Godly Character

21 Steps to a 21st Century Church – Part 2

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Light in the ChurchThe second installment (#1 here) in the series “21 Steps to a 21st Century Church” adds another four issues the Church in the West, in America in particular, needs to address. None of today’s items are earth-shattering, but it amazes me how the simple things get overlooked and fester in our midst:

16. Deal with offenses swiftly
I don’t know when we became so thin-skinned in America. The rise of the culture of victimization, I believe, is the reason that so many people simply can’t get along with those who hold differing views. Doesn’t matter what the topic is, we too easily take offense at what the other side thinks. It’s as if we’re stabbing someone in the heart if we say that we don’t agree with a dear position of theirs. When you get right down to it, though, the source for being so easily offended is just human pride and self-centeredness.Nowhere else is this more evident than in churches. It used to be that churches split because of fierce doctrinal battles, but I heard of a split recently due to differing takes on whether the church parking lot should be expanded. All this rancor bodes ill for a Church whose growth in America has plateaued. The world looks at us, sees the disunity, and thinks, That’s no better than what I’ve got to deal with every day—and they’ve got more rules, too! Should we be surprised that we aren’t growing? Who wants to step into the middle of a group of people who take offense at everything?

The Lord has something to say about this:

There are six things that the LORD hates, seven that are an abomination to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil, a false witness who breathes out lies, and one who sows discord among brothers.
—Proverbs 6:16-19 ESV (emphasis added)

Did you catch that last one? God considers stirring up discord to be an abomination. I’m fairly familiar with the abominations that Christians prattle on about, but offending our brothers and sisters in Christ is curiously left unmentioned. If only each one of us would heed that warning!

It’s time to stop to consider how others think. Time to walk a mile in their moccasins, as the old aphorism goes. Most arguments aren’t worth it, yet we would rather fight than not because we in the Church today have developed a chip on our collective shoulder. Doesn’t matter what the topic is, we have to be right and damn everyone else who thinks differently than we do! Literally.

This isn’t a call to abandon good doctrine, only to realize that it’s easier to get someone to your side by lovingly (with genuine affection) dealing with another person as God directs in His time. We need to pick and choose our battles wisely and be willing to let some things go. Our fellowship with another believer is infinitely more important than the size of the church parking lot. Let’s start living like we believed that to be true. Like the Bible says, if you have offended a brother in Christ (or he you), go and be reconciled before you render your spiritual service. Let’s not pretend that Matthew 5:21-25 doesn’t exist in our Bible.

Let’s learn how to be the bigger people.

15. Not more church plants, but more connection to existing churches
We practice a sort of Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest ekklesia that goes hand-in-hand with taking offense at others. Nothing else can explain the need for another church plant in the middle of a region filled with churches. Few church planters ever ask whether another church is necessary in a town of ten thousand that already has a church on every corner, but our predilection toward believing that ONLY WE ARE DOING IT RIGHT tends to lead to that congestion.The result is that estimates put the number of churches in this country at more than 350,000. That means that if every man, woman and child in this country were to be in church in Sunday, each one of those churches would hold about 850 people. Last time I looked, I didn’t see every man, woman, and child in America in church on Sunday. In fact, if you believe church pollster George Barna, we’re seeing fewer people in church than ever before.

I understand that some will cry that we need to build more churches to reach more people who don’t have enough churches around them to choose, but the fact is that too many churches are under-attended. Not only that, but church planters aren’t rushing to plant churches in rural communities where there might actually be a dearth of churches; they’re trying to put one across the street from three other churches in the fastest-growing Caucasian section of town. I know an area near me that is growing like crazy, but nothing explains the half-dozen monster churches built (for millions of dollars that could have been better spent) within a quarter mile of each other. I suspect you could put 2500 to 5000 people in each of them, but I guarantee that not even a third of that are showing up any given Sunday. And if they are, there’s another church somewhere that lost those people.

The plain truth is that we’re just cannibalizing each other’s churches. We’re not talking about the “three thousand added to their number that day” kind of evangelism that everyone dreams about, but no one actually does anymore. No, we subdivide our Christian population like a randy amoeba bent on replicating itself in ever smaller bits until there’s nothing left.

But what if a church decided it wasn’t going to view the church across the street as competition? What if we did a better job bringing people into existing congregations rather than building yet another church? What if we worked with the churches we had rather than build a new one because of a church split (see #16)? Or what if we changed our view that other existing churches can’t possibly be preaching the Gospel, instead suggesting that someone looking for a church might find a better fit in the church across the street than the new one we’re thinking about building?

Until we start getting off our duffs and actually start evangelizing people to the point that our own church is swelling because of new converts, not recycled ones from some other church, we just don’t need another new church to add to the cacophony of churches already screaming, Don’t go to those heretics over there, come in here!

We’ve got to stop thinking about our own little mission and start thinking about what serves the Lord best. Yet another church that is hot today and dead tomorrow is not serving the Lord best. Let’s stop now.

14. Think like a visitor
Over the course of a men’s retreat my own church held, I brought up the issue that churches, in general, rarely think about what visitors experience walking into their church for the first time—especially if those visitors have never been in a church in their lives. The puzzled looks on the faces of several of the men told me that they’d never once thought about that. They’d grown up in a church and knew church practices and culture like the back of their own hand. What could possibly be “scary” about church?I have a degree in Christian Education. One of the things drilled into me by my profs at Wheaton College was keeping an eye open for how churches actually communicate with people. What does a church say through non-verbals? Those unspoken messages can be powerful, in many cases overshadowing the message that comes out of the pulpit.

A church that preaches the love of God, but never talks to visitors, is at cross-purposes to their message. Yet the doing may be even more important than the saying.

I suspect that most people reading this are old-timers. By and large, we’ve forgotten what it’s like to be new to a church—any church at all. We know the Christian lingo, the do’s and don’ts, where to take our kids to the right Sunday School class, and what weekday ministries our church offers. But visitors don’t. And when they find themselves overwhelmed by choices and less-than-helpful church regulars, they won’t come back. Ever.

We Americans are amused when folks from other countries talk about America and what it’s like. We take for granted that we live in a big country that has supermarkets everywhere, or that people drive rather than walk to destinations. We’ve all heard the stories. A Japanese fellow told me how frightened he was to drive on the highways here because of the sheer number of monstrous semis that roared alongside him. He’d never seen so many huge trucks, nor had he ever battled them for position on a highway at 70 miles an hour. That was a source of terror for him.

What sources for terror exist for visitors to our churches? To them, our church may very well be like another country where they don’t speak the language, can’t find anything, and seem stupid about the customs that everyone around them performs without thinking, as if in some intricate ballet.

Start thinking like a visitor. Act like we’ve never stepped foot into a church before. Note the lingo and culture. Brainstorm how to make the church more accessible and less scary.

Five simple things we can do to help:

a. Always be on the lookout for people we don’t know. Don’t leave it up to the greeters to be the friendly and informative ones. Offer to sit with new people. Offer to take them out for lunch afterward—on our tab (or even the church’s if the church is wise enough to see how meaningful that can be to retaining people.)

b. Make sure signs in your church point out where people need to go. We should walk them ourselves to make sure they’re accurate.

c. Install a map in the lobby that pinpoints the locations of all church small groups meetings. Have flyers near the map that have the pictures, phone numbers, and addresses of those small group leaders on them. Ideally, if we’re doing #1, we can take people to that small group map ourselves and walk through options with them.

d. Prominently display a plaque with the church beliefs and vision in the lobby.

e. Volunteer to call people who may have filled out a visitor card, especially if they live near us.

What other ideas for making visitors feel welcome can you come up with?

13. Our neighbors matter to Jesus
Yes, the people who live next door. The couple down the street with the sickly child. The elderly couple across the street who can’t do as much around the house as they would like. The single person in the nearby apartment who gets lost in the shuffle.Steve Sjogren once gave a message where he said that he didn’t understand how someone could jump on a plane to go to India for missions work when that same person’s neighbor didn’t know Christ. Say what you will about the slight that gives to world missions, but he does have a point. I’ve never understood how we can expect to win over another culture to Christ when we can’t even lead our neighbor to that same Christ.

Our best mission field is within a half mile of our homes. What are we sowing in that diameter of one mile? And if we can’t sow there, where can we expect to sow?

Every Christian and every Christian family is like an outpost on an unforgiving and hostile planet. Imagine living on the planet Venus with its 900 degree days, acidic atmosphere, and crushing surface pressures. The house of the Christian is the sole sanctuary from that brutality. If we all lived on Venus, people would be flocking to our little respites from savage living conditions.

Our problem is that we forget that the planet Earth is unforgiving and hostile. Our unsaved neighbors are already living with one foot in hell. Do they find a respite in our homes? Do we take our respite to them in their time of need? Do they have even one clue as to the source of our respite from the storms of life?

If not, why not?

We talk about growing our churches, but we too often forget about our neighbors. Instead, evangelism becomes a concept rather than a reality. If we are not there for our neighbors in their time of need, how can we call ourselves servants of Jesus Christ? Can we expect our neighbors to suddenly fall under the conviction of the Holy Spirit by some random encounter or can we be the ones to bring the Spirit of Life into their homes?

Churches convinced of the need to grow need look no further than the neighbors of the people in the church. That’s where it starts. And if our churches are hindrances to our neighbors, then we need to find ways to take down the barriers without compromising the natural offense of the Gospel. If Christ is the stumbling block, then so be it. He Himself declared that He would be rejected because of who He is. But we, our churches, and the way we live out our faith should never be obstacles that keep our neighbors from Christ.

Tomorrow brings four more issues. Thanks for stopping by. I pray that what you read here stirs your mind, your soul, and your actions.

Blessings!

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21 Steps to a 21st Century Church – Part 1

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Shining the light on darknessToday I begin a new series called “21 Steps to a 21st Century Church.” During this five-part series we’ll be examining the ways that today’s Church in the West can rise above mediocrity and get back to being all it can be. We’ll count down to what I feel are the most important issues we need to address by order of importance.

I want to thank all those who contributed ideas. Many of those are included in this countdown, so you have been heard. I pray that the results are satisfying and that all who read this are not only blessed, but begin thinking about how they can implement these ideas in their own churches.

And now on to the first five:

21. Two-way sermons can increase biblical understanding
Given the appalling level of scholarship and biblical knowledge in the Western Church today, few people have enough grounding in the Scriptures and Church history to teach anyone anything. Churches that jettisoned their primary teachings on Sunday in order to present watered-down seeker-sensitive messages that bored the faithful to tears usually have an adult teaching model that pushes all the real meaty Scripture study down to small group leaders, many of them barely biblically literate. With adult Sunday School programs vanishing faster than you can say “ignorance,” fewer and fewer people are equipped to teach, more of that role falling on the pastoral staff.The problem then becomes one of understanding. What good is a sermon or teaching that people can’t grasp? I’ve been around enough churches to know that plenty of people leave on a Sunday scratching their heads, even if we can’t see it. Worse yet, most can’t remember the message a week later; often this retention issue revolves around failing to draw the necessary connections to put the teaching/preaching into practical focus.

Opening up the message to questions is one way that folks can grapple with meaning in the environment primed for delivering meaning. A two-way sermon allows the pulpit to connect with the pew and vice versa. I know that if I were a pastor, I’d like to know when my people were comprehending or not. Too often I think that pastors assume the message got through and take it at that. I would offer that the intractability of discipleship failures in our churches only points out the fallacy of that belief.

Preachers/teachers/pastors—take questions! Open the message up so that folks can truly understand. Don’t make assumptions about comprehension. Welcome the opportunity to let the Spirit guide your responses. You may find your people ask smart questions when prompted!

How can this be facilitated? Have an elder gather written questions that can be answered by the message-giver at the end of the message. If the congregation is small, consider fielding questions as they come to people. If the church is huge, give the message-giver a room in the church to field questions immediately after the service.

Some Emerging churches are doing this very thing and I believe it’s a great idea. Rarely do we give people the freedom to ask questions, so most don’t. But if we create an atmosphere of learning and expectation on Sunday, I suspect everyone in the church will benefit.

20. Leaders should seek out the gifted
We might think we know ourselves, but time and again parents and spouses have keener insights into how we operate than we do. Despite the fact that we live in a self-help culture, most of us are blind to at least a few of our own traits.The same is true of spiritual gifts. Few things are more useless than a self-administered gifts inventory that reaffirms what we already know about ourselves, yet this is how countless people judge their own gifts. It’s amazing how many times our results look exactly how we desire ourselves to be, though.

I personally believe that one of the great failures of the Western Church is that church leaders are not looking for gifted people within their ranks. They’re waiting for those people to self-identify. This is one reason why we have vast swarms of people in leadership roles in churches who are ill-equipped to do the very thing they believe they are qualified to do. How many of us have encountered teachers in our churches who shouldn’t be allowed to teach a preschool class much less adults? I’ve personally lost track.

If we truly believed the Holy Spirit guides into all truth, then we should be able to trust Him to point out gifted people. A pastoral staff that is not going before the Lord daily asking Him to give them eyes to see the truly gifted in their congregations is wasting God’s resources. The tendency is to respond to the boldest extroverts who say they have this gift or that and miss the quieter folks who may truly be the needle in the church haystack.

Not to give pastors one more task, but picking out the folks upon whom the Holy Spirit is resting in power is a critical responsibility. Start taking it seriously!

19. Leaders should primarily come from within a congregation, not from the outside
Want to know if a church’s discipleship and education programs are effective?The surest way to take the pulse of a church’s effectiveness is how many of the pastoral staff came from within the congregation from one generation to the next. Hiring all your pastors and leaders from outside? Then the answer is clear: your programs stink.

The chilling truth is that too many churches have to hire from the outside. Any church that does so is a failure from a discipleship standpoint. If Church A has to go to Church B to get staff, then maybe everyone in Church A should be at Church B.

The surest mark of a church’s health is an unbroken generation-to-generation line of leadership succession. Not nepotism, but genuinely earned positions based on maturity developed within that same congregation. That so many of our churches today can’t do this is appalling. Time to get tougher on how we educate people.

Going hand-in-hand with #20 above, we should be recognizing which young people coming up are gifted for church leadership and we should be encouraging them in that regard. Even more, a church should ensure that the next generation of gifted young people gets the additional training they need to make best use of their gifts, even if that means that the congregation pays for that training! How’s that for a radical idea? If we value leadership and gifting as much as the lips service we give to it, then we should be willing to open up our wallets and put our money where our lip service is.

18. Christian intellectuals must be honored
One of the most insidious trends within Evangelical and charismatic circles in the last thirty years is the absolute scorn with which most Christian intellectuals are held. The wholesale mental slaughter inflicted on thinkers in your average megachurch is contemptible.Everyone loves the people who will let you cry on their shoulder, crying along with you. But how much value do we place on Christian thinkers? My own experience is that they’re treated as carnival sideshows in a lot of churches. Folks who think deep thoughts are somehow inferior to the weeping Wendys and empathic Eddies who get all the attention.

Who can blame intellectually-deep Christians for fleeing the average church? What happened to the Francis Schaeffers and J. Gresham Machens of this world? I’m not really sure where they go, but whenever there’s a “spokesperson for Christianity” quoted in the newspaper or featured on a TV roundtable discussion one truth can be counted on: you’ll never see the theological equivalent of William F. Buckley.

Why so many Christians despise the intellectuals within their midst is beyond me. That so many church leaders allow this confuses me to no end. Perhaps we should not be surprised that the best we can do is Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson whenever the news media wants a Christian perspective.

We need to change this attitude NOW. Instead of poking fun of the theology whiz-kid, we should be holding him up as the standard for the rest of us—unless we’re satisfied with the stupidity we see paraded in public whenever a Christian is asked for his opinion on an important issue.

17. A church’s core values should be obvious
No one should walk into a church and have to ask what people at that church believe. If folks have to go on an extended hunt to get a statement of faith and the general vision of a church, that church has failed to communicate. The first thing folks see when they walk into a church’s lobby should be a big plaque on the wall that lists core values. Also, newcomers should have no problem recognizing the core values because they are proclaimed from the pulpit and lived by the people in the church.In addition, there’s no reason to have people hanging on at a church when they don’t assent to those core values. Nothing drags down a church faster than being loaded with people who don’t want to follow the core values. I think that church leaders should reiterate those values and let people know that if they don’t like them, there’s always some other place down the street that malcontents can attend.

If that sounds harsh, well…it is. But it should only be harsh if the core values of the church don’t align with the core values of the Gospel. If that’s the case, then we should only be happy to leave such a counter-productive church. Otherwise, we should let the dross know just where they stand.
The Church Growth Movement has made us too mamby-pamby about losing people. The honest truth is this: a church of 50 who are all on-board with the church’s core values will grow and make a difference for Christ. On the other hand, a church filled with 5,000 who continually question the core values—or who never live them out—will get nowhere and fight perpetually losing battles until they become worthless for the Kingdom.

I hope you’ve gotten something from the start of this series. Stay tuned for the next four entries coming tomorrow!

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Fire in China, Ashes in America

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God's torch is passing to Asia, and he is performing many miracles in China.
—American missionary David Lin

Diane over a Crossroads is starting a series looking at the underground Chinese Church. I'll be quoting liberally from her blog, Chinese Girl with Her Biblebut as always, it pays great dividends to read her post.

Every Godblogger I know tries to tell it like it is, but inevitably the vast majority of us are English-speakers of American and British extraction. No matter what we might think of ourselves, most of us are not that much different in how we reflect a Western Church philosophy with roots in Reformation Europe. Acculturated as we are within Evangelicalism (mostly), we also take on the sheen of our wealthy American and U.K. culture. Especially for those of us in the United States, our models for how to live out the Christian walk are inextricably linked to American Manifest Destiny, the American Dream, Rugged Individualism, and a "What's in it for me?" attitude.

Yet not every Christian in the world thinks or acts like we do. I know it's hard to believe, but we are not the measure of all things Christian.

Yesterday, I posted that our Western roots and over-reliance on Greek thought have led us into a pit of division, where sides must be chosen, for some have even wondered which hemisphere of our brains is more godly. While we seem to be obsessed with drawing dividing lines wherever we can stick our straight-edge, the non-Western world shows us a Christianity far less at odds with itself—or with the Gospel.

Take the simple act of prayer. Ask most Americans about prayer and they'll say they wholeheartedly believe in it, even if they don't do all that much of it daily. The Chinese underground Church takes a different stance. Not only are the leaders of those churches praying several hours each day, but they have older saints who are devoting themselves to prayer all day and most of the night.

A couple years ago I posted a comment to TheOoze Web site stating that I did not believe that the Church in America would ever see any kind of revival unless people started praying a minimum of two hours a day. The response was that two hours of daily time dedicated to nothing but prayer was too much to ask. TheOoze is an Emerging Church site, so I was not surprised by that reaction from the mostly sub-35 crowd there. But what has been eye-opening to me is that Emerging Church foes in the Traditional Church largely have the same response: two hours solely devoted to prayer is unreasonable given most people's circumstances.

If one assumes that we continue to follow the societal structures we've created in our "every man for himself" society hellbent on fifty hour work weeks, two hour commutes, and family quality time, then maybe two hours is too much to ask. But persecuted Chinese Christians are pulling it off. They seem to be loaded with praying people, but where are our Western prayer warriors? If we wonder why Christianity in the U.S. is in the doldrums, I think we should look no further than the woeful prayer lives that most of us have, from the newest believer up to the most senior pastor. What kind of vital faith do we expect to see when we try to squeeze by on a handful of minutes tossed heaven's way while we rush around like headless chickens?

I don't hear American Christians talk about breakthroughs in the Spirit the way the Chinese do, either. We tend to timidly toss in the towel when confronted with a mountain-sized challenge—or else we resort to the following:

  • Traditional Church – Form a committee to examine the challenge. Form another one when the original disbands because of in-fighting.
  • Emerging Church – Walk a labyrinth to clear our heads so we can think deep, spiritual thoughts about the challenge while asking, "What would Thomas Merton do?"
  • Seeker-Sensitive Church – Commission a demographic study to examine what most people think of the challenge, then design new programming that makes talking about the challenge culturally relevant.
  • Charismatic Church – Bring in a band of traveling prophets to have them scry the meaning of the challenge in terms of battle plans for Joel's Last Days Army.

What do Chinese house churches do? They fast and pray for as long as it takes for God to resolve the challenge. As one Chinese Church leader says it:

When there is a real resistance, the teams do not try to push the Gospel. They just go on their knees and wait on the Lord to hear His voice for direction on what to do. They just keep silent and continue to fast and pray. This is a very practical part of their lives.

