Todd Strandberg – http://www.raptureready.com/rap16.html

For a long time, I have been mindful of how the age factor plays a role in the ongoing culture war. Conservative Christians have been losing battles simply because our numbers are rapidly dwindling away.

This past weekend, conservative pundit George Will was very blunt about why he believes the gay marriage forces are on a winning streak. He said there is no need for the Supreme Court to stick its nose into the issue because, “Quite literally, the opposition to gay marriage is dying. It’s old people.”

Opinion polls paint a very dark picture for our nation’s future. People over age 65 oppose gay marriage by 70 percent. People who are under 45 support gay marriage by the same percentage.

These figures show that time is on the side of the gay lobby. If they wait long enough, same-sex unions will become the normal in all 50 states. Since they only need a simple majority to pass a measure, we are already at the tipping point.

The responsibility for this slow-motion train wreck rests at the feet of the church leadership. We have had the opportunity to instill biblical moral values into the minds of two generations, and we squandered our chance. Now that we have millions of adults with no parent or grandparent to act as role models, it will very hard to get people back into the church.

Every time I go to a prophecy conference, I can’t help but notice the sea of gray hair in the main meeting room. A few years back, at a conference in South Carolina, there wasn’t a single person under age 50–and we had over 500 people in attendance.

I’ve very concerned about the state of leadership in the field of prophecy. I’m 47, and I am a spring chicken when compared to the ages of my peers. The top three names in Bible prophecy are all members of the 80s club: Hal Lindsey is 83, Tim LaHaye is 86, and Jack Van Impe is 81. Noah Hutchings, the head of Southwest Radio Church, turned 90 a few days ago. The youngest major author I can think of in Bible prophecy is Mark Hitchcock, who, at 52, is just out of diapers.

I only come up with blank spaces when I look for prophecy leaders in their 40s, 30s, and 20s. In the past few years, we’ve lost several big names in the field – Grant Jeffrey, J. R. Church, and Hilton Sutton. Unless the Rapture happens in short order, we are going to see a rapid thinning out of the ranks.

One of the saddest examples of how out of touch Christianity has become to the main society occurred last week when I saw that Pope Benedict XVI had joined Twitter. The 85-year-old pontiff reached across a table with a shaky index finger to press a button that sent his first tweet. If the event was staged to show that the Catholic church is still relevant to the youth of today, I’m sure it had the opposite impact.

The age problem even extends to the people who watch news. The average age of a Fox News watcher is 65. The network has the oldest audience of any cable network. The liberal CNN isn’t far behind–its average viewer is 63. Democratic mouthpiece MSNBC is a perky 59. So, not only do we have a host of people in a godless state, they are clueless about the dire world events that are about to engulf them.

The current state of the church in America and Europe might make it hard to understand Jesus’ promise in Matthew 16:18 that “the gates of hell won’t prevail” against the church. In many regions of the world, Christianity is doing extremely well. When God looks down from heaven at His faithful flock, I’m sure many times he looks at Southern Africa, South America, and China before he glances our way.

The Bible is very frank about how the days leading up to the Rapture will be marked by a church that is “wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked”(Revelation 3:17). We who still stand ready should consider ourselves lucky to be found faithful when our Lord returns.

“Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come. But know this, that if the goodman of the house had known in what watch the thief would come, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken up. Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh. Who then is a faithful and wise servant, whom his lord hath made ruler over his household, to give them meat in due season? Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing” (Matthew 24:42-46 KJV).