Prayer is, perhaps, the most important element for those seeking a great awakening.  A lot of things happen when we spend time with God in prayer.  God has chosen that the mechanism of prayer to be his way of allowing us to participate in the ruling of his world.  God chooses to do something only when we pray and only when we pray according to his will.  This fact struck me some time back when I was doing a study in the Book of Revelation.  Notice what these verses say.

Revelation 8:1 When the Lamb broke the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.
2 And I saw the seven angels who stand before God, and seven trumpets were given to them.
3 Another angel came and stood at the altar, holding a golden censer; and much incense was given to him, so that he might add it to the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar which was before the throne.
4 And the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, went up before God out of the angel’s hand.
5 Then the angel took the censer and filled it with the fire of the altar, and threw it to the earth; and there followed peals of thunder and sounds and flashes of lightning and an earthquake. (Rev 8:1-5 NASB)

The action of heaven stops for about an hour so that the angels could collect the prayers of the saints and add them to the smoke of the incense.  Then and only then did he cast it to the earth as an act of judgment.

If we do not pray, we do not hear God.  Even reading his Word will not penetrate our hearts if we do not practice the art of conversation with God.  We become like the fool of the book of Proverbs who refuses to listen to Wisdom:

22 “How long, O naive ones, will you love being simple-minded? And scoffers delight themselves in scoffing And fools hate knowledge?
23 “Turn to my reproof, Behold, I will pour out my spirit on you; I will make my words known to you.
24 “Because I called and you refused, I stretched out my hand and no one paid attention;
25 And you neglected all my counsel And did not want my reproof;
26 I will also laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your dread comes,
27 When your dread comes like a storm And your calamity comes like a whirlwind, When distress and anguish come upon you.
28 “Then they will call on me, but I will not answer; They will seek me diligently but they will not find me,
29 Because they hated knowledge And did not choose the fear of the LORD.
30 “They would not accept my counsel, They spurned all my reproof.
31 “So they shall eat of the fruit of their own way And be satiated with their own devices.
32 “For the waywardness of the naive will kill them, And the complacency of fools will destroy them.
33 “But he who listens to me shall live securely And will be at ease from the dread of evil.” (Pro 1:22-33 NASB)

God’s judgment on those who do not hear is to abandon them to themselves. Romans 1 confirms that this is the worst kind of judgment is this life.  But those who listen to God shall be secure.

How does one pray for revival?  One prays with brokenness and honesty.  We may not know how far from God we truly are until we make prayer for revival a regular part of our lives. Too often our prayer lives are just  slight glances at God with a few words that we really have not thought though.  When we finally become aware of our sin before God, it should shake us up.  And when we realize that God has not been listening to us because of our sin, then it should cause us to cry out for mercy.  There are several Psalms that serve as an example of when God stopped listening to the nation or to the one praying.  Psalm 51 is, of course, a Psalm of Contrition.  There David begs God to restore to him the joy of his salvation.  That sounds like revival to me.  Psalm 80 implores God to rescue his people.  But there is more than that.  He asks, “O LORD God of hosts, How long will You be angry with the prayer of Your people?”  The people have so sinned that God was angry even with their prayers. All one can do is ask God to forgive us and move beyond this impasse.  And only God can remove the barrier.  The Psalmist is persistent in his prayer to God.

Psalm 80:1 For the choir director; set to El Shoshannim; Eduth. A Psalm of Asaph. Oh, give ear, Shepherd of Israel, You who lead Joseph like a flock; You who are enthroned above the cherubim, shine forth!
2 Before Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh, stir up Your power And come to save us!
3 O God, restore us And cause Your face to shine upon us, and we will be saved.
4 O LORD God of hosts, How long will You be angry with the prayer of Your people?
5 You have fed them with the bread of tears, And You have made them to drink tears in large measure.
6 You make us an object of contention to our neighbors, And our enemies laugh among themselves.
7 O God of hosts, restore us And cause Your face to shine upon us, and we will be saved.
8 You removed a vine from Egypt; You drove out the nations and planted it.
9 You cleared the ground before it, And it took deep root and filled the land.
10 The mountains were covered with its shadow, And the cedars of God with its boughs.
11 It was sending out its branches to the sea And its shoots to the River.
12 Why have You broken down its hedges, So that all who pass that way pick its fruit?
13 A boar from the forest eats it away And whatever moves in the field feeds on it.
14 O God of hosts, turn again now, we beseech You; Look down from heaven and see, and take care of this vine,
15 Even the shoot which Your right hand has planted, And on the son whom You have strengthened for Yourself.
16 It is burned with fire, it is cut down; They perish at the rebuke of Your countenance.
17 Let Your hand be upon the man of Your right hand, Upon the son of man whom You made strong for Yourself.
18 Then we shall not turn back from You; Revive us, and we will call upon Your name.
19 O LORD God of hosts, restore us; Cause Your face to shine upon us, and we will be saved. (Psa 80:1-19 NASB)

Again this sounds like a request for revival, for a great awakening among the people.  If we want God’s face to shine on us, I think we too must become men and women of consistent prayer, asking, even begging if need be that God will cleanse us, make us holy and most of all, send a great revival upon us and upon the land.

