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.

Eclipse image © Bill Kilgallon. Used by permission.

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!

A Christian Response to News, Politics, and Current Events

paperboy Increasingly, I believe too many Christians do not have a Christian response to most aspects of life. Instead of a true New Testament Kingdom of God mentality, we have firmly ensconced ourselves in an Old Testament judge mentality, despite the Old Covenant’s obsolescence and replacement and the demise of the national Israel of the Old Testament.

Compounding this error, American Christians have a desperate need to be seen as right on everything, regardless of who or what this tramples. To our amazement, we are now eating the fruit of that error and yet remain incredulous and oblivious to how this reversal of fortune came to be.

To sum it up, we’ve been doing it wrong and just can’t admit that we’re the ones who screwed up.

Of course, this does not excuse the world, as the world has screwed up just as badly or worse. But we Christians simply can no longer pretend that we are innocent bystanders to our own undoing.

I write all this because I continue to see rotten and ill-advised behavior by Christians in the public square. We can’t seem to learn our lessons.

This post is about getting ourselves back on course. Take it for what it is, a 50-something Christian attempting to inject some wisdom into the conversation.

How Christians Must Think and Act about the News & Current Events

The most important thing to understand about all news and about all conversations that spring from current events: Most likely, you and I were not there. For this reason, anything we hear in response is hearsay.

The Bible says this:

“Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but fulfill to the Lord the vows you have made.’ But I tell you, do not swear an oath at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. All you need to say is simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.”
—Matthew 5:33-37 NIV

Jesus is talking about oaths and vows here, but His point is that we not go in our speech where we cannot promise or understand. When we go beyond our understanding, we invite Satan into our words.

I believe this is critical for how we speak in the days ahead.

When we comment on news stories and current events, we rely on hearsay, information we cannot corroborate. Most of are old enough and wise enough to know that unbiased reporting is a myth and probably always has been. Human beings always bring their own perspectives and biases into all communications. Period.

If you and I were not there to witness and personally experience an event, commenting on motivations of individuals/groups/governments and speculations beyond what was personally seen with eyes and heard with ears are out of bounds for us. We simply cannot know.

The proper Christian response in that case is not to speculate, but to say instead, “What a tragic event!” or “How sad for those people.”

That is letting your yes be yes and your no no.

The Bible makes the truth of this even more clear:

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
—Jeremiah 17:9 KJV

You cannot know another’s motivations. Heck, you cannot even know your own motivations, so how can you speculate on what people involved in crimes or tragic events were thinking or why they acted the way they did? Do you know that person personally? Do you know his or her story? Were you there with them when they did what they did?

No, you do not know and you likely were not there. So don’t speak as if you do know or were there.

In short, don’t add fuel to any fire about which you know nothing. And the fact is, you and I know nothing about most everything.

The only Christian response is to say as little as possible and to leave the speculation to speculators, of which you are not to be.

Instead be as still as possible. Yes yes, and no no.

How Christians Must Think and Act about Politics (I)

The only allegiance the Christian is to have is to the King, Jesus, and to his Kingdom. Jesus Himself said this. He takes precedence even over our families. He is #1, and everyone and everything else is a far distant #2. This is God’s wisdom for our own spiritual health.

When it comes to the Kingdom of God, we are to pursue it first and foremost. In all we do, we do it for the King and the Kingdom.

To this end, when we engage in politics, we are to engage it with a Kingdom perspective and as citizens of the Kingdom of God before considering any earthly Kingdoms:

Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.
—Matthew 6:33 NLT

Therefore, when we consider candidates for political office, we should keep this in mind:

1. The candidates we endorse should pursue and promote the Kingdom of God as much as humanly possible within a system of government, as directed and empowered by God.
2. Candidates for political office who receive our vote must reflect the evidences of the Kingdom of God and its fruit: Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness, and Self-Control.
3. We should in no way endorse, promote, or vote for a candidate who does not reflect the two conditions above.

No excuses, Christian. Do not vote for or endorse candidates who cannot or will not reflect the purposes of the Kingdom of God. Vote for someone else. Write in a vote. But do not cast your vote for people who oppose the Kingdom of God and its evidences and fruit.

