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Advertising Ashes

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Man on fire

You never have to advertise a fire. —Leonard Ravenhill

Are you growing increasingly distressed by the worldly attempts by many churches today to market their church? Does the latest church fad sweeping the nation leave you cold? Are you growing nostalgic for "the olden days" when a preacher would walk into the pulpit and by the unction of God set the place ablaze?

Now that everyone in the United States has a blog—it seems like it, doesn't it?—I read an increasing number of sites that are advertising that they have the solution to whatever the Church's problem is. We all know what the problems are. Just a glance at the Top 25 bestselling Christian books in your local Christian bookstore will tell you:

  • Your church needs better marketing.
  • Your church needs to understand community demographics better.
  • Your church needs to have purpose/mission.
  • Your church needs to be relevant.
  • Your church needs to be authentic.
  • Your church needs to reach out to whatever group of people it's failed to reach in the past.
  • Your church needs to be concerned with end-times prophecy.
  • Your church needs to have a better men's/women's/youth/children's ministry.
  • Your church needs __________.

In a charismatic age, when even the crustiest Presbyterians are raising their hands in worship, how is it that we have forgotten the only thing the Church needs? Why have we forgotten the Holy Spirit?

You never have to advertise a fire. That's the answer to all these books clamoring for attention, trying to get you to buy to find out the "Super Secret Christian Formula" that will suddenly take you, your family, and your church to the absolute pinnacle of Christian experience.

Yet nothing draws people like a fire. You see a fire, you immediately start wanting to linger, to see what is burning, to watch what happens next. Fire evoke memories of stories told while camping, the community around bathed in the amber glow of timelessness and wonder. Fire heals, cleanses, and illumines. It spreads and envelops.

If there is any one characteristic of the Church in America in 2005 it is that for all our bluster, our bestselling fixes, and our introspection over the failure of believers to rise above the secular mire, no other answer can come but that we need the fire of God poured out on us.

John Eldredge, bestselling author of Wild at Heart, claims that men find church boring. David Morrow recently wrote Why Men Hate Going to Church. I have the simple answer for that: they are not encountering the Holy Spirit in the churches they attend. Someone who regularly attends a church that is filled with people overflowing with the Holy Spirit and who experiences the Holy Spirit in power in those meetings will NEVER be bored and will NEVER hate gathering.

But this is not most churches.

Ever heard of the aviator cults? These were primitive people who lived in remote areas untouched by modernity. As aviation grew, these tribal people started seeing huge, unusual birds in the sky. They were a sign. And some of those tribesmen were startled when a metal bird descended from the clouds and tall, white people emerged from their bellies. These people were like the gods themselves. So when the gods got back into their metal birds and flew away, the tribesmen were compelled to erect effigies of them and the odd bird they came in. Totemic planes built of reeds were set up in hopes that the gods would some day return and bless the people. This persisted for generations.

Today, our churches resemble aviator cults. We have a vague memory of generations ago when God showed up in our churches in power. But as time goes on, the story breaks down, the reason for it becomes muddied, and we start dancing around trying to make the aviator gods return. Churches do this in a variety of ways. Most churches entertain, rely on clever marketing campaigns to put posteriors in the pews, or scour the demographic data to tailor their message to what the neighborhood wants to hear. They advertise the ashes of the fire that might have once burned brightly, but is no more. They'll sculpt the ashes into amusing shapes and toy around with the properties of the ashes until they've mined all the ashes are worth—but on reflection, the ashes remain ashes and the fire is eventually forgotten.

You never have to advertise a fire. The Holy Spirit's fire in a church will obliterate whatever feeble gains a marketing campaign can create. The Holy Spirit's fire in a church catches in the community and changes lives profoundly. The Holy Spirit's fire cleanses, renews, and empowers.

For all too many churches today, there is no fire, only ashes. This is the dirty little secret that no one can utter. And when the Sunday service is over, it's the nagging doubt in every person's mind as they walk out wondering why they feel so empty even though they just spent all that time in church.

Everything besides the Spirit will fail to change this condition. The Christian pundits out there are misdirecting people into thinking there are other ways to get there, but there aren't. Only the Spirit of God satisfies. And once you have the Spirit, all that other dross is burned away.

It's time to stop pretending. For too many the Holy Spirit has become a dim memory in a dim church filled with dim people. God, send us your Fire!

The Frankengospel

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The bag of corn chips on the grocery store shelves trumpeted in bold print, "No GMOs! We use only 100% organic corn."

To many consumers, the rush to add the genetic material of jellyfish, mice, and whatever is the hot DNA of the day to our crops cruised in right under their radar. Here in the United States, most people took for granted that when they reached for a tomato at the grocery store they weren't buying a mutant loaded with the genes of something that had four legs and a complete lack of chlorophyll. But Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) are now the talk the world over as scientists play God with the very seeds that sprout into what we eat. Those who claim we are going down a slippery path with our tinkerings have labeled foods that no longer contain the DNA the Creator intended "Frankenfood" in honor of Mary Shelley's manmade monstrosity. But those folks in the white lab coats do not like having their ox gored. They will just as quickly note the innocent truth that they are merely striving for better disease resistance, hardiness, and yields.

There is another kind of food that we are turning into a similar crime against the Creator. We in the Church are taking the seed of the Lord's Good News and transmogrifying it into something utterly devoid of life.