I closing I recommend that the reader check these articles on prayer and revival.  The first is by the old Scotsman, Robert Murray M’Cheyne.  http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/ref-rev/01-4/1-4_mccheyne.pdf

The second article is by Roger Nicole  http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/ref-rev/01-3/1-3_nicole.pdf

The following are quotations on the meaning of Revival  from Iain H Murray, Revival and Revivalism: The Making and Marring of American Evangelicalism 1750-1858

There are eras, said (Samuel) Davies, when only a large communication or outpouring of the Spirit can produce a public general reformation. Thus, preaching on “The Happy Effect of the Pouring Out of the Spirit” from Isaiah 32:13-19, he argued that the outpouring of the Holy Spirit is the great and only remedy for a ruined country– the only effectual preventative of national calamities and desolation and the only sure cause of a lasting and well-established peace. (p 21)

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In speaking of the meaning of revival it is also essential to note that what Davies and his brethren believed about revival was not something separate from, or additional to, their main beliefs; it was rather a necessary consequence.  Such is a man’s state in sin that he cannot be saved without the immediate results from it, the gifts of God.  Therefore, wherever conversions are multiplied, the cause is to be found not in men, nor in favorable conditions, but in the abundance of influences of th Spirit of God that alone make the testimony of the Church effective. No other explanation of revival is in harmony with the truths that are “the essence of the Christian scheme– the utter depravity of man, the sovereignly-free grace of Jehovah, the divinity of Christ, the atonement in his blood, regeneration, and sanctification by the Holy Spirit.

This school of preachers held that the Holy Spirit has appointed means to be used for the advancement of the gospel,  pre-eminently the teaching of the Word of God accompanied by earnest prayer.  Yet no human endeavors can ensure or guarantee results.  There is a sovereignty in all God’s actions.  He has never promised to bless in proportion to the activity of his people.  Revivals are not brought about by the fulfillment of “conditions” any more than the conversion of a single individual is secured by any series of human actions.  The special “seasons of mercy”  are determined in heaven.  Thus for a modern biographer of Davies to say what Blair “began a revival of religion in 1740″ is to assert the opposite of what they believed.  For the same reason it would have been obnoxious to these preachers to hear themselves described as “revivalists” . . .(p 22)

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. . . It can be further noted that what happens in revivals is not to be seen as something miraculously different from the regular experience of the church.  The difference lies in degree, not in kind.  In an “outpouring of the Spirit” spiritual influence is more widespread, convictions are deeper, and feelings more intense, but all this is only a heightening of normal Christianity.  True revivals are “extraordinary,” yet what is experienced at such times is not different in essence from the spiritual experience that belongs to Christians at other times.  It is the larger “earnest” of the same Spirit who abides with all who believe.

Thus Davies and his brethren repudiated the idea that revivals restore miraculous gifts to the churches.  They regarded revivals as more wonderful than that: The Spirit magnifies Christ, and the more abundantly his influence is possessed by the believers the more they will live for his praise.  When we meet with lives such as those of Davies, Whitefield (he had such a sense of the incomparable excellence of the person of Christ), Aaron Burr, Sr (a perpetual holocaust [a sacrifice consumed by fire] of adoration and praise, and many others in the revival period, we are tempted to suppose that theirs was a different Christianity.  It was not so but rather, as Thomas Murphy wrote, it was “the baptism of the Holy Ghost which caused the infant Church [in America] to become animated by the most fervent piety.”  The same writer said of these preachers: “they believed in refreshings from on high, felt some of them in their own souls, and were ready for still more . . . these bright and cultured souls were stirred to their very depths, and blessings untold were involved therein.  They awoke to a life not new in kind, but new in degree, and in all truth and soberness a new prospect opened before our Church and country.”

If revival is a larger giving to the church of grace already possessed– a heightening of the normal– then it follows that the evidences by which revivals are to be judged are the same as those which form the permanent evidences of real Christianity.  Foremost in the New Testament list is the evidence of love to God and men.  At all times to all true believers Christ “is precious.”   Preaching on those words, Davies said:

Because he loves him he longs for the full enjoyment of him . . . Because Christ is precious to him, his interests are so too, and he longs to see his kingdom flourish, and all men fired with his love.  Because he loves him, he loves his ordinances; loves to hear, because it is the word of Jesus; loves to pray, because it is maintaining intercourse with Jesus; loves to sit at his table, because it is a memorial of Jesus; and loves his people because they love Jesus.”

