Being people of God's Word

There is an article going around on the Internet that gives us some important words that we all need to hear.

It's an editorial by Michael Spencer, written in the Christian Science monitor, entitled, "The Coming Evangelical Collapse."

You can read it at: http:www.csmonitor.com/2009/0310/p09s01-coop.html

Michael Spencer writes, "we are on the verge, within 10 years, of a major collapse of Evangelical Christianity."

He then gives seven reasons why (Listed below).

Let me draw your attention to reason number two:

"We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we've spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it."

He further writes:

Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures."

As we relocate our church to 183rd street, we are all going to need to be in prayer and dialogue with one another concerning our identity.

One thing I do know. I am anticipating us being a church that is centered around the Word of God, and the Word proclaimed and explained, not just simply given a passing nod on a Sunday morning.

I'm not going write about what others are doing - let me simply make this point. I have complete confidence in what God's Word, