This morning I had a revelation during my morning prayers. I have a prayer list of about 28 people or ministries I pray for each morning. As I was praying for these men, women and ministries I had an insight that hit like a brick on the forehead. This is not a revelation of new truth but rather an insight that was there all along and I just understood it in a new way.
As I prayed for a friend who is a minister. I prayed about the church he serves, a church that is having a Truck or Treat Event this evening. This preacher is a good man who loves the Lord and His church, and is doing the best he can. I was asking for non-believers to come to the church's Halloween party and in some way connect with the church so that maybe they would come back for a service and perhaps hear the gospel in such a way that they might be willing to consider the claims of Christ.
I also prayer for a minister who serves in the 10 40 window. He goes out an evangelizes among Muslim and Hindu people. He trains other ministers to evangelize and to train other evangelist. My prayer for him and his team was that they would be protected in their travels and teaching, that the lost would come to faith, and that when, not if, they are persecuted they will be kept strong and be a great witness.
The juxtaposition of those prayers told me so much about the church in America. My own poor ministry and why the church is growing other places but not here.
God have mercy on us.
Tuesday, October 31, 2017
Monday, October 30, 2017
Who picks you up when you are down?
I recently had to make a
change in my weekly routine. I had set
up a Google alert to bring me news of specific church events that popped up on
the World Wide Web. One of the alerts I
set up was the word, “pastor”. Anytime
the word pastor would appear in the news Google would send me a link for the
news report.
I had to delete that alert
because it was so disheartening.
Everyday I would get alerts where pastors would appear in the news and
it was almost always bad news. The
number of alerts varied from as few as a half dozen to some days twenty or
more. The stories ranged from the goofy,
such as the pastor who delivered the sermon dressed as the Easter Bunny, to the
all too frequent reports of criminal/sexual misconduct. It was a daily heartbreak that saddened me to
the core of my being. It also angered me;
so much I wanted to take some of these pastors on a “Millstone Swimming
Trip”. But the most pronounced effect was
that it discouraged me. It was not
unlike the painful betrayals I have experienced in local church ministry. The discouragement of these daily briefings
of ministerial failure wounded my heart and twisted my soul. Getting down into
the slough of despair can and will happen to any of us. But once there what do we do? I have taken three steps to help readjust my
attitude.
First, I have to take
responsibility for my negative attitude and for changing it. That begins with limiting the negative input
in my life. While I work with pastors
and do need to stay current on the negative issues related to ministry, I have
to make sure that the volume, both in bulk and in decibels, is limited. Paul gives a great list of things to think
about in Phil. 4:8. Awareness of evil is
wise, but meditation needs to remain focused on attributes Paul mentioned. I need better boundaries.
Second, I must remember that
it is not about me. Luis Palau once
said, “We have everything we need when we have Jesus Christ living in us. It is his power that controls our
dispositions, enables us to serve, and corrects and directs us.” By both personality and training I am a
fixer. I enjoy fixing. Both the process and the result are very
satisfying to me. The desk I am using as
I write is in the process of being restored.
I would love to get a “basket-case bike” and put it on the road. My dream house is a fixer upper. I like to fix things. The problem is that I want to fix stuff that
is not mine to fix: the church, pastors and situations from the Google alerts. I need better boundaries; I also need to remember
who is Lord on all sides of all boundaries.
Third, I need to encourage in
order to be encouraged. It is a
spiritual principle that never fails that what you sow you reap. In the act of loving someone you discover
that you are loved. In the blessing of
an enemy you find that you are blessed.
It is true of encouragement as well.
When you encourage someone it comes back to you and you are
encouraged. When I am pulling someone
from the slough of despair it helps pull me from that same bog. We all need to be encouraged, but we forget
that a good place to start is by encouraging someone else. We shouldn’t go on an encouragement fishing
expedition, but encourage another and trust that in giving we will receive. You never know the impact of our
encouragement on another person.