For revivals to be judged to be true we are to look for no greater proof than the increase of this same grace.  Love is not uniform in its strength but it knows many degrees.  Although it is an “active principle” in all Christians, love can also blaze and burn.  Men filled with the Spirit are filled with love (Eph. 3:16-19) and “the sacred fire of love” (to use Davies’ words) will affect al that they do.  They cannot be to others than fervent in spirit as well as dissatisfied with their own coldness. (p 23-24)

In Iain H. Murray’s book, Revival and Revivalism: The Making and Marrying of American Evangelicalism 1750-1858, describes the ministry of Samuel Davies, a Presbyterian pastor  who eventually became president of Princeton. “Davies was subscribing to the Pauline theology of the Reformation when he said that men

are estranged from God, and engaged in rebellion against him; and they love to continue so.  They will not submit, nor return to their duty and allegiance.  Hence there is need of a superior power to subdue their stubborn hearts, and sweetly constrain them to subjection; to inspire them with the love of God and an implacable detestation of all sin.  And for this purpose the Holy Spirit of God is sent into the world: for this purpose, he is at work, from age to age, upon the hearts of men. (p19)”

When one thinks of the need for a Great Awakening, you have to ask what kind of preaching are you doing and what kind of preaching describes the average contemporary pulpit.  Most likely it has quietly slipped away from the Pauline doctrine of original sin and separation of the sinner from God.  It most likely does not emphasize the offense of the sinner against the holiness of God, wrath of God against the sinner, or the radical nature of the God, of God’s love and to the extent he goes to overcome our sin on our behalf or the need for repentance and confession.

If there is ever to be another Great Awakening , we must examine our own preaching and even our own convictions. People cannot respond to what they do not hear.

In the last few years I have become burdened with the need for personal spiritual awakening.  In discussions with our local pastors, I have discovered that this is a growing burden among my pastor friends.  The desire is not only for personal awakening but for our churches, especially for our churches.  But it also seems that our denominations all need to experience a Great Awakening.

Of course, I am most familiar with Southern Baptist Churches.  While we southern Baptists have been known for our growth and evangelism, some kind of death pall has come over us.  I was recently in a denominational meeting and the topic of the day was the demise of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).  In the last few years the International Missions Board of the SBC has suffered various doctoral issues.  But the biggest problem has been the North American Missions Board.  Money is down. Our collective number of baptisms are down. People have had to be laid off, missionary service has had to be postponed due to the lack of money. The seminaries have had to cut salaries and law off workers.  While the SBC is the largest protestant denomination in the United States, we are now easily ignored.  In fact, many Christian journals have set up a death watch to see when we will keel over.

The question is how can we fix it.  I do not think it can be fixed in the traditional sense.  No commission or study is going to give us a solution.   While my analysis may be a bit amateurish, I think we can clearly see the problem if we want and learn about a possible solution.

Baptists use to be plain people, ordinary working men and women.  We were far from the seats of power.  It would be true that in county seat churches, doctors, lawyers and local politicians would be members of local Baptist churches. Yet Baptists were largely engaged with local community ministry and foreign missions.

In the twentieth  century Southern Baptist had grown enough that leaders wanted to be part of the larger social and even political power group that wields influence in our country. I suppose that there is nothing wrong with this and may have even appeared as an act of providence.  But in serving God we are connected to the only seat of power needed to influence a nation.  Seeking to be power players can be a dangerous thing in that it causes us to forget utter reliance on God.  The result is that Southern Baptists became main street.  We were no longer just plain old people.  Now we have presidents who were Southern Baptists.  Southern Baptist pastors and leaders became nationally known figures.  We were caught up in our size, in the amount of money raised collectively for ministry, and most of all, public fame brought by being main street and being powerfully connected.  We were part of the rising new south and we had a big role to play.  I am convinced that our social success contributed to our decline.

A second factor can be found in our tendency to want to program everything.  If we have a problem, a need, or a want, someone will come up with a program to fix it.  Most of the programs came from our Sunday School Board, as it was called, now Lifeway.  Many came from the Home Missions Board, now NAMB. We borrowed from the business community our sense of organization and record keeping.  And these practices served us well.  It allowed to have a standard Sunday School and Discipleship program thus fulfilling the biblical mandate to teach Scripture, to teach discipleship including churchmanship, doctrine and history, to encourage fellowship and to do evangelism through these two programs.  These two programs gave us a uniformity as a denomination that one would not normally find in a non connectional church.

Being successful at Sunday School, we concluded that we needed a program for everything.  Evangelism, Stewardship, building and equipment, almost anything you could imagine.  Soon churches were trying to make one-size-fits-all programs work in their churches even thought most programs were written for larger churches.  The program approach stifled local creativity among church members and even encouraged them to be observers and not participants.

Often these programs were unitarian without thought given to doctrine. This is the third and perhaps most important factor.   We became impressed by size and numbers while we neglected based doctrine.  I am convinced that our efforts at evangelism, no matter how noble, resulted in churches being full of lost people who made emotional “decisions” instead of coming to faith in the incomparable Christ.  It became a routine matter for denominational leaders to claim that the purpose of the church is evangelism.  I heard this just this week.  Not only is it the only purpose of the church but we pastors need to repent if we disagreed with the speaker.  It is a kind of arrogance that says I know better because I am a denominational worker and you are a mere pastor.  The fact is, the purpose of the church is to glorify God and bring him honor by our holy living. But above all, the church brings honor and glory to God by faithfully worshiping him.   The pastor shepherds the flock.  Shepherding includes teaching them the things of God, helping the member to become mature believers. Thus, discipleship and fellowship are integral elements in the purpose of the Church.  When these things are done, the church will be self replicating, evangelism will be normal and natural.  But, no, we tend to listen to our “leaders” who know better.

Our literature has been so dumb-down that very little substance is found in it.  We have been too busy trying to accommodate the world that we have stopped teaching doctrine.  Baptist suffer from a lack of understanding of our basic doctrines.  No one really understands the sovereignty of God and his right to order the lives of his people according to his purposes.  We “accommodate” God by coming to church when it suits us and, for the most part, not paying attention to the things of God during the week. This latter behavior is being reinforced in local churches, often because they are following the latest trend and fad expressed by denominational leaders.

The same can be said for the doctrine of the church, the person of Christ, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and the doctrine of the atonement. Feelings have become the substitute for sound doctrine.  We lose members to cults, and defective churches because we have settled for the lowest common denominator instead of seeking to teach doctrine that leads to a mature Christian.

Finally, this needs to be said. We fought over various definitions of orthodoxy for 25 years and it left us weak and feeble in our practice of the faith.  I am not commenting on the necessity of that fight but the results.  The main argument was that there were many in the denomination who did not believe that the Bible was the inerrant, infallible Word of God.  The battle was won but if you survey the preaching and teaching done by many Southern Baptist pastors you would never know it.  Much of the preaching is topical.  The topics are often about finances, marriage and sex.  The drama of preaching has become more important than the words preached.  It is not unusual to see a stage with cars, motorcycles, beds, and others displays used to promote the subject of the sermon.  It is all entertaining and many men have become famous preachers for these kinds of tactics.  But the Word is not being preached, the kingdom of God is not being built.  No doubt the subjects of modern preaching are important, but we are called to proclaim Scripture not topics.  Expositional preaching is almost gone from many pulpits (if they have a pulpit) because the pastor is trying to imitate his favorite popular preacher.

Since the troubles we experienced in the Southern Baptist Convention, no national leader has risen up to lead us back to the important things.  Institutionalism is stronger than ever even though all the major Southern Baptist institutions are in trouble.  What has been forgotten is that it is all about the local church, not the denomination.  Ultimately the denomination is nothing.  When we get to heaven all there is going to be, is the local church, the Bride of Christ.   The principle was given by Christ himself, “for whoever wishes to save his life will lose it.”  Institutions take on a life of their own and they often forget why they exist.  Instead, they become concerned for their self existence, protecting jobs without regard to their original purpose.  If we want to save the institutions of the Convention, then they will have to give themselves away so to speak, and become servants to the local churches.

It is the reason that these things happened that is the most disturbing.  It happened, not because of the leadership of the Convention, but because of the wants and compromises of the local churches and the pastors who lead them.  We cannot put the blame on others. If the convention is in decline, it is because the churches are in decline.  That decline is more than numbers, it has to do with the spiritual vitality of the local churches.  We got from our denomination what we demanded.

I think the answer does not lie in the SBC or it’s leadership. No Great Commission study can solve our problems. It is evident that we need a Great Awakening on a national scale.  The great need for an awakening becomes even larger when we view the condition of the SBC in light of the health of local churches.  We must get back to our relationship with God that caused our existence in the first place.  No Great Awakening ever began on a denominational level.  No denominational leader has been at the heart of one.  Great Awakenings begin in churches and with small groups of people who are so disgusted with themselves that they turn to God to restore them.   Most likely if there is ever a Great Awakening in SBC life, it will begin in some small church or group of churches. If God allows an awakening to come, he will sovereignly move his church and if he allows, it will spread until it becomes a raging fire.  It will not be something that any man, any institution can claim to be the leader of or heralded as the one who started it.  Great Awakenings are always a sovereign work of God.  No doubt, God wants us to be right with him.  But it must begin at the top, which is the local church.

Recently a friend sent me this quote from Joe McKeever, “Something that has eluded religious historians and pastors for decades: ‘Why churches do not have revival.’ Insufficient prayer? Lack of godliness? Those are important, but are the symptoms, not the reason. The real reason for no revival is: we don’t want one. Revivals mess with your mind, rearrange your priorities, upset your lives. We prefer to be left alone. Agree?”  And yes, I agree.  But when our situation becomes so grim, when there is little life left in the church, we can no longer sit back and watch it all die.  We are compelled to fall before God and seek His life-giving Spirit for a dose of real revival.

It is my greatest desire to see the fires of a Great Awakening blow its way among our churches and revive our Convention and our state conventions.  I pray that before I die I will see such a movement.  I hope that we all find ourselves before God confessing our sin, begging God for his forgiveness and seeing the revival fires light up in the hearts of believers everywhere.  May God grant it to us.

Who Rules the Church?: Examining Congregational Leadership and Church Government

Who Rules the Church by Gerald P. Cowen is a very good book on the nature of the church. He is a Baptist and writes from a Biblical perspectiv Cowen is a New Testament Scholar and he makes his argument from Scripture before any appeal to tradition.  Cowen makes a very strong case for Elder/Pastor lead, congregational rule church as basic Baptist polity. It is well worth a reading in a day that seems very confused about the nature of the Church.

Worship is Trinitarian.  We fellowship with the Father, in the Son, through the Holy Spirit.  God is the only one worthy of our adoration, fellowship, prayers, and honor. The Father calls us to himself through the advocacy (an advocacy that includes the cross, the grave and  resurrection) of the Son and by the instrumentation of the Holy Spirit.

Because we are in the Son and when the Father sees us, he is seeing the Son in whom we are in union, and the Holy Spirit who maintains that relationship.  Therefore as the Father and the Son and The Holy Spirit fellowship, we participate in that fellowship as well.  In fact, since the Holy Spirit resides with the Church until the end of time, we need to see the profound nature of that work He works in us when the Body assembles to worship. It is he who maintains our fellowship.  He is the one who calls us out of sin, enables us to come to faith and then maintains that faith forever.  In the last chapter of the book of Revelation it is the Bride (the church) and the Spirit who call unto Christ to return.  So, for now, then and until the end of time, the Holy Spirit empowers the church to do all of its functions.

Considering the depth of the nature of this relation, then what kind of worship is worthy of the Creator of the universe who has condescended to man and allowed us into his holy abode for fellowship?  Do we not offer our best to him? The best of our income, the best of our time, the best of our voice and heart and mind?  Do we sing meaningless jingles or words of depth?  Do we prepare our hearts for worship or do we carouse all night, come in late, come to the  assembled Body of Christ unprepared to be in his presence?  I think the answers are obvious.

If we want to take worship seriously we must forever be aware of who God is and who we are.  That means that we live our lives in anticipation of meeting God in worship.  But since worship is also an eschatological event anticipating the return of Christ, we must live as those prepared to meet our returning Savior.  In Church we are living proleptically (that means we are living future promises in the present) thus we assemble and worship with the same solemn (meaning the with the awe that comes from being in the presence of the living God–the word awe used in its proper way)  and depth as those who are worshiping in the Book of Revelation, as if the church were already sitting at the banquet of the Lord’s Table as he lifts the cup for the first time since the night of his betrayal.

When we enter to worship, for those few minutes we are no longer those whose portfolios lost over half its value this week, we are not those whose bodies aches with the pain of age, we are not those riddled with anxiety about what we will do for a living or whose lives are troubled by the brokenness of their family.  When we enter to worship, we are the People of God, the Sons and Daughters of the Father, the Siblings of the Son, the saints of God those who reside in heaven, we are the future in the this very present moment.  When we worship, we are in the presence of the Father and we gather around his Word as the tree of life.  We gather at his table for fellowship with the one who died for us and we find our strength renewed as we drink the cup and take the bread.  And our prayers, the prayers of many as one man, are intense and deep words to our Father.  And when we sing, we are in chorus with the heavenly angels as we proclaim our collective praise to our King.  And for that moment are in a bubble of the future intruding into the present, a bubble that is a new heaven and a new earth.  For that short time we are straining to apprehend that which has apprehended us.  And when we leave that worship, we should be thirsty for more, a thirst that cannot quenched, a hunger that is cannot be satiated until we stand in his presence forever

That is how we should worship!

This week, Ed Stetzer, part of Lifeway research, published an article on his blog titled, The end of the Beginning. The article is a response the news published by Lifeway that Baptism numbers have dropped for the third straight year.

NASHVILLE, Tenn., 4/23/08 (Lifeway.com)– The number of people baptized in Southern Baptist churches fell for the third straight year in 2007 to the denomination’s lowest level since 1987. Although the SBC added 473 new churches and gave more than $1.3 billion to support mission activities around the world, there’s no escaping the disappointing fact that Southern Baptists are not reaching as many people for Christ as they once did, according to Thom S. Rainer, president and CEO of LifeWay Christian Resources, which gathered the information on the denomination’s behalf.

According to LifeWay’s Annual Church Profile (ACP), baptisms in 2007 dropped nearly 5.5 percent to 345,941, compared to 364,826 in 2006. Baptism is a public act administered by the local church in which new followers of Christ are immersed in water. Baptism symbolizes believers’ identification with Jesus in His death, burial and resurrection; signifies their new life in Christ; and anticipates the day in which Christ will raise them from the dead, demonstrating His victory over sin and death. Therefore, the number of baptisms is a key measurement of the SBC’s effectiveness in evangelism.

For those who do not know, Lifeway is the book and curriculum division of the Southern Baptist Convention. It was once called The Baptist Sunday School Board. Ed Stetzer is currently the Director of Lifeway Research and Lifeway’s Missiologist in Residence. In other words, he is an expert.

I have been a pastor for twenty years and served as a staff member before that. And I have been preaching for thirty-six years. I am not easily impressed by experts. This is not to put down Dr. Stetzer in any way but to speak of certain realities. I am an experienced pastor. And I have noticed that experts don’t listen to experienced pastors. And what is more important, at least to me, I am a theologian by training. This means that to this day, I still take biblical studies and doctrine very seriously. I tend to think that when churches are in trouble, they first need to turn to Scripture for answers, not to demographic and statistical studies. So, I wrote the following on his blog and he graciously published it. I reproduce it here.

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In the 1940s and 50s, Southern Baptists became institutionalized, we came to believe that the larger body was more important than the local church. So, we looked to the denomination to tell us how to do things and when to do it. By the end of the 1960s every Baptist worship service, every Sunday School class, every Wednesday night service were all alike.

In the 1970′s “cutting edge” Baptists bought into the Church Growth movement with all its statistics, studies and public relations models taken from the business world. Instead of focusing on preaching Scripture and teaching doctrine, we relied on worldly models to define church outreach.

In the 1980s the church growth movement morphed into the seeker sensitive service model of church. Soon Baptists were importing charismatic worship into Baptist churches with the claim that we must be relevant to society.

The institutionalizing of Baptist churches set us to be gullible to any kind of movement passed on to us by experts. We became consumed with pragmatic concerns. “Whatever works” became our mantra no matter what damage such programs may inflict on our churches. The concepts that we bought into, Church Growth Movement, the Seeker Sensitive worship, etc. has all lead to decline. It seems obvious that these things made church members self-centered consumers and not Christians. Instead of preaching the Word and relying on the Holy Spirit to call people out of their sin, we figured the Holy Spirit was weak and needed our help. Self-centered consumers do not go out and bear witness to Christ.

The fact is we have been in decline for decades. The FBI could not find half of the Southern Baptist membership. This has been true for the last forty years. We have been hiding behind numbers. So, we baptized more in the past years? How many of those baptized stayed in church? When you scare people into converting or make it so easy that no repentance is required, what should we expect? Which is better, fake converts whom we baptize or lower baptisms?

Pragmatism does not work, an ironic statement. Looking like the world, acting like the world, sounding like the world, does not work. If we are going to look foolish to the world, then let it be because we live as those who have been crucified and let us preach the scandal of the Cross.

Church is not a political action committee, it is not a self help group, it is not entertainment, it is not a place for self actualization. The local church is the people of God. And the people of God are aliens and strangers in a foreign land, we are not of the world. We need to be more like strangers.

I do not have confidence in numbers and in experts who spin them. I do have confidence that if we live holy lives before our living and holy Lord, then we will bear much fruit. But if we are not faithful to the call of Christ, why would he bless us? We do not need our own pragmatically induced “revival.” We have a great need for repentance and the willingness to remain in decline until we have God’s blessing.

Note, I intend to address this subject further in another posting.

When I was a teenager, we had a man in our church named Bill. He was short, with a small rectangular face and wore something like a flat top haircut. In today’s more precise and kinder language, he would be described as having Downs Syndrome. Bill could not talk. He grunted, whistled and used his hands to communicate.

A lot of church members where not happy with Bill being in church. His kind tends to subvert the dignity of more normal people. But they tolerated him. Like every small town, there was a kind of competition as to who is more important. Family names, income, size of home, the kind of car and how one dressed all played a role in determining the imaginary pecking order. Bill was at the bottom of the pecking order. His whole being subverted the system because with Bill, wealth, name, cars, homes, or clothes were of little value. You could not impress someone like Bill.

Bill had one habit that irritated everyone. I have to admit that I was as bad as the others. I did not see the value that Bill had then. His one habit caused us teens to roll our eyes and laugh and make fun, much the same way many of the adults did. Bill would come down the isle during the invitation. He came for every invitation, every Sunday. The pastor would make his appeal to the lost and the saved who needed to repent. Bill would get this look on his face. It was sadness and loneliness and compassion all combined. He would slip out and go up front and take the pastor’s hand, whispering and whistling as he did. No one else would come down the isle. But if the pastor wanted to brag about something at the pastor’s meeting, there was always one “decision” that he could count on.

Something changed in Bill, he began to dress differently. He started to wear a fine blue polyester suit with red stitching. It was like our pastor’s suit. Most of us country people knew, even in the polyester 70s, that polyester suits were not cool. However, we did wear those silk shirts with prints on them. You know the ones with flying geese, sunsets, Luaus, etc. Therefore, no one really had room to criticize the pastor’s clothes, or Bill’s.

Bill, now wearing his blue polyester preacher suit, still came down the isle every Sunday. But now he stood with the pastor and helped him offer the invitation. Eyes rolled, people moaned. And they asked quietly, “what are we going to do with Bill?” I never knew how the problem was resolved because I moved away to go to seminary. But several years ago he died and I guess the problem was solved then.

Since those days, my home church has declined significantly. They may never be able to have a full time pastor again. Bluntly, it is their own fault. I know this is brutal but it is the truth and every church needs to examine itself and see what road they travel. Members of my home church, as did I, wanted a comfortable religion. We did not want to be challenged too much. Church was part of our social life. In a small town the size of mine, about 300 people, church was one of the few places where you can flex your social status. But above all, they did not want any kind of change, personal change or congregational change.

They really made no effort to reach the community. The pastor did. I and a few others would go and visit with him and I know that he tried. But as it is true in all churches, the pastor cannot make a church grow. He cannot visit enough people and witness to enough of the lost by himself to make that much difference. It takes a whole witnessing church to reach a community. My home church refused to do that because often that meant reaching the wrong kind of people. I remember when one of my friends came to church. He had taken some side roads in his young life. He was a hippy, had long hair, wore hippy clothes. And the church responded to him like he had leprosy. I remember it quite well. I was in college. Even I knew that in order to love others as Christ loved, you have to get down and dirty sometimes. You have to love people where they are and you have to love people you don’t like. A nineteen-year-old kid with long hair needed to know Christ, just not in my home church.

Thirty years later, my home church has been through many pastors and they have severely declined. It is sad. When I see my home church, I want to cry. Hypocrisy (and we are all guilty), materialism, shallowness of faith, refusal to repent, arrogance, lack of real love have all lead to their decline. Their decline was the result of deliberate choices made by the church through the years. The choices avoided the commitment of faith, not making necessary changes, and avoiding taking responsibility for the life of the church. Each choice would lead them further from the biblical ideals and set them up for future decline. They would blame their decline on the pastor or on circumstances. Now they are old people who love their comfortable worship and lifestyle. They would not change even if it meant their grand children coming to know Christ, even if it meant sustaining the church for one more generation. I hear things and it sounds like the death rattles of a once great church now creeping toward extinction.

These are not evil people. In fact, they are good people. Many of the men had a powerful influence on my development as a person and as a Christian. But like most of us, it was too easy for them to shape their faith in such a way that they were able to avoid the major challenges of their day.

It grieves me that my home church and so many other churches in my former rural community are dying. And it is not for the lack of people. The population has grown considerably. It is in this context that I started thinking about Bill. It was as if a carbide lamp flashed its hot, bright light on me and caused me to see. I know who Bill was, he was a prophet. God was using him to call his people to himself.

Isn’t that just like God? He chooses the lowest guy in the pecking order, the most humble, the simplest man there to be his prophet. Why, if a man like Bill understood the need to repent and turn to God, surely the town fathers were wise enough to do the same. But we laughed at him. We rejected the hippy and we were unfriendly to the dirt poor family who might attend ever so often. In the congregation, Bill had the least need of all to repent. But each week he repented before us as a public example. He joined the pastor in extending the invitation, much like the prophets of old who called and cajoled and begged and demanded until their souls were empty trying to get the people to repent. But they, me, we were too stupid, too dense, too dull minded to hear God in the actions of this simple man. Remember what the Apostle Paul said:

But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before God. (1 Corinthians 1:27-29, NASB)

We were too smart for our own good. We simply missed it. If Bill could understand the call of God why did not the rest of us? Why did it take me over 30 years to figure it out? I hope I can stand in heaven and apologize to Bill one day.

What concerns me is that the situation does not seem to be any better today. We do not hear the voice of God. Maybe it is because the world is getting old and tired and running down. Whatever the reason, the church is in a major decline. Denominational leaders push programs and lament that churches are “plateaued” or declining. They pick out some pastor who was “successful” over the last couple of years and put him on display, the latest hero. The denominational leaders will try to embarrass the rest of us while the hero tells us how he did it. “Follow my plan and you can be great like me.” But it seems he was just doing what the rest of us were doing. It never dawns on folk that perhaps it was God doing the great things, not the pastor.

However, denominational leaders always seem to point us to various mega churches and comment on how much the church grows. We need to be more like them, they tell us. But if you will look carefully, those mega churches grow by siphoning members off of smaller churches. Smaller churches become the feeder church. The baptismal ratios (the ratio of members to the number baptized converts) of most mega churches are no better than the smaller church. All the while, hundreds and thousands of churches, God’s precious Bride, are dying and shrinking and will soon close their doors. Yet, the majority of pastors go to bed every night feeling like failures. They tried all the programs and it did not work.

No doubt, there are all kinds of Bills, prophets simple and small, who are calling God’s churches to repentance. Jeremiah the prophet once wrote, “And I set watchmen over you, saying, ‘Listen to the sound of the trumpet!’ But they said, ‘We will not listen.’” (Jer. 6:17) I am afraid this is most of us. We are not hearing God. All the programs in the world will do no good if we are unwilling to hear God and do things God’s way. His way is simple, we repent of our sin, he heals our broken souls and we serve him with a fresh faith. Then the church becomes real and authentic and it grows.

Nevertheless, will anyone hear the simple message? The poor prophet, will he be heard? Have our years of sin and refusal to repent caused us not to hear? Jeremiah was called the weeping prophet for a reason. He recorded God’s word to him : “You shall speak all these words to them, but they will not listen to you; and you shall call to them, but they will not answer you.” (Jer. 7:27) I pray it is not too late.

