Walking into the middle of the woods can be kind of a disorienting thing. Going off the path, if you are not careful, you can very quickly realize that you do not know where you are, and when you try to get your bearings, you quickly start to realize that the things you thought were guiding your path were not actually, and now…you are lost. But this type of situation is not just limited to first excursions. This can happen in our lives individually, and it can also happen on a bigger scale with whole groups of people.
The same quiet disorientation can happen to churches and whole denominations. At first, the path seems obvious: preach Christ, make disciples, and bear witness to the kingdom in word and deed. Over time, however, other concerns begin to press in, urgent causes, institutional anxieties, financial pressures, and the constant hum of cultural expectation and without anyone announcing a change of direction, the community finds itself walking by different markers than the Gospel itself.
One of the earliest signs of this drift is not open denial of core doctrines, but a subtle neglect and reshaping of them. The church still uses words like grace, salvation, and kingdom, yet their content slowly shifts away from the historic, creedal vision of a holy God, a real fall, a truly incarnate Christ, and the hope of resurrection and judgment. The vocabulary remains familiar, but the underlying story and the claims it makes on our lives become thinner, more therapeutic, and more imprecise.
Another marker appears when activism begins to function as a replacement horizon for the church’s imagination. There is a rightful and necessary place for works of mercy, justice, and cultural engagement within the great tradition of the faith. Yet when external causes become the primary measure of seriousness, and the thick, doctrinal shape of Christianity is treated as flexible packaging for whatever issue currently feels most pressing, the church has begun to trade the old paths for whatever looks most urgent in the moment. Faithfulness is then gauged less by conformity to the catholic and apostolic deposit, and more by alignment with contemporary movements and moods.
At the same time, business mentalities seep into the bones of the institution. Strategic plans, branding exercises, leadership pipelines, and key performance indicators begin to dominate the conversation, not simply as tools in service of a received faith, but as the primary way the church now understands itself. The community starts to think of itself less as a people gathered around creed, Word, and sacrament, and more as a religious enterprise tasked with managing growth, reputation, and market niche. What cannot be easily graphed, marketed, or leveraged, mystery, holiness, adoration quietly recedes.
In such a climate, confessional and doctrinal commitments often remain formally intact but become functionally optional. Official statements continue to affirm Nicene and apostolic truths, yet they no longer strongly govern what is taught, celebrated, or funded. The boundaries they once provided are treated as starting points for “reinterpretation,” as if the accumulated wisdom of centuries were merely a set of suggestions to be updated whenever cultural winds shift. Bit by bit, the tether to the broad, historic Christian consensus frays, and the church finds itself improvising a faith that is recognizable in language but noticeably different in substance.
This kind of wandering is especially dangerous because it does not feel like rebellion while it is happening. No one wakes up and decides, “Today we will move beyond the faith of the creeds.” Instead, leaders respond to crises, opportunities, and cultural pressures with a hundred small, reasonable-seeming adjustments: emphasize what feels more accessible, downplay what seems strange, reframe ancient doctrines in ways that no longer bind but merely inspire. Only after many such steps does the community look up and realize that the landmarks of classical Christianity are behind it, faint on the horizon.
For denominations, the way back is not mere nostalgia but a sober recovering of the true path. That recovery begins with candid self-examination: Are we still consciously standing within the great stream of Christian belief, rooted in Scripture, informed by the creeds, attentive to the wisdom of the saints—or have we gradually come to treat the tradition as raw material for our own experiments? Do our teaching, worship, and institutional decisions show that we are being shaped by the church’s long memory, or by the short attention span of the present moment?
From there, repentance must take corporate form. Churches and denominations need to name, in specific ways, where cultural agendas have eclipsed catholic conviction, where managerial habits have supplanted dependence on the Spirit, and where the desire to seem enlightened, sophisticated, or successful has led them to loosen their grip on the shared faith of the church across time and space. Such confession is not a backward-looking reaction, but an act of humility that reaffirms: the church does not own its message; it receives and hands it on.
Finally, the path forward requires a deliberate re-centering of everything—teaching, catechesis, mission, mercy, institutional planning, around the rich, thick, and time-tested core of the Christian faith. Programs and causes that clearly arise from and lead back to this center can be pursued with freedom; those that require us to muffle or revise the heart of the apostolic and creedal witness must be questioned, pruned, or relinquished. The church does many things, but it is not about many things; it is about the worship of the Triune God, the lordship of Christ, and the life of the world to come. To remember that, and to live as if it is true, is to step back onto solid ground after many disorienting steps in the woods.