I will conclude with an excerpt
from my up coming book, The
Adventures of June Bug Johnson.
The story is true, but embellished, and the names and characters are
fictionalized to protect identity. The
chapter is called “Cussing in Church” and tells about a word of encouragement that
rescued a young pastor’s ministry.
At this point, Randy realized what he had done. He had slipped back into his old Marine
words. He stopped mid-sentence and
looked over the congregation. They sat
there eyes wide and mouths hanging open, it didn’t seem like there was even one
of them breathing. Grandpa Lymon and
June Bug sat on the second pew. Grandpa
Lymon had his brow so knitted together it looked like a once-plowed field. June Bug looked afraid-really frightened-as
if he expected the roof to be split open by fire from on high at any
moment. There is never a silence like
the silence in a church after someone slips up and cusses and Randy did a dandy
job of cussing.
Randy almost broke down in tears. He was so ashamed that he couldn’t even word
an apology. He saw the shock on the
faces of the little congregation and simply stepped out of the pulpit and went
and sat down on the front bench. He didn’t
look like a proud Marine or even a young preacher. He looked like a dog that had been beat all
its life. He looked like he might just
curl up on the front pew and cover his face with a hymnbook. He just slouched there hoping everyone would
just leave without him having to talk to anyone. In that moment, he decided he would go back
to school, drop out of college, and go back into the service.
That is when, Grandpa Lymon stood up and took just
three steps to stand next to Randy and turned to face the congregation. He put one hand on Randy’s shoulder and
extended the other to the congregation, hand up as if asking for a coin. After a moment that seemed like a year to
Randy, Grandpa Lymon spoke.
“I don’t care much for the way he said it, but I sure am
glad to know which side he is on. I
think this church ought to hire this young man.
I think he could do with a bit more training, but you got to admire how
he feels about the enemy.”
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Monday, October 23, 2017
Churches Praying for Vegas a good thing or is it a symptom of something un-healthy?
Personal note: This was the blog I did not want to write. I put it off and tried to avoid it. The truth is I had to come to some very uncomfortable realizations about the church I love.
On October
1, a man deeply committed to evil launched the bloodiest shooter attack in U.S.
history on a concert on the Las Vegas strip.
It created immediate media frenzy.
The concertgoers and by-standers began posting videos, photographs and
commentary almost before the shooter took his own life. In the media storm everyone wanted his or her
voice to be heard and to be portrayed as compassionate and caring. Churches across the nation had special prayer
services, watches, masses and candlelight vigils providing a note of
spirituality to this dramatically horrible event. The phrase “Praying for Vegas” graced almost
every outlet of social media.
While
prayer is the appropriate response to any tragedy we should have been praying
for a long time. There are heroic, great
Christians with a strong Christian witness serving in Vegas and their work is
not in vain. Any perceived negativity is
not meant for those who have become missionaries to what might be called “America’s
Corinth”.
However,
the “Pray for Vegas” flourish may reflect a problem in the American church’s
culture. Before I make a specific assertion,
let’s note several observations.
Consider
this:
- · In September of this year 58 people were killed and over 200 wounded, not in Vegas, but in Chicago.[1]
- · According to Yelp there are almost 100 strip clubs in Vegas. It has been called the Strip Club Capital of the World.[2]
- · According to one website that studies and reports on black market economies, there are 30,000 prostitutes in Vegas.[3] In one police raid girls as young as 13 years old[4] were found working in the Vegas sex industry.
- · Vegas’ city fathers (and mothers for that matter) have intentionally marketed Vegas with a marketing campaign, “What happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas” that is a blatant appeal to the most base nature of fallen humanity.
- · In the last 30 days (as of this writing) there were 126 Islamic attacks in 26 countries, in which 1,102 people were killed and 1,116 injured.[5]
- · In the US there are an estimated 3,000 abortions a day.[6] That is roughly the same as a Vegas shooting every 25 minutes, around the clock.
We are very selective in our
moral outrage! Why?
