Powerlessness and the Church

Jesus answered them, “Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what was done to the fig tree, but even if you tell this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ it will be done. And if you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.”
—Matthew 21:21-22 CSB
Now the entire group of those who believed were of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but instead they held everything in common. With great power the apostles were giving testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was on all of them. For there was not a needy person among them because all those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the proceeds of what was sold, and laid them at the apostles’ feet. This was then distributed to each person as any had need.
—Acts 4:32-35

If the Church in America wants to stem the tide of declining attendance, restoring supernaturalism isn’t the only fix.

“Can’t someone do something?” seems to be the biggest lament I see across the web. People have lost faith in institutions that can’t live up to their promises. Law enforcement is hamstrung to control indiscriminate crime and vandalism, City governments can’t control vagrancy and the trashed condition of their streets. Legislatures seem incapable of passing laws the average person needs. Job agencies can’t find people work. Companies charge us more and yet give us smaller portions of worsening quality.

Every institution we used to count on can’t seem to get its act together. In the middle of all this entropy, you would think the Church would be a bastion of efficacy.

But if so, why are people leaving our churches?

I read many articles about the state of the Church in America, and it never fails that when someone wants to point a finger of blame at anyone for the Church’s declining attendance and iffy discipleship, it’s always pointing at the people in the pews. Then when you find out who the author of the article is, it never fails to be either a church leader or an outsider journalist.

Hmm.

People will be loyal and will stick around if they…

Feel wanted and needed.
Have an opportunity to make a difference.
Find what they need.

It’s really that simple. If those three things are not being met, people won’t stay.

How easy it is to pass that off as selfishness, and sadly, that often happens. That’s one of the blame points, that people are only in something for their own needs.

But why wouldn’t they be?

Check out that passage in Acts 4 above about the early Church, and note this:

For there was not a needy person among them…

People were getting their needs met in the early Church. They prayed for this and that, and this and that happened. People came in with an expectation of awe, and they got awe. They needed signs and wonders, and they got signs and wonders. They came in with financial and personal needs, and they got financial and personal needs met.

People won’t leave when the group has got their back and they know it.

It worries me that many churches seem devoid of power, whether that’s powerlessness in the Spirit, powerlessness in addressing the needs of people, or powerlessness in the face of the entropy of the age.

But why is this?

One sad trend that has perplexed me for as long as I have been writing about the American Church is the growing prayerlessness of our churches.

Consider this thought experiment…

A church leader decides that instead of 20 minutes of worship music and less than five minutes of corporate prayer, the church will do 20 minutes of prayer together and five minutes of worship. It may even mean soliciting prayer needs from the people in the seats so the church as a whole can pray for those needs.

Now, do you think that will change anything?

I think that literally everything that should happen in the life of the Christian and the church that Christian attends should begin and end with prayer. If we are not praying, then we should not be starting anything. If we are not praying, then we should not be expecting anything. And if we are not praying, then we are contributing to powerlessness in all its forms.

Yes, there remains practical responses to needs, but have we ever considered that the practical responses arise out of prayer? That prayer is the soil from which fruitfulness springs?

How do we overcome powerlessness as a Church? When the Church makes up it mind to pray with genuine faith.

Church leaders, you are the ones who must lead this turn to prayer. The onus is on you and no one else. If you’re not leading meaningful prayer time in your assemblies, you are failing your church. And I’ll go out on a limb here and say that if your church spends less than five minutes of its assembly time in corporate prayer for real needs, then that’s a fail.

No church will have problems keeping people when its prayers are powerful and efficacious. Believe it.

An Ache for Awe

Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and signs were being performed through the apostles.
—Acts 2:43

The mainstream media has discovered the empty pew. Everywhere I turn online, publications weigh in to explain dwindling church attendance in the United States. The pile-on of doom has been so intense of late, you wonder if the reporting verges on glee as one more despised institution crumbles into dust.

To every article I encounter, I post the same comment. It’s a quote from British/American revivalist Leonard Ravenhill:

You never have to advertise a fire.

This past week amplified the truth of that quote as people around the United States flew, drove, bicycled, and walked, sometimes hundreds of miles, to dwell in the shadow of the moon. The April 8, 2024, total eclipse captured the imagination of millions seeking a rare experience, an awesome thrill irreproducible via AI, CGI, Apple Vision Pro, or a vivid imagination. It was a cosmic event too big, too wondrous to ignore.

Call it a “fire in the sky.”

At the risk of alienating fellow believers. I’m going to state what I believe is the obvious. No one is banging down the doors of our churches because, in far too many of them, the glory has departed. Whatever fire of God burned brightly within the church walls has dimmed or departed.

What has remained after this Ichabod event is whatever human beings can substitute. Manmade experiences fill the void. You get a rock band, a million dollar sound system of epic decibels, a half-million dollar lighting rig of retina-frying lumens, attractive people on stage, special effects to empower the sermon message, and voila! You have the average megachurch meeting. Ramp that up now and then for a “special event” to pull in the lost, and now you’re cooking with FIRE.

