Revival

21 Steps to a 21st Century Church – Part 5 (Conclusion)

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No need to wait for March Madness, the Final Four are here today!

So without further cleverness, here are the final four issues that the Church in the West needs to address if she’s to be the light to the world that the Lord intends her to be.

4. Make the church for believers
Anyone who’s been watching the Church in the West, and America in particular, has seen the spectacular, meteoric flame-out of the Church Growth Movement. All sound and fury signifying nothing, the CGM gave us their new and improved Church without a Cross™. The upshot is that we now have a Church whose teaching consists of nothing more than milk 24/7/365, and mostly byproducts at that. It’s like casein —and anyone who’s ever eaten a $2 pizza knows how gross that tastes!

For 13 years I was part of a what was once a fantastic church that progressively fell on hard discipleship times because it swallowed the CGM whole. In our final grim days there, it got so bad that I alerted the church’s denomination that the church had gone so far to attract anyone they could that they’d actually stopped preaching the Gospel. Messages had become mired in Human Potential Movement garbage and a smarmy cuteness aimed at those who live for cultural relevance. After repeated unsuccessful attempts to get to the pastor to ask him what was up, my wife and I finally left.Only later did it come out that we weren’t the only ones. More than 40% of mature Christians within that church were bailing out year over year. Eventually the leadership of the church recognized the hemorrhage and repented, but we were long gone—and with a bitter taste in our mouths.The lesson here is one that all Christians should heed: the Church of Jesus Christ is for those who believe in Him. It is NOT for unbelievers. We are sent OUT to the world to bring the Gospel out to the perishing. Once the lost believe, we are to bring them IN to our churches. In their attempts to reach the unsaved, what our churches must never do is dumb-down the messages and training toward maturity that growing Christians need so that unbelievers can be accommodated. And especially if that accommodation looks no different from the world.

The Church consists of the called-apart people. Our teachings should be geared toward Christian maturity, not toward those who don’t even know Christ. The abject failure of the Church Growth Movement is that it didn’t spike the numbers in the truly converted. Sure, it attracted a few people who traditionally had skipped church, but that came at the expense of people looking for substance. Meanwhile, mature Christians have abandoned the typical church on the corner, delving into house churches, emerging churches, or skipping church altogether. They’re so fed up they don’t know what to do.

What to do is this: our churches should always hold Christ’s banner high so that those who can embrace it will, not low so that it gets trample upon. The Church has to be for believers first. Strengthening real believers into hardcore disciples is our mission. We send them out into the world equipped and ready; they bring in the harvest. No other method works.

3. Recover prayer & fasting—especially to repentance
Truthfully, I’m not sure I should add anything here. I’ve said before that we can’t expect miracles to happen, we can’t take down the Enemy, we can’t do anything at all in the Lord’s power unless we’re serious about prayer.But we’re not praying. We’re “practicing the presence” or we’re tossing up tiny “prayerlets,” but our frenzied lives have left us devoid of real down-on-our-knees prayer—though we’ve never needed that kind of prayer more than now.One of my all-time favorite Christian authors and speakers was Leonard Ravenhill. He said this about prayer: “No man is greater than his prayer life.” I don’t think a greater truth ever existed in eight simple words.Fasting. What can I say? Are we doing it? I knew a lot of guys growing up who fasted in order to find a wife. Sounds hokey, but a host of guys are nodding their heads as they read this. However, now that we have wives, we’ve let this one slip. The Bridegroom’s gone away, but if we want Him to come back to find faith on this third rock from the sun, we better be fasting along with our praying. Fasting goes with prayer like peanut butter goes with jelly (well, maybe that’s not such a great illustration—pairing food imagery with fasting—but hey, it’s late!) Both are great individually, but together they’re more than the sum of their parts.

And to what end should the Church be fasting and praying today? To repentance.