How Christians Must Think and Act about Politics (II)

If we want to talk about governments and the Bible and attempt to pry verses out of the Bible to endorse the American system of government, we will fail. I’ve looked, and I see no evidence for a democratic system of government in the Scriptures. Likewise, if we want to find a federalist system of government, we might find something similar, but that would be Rome—not the most positive example in most of Scripture. Read Revelation if you don’t believe me.

We Christians in America have it difficult, because in America, the system of government is by the people and for the people. Finding direct Bible verses that speak to how such a form of government would operate and how Christians within it should operate it is like finding a needle in a haystack—except there is no haystack.Monarchies rule in Scripture. Even the Kingdom of God is a monarchy.

This poses a problem for Christians who attempt to pry verses out of the Bible to endorse how our American government is to act.

Christians are given direction on how they are supposed to function as members of the Church, but not so much on how they are to govern on immigration issues, for instance. We are to be kind to all aliens, but would closing down immigration into our country for a set number of years become an unkindness? We don’t have a Bible verse for that.

The problem is, we err sometimes when we attempt to force a verse to say something about government immigration policy when it’s not meant to be used that way.

Part of the problem for the American Christian is that we will NOT find verses that tell us how we should handle gun control, or immigration, or welfare, or any of a number of other topics intended at a governmental level. We are sometimes told what we should do in our churches, but the government is not the Church, nor vice versa, and too many Christians try to meld the two, resulting in an unholy abomination that works neither as a Church nor as a responsible government.

Again, we must go back to the Kingdom of God.

What does the American government look like when American Christians act out their responsibilities as citizens within a representative government of the people and for the people WHILE also promoting their primary responsibility, the advancement of the Kingdom of God?

I find this question is not asked by most Christians, nor even most Christian politicians. Instead, we make futile attempts to make the Bible say things about governance in a federal republic that aren’t there in the Book.

What this means is that Christians in America need to rely on the source of wisdom we perpetually think we can do without: the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the mouthpiece and “town cryer” of the Kingdom of God. The Holy Spirit is the distinguishing mark of the Church.

Keep in place the underlying Scriptures that speak to Christian character and practice on a 1:1 level , but govern in such a way that we Christians listen to and operate from the leadership of the Holy Spirit, which we then carry over into our government.

Sadly, most Christians today have no idea how to make that happen, because too many of us are plugged into our gadgets and distractions and not plugged into hearing the voice of God through the Spirit.

Want a godly government? Christian, put the Kingdom first and listen to the voice of the King. We may not have a verse to cover a particular issue, but we will be covered by the voice of the Spirit, who can speak to any situation we face.

Why I’m Not in Church on Sunday Mornings Anymore

Leaving, walking out of churchurch When my 15-year-old son graduated out of Sunday School, he missed the dialog he got in class. We sat passively in church on Sunday mornings, and I could tell he was disconnecting. I’ve never been a twice-on-Sunday person, so I thought that perhaps we instead could go on Sunday nights, where the youth group was a little more like the Sunday School he had been attending. Similar worship, but with a little more back-and-forth, and a more intimate crowd.

Still, something is not the same. It’s not just the transition from Sunday morning to Sunday evenings, but something in me. And it’s because I’ve changed at the same time the Church in America has.

We’re at a crossroads, folks. I’ve written about it for years, but I think I need to talk more about it.

This transition has got me pondering where we as Christians got off base and the general status of the Christian Church in America. I want to share my experience.

I want to reiterate that it’s my experience. I’m drawing on it. It may be different for you. It probably is.

First, I don’t have any allegiances to any one flavor of Christianity. Each has some validity, and each has its blind spots, and even its wastelands. In fact, the valid and invalid differences are largely what define each church or denomination.

I’m going to cheese off a lot of people by saying this, but if you’ve been in the same denomination from the day you were born, it’s like living on a farm in Montana in the middle of nowhere. Nothing wrong with your place, but East Etherville, Montana, is not New York City, and it sure as heck is not Beijing, China. Don’t kid yourself into thinking you know what the Christian faith is like, because your flavor of it ain’t even close to being the full expression. Really. You don’t know. And as much as I’ve been around the block in a bunch of American denominations of radically different expressions, I’ve never sat in a Catholic cathedral in Argentina, a house church in peril in Iraq, or a decaying Greek Orthodox Church in Athens. I can imagine what those would be like, but I would be wrong. You and your favored flavor are wrong, too, about some aspect of the Christian Church universal. Just accept your limited view and subsequent wrongness. You’ll be a better and more humble servant of Christ if you do.