Except none of this is the fire of God, the Spirit He promises to all who believe. The Spirit whose presence in their midst stirred the early Church to awe.

Too critical?

I wonder how long it took the priests of the Temple in Jerusalem to realize something was amiss. They’d killed that troublemaker Jesus, so they must have thought their troubles were over. Except some vandal tore the temple curtain that restrained the overwhelming glory of God’s Presence, exposing sinful men like themselves to the Shekinah, which at one time was instant death for the unprepared.

Except nothing. Nothing happened because, at the death of Jesus, the barrier that separated God from the unwashed masses disintegrated and the Shekinah glory of God no longer dwelt in temples built of stone but in sanctified hearts made by God Himself in His image. (More on this here.)

Do you think the priests noticed? Was the Temple colder? Emptier? Do you think they changed their rituals after God left? Or did they go on like nothing happened, sewing the curtain, and reverting to business as usual, unaware that they had become superfluous?

Do you think the priests felt the old fire return when Spirit-filled believers began to meet in the Temple? Did the presence of those born-again, fire-filled souls ignite in them a desperate thirst for what they had lost?

People need awe. People are desperate for the fire of God made manifest in their lives.

Are we failing this lost generation because we ourselves have lost the fire? Would we know if we had? Or would we go on substituting manmade experiences in an effort to keep the masses from missing the genuine fire that once burned brightly?

I ask this because rekindling that spiritual fire is the only answer to dwindling church attendance. And it absolutely boggles my mind that I can go into the comment section of any of these “Why is the Church in America losing attendance?” laments only to find a million excuses and countless solutions, and yet the answer given is NEVER “We need a reinvigoration by the Holy Spirit.”

Why? Because too many church leaders today have never had the Holy Spirit fall on them in that fire-filled way. They’ve never seen a genuine revival, the kind that would at one time sweep the world now and then. They’ve never seen the charismatic gifts of the Spirit in genuine operation (in fact, many have misguidedly crusaded against them).

So all or our offering of awe becomes manmade. We’ve substituted manmade smoke and mirrors for Spirit-sourced signs and wonders. We read the second chapter of Acts, and our response is “More strobe lights.”

People are dying for the kind of movement of God in their lives that the Bible holds up as the normal Christian experience. They’re desperate for healing for their diseases. They’re desperate for deliverance from their afflictions. They’re desperate for a move of God in their impossible situation, whatever it might be. They’re desperate.

Where is the fire of God? Church leaders need to start asking this and doing what it takes to answer it. Because when someone finally figures this out, we won’t need a church marketing campaign anymore because people will be beating down the doors to experience true, Spirit-filled fire.

Many reading know that Cerulean Sanctum has been moribund since I signed off about seven years ago. I wrote about my wife’s illness and its impact on our lives. We later had a terrible 2019 where she spent most of the year in and out of hospitals, only for us to finally find some calm as 2020 started. We all know what happened next.

But, praise God, my wife is coping better and is moving into new horizons helping others with mental illness. Our son is grown and graduated college. I find myself with more free time and more opportunities to think and pray deeply.

So, perhaps I will blog now and then on issues facing the Church in the America, because God knows they are piling up and the solutions some are offering are truly whack-a-doodle.

Father God, bring your holy Fire. Maranatha!

Why Cerulean Sanctum Has Been Quiet

Man alone This blog has been in operation since 2003. That’s a long time. And in that time, much has been weathered.

A select few readers know my wife has battled mental illness for going on nearly a decade now. I haven’t talked about it much here, since talking about mental illness in a public space can be something of a death sentence. People don’t understand mental illness, nor do they know what to do when someone is mentally ill, so talking about it brings raised eyebrows and that slow drift away. Stigma—it’s still out there. As is a feeling of helplessness. If it were cancer, people would know what to say and do, but with mental illness, no one shows up at the door with a casserole. The person with the illness may seem fine, but when the visitors go away or the event ends, there it is. The spouse and family see it and live with it, but few others must.

Traumatic events can destabilize someone with a mental illness. We had a series of such in late 2016, which led to much heartache and grief, and my wife’s illness flared up. We’ve been battling back ever since. Doctor changes, medicine changes, and on and on. When your spouse suffers, you suffer. This has meant scant time for side projects and pursuits. And between a son trying to get his driver’s license and thinking about college, my work, household needs, helping my wife battle back, and all the various vicissitudes of life, blogging had to take a back seat. Fact is, almost everything that was not core to daily existence had to.

It’s not that I don’t have pressing thoughts to share. It’s that sometimes, you have to choose your priorities.

Winter and spring were rough, but I hold out hope that summer will be better. Maybe that will free up time for Cerulean Sanctum. God knows I want to write, but God also knows that family matters.

Thanks for being a reader.