Jesus told a parable:

Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose it was scorched, and since it had no root, it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. And other seeds fell into good soil and produced grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.
—Mark 4:3-8 ESV

We in the American Church need to come to grips with one startling fact: The sower's success rate was only 25%. Three-quarters of all the seed that was sown was ultimately lost or proven unfruitful.

But as Americans, we figure we can always improve a process. As Christians, we like to only think positively, too. So in our effort to do better than Jesus' example in His parable, we've formed a few committees and come up with the perfect solution to that atrocious 75% lack of productivity on the part of the seed; we'll modify the kernel altogether. A little genetic tweaking here or there can only help the cause, right?

The reasoning seems innocent at first. If we can add something to the seed so that it overcomes being eaten by birds, scorched by the sun, and choked by weeds, we will solve the problem of that awful 75% loss. And if that doesn't work, we can always subtract something else if we believe it will accomplish our ultimate purpose.

The problem is that we have tried modifying the truth of Jesus Christ in order to boost its perceived retention rate, succeeding only in creating a "Frankengospel."

We've all seen and heard the Frankengospel. It is characterized by its lack of Jesus, His missing cross, no mention of repentance, and the absence of the Holy Spirit. By these omissions, churches have successfully excised the troublesome parts from the sower's seed. Other churches have tried to overcome the perceived lacks in the seed by adding miraculous marketing techniques, appropriated business seminar know-how, heaps and heaps of weepy-eyed love, and laser lightshows that leave the lost slackjawed at the sheer entertainment value of it all.

If only those slick modifications to the simple seed produced the desired fruit. But it doesn't take a ThD for us to see that the Church in this country has lost its way. The results of our tinkering? Barrenness. Our land is empty, but we refuse to stop sowing our monstrosity.

The simple truth is that we lost faith in the seed itself. We foolishly thought there was something wrong with the whole Gospel. The reality is that Jesus Himself two thousand years ago sowed His seed straight from His own lips and yet it was largely scorned; the birds, sun, and thorns did their evil work. Who are we to think we can improve on our Master? (And let us not forget to give thanks to the Lord for the remaining seed that fell on good soil!)

The only way to counteract the empty, fruitless land that confronts us in America is to sow only the good seed, every part of it, and to sow it with renewed abandon and commitment. We cannot hope to raise the percentage yield beyond what the Lord Himself did, but if each of us shared the whole Gospel of Jesus with enough people, we would each probably need just three of those people coming to salvation in our lifetimes in order to miraculously change the entire world for Christ.

We don't need a Frankengospel. All we need is the true Gospel, the life-giving whole of it, told with joy and enthusiasm, and empowered by the Spirit, to meet the Great Commission.

The Superficial vs. The Supernatural

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A church without the supernatural is superficial. —Leonard Ravenhill

It cannot be about numbers. If our churches are only concerned with how many people are packed into the seats rather than being concerned about the power of the Spirit of the Lord made manifest in our meetings, then we have lost the war and we should all go home and wait to die.

If the people who run our churches do not understand that the measure of spiritual depth in those who show up on Sunday can only be the presence of the Holy Spirit indwelling in fullness, then we will never see revival, only irrelevance.

We can jabber on about church models, worldviews, programs and such, but none of those ever raised the dead and never will, no matter how hard we work to refine them.

But when you talk with most people who claim to be Christians about this, more often than not you can count on a glassy-eyed stare. This is usually accompanied by the inevitable question, "But how do you measure that?"

No one who has encountered the shekinah glory of God ever asks that question. That the question is so prevalent is a shameful mark of our abominable lack of seriousness about what we believe.

I am not satisfied with my own spiritual state. And while I only have myself to blame, I am disheartened that the leaders of our churches today have aspired to so little, looking for plastic trinkets when the storehouse of heaven is ready to be poured on us. Why are we aiming so abysmally low?

Personally, I've had it with all the debates over process, programs, and progress. It's a lie from the enemy of our souls to keep us away from the One who can accomplish it all through us if we only submit to His workings and not our own.

Does anyone out there get this? If you do, how do we band together and seek to revive the dead thing the Church in America has become?

My promise to you is that it will start with me. I cannot endure this powerless thing we have made from the vital, living, fire-breathing Church Jesus set in motion more than two thousand years ago. If what we have now is the best it can ever be then Jesus take me right this second.

I know this blog doesn't get much readership. I don't care. I can only pray that it gets the right readership, people who feel the same way and are angered by what is happening to the Church in this country. You have to have your head in the sand not to see how we are failing, but where are the prophets who are calling us back to repentance and prayer and weeping between the horns of the altar? We've had our eyes gouged out by the worldly, just like Samson, but he prayed, "Lord, just one more time strengthen me." Before the Lord comes again, let that be our prayer.

Oh, Most Holy God, send the Fire! Your people are content with smoke when we need your Fire! Spirit of God, descend upon the altar of our hearts and make us again a supernatural people, a people to whom the lost can look and say, "Truly, God is among them." May your glory burn brightly in the breast of each of us who name you, that we take up our holy calling that is our destiny, tearing down the pillars of hell by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony. Make us content with nothing less than the fullness of your indwelling, Lord Jesus, that the works you have set aside for us to work from the foundation of the world be made manifest in these last days, that none should perish, but all come to knowledge of you. Kindle again in us your Fire before your great and final day. For your glory and honor, always in the name of the Lord Jesus, Amen.