Let us weep for each other. Even to this day, God is calling us to repent, to turn from our self centeredness, from our materialism, from our lack of love and grace. He still speaks. My prayer for us all is that we will listen.

But we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. (1 Corinthians 1:23-25 NASB)

I have always known that the Christian faith was an offense to non-Christians. But it seems that the faith is becoming an offense to believers as well. I have engaged in conversations with folk who think they have discovered that the church is sinful and corrupt and that the means of salvation is embarrassing. Imagine that.

I will take the last one first. Some folk are offended by blood sacrifice and the idea that God sent his Son to die for someone else. It is an offense to the modern mind. A fairly large number of pastors and theologians, who identify themselves with the emerging church, have referred to the idea of the Son being sent by the Father to die as cosmic child abuse. So, they try to find some other model for the Atonement. May appeal to the Christus Victor view of Christ offering himself as a ransom, paid a ransom to Satan for us. I have problems with the idea of God paying a ransom to Satan. On the other hand, I have no problem with the idea of God being victorious over Satan. But it is not all there is to atonement. The New Testament is clear, Christ died as our propitiation (meaning to turn away the wrath of God), and it is spelled out in Romans 2:25; Hebrews 2:17; 1John 2:2; & 1John 4:10. But it is more than propitiation, it is substitutionary atonement, 2 Corinthians 5:21 “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”

Many are embarrassed by the idea of blood sacrifice. But the entire Bible expresses the seriousness of our position before God through the requirement of blood sacrifice. The Old Testament sacrificial system is about the repetitive need to be cleansed by the blood of a sacrificial victim. The Book of Hebrews says that Jesus becomes the infinite sacrificial victim and that he dies once and for all for our sins. As embarrassing as it might be to modern sensibilities, there is so salvation without the shedding of blood. Hebrews 9:22 Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins. (ESV) The fact is, the only way to be forgiven of your sin, to be made right with God, and to receive eternal life, is through the sacrifice of Christ on the bloody cross.

Those who say that substitutionary Atonement is cosmic child abuse, do not understand the doctrine of the Trinity. Scripture says that the Father and the Son are one. The concept of Perichoresis, mutual interpenetration, means that each member of the trinity is an individual yet each shares in the life, will, and thought of the other two. What the Father thinks and wills, the Son thinks and wills. Appropriation means that the works of the Trinity are a unity; every person of the Trinity is involved in every outward action of the Godhead. God does not single out the Son against his will and send him as a sacrifice. The Godhead, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit choose this course of action on behalf of fallen man.

The first problem I listed was the nature of the church. Many are embarrassed by the local church because, it is so . . . , so sinful. In an interesting commentary by Mark Galli titled, Grace-That’s So Sick he says that there is a new breed of “Christian” who refuses to call himself Christian because it carries so much baggage.

Christians have been bad. We have crooked televangelists, high profile pastors who get caught being morally compromised and some Christian organizations being swindled out of large sums of money by “Christian swindlers.” And we are ever mindful of the horrible fact that hundreds of child sex abuse cases committed in churches.

There is no doubt that the church has much to repent. But the church is made up of redeemed sinners who still struggle with their sin. Galli writes:

It has pleased God to love sinners and that is the cosmic scandal. Why would a holy God love sinners like me? I don’t have the answers. But his love has been costly and it comes to us all with a calling. Our calling is to grow in holiness, to be progressive in our spiritual maturity so that we all become conformed to the image of Christ. We are with Paul when he wrote:

This past week I took a week of vacation. Instead of going some place I stayed home and did a few things I had neglected because I did not have time. Some of it was church work. I met with a church planter our church supports. I also visited the worship service of a mission church our church supports. We took over the sponsorship when another church had to let it go.

Both meetings were very fruitful. The church planter is working in a mission near the LSU campus. Though they had some set backs because of heath issues and even death in the family, they are still committed to the work. They had to restart the work this past May. I was impressed by the maturity of the young I met with. It was a maturity that came from going through the fires of life.

Crossroads Church on the campus of Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond is the church plant we sponsor. Their pastor is a 27-year-old man who is becoming an excellent leader of the church. The church reaches a lot of college students but they also had a few gray-headed folk there. It fact, it was good to see a wide range of age groups. We were met at the door with coffee and fellowship. The fellowship was sweet. The worship service is quite contemporary. They had a guest band this week which was acoustic and I enjoyed the music very much. One of them played a drum called a jamba. I was fascinated by the number of sounds that came from it. The music chosen for the service was remarkable in that it pointed to God and not to us. All too often contemporary Christian music is me centered. They used their music to point to God in worship.

When I preach, I stand before the congregation. Asah came out with a stool and a music stand and preached sitting down. There is nothing wrong with this, it is just different. But I will say that he preached a very good, well thought out sermon.

I am very happy that we are associated with Crossroads Church. If they are able to constitute as a church in the coming year, they will have gone from mission to church faster than any other church in our Association.