As
we consider these great tragedies, many of which are in terms of sheer numbers
and much worse than the Vegas shootings, one has to ask, “Why is there so
little moral outrage on the part of the church?” Is there a reason that the
passions and energies of the church can be so excited by one thing and not
another? Why was there no outcry to
“pray for Vegas” as she marketed herself as a vacation spot for vice? Why is
the church both locally and nationally so selective in taking the moral high
ground?
Throughout
its history the church has had a tendency to take the shape of the predominate
culture. Today our culture is media
dominated and I believe that in many cases the Christian’s spirituality is media
driven. What ever is trending is what
gets our attention.
Often
the pattern is something like this:
1.
We see the tragedy as presented by the medias in our lives.
2.
We are caught up in the emotion associated with the tragedy and have a
strong emotional reaction to that tragedy.
3.
We express our emotions, often mimicking the emotional reactions we see
in the media.
4.
We often feel that our participation in this flood of emotion will in
some way make a positive difference.
5.
Having had our cathartic experience (posting a video, lighting a candle,
or liking a post of a video of someone lighting a candle) we go on unchanged in
an unchanged world.
If
you ask me if I am just being cynical, I would ask you, “Are you still praying
for Vegas? Are you praying for the
children in human trafficking in Vegas and other U.S. cities?”
Is the Media driven culture
hijacking Christian spirituality?
Could
it be that as Christians we have mistaken emotion for spirituality and that our
spirituality is media driven? Our emotions are drawn to those events that garner
media attention and we respond accordingly. With the rise of visual media we are tempted
to think with our eyes. As Francis
Shaffer said, “He (the viewer) knows, because his own eyes have seen. He has the impression of greater objective
knowledge than ever before. For many, what
they see on television becomes more true than what they see with their eyes in
the external world.”[7]
The
great problem with a media driven spirituality is that it easily becomes a
media manipulated spiritualty. There
need not be a grand conspiracy. If the
dominant cultural and media establishments share a common worldview they need
not conspire to exert the pressure in the same direction on Christian
sensitivities.
For
example, we might find a circumstance in which a church that held a traditional
view on a subject would be labeled negatively and congregations that held a
more progressive view would be presented in a more positive light. Christians with a media driven spirituality
could be swept away with the accompanying emotions.
While
it would be wrong to suggest Christians should not be engaged in the media
available to us, we must be careful to think prudently. Here are three suggestions that might help
prevent Christians from being manipulated by the media and led astray.
Re-evaluate our involvement
with all media outlets.
As
we approach any media outlet, be that mainstream, talk radio, entertainment or social
media we need to make sure we know why we are engaging and what we want to
accomplish. We need to have a plan for our participation with the media. We can do this by asking some simple
questions:
How
is this related to God’s will and calling for my life?
Why
am I choosing this medium to do this?
How
am I going to use this media to advance God’s calling on my life?
When
will I know that I am reaching my desired objective?
Once
that objective is reached how do I need to re-evaluate my involvement with the
media?
We
can go to the media to be informed, entertained, conduct business, or just to
keep up with friends, but we better not go there without an intentional
approach in mind.
Prioritize the study of
Scripture
If
the foundational beginning of our spirituality and consciousness is anything
other than scripture we cannot help but end up in the wrong place. In the early church it was scripture that
shaped the spirituality of Christians.
There can be no doubt that the church needs to be aware of its cultural
context. However, we have, in my opinion,
over-emphasized cultural sensitivity to the detriment of our commitment to
scripture. The seeker sensitive and
seeker driven approach to the life of the church might have brought us to a
seeker driven spirituality, which results in a faith that is pushed by the
currents of culture. In our context, the
currents of culture are the media.
Biblically trained Christians are not apt to be manipulated about moral
high ground.
Think critically
Many
committed Christians engage with the media without serious reflection. While they are deeply committed to Christ
they tend to not think critically. To often the media has become the background
noise of our lives. We often approach
media without the realization that there is an agenda behind what we see and
hear. From Michael Savage to NPR to Oprah
Winfrey to Justin Bieber to this writer, everyone has a reason to be, a message
and agenda. We must learn to measure
what we see and hear against God’s word; in so doing, we learn to think
critically. By laying the ideals we encounter in the media with the statements
of Scripture we can discern truth from falsehood.
A
fun exercise to learn to do this with is by measuring church music against
scripture. This is a great way to see
that both traditional and contemporary worship songs have examples of Biblical
and un-Biblical messaging. By training
ourselves to think critically about ourselves we can then move on to news,
entertainment and culture.
We do not need less prayer.
When
we face the next tragic moment that will surely flood the media we do not need
less prayer. We need less sentimentality
disguised as a spiritual moment the only purpose of which is to make us feel
better, but makes no difference at all.
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Monday, October 16, 2017
An intercepted letter to Jesus:
“Sometimes,
Lord, the energy and excitement of getting into your word during morning
devotions is so great I feel like I could study the Bible all day long. Then there are days like today. The Scriptures seem like little more than an
interesting story, and maybe not even that.
Perhaps,
Jesus, it was the passage or being out of my routine. Maybe it was just the fatigue and sleepiness
of a long day yesterday catching me this morning. Perhaps, it is the darkness of my own soul or
the sinister plot from the evil one.
Maybe, Lord, you have allowed this into my life, and from You and this
circumstance You will teach me.
More
important than the moment is what comes from the moment. Lord, help me to look for You more closely, hear
You more clearly, depend on you more completely, and love You more deeply
because of moments like these.
The
new day is beginning. I can be busy with
many things today. What I want is to be
where you want me to be, doing what you have prepared for me to do. Lord, grant me opportunities to serve you
today and give me the wisdom to see them and to know that they have come from
You.
God,
there is no question of your goodness and holiness. The problem is entirely mine, so use it, Lord,
to Your good purpose. Have mercy on me,
Lord, and help me.
In
the Name of my only Hope,
Amen”
Name
withheld and used with permission.
Monday, October 9, 2017
Thom Rainer missed the point.
I realize that it is a very bold
statement to say, “Thom Rainer is rarely mistaken but I believe in this case he
was.” In September of last year, he
wrote an article entitled FIVE REASONS WHY CHURCHES ARE DYING AND DECLINING FASTER TODAY. After a brief introduction he listed five
reasons churches are in decline and why it is much more difficult to grow
churches than in past generations. Here
are the five reasons he suggests that contribute to the decline of American
churches:
1.
Cultural Christianity is declining rapidly.
2.
The exit of the Builder generation.
3.
Migration from rural areas and small towns to the cities.
4.
Faster church transfers.
5.
Slow response to change as change accelerates all around us.
I do not disagree with Mr. Rainer that each of these has had a
profound impact on Sunday morning church attendance. All of these represent dramatic change in the
reality of the life and culture of the church.
But none of them, alone or in combination is the reason the church is in
decline.
I believe the decline of the church has a much more dangerous
root problem and if we do not address this root problem the American church
will go the way of the church in Europe.
Unless we make a radical course correction we may witness the end of American
Christianity. What is this change we
must make? What is the course correction
that we have to adopt?
The Big Picture
Dr. Michael Householder has surveyed Christians around the
world, from Cuba and Central America to Russia and Myanmar. He has talked to Christian leaders who came
to faith in traditional, American, church settings, to mission stations in
remote villages. Here is his single
question he has asked the over 4,600 leaders he has taught, “When you became a
Christian did anyone disciple you?” Out
of 4,600 Christians 111 answered yes.
That represents a whopping 2.4%.
A couple of generations ago we made a subtle substitution that
has had a disastrous, long-term impact on the church. We have replaced a Biblical concept for a
highly marketable one. In this
marketable concept were the seeds of our demise. When we got this wrong everything else began
to drift toward our demise. We replaced the
Biblical command of Jesus, “Follow Me” with the more palatable invitation to
“Accept Jesus”. Stop for a moment right now,
open your concordance (online or book) and find where the Scripture tells us to
“accept” Jesus. Now look up the word
“disciple”. Now, look up the phrase
“Follow Me”. What results did you find?
For several generations the church has used a non-biblical
concept for what it means to become a Christian: accepting Jesus and His gift
of eternal life. Jesus never asked for
that, nor did the apostles teach that.
Jesus said, “Follow Me.” For the
last few generations we have not made disciples. We have asked people to “Accept Jesus as
Savior”. In a context of cultural
Christianity, many of these new “acceptees” stayed in the church. But they never grew strong in their
faith. We adjusted down the expectation
from being a disciple to being a church member.
We can see symptoms of that lowered expectation in any one of several measurables. Things a disciple would do out of love for
their master become optional if they are members of a church. (Consistency of
attendance, Bible study/reading, giving, serving, etc.)
As the grip of cultural Christianity became tighter we attempted
to reshape the faith and worship to be more attractive. We became first “sensitive” and then “driven”
by the wishes of those we wanted to reach. We promised more and downplayed the
demands of being a disciple. We have
come to the point where some would tell you that you can have everything you
want on earth, by naming and claiming it, and heaven besides; all that is asked
is that you give God some seed money and really, really believe, and that you
claim your blessing out loud. The call
to discipleship is unheard.
The absence of discipleship is not limited to Word of Faith
congregations. Saying a prayer and raising
a hand at a mass meeting a disciple does not make. There is no Biblical precedent for such
sloppy believe-ism. Even churches that
practice baptisms often do nothing more than hand the saturated candidate a
towel. While still dripping they are
told they need to attend services regularly or get involved, but there is
almost never a concerted effort to disciple.
The church growth movement did much to raise the standards of churches
in a great many ways. It was obvious in
a more secular society if the church was going to attract larger crowds it had
to make changes. But Jesus never said attract
large crowds. His command was to make
disciples.
Disciples are not mass-produced.
They are not made in batched groups.
They are never created in a flash and wow moment. Disciples are made over time; it took Jesus
three years to mint His first group. Disciples
are formed in small gatherings like two (on the road to Emmaus), three (Peter,
James, and John), or a dozen. Some might
say that on the day of Pentecost 3,000 were baptized; so large group
discipleship has it precedents. Let’s
not forget that those 3,000 had almost certainly had extensive exposure to
Jesus over the preceding months. Please
notice what happened with those 3,000 next; they met daily with apostolic
teaching, shared meals, and wealthy members liquidated their assets so that
everyone could have their livelihood funded.
The biblical pattern associated with the 3,000 on Pentecost is unmatched
in the contemporary church. I am not
anti-large church. But I am passionately
opposed to churches of any size substituting our cultural expectation for the
Divine command to make disciples.
I am a firm believer in the 5% + 15% +80% rule, proposed by Dr.
Householder. This rule says 5% of
churches can be innovators and develop fully effective tools and systems on
their own. About 15% of churches can adopt existing tools and systems and
formulate them to make them their own and use them effectively. The remaining 80% of churches need to use
tools and systems that are provided for them.
Every church needs to determine into which category it belongs and begin
working to make disciples.
It is my conviction that within a generation the church in
America will be a shadow of its current self unless we shift from being focused
on our own wants and wishes and become focused on making disciples. Part of me is afraid it is too late; that we
in the American church have passed a point of no return. I have been wrong often. I hope I am again.
I would be remiss if I did not offer a solution. If you need to develop a disciple-making ministry
in your church I would like to suggest that you contact Dr. Mike Householder. mikerhouseholder@gmail.com Let me offer a disclaimer
here. I am not being compensated in
anyway by Dr. Householder or his ministry for this endorsement. I simply believe that it is the time to
restore the biblical practice of making disciples.
You can follow this link to purchase his materials.
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