Does anyone besides me think that if every church in this country called the faithful to prayer and fasting toward repentance that God wouldn’t shake things up? People have called me idealistic before, but I still believe that if the Church in the West got down on its knees, fasting and praying until the gates of heaven shook, God would do a mighty work among us.

I believe that dire days are ahead for the Church in the West unless we repent. God has already removed some of His Glory from us and given it to the Third World because they have come to Him in their poverty, believed Him, and gone out to minister as if every day is the last. And what did the West do? The children of the world said, “Jump!” and we replied, “How high?”

I don’t ordinarily pick fights with people, but I will on this topic if people say, “No way.” We’ve lost something here in Western Christianity and if we don’t want to see our lampstand removed altogether, we better get serious about prayer and fasting, especially to repentance.

2. Live by The Golden Rule
I may have reiterated this particular case here one too many times in these twenty-one steps, but I promise this is the last time. Stay with me.Jesus wasn’t scourged for 401k accounts. He didn’t have a crown of thorns driven into His scalp so we could fight to get the latest iPod. He didn’t have three nails pounded through His hands and feet so that we could climb over the little people on our way to the brass ring. He didn’t die in agony on a hillside for the world to see so that we could pass by the homeless man on the street and feel good about our lot. Jesus Christ died for people—and not just you and me.I believe our hopelessly broken societal “norms” have led us to this grim place where our first inclination when we meet someone for the first time is to assign them a stereotype we believe they fit. We judge. We assess. We categorize. We assume.Jesus Christ annihilates that thinking. He says:

And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.
—Luke 6:31 ESV

I can’t help but think that if we truly believed this verse and lived it out, it would transform every single aspect of how we relate to people. We think the Golden Rule is good enough for our children, but when did it stop being good enough for us?

What would happen in the Church in the West in 2006 if every one of us who call Jesus Lord would view every relational encounter we have in a day through the lens of Luke 6:31?

I’ve got to believe that the world would be a far different place.

1. Show people Jesus
Earlier, I mentioned how a church I’d been a part of self-destructed by going completely seeker-sensitive.During a service at that church back a handful of years ago, the Lord revealed a great truth to me. I saw all those people in that huge church glued to some well-calculated, but throwaway, piece of church programming, yet the cry of their hearts was for what they were not getting. That cry was, Show us Jesus.Folks, are we showing people Jesus or are we giving them something (or even someone) else? The heartcry of every person on this planet no matter what it may seem to be on the surface is show us Jesus.Now I’m not so ignorant that I don’t realize there are people who are sworn enemies of Christ, but I still believe that even they want to see Jesus, if for no other reason than to steel their own resolve against Him, to hate His people more, to gnash their teeth at their own Christ-denying error.

But this is not about them. It’s about those people who are desperate to know Jesus, but have no idea where to turn to find Him.

What saddens me more than anything else is to see people crying out to see Jesus, yet we give them man-made garbage instead. For those of us who know Christ, why has it become so hard for us to show Him to others?

The problem starts in the household of Faith. If we’re to show people Jesus, then we have to know Him first. We must know His words, know His voice, and have spent so much time at His feet that we know Him better than we know ourselves. Only that kind of dedicated servant of Christ can show Him to other people.

That’s where the weakness is, though. We truly don’t know Him all that well. We know about Him to some extent, but we’re not spending enough time on our faces before Him to know Him as a person. So the world goes waiting while we get to know the cast of our favorite TV show, or the latest stock market trend, or whatever noise the world serves up to us to keep us from knowing the one person who can save the world.

Jesus. It always comes down to Him because He is all that matters.

***

I believe that if we took these 21 steps, the Church of Jesus Christ would be radically altered. If we only took these last four steps, nothing would be the same.

I can’t live like the middling throngs. Breathing light into the darknessThe Christianity we live in the West doesn’t have to be toothless. Christ didn’t do all He did so we can be feeble in our living of the Gospel. The Church we see in Acts rocked the world! Strongholds were demolished, people were wrenched out of the hand of the Enemy, the dead were raised—and not just the spiritually dead!

Are we happy with the Church we see today? I’m not. My problem is that I’m the Church. If I expect to see change, then it starts inside me. Christ alone has the words of eternal life. Only in Him is true purpose found, true life.

Leonard Ravenhill, again, put it all in perspective when he said, “When are we going to get serious about getting serious?”

For 2006, let’s answer that question with the only answer that matters: Today.

***

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

Overflowing

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Today is Pentecost, the birth of the Church and the fruition of the Old Testament prophecy of Joel declaring that the Spirit of God would personally indwell men and women.

El Greco's PentecostHow sad then that the Holy Spirit is barely a presence at all in our meetings or in American believers in general.

Yesterday, I wrote to a faithful reader of this blog about my experiences in camping ministry. Ruminating further on what I wrote her, I want to literally and figuratively talk about two camps. I'll let you decide which one was more Spirit-filled and had a more effective ministry.

The camp in Southern Wisconsin had everything that an Evangelical camp could want—multi-million dollar budget, national recognition, much-copied programming, an enormous staff filled with well-known names in camping, and superior food and accommodations. They had all the right doctrinal stances and perfect theology. The director of the camp was also the sitting director of Christian Camping International.

The camping program in Southern Ohio had a minute fraction of that money and was part of a Mainline denomination that had been losing members to churches like the one that supervised the Evangelical camp. They didn't own their own campgrounds and the camping program was largely funded by one church. There was no national recognition and the leaders, while respected, weren't being asked to speak at Christian Camping International conventions.

The Wisconsin camp was a stickler for rules, even those that made it hard for summer staff members to attend church on Sundays. The camp didn't provide for the spiritual needs of the staff, going so far as to oppose a volunteer, staff-run, mid-week church meeting (organized by yours truly.) Year-round staff made it clear to summer staff that they were just there for a few weeks and the camp really didn't belong to them in the same way that it did for the resident year-rounders. Resident staff almost never let summer staff into their homes.

The Ohio camp made every allowance for the spiritual lives of staff. When leadership saw that the staff was getting tired, they poured their lives back into the staff and made certain that each staff person was getting fed by the Lord. Although many of the summer staff were not local, almost everyone on staff decided to attend the sponsoring church and time was made for staff to attend church and even enjoy fellowshipping afterwards. People from the church housed the staff in their own homes when camp was not actually in session. Relationships were forged for a lifetime.

The Wisconsin camp believed that God came first, campers came second, and staff came third. The Ohio camp believed that God came first, staff came second, and campers came third.

The Wisconsin camp poured out their staff until they were bone-dry and used-up. The Ohio camp got their staffers into the waterfall of the Holy Spirit and let them minister out of the overflow.

By summer's end, the Wisconsin camp staff had nothing more to give, while the Ohio camp staff was still ready to serve. The staff of the Wisconsin camp limped out of camp with long faces and few tears. The Ohio camp staff walked away empowered for service, and there were long farewells and many tears. Many of the people from the Ohio camp are still friends almost twenty years later.

I tell the tale of those two camps because today's Church in America falls into the same two camps. Our ministry is either a pouring out of people until there is nothing left to give or it happens out of the overflow of the hearts of people filled with the Holy Spirit.

Unfortunately, I believe that too much of our ministry today is taking what little of the Spirit of God is in those ministering and pouring Him out until people are dessicated.

A simple look around the United States will reveal the following:

1. We have more seminarians than ever and yet people are starving for good preaching.
2. More people have taken evangelism courses than ever and yet there is no revival in this country.
3. We have more books on Christian topics than ever, yet the ignorance of the Word of God is growing.
4. We have more Christian conferences and seminars than ever, and yet the world around us thinks Christians have nothing to offer.
5. We have snazzier, more consumer-oriented programming in our mega-mall-churches than ever before and yet every poll shows more and more people staying away from our churches.

Folks, we cannot do this by our own strength and yet that is all we seem to offer people. Is it any surprise that people stuck in this kind of dry, manmade Christianity are bored and restless? And for those who labor within those congregations, should we scratch our heads when they burn out and go elsewhere?

There is no substitute for the Spirit of God! We cannot build Christ's Church by any other means than by His Spirit! Our programming won't do it, our happy faces won't do it, our seminaries won't do it, our bookstores won't do it. Nothing builds the Church but the Spirit. We're wasting our efforts and wasting God's time if we think otherwise.

I've said here before that you never have to advertise a fire. If each believer in Jesus was filled to the brim until they overflowed with the Spirit we'd have people begging us to know what our secret is! We'd sit down on a plane and the people in the seats next to us would be clamoring to know how it was possible that they could actually sense our contentment and inner joy. Anyone who is empty would want a piece of Who we have!

I wish that everyone who reads this blog will take time today to read the entire Book of Acts in one sitting. Read it all the way through—your translation doesn't matter. Just read it. Now ask yourself if what you read there bears any resemblance to your own experience. If not, then why not?

The simple answer is that we are not serious about ministering out of the power of the Holy Spirit. But can I tell you something? You will burn yourself to a cinder of you minister to others in the way that most of you have been taught. But if you minister out of the overflow of the Holy Spirit, ministry becomes so effortless that you'll wonder why you wasted so much of your sweat trying to do it by your own strength!

My favorite passage in the Bible is Acts 4:23-31:

When [Peter and John] were released [from prison], they went to their friends and reported what the chief priests and the elders had said to them. (24) And when they heard it, they lifted their voices together to God and said, "Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them, (25) who through the mouth of our father David, your servant, said by the Holy Spirit, "'Why did the Gentiles rage, and the peoples plot in vain? (26) The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers were gathered together, against the Lord and against his Anointed'— (27) for truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, (28) to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place. (29) And now, Lord, look upon their threats and grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness, (30) while you stretch out your hand to heal, and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your holy servant Jesus." (31) And when they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness.

Did you catch that last verse? The place they were in was shaken! When was the last time that the Holy Spirit showed up so powerfully on Sunday morning or Wednesday night that your gathering place was shaken? Or how about you? When was the last time the Spirit go so ahold of you so fully that you were shaken? Those folks in that place already had the Holy Spirit in them since it was a gathering of believers, but look how God filled them to overflowing. And notice what follows from that massive empowering of the Spirit: the people went out filled with the Spirit, ministering the word of God boldly out of that overflow of their hearts! Do you think that they could NOT talk about the Lord after being filled like that? They didn't go out timidly, nor by whipping themselves into an emotional frenzy, nor by whatever they'd learned in a two day Evangelism Explosion session, but they went out in the utter confidence of the Holy Spirit! How could they NOT impact their environs if God Himself was dwelling in them so richly?

You can't buy the Holy Spirit; people have tried unsuccessfully (Acts 8:18-24.) The only way we can experience that filling is to humbly repent of our sins, travail before the Lord in prayer (and I don't mean for five minutes, either), praise His Holy Name by the Spirit already living in us, and wholly offer up our lives as a living sacrifice to Christ—our spiritual worship. We also need to surround ourselves with others who have the same single-minded devotion to Christ. And lastly, we need to be around mature Christians who have tasted the Lord in His fullness. They know what is possible and they believe, even when others don't.

The Lord never intended us to live any other way than overflowing with His Spirit. His promise in Joel was not half-hearted; He promised radical lives, radically changed, and radically equipped by Him to radically speak to shattered people in a shattered world. He alone makes this happen. And no matter how hard we try to manufacture results, without Him we can do nothing. N-O-T-H-I-N-G.

Now do we believe that?

{Image: "Pentecost" by El Greco, 1600. One of my favorite artists.}