Is that how our churches today—no matter what kind they might be—do anything?

Our Western tendency to compartmentalize the Faith is strange to Asian believers. They have a far more holistic view of the Gospel and how it plays out in everyday life. From Diane's post:

Brother Denny (an American missionary interviewer): How do the Acts of the Apostles compare to the Chinese church? What does the Chinese church believe about the Book of Acts?

Brother Paul (Chinese): They would say, "We are there. It is our normal Christian life." They believe that Acts is a demonstration of the normal Christian life. It is a testimony of the resurrected Christ, and He is still the same today. They do not believe that miracles have passed away.

Brother Ren (Chinese): We have to understand that the Gospel that is preached in China, is a little bit different. The emphasis is not only intellectual and mental messages. It is fifty percent preaching, fifty percent showing the power of the Gospel. There is always an expectation and readiness for miracles. It is normal that anytime when the message of the Gospel is pronounced, there is going to be a demonstration of the power of God in that situation. People can see clearly that Jesus is the Son of God, and that He is the Savior of the world. The church of China is not praying for miracles, but they are living in miracles. It is like [Brother] Paul said: it is the normal Christian life.

While we continually argue the theological points of our own little factions, the Chinese Church is living the whole Gospel, not just the parts they like. The result is that God is growing the Chinese Church exponentially, while we American Christians bicker about one topic or another as fewer people care to listen to what we have to say.

Here is a Church that has none of the material available to them that we have. They have no money, no political standing, no cleverly-devised programs, no conventions, and nowhere near the dogmatic factionalism that we have. But what they do have is a faith that moves mountains and may very well topple the atheistic Communist regime in their country of 1.3 billion souls.

And what of the persecuted Chinese Church's view of evangelism? Well, they believe that the Great Commission comes first. What is unusual to Westerners is how they go about it.

In many cases, Christians are sent out to towns that have no Christian witness and the first thing they ask is, "What is the greatest problem in this village?" When they hear what it is, they immediately begin fasting and praying that Jesus Christ would prove Himself greater than the problem. Diane quotes the Chinese Christians (from the quote above) saying that two young women went into a town and were told that a demon-possessed man had the townspeople under his thumb. They confronted the man in the name of Jesus, cast out his demons, and led him to Christ. Then that same man joined the two women as they spoke to the entire village about Jesus. All three hundred in that village repented and gave their lives to the Lord.

Does that model seem familiar? We saw it in Jesus' ministry and the ministry of the apostles in Acts. In fact, the Lord Himself advocated this type of ministry when He said:

And proclaim as you go, saying, 'The kingdom of heaven is at hand.' Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. You received without paying; give without pay. Acquire no gold nor silver nor copper for your belts, no bag for your journey, nor two tunics nor sandals nor a staff, for the laborer deserves his food. And whatever town or village you enter, find out who is worthy in it and stay there until you depart. As you enter the house, greet it. And if the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it, but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. And if anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet when you leave that house or town. Truly, I say to you, it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town. "Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Beware of men, for they will deliver you over to courts and flog you in their synagogues, and you will be dragged before governors and kings for my sake, to bear witness before them and the Gentiles. When they deliver you over, do not be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say, for what you are to say will be given to you in that hour. For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. Brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death, and you will be hated by all for my name's sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.
—Matthew 10:7-22 ESV

Should we be surprised at the quote that opened this post? We out-thought the Lord here in America. We told His Spirit that we can do it all in our own cleverness or we told Him that He could not work that way anymore. Either way, we seem to have lost Him here in America. He took His fire to China.

I can't read Diane's post and not get excited. Unfortunately, I'm excited for China and not for America. We can't seem to see what we've done to ourselves because of our overt anti-supernaturalism and our reliance on our own human reasoning. Meanwhile, the Chinese Church is receiving the blessing of God while they live out the whole Gospel, or as they say, "The normal Christian life."

I don't know about you, but I want that same kind of "normal Christian life" here in America. What has happened to the Church here is criminal, but we brought it on ourselves. It will take the Holy Spirit of God to bring His torch back our way, but He'll only do that if we are ready.

Lord Jesus, make us all ready.

Tags: China, America, Revival, Holy Spirit, Evangelism, Church, Faith, Christianity, Jesus, God