So again, what I share here is my experience. It’s wrong from the start from someone’s perspective, and I understand that. You don’t have it all down either. Thank you.

I grew up in the Lutheran Church, and as much as the Lutherans had it going on with understanding grace and the centrality of Jesus, there wasn’t a lot of concern for the lost or for being the priesthood of all believers empowered by the Holy Spirit. Sure, the priesthood of all believers is a bedrock Lutheran understanding, except like an excerpt from Animal Farm, some creatures were more equal than others—and those had ordination papers and a seminary degree.

Ironically, it was a Spirit-filled Lutheran who taught me about the charismata, but then there wasn’t much room for that wonderful man in Lutheranism either, so…

I saw a lost-concerned, Spirit-filled way to live when I started attending an Assemblies of God church. While the leaders at that church were solid, the denomination had trouble with some of its other leaders and big names, and it all tainted the rest of it. Human frailty—and for a young, naive man, it was hard to make sense of. Now, I know better.

The Church of Christ Restorationist asked many good questions about some aspects of the Faith I had always taken for granted, but they had the opposite problem with wayward leaders, and I never understood how one could restore the Christian Church by blackballing people.

The Presbyterians held Scripture and study in high regard, but sometimes money was held up equally high, and people who didn’t have any money not so much.

Evangelical Free excelled at being all evangelically. Good sermons, though.

Methodists somehow hold together their big tent of diverse factions, and we can all learn from them, but they also have a hard time telling anyone, “Yeah, that ain’t right, and you need to stop doing that.”

The Vineyard rocked both the Kingdom of God Now and the Kingdom Not Yet, and it also got the gifts, creativity, and worship right. In fact, the Vineyard folks had the best balance—at least until John Wimber died. And that whole Kansas City Prophets fiasco.

American Baptists—well, they have John Piper and a few other solid pastors who are trying.

Pentecostals have a great sense of duty to God and country and to ol’ time religion. Coming full circle, I just wish there were more focus on Jesus (rather than whatever it is I’m doing) and grace.

Here’s the thing. All those churches and denominations have their goods and bads. But somehow, someone, somewhere, some church, has got to put all those goods in one place. And start dumping the bads at the same time.

Does any church pray anymore as a corporate body on Sundays? And not here and there, three minutes and a cloud of dust, but on-your-knees, specific, intense, non-canned prayers, both with church leaders leading and the people in the seats praying for the immediate needs of the folks sitting next to them. I mean, how hard is that? Really, if the Church as a whole isn’t devoted to prayer, we might as well pack up and end the charade. We’ll spend a half-hour singing witless, CCLI-approved chart-toppers, but praying for more than five minutes taxes everyone’s ability to focus. C’mon, Church!

I used to adore worship times. I would genuinely lose myself in the hymns of my old Lutheran church and during the peak era of the Vineyard with its huge P&W influence. Great, great music sung with passion to our great God.

Today, I grit my teeth in worship time because the songs we sing are so bizarre, unfocused, irrythmic, vague, and constructed for marketing purposes. Who is this sung to? For? And why is there a new song or two every week? Why does the entire verse consist of the same note or two, and yet it’s so hard to sing? Heck, I used to play drums on a church worship team, and I’m not even sure how to make all the syllables fit in that line. And why does nothing rhyme so I might recall the rhyme and remember how the song goes? Maybe it’s me. I dunno. I think the last contemporary worship song that helped me connect to God was “Revelation Song,” and that came out like a decade ago, right?

I don’t want to sit in a pitch-black theater anymore, where I can’t see people around me (you know, the Body of Christ), and where I can’t look at anyone on stage because I have a strobe light flashing in my eyes, all 50,000 watts of it. I don’t want to go to church and worry that I may have an epileptic seizure from the light show.

Jesus, Light of the World. Remember when churches were lit by natural light? Often with some stained glass windows, which were enough light show for most of us? I get enough darkness during the week. Can I come to church and see the faces of fellow believers lit both by natural light and also the Light of the Holy Spirit? Please?

And speaking of Jesus, can I hear the Word of God read out loud? A big chunk of it? In context, please, and not a set of cherry-picked verses used to make a point. And can the sermon be about Jesus and not about how I can try harder to be a good Christian? I don’t need five points and an application or three. I need Jesus. I need to hear about Him because it’s unlikely I’ll hear about Him from the world, except as a curse word or two, and the world is where I dwell for most of the week anyway. Maybe if I heard more about Jesus, some of those places where I’m screwed up as a husband, parent, employee, or whatever would get better because I had more of Jesus—rather than having more Christian principles I can’t possibly keep because I’m a broken person who is terrible at using checklists to make myself better.

Maybe I could go to church and use the gifts God gave me to help other people. If I had a chance. I pray well, I think, and I do hear from the Lord for other people. Words of knowledge. Words of wisdom. I care about other people, but sometimes my life is harder than I wish it was, so I don’t get the chance to do as much personal ministry outside of this blog and those opportunities I might have for a couple hours a week in the assembly of the believers.

Sometimes, I wonder if any church thinks I have value within the Body of Christ. I think I’m not alone in wondering that.

Maybe I’m too self-centered by asking these things and wondering what the solutions might be.

I hope to see a church that lifts up Jesus and never stops doing so, where the whole Bible is read actively and with joy, and prayers are the language of love that each of us bestow on each other (and not just hidden in our prayer closets).

I want to sing to the Lord and not worry that I’m off beat or that I’ll screw up the words, and that those words have real meaning about Jesus, and not some capitalized Someone, or some River, or Rain, or whatever the market-driven metaphor of the week is. I want to connect with God in worship and not hope to and instead leave disappointed that somehow I knew how to worship just fine once, but I’m not doing it right anymore.

I keep hoping for more spiritual Light and not more artificial lights. There’s enough gloom in the world; I don’t want to marinate in it on Sunday, punctuated only by lasers and disco balls.

I really don’t want to hear about me anymore or what I should be doing. I’m painfully aware of what I can and can’t do, and the can’ts outnumber the cans. I want to hear about Jesus, because He can do everything, and without Him, none of us can do anything.

I want to hear about and experience the Kingdom of God Now. Because none of us is marking time until Heaven. It doesn’t work that way and never has. Most of us are aware of the Kingdom of God that is Not Yet. Most of the Church in America has shifted everything to the Not Yet and acts like the other half doesn’t exist. I want to see—and be a part of—the other Kingdom half too.

I long to be the beneficiary of the assembled Body of Christ’s collective charismatic giftings and to use my gifts to help too. Because that’s the entire point of being the Body of Christ, each person unique and necessary to the health of the whole. Along the way, maybe we will hear prophetic revelation that will be discussed and discerned as true by mature leaders, so the church can anticipate needs and not always just react, both with too little and too late. You know, the way Paul said the Church should be, not this deaf and dumb thing we substitute because we’ve disempowered everyone out of ungodly fear.

More than anything, despite all the cranks, killjoys, fearmongers, and naysayers, I pray for a Church that is everything we see in the Book of Acts and more. Because THAT Church has never stopped existing—except in the hearts and minds of shriveled people. And I’m not one of them. God help you if you are.

We keep asking what is wrong with the Church in America. We’re wringing our hands over what has gone awry, and why attendance is down, and why, why, why…

I’m no genius, but it seems to me that we have simply forgotten what is main, plain, and important. We have no patience for God, no love for anything authentic, and we want to be entertained for an hour.

But that’s not everyone.

I really don’t want what most people seem to treasure in a church nowadays. A show doesn’t cut it for me. Neither will business principles and celebrities save a church, nor hip leaders, marketing trend analysis, or flash.

The Holy Spirit showing up in power WILL draw people, though. Churches toss in everything else when there is no presence of God. Sooner or later, people get wise to the lack. They’re getting wiser every day.

Some people want the presence of God. Heaven knows I do.

Maybe I’m self-centered in my wants, but I want real Church done the old-fashioned way. More than that, I desperately need it. Maybe you do too.