goes along with this, the last point really I'd have is like the fear of real cost.

The Cost of Robust Biblical Christianity

So the issue is you have people within anemic Christianity and maybe they see a healthy church across town or they begin to read and they begin to say, oh, this is how it should be. But then there's a fear.

There's a fear. Because to be in a biblical church, to practice robust biblical Christianity, it's costly. People are gonna think that you're weird. People are going to maybe even lose friendships. You may even lose certain situations.

You might lose the promotion or the electoral race or whatever. There's a real cost. Jesus says there'd be a cost, right? Luke 9, 23, take up your cross. We're gonna take up our cross daily, Matthew 7.

Jesus says it's the narrow way, few find it. The point is there are some who would stay in anemic Christianity because they look at biblical Christianity. They begin to know a little bit about it and they say, I just can't do that.

I just can't give myself to that. Now, I do believe that real Christians, true believers who begin to be associated with robust Christianity eventually are gonna give themselves over. Initially, there's maybe a fear or rejection.

I don't know what to do. If I go all in, this is gonna be a cost. But the spirit of God inside them continues to pull them towards that, continues to draw them towards that because they see the substance.

They see the real meaning and truth. But for unconverted people, the cost is too great. I think it was Leonard Ravenhill who said something along the lines of revival tarries because we are content to live without it.

And that's maybe kinda similarly connected here. Anemic Christianity is tolerated, is loved because we're content to live without real repentance, reordered priorities, public identification with Christ's people, a true, robust, biblical Christianity.

Rejecting Anemic Christianity and Seeking Healthy Churches

So I hope that this episode has been helpful for some. Man, honestly, I hope it's been convicting for some that you would see. Like, you know what? I've tolerated pathetic expression of Christianity and I'm done with it, right?

Stop singing the trash song. Stop tolerating the weak membership and pray. And see about even if there's opportunity. Sometimes there's opportunity. Sometimes you may not even know it. But sometimes there's a movement within your own church to be healthier, to be better.

And even your own pastors would wanna push towards that, but they just don't have any support. So go and talk to them. But if you see some of these guys on stage just talking about going deeper. Well, if you wanna go deeper, go with small groups.

And so your worship is just gonna stay surface level. It's just gonna be hokey. It's not gonna be real substance. There's not much prayers made in your service. There's not much scripture read in your service, maybe other than the sermon, not much doctrine.

If you talk to people and they're just like, look, this is never gonna change. Well, it may be time for you to change. May be time for you to pray and to consider. And sometimes you might be surprised because here's one thing that I have noticed that there are pockets of the United States where this anemic Christianity is not tolerated.

And people are pushing for robust, doctrinally robust, Christ-centered, holy people, loving church, fellowship, membership, discipline, worship. They love these things. They love the gospel, the good news of what Christ has done.

And God has his pockets of people all over. I saw it this summer in Wyoming. I know of some places in Texas. I know of a church plant in Tennessee. And of course we have Arkansas. I know of a dear brother in Louisiana and another brother striving to work towards reformation in Louisiana.

I know of churches in Missouri. These are just places I'm personally connected with. A church I know of in Nevada. It's like God is working. And there's so many other places and states I could have mentioned, but God is working.

And I hope that it is a sort of a revival of weighty Christianity. But don't stay in anemic Christianity. Christ is worthy of a healthy church. I hope that you have enjoyed this episode of the Rural Church Podcast.

If I can answer any questions for you or maybe point you to a healthy church, feel free to email me at quatronelson at gmail .com. That's C-U-A-T-R-O-N-E-L-S-O-N at gmail .com. Thank you guys for listening.

And I hope to see you, ah, I won't see you. Hope you'll join me or me and a guest next week on the Rural Church Podcast. God bless.

The Church as God's Workmanship

If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what God's doing. This is his work. If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the poemos, the masterpiece of God.

How are you gonna respond?