The Church’s Laryngitis: Three Causes, Three Cures
This Viewpoint blog post is a companion to the April 7 episode of the Theologically Speaking podcast featuring BJU Seminary Professor Billy Gotcher, and is adapted from his remarks at the 2025 Seminary CoRE Conference.
BJU Seminary’s recent CoRE Conference focused on whether the Church has “lost her voice.” And God having a sense of humor, I came down with a case of laryngitis before I was to speak.
In many ways, it seems the Church has indeed also come down with a case of laryngitis, which is no laughing matter. I’d suggest three causes for this malady.
Cause #1: A “cancel culture’s” pressure to keep our convictions to ourselves. In 2022, Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin, a columnist for the Religious News Service, wrote in 2022, “It is not only that there was no public church in America. There could not have been. The principles of the enlightenment consigned religion in America to the private realm of the individual.”
Roman Catholic Bishop Robert Barron has similarly insisted that Christians have a right to our beliefs but need to “keep those beliefs inside your hearts, your homes and your churches.”
If, as a Church and as individual Christians, we succumb to this cultural pressure and keep our faith to ourselves, we get to stay comfortable and avoid being “canceled.”
Cause #2: A false hope in political activism. In his 2010 book entitled To Change the World, James Davison Hunter asserted that American evangelicals have placed our hope in political activism in ways that hurt the Gospel. The Church has gotten really good at shouting at the darkness, all the things our culture’s trying to shove down our throats.
We have failed to equip people to speak to those in the midst of Satan’s deception. We see the problems, but not the pain. Our culture is like a pilot flying in cloud cover who becomes “spatially disoriented:” he doesn’t know which way is up or down, and like a friend of mine once did, can find himself flying 800 feet a minute toward the ground.
The world around us is being sold a bill of goods that they can thrive without God in this world—and believing lies that are crashing their lives.
The consequences of a silenced or politically distracted church are 3300 violent crimes, 6300 sexual diseases contracted, 3300 abortions, some 2100 divorces, and 134 suicides every day in America. Not to mention, there are some 400,000 children in the foster-care system in any given year.
Cause #3: The Consumer Church. As described by Carl Trueman in his Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, we have come to the place where there’s no real authority other than a personal psychological conviction. If I feel it, that’s my truth, and even in the church, we’ve become good at being American consumers. We swerve from church to church based on whether we feel good about our spirituality at the end of the service. We don’t want to speak the truth of the Gospel into a lost culture, because that might be uncomfortable.
The truth: God has placed the Church here with the purpose of taking the Gospel into that lost and lied-to culture. But first, we have to get over our laryngitis. Alongside the three causes I’ve mentioned, here are three cures from the Word of God.
Cure #1: To speak boldly amid opposition—the correct response to our culture’s pressure to remain silent. Paul wrote to the Thessalonians that “though we had already suffered and been shamefully treated at Philippi… we had boldness in our God to declare to you the gospel of God.” (1 Thessalonians 2:2 ESV)
Paul was, in fact, brutally beaten with rods and unlawfully imprisoned. You would think that he would maybe lay low, let the heat die down, let his bruises heal up. Instead, he came to the next city, saw its lost condition, and was compelled to further “declare the gospel… in the midst of all this conflict.”
Earlier in Acts, Peter and John preached the Gospel in the streets of Jerusalem so powerfully that 5000 men were saved. The Sanhedrin had them arrested and threatened them. Their response was so striking that the Council “saw the(ir) boldness…”—there it is again—”perceived that they were uneducated, common men (and) were astonished.”
An important aspect of speaking boldly is found in Ephesians 4:25: “having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor.” (ESV) Have we focused on the possibility that God wants us to talk to our neighbors—to see the people in the city around us the same way Paul saw the people in Thessalonica?
The Gospel came to us in words. It didn’t come in a movie. It didn’t come in a picture book. We need to learn to—and have the courage to—communicate to others in order to take this glorious message of redemption and hope to hopeless people.
Cure #2: To pray for this boldness, recognizing that its source is the Lord. Paul affirmed that his boldness was “in our God.” Peter and John, upon their release, returned to their friends and prayed that God would look upon the Council’s threats and “grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all”—wait for it—“boldness.” Scripture records that “the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness.”
I’ve seen a lot of church prayer sheets through the years, but not many of them ask for God to help them speak His word with all boldness. What pastor doesn’t want this for his people?
Cure #3: A healthy dose of the right motivation—Paul reminded the Thessalonians that he spoke “not to please man, but to please God who tests our hearts.” He was so committed to this purpose that he wrote to the Corinthians that he would “most gladly spend and be spent for your souls.”
Peter and John responded to the Sanhedrin’s threats by remonstrating, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.”
In the face of the world’s opposition, we must remember that Jesus came to seek and to save the lost, and He called us to do the same thing with the same heart of compassion.
Can we pray for the Lord to shake us and move us from our lethargy, from being okay if a lost and dying world will leave us alone and let us do our church? Most of all, cure of us of our laryngitis so that we can speak boldly His Word of Truth in His love?
