Powerlessness

Powerlessness and the Church

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Jesus answered them, “Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what was done to the fig tree, but even if you tell this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ it will be done. And if you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.”
—Matthew 21:21-22 CSB

Now the entire group of those who believed were of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but instead they held everything in common. With great power the apostles were giving testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was on all of them. For there was not a needy person among them because all those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the proceeds of what was sold, and laid them at the apostles’ feet. This was then distributed to each person as any had need.
—Acts 4:32-35

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

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

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

But if so, why are people leaving our churches?

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

Hmm.

People will be loyal and will stick around if they…

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

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

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

But why wouldn’t they be?

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

For there was not a needy person among them…

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

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

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

But why is this?

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

Consider this thought experiment…

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

Now, do you think that will change anything?

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

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

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

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

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

The Idol God Is Breaking in the American Church

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Previously, I’d commented on an article that posited a slightly different idol that afflicts Americans:

“Idol #1”

But after recent political upheavals that left a lot of Christians wringing their hands, I read a different article a Christian friend posted:

“How Cruz’s Dropout Exposes the Corruption of the American Soul”

The sheer brazenness of the title was enough to suck me in, plus it’s CharismaNews, so it’s bound to have hyperbole galore.

I was not disappointed.

Or, actually, I was.

Like far too many articles in Christian sources today, the foundation rests on fear. Despite the fact the Bible tells us over and over NOT to fear, Christian media love to fan the fear.

And the fear this article fans is one I see rising everywhere: The fear of not having power.

I’d use the polysyllabic word powerlessness instead, but the “not having” carries a nuanced interpretation I think must be stressed. This is about control too.

Right now, American Christians of many stripes are scared to death that both they and the American Church are not in control of power.

Consider the following:

  1. Declining church attendance
  2. A string of losses in high-profile national, state, and local legal battles and protections
  3. A presidential race where no clear “Christian candidate” remains, in fact, the remaining candidates seem the polar opposite

Most interesting is the swiftness of this reversal of fortune. And it has been a dire and fast fall.

But here’s the thing…

We Christians look at patterns of events in the world and in the Church, and while we’re good at noticing them, we’re terrible at providing solutions because we misinterpret what is happening behind the scenes. Only later does it turn out that what we thought was A proves actually to be B.

So while gloom, doom, and The End get bandied about by Christian Chicken Littles driven by fear, I want to propose that our fear of judgment on America is wrong, and that the actual judgment is on the Church. I want us to consider that all these dark happenings are good because God may be breaking an idol in the Church.

Broken idolAnd what is that idol? Well, I mentioned it already: Power.

But not all power. Instead, I think that God is forcing the Church to stop investing so much time, effort, and devotion to man-made, secular power.

The #1 form of secular power obsession in the American Church for the past 40 years has been political power. Guess what? The previous couple elections punched in the face the idea of the power of the Christian voting bloc, and the 2016 presidential race shot it in the head.

To this I say, good. I also say that Roe v. Wade didn’t just turn America into a wicked charnel house, but it ingrained in the Church the wrongheaded idea that the godly response must come primarily through political maneuverings, which may have set the progress of the Christian Church back by 40 years. I know that’s not a popular opinion, but in the wake of recent events, it seems crystal clear.

Some of that failure in politics comes from a declining church attendance. With that has come the fall of the über-pastor, and with him/her, the importance of the über-churches they pastor. And what accompanies that fall? A loss of man-made power. The media stops focusing on the same old Christian faces, and instead shoves microphones in the faces of other 15-minutes-of-famers.

Where does this leave the American Church? Pretty busted. Heck, we can’t even keep pervs out of bathrooms.

All that man-made, secular power? Gone.

And I firmly believe God has purposefully taken it away. Good for God.

So Christian, stop blaming this on the devil. Stop blaming this on evil groups and people. Stop blaming, period.

You see, a Church that relies on man-made, secular power is no Church at all.

This is the Church:

Then he said to me, “This is the word of the Lord to Zerubbabel: Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts.”

—Zechariah 4:6

“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

—Acts 1:8

Where is real power, Christian? In the Spirit of God. And honestly, in a supposedly charismatic generation, the Spirit of God and the power He alone brings has been #2 for a long, long time. God’s not going to let that be the case anymore.

This is a good thing.

The reason all the man-made, secular power sources are now failing Christians is because God wants them to fail so Christians will start getting serious about living by the Spirit, and not by manmade, secular power.

Boom.

Feel a little naked right now? Honestly, that’s where we are as Church. Naked and exposed. Because we’ve been doing it wrong. And for a long time.

I hope a lot more starts to fail for us. Because perhaps then we’ll get serious about what it means to have no power in ourselves or in other men yet have all the power of the universe and beyond available to us.

We haven’t seen that in this generation. Heck, we haven’t seen that in a few generations.

Better start learning what it means to cultivate humble, Spirit-driven power, because that’s the only power that will get us through the days ahead.

Hmm, I Wonder What My Father’s House Shall Be Called?

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PrayerThe fashion today finds some churches talking smack about how long the worship portion of their Sunday meeting persists.

“We open with 20 minutes of nonstop praise to the Lord!”

“Well, we spend 40 minutes lifting up His name!”

Meanwhile, churches continue to build or renovate so that the altar area is more like the stage at a KISS concert. It used to be that a church could drop $50,000 easily on sound equipment. How 2005! Now they spend that much on stage lighting.

Can I ask a simple question?

What did Jesus say His Father’s house shall be called? A house of a 45-minute worship set with lasers?

When was the last time you heard anyone brag, “We open our meeting with a half hour of prayer”?

Something is monstrously wrong in American Christianity when a church of believers can sing some bad rock songs interminably  and then brag about it, yet you can’t get the assembled Body of Christ at that same church to spend five minutes in shared prayer.

I wonder if we’ve reached a stage where we can say that our Father’s house has become one of misplaced priorities.

He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a den of robbers.”
–Matthew 21:13

You see, there is more than one holy thing such robbers can steal.