Now, quite unwittingly, the Church Growth Movement has fallen for Satan’s deceit. For their Model has been: meet human needs as the best way to teach them their real need. That merely rebirthed the old Adam complex: letting him decide what’s right, wrong and best. How dreadfully destructive the Model has been is most easily seen in the result: never before has America enjoyed such massively-large worshipping fellowships, and never before has America been as spiritually depraved as NOW!
What an interesting nexus: while the growth in mega- and meta-churches has never been as great, a corresponding moral decline in society has occurred. BECAUSE church leaders opted for a worship venue to reach the unsaved instead of the Gospel message that stressed Repentance. “And so John came, baptizing…and preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” Mark 1:4. And, “After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. ‘The time has come’, he said. Repent and believe the good news’” Mark 1:15. John emphasized human repentance first because he preached the new kingdom based on a personal relationship with God, not a continuing priestly-led sacrificial system of animals. And Jesus preached repentance because he embodied the new kingdom as a personal relationship with sinners forgiven and living in his will. When church-growth advocates continued to stress felt human need, God’s word immediately became secondary to the preachers AND in the mind of the unsaved. Scripture merely offered convenient pegs on which preachers could hang points stressing self-improvement and better inter-personal relationships. However, their emphasis didn’t change God’s demand that his word must always be first in preaching. For that view emphasized evangelizing the lost, not entertaining them, as a means of gaining a positive reception. And it did withdraw God’s grace from society that won’t be restored until his people restore his word to prominence and his demand of repentance on sinners as our first approach. Stephen Ambrose noted that Lewis and Clark depleted some of the supplies needed in their Voyage of Discovery. But they still had a surplus of rifles, powder and ammunition on their return to St. Louis. Because, in the wilderness, the trio had life-saving powers. Undaunted Courage, 89 A lesson church leaders should learn. Improvement in society’s moral values will come only when church leaders stress that evangelizing the lost is the church’s most important task, followed by edifying in Christ’s discipleship those he saved by grace. Worship services can then be celebrations of the joy of the Lord while small group studies, using scripture passages, can be educational, which itself will be inspirational. It refreshes our memory that the church has two purposes. One is to evangelize the lost. Two is to edify (build in faith) those Christ has forgiven. By a false assumption, even well-intentioned Christians became troublers of our country, not benefactors. In the absence of God-centered thinking by Christians, satanically-inspired arrogance in the secular world promoted itself as humanity’s answer. Given enough time, education and MONEY, humanity can create what the men of Shinar desired—an edifice to humanity soaring high into the heavens on whose summit humans can build an altar to REASON, A.K.A., OURSELVES! All of this raises the question of revival in America. Will one occur before Jesus returns? Yes, but only after we suffer such tribulation that we lose confidence in what we presently have complete confidence: our intellectual ability to solve the problems now faced. We will repent and seek Christ when we have experienced sufficient sorrows, and our failures become so glaringly obvious that we turn again to the God who made us, to the Christ who forgives us, and to the Church embodying the Kingdom of God on earth—all those living in God’s will by faithfully serving Christ. It's time that churches emphasize evangelism by hiring Ministers of Evangelism. And they should use Biblical principles, not human-inspired methods, of evangelism which pew-sitters can use without memorizing passage or learning sales techniques to convince doubters. Indeed, Christians will start with the unsaved where Jesus started: Repent for the Kingdom of heaven has come. That very start will eliminate a lot of the noise Christians now use to hopefully influence the lost. End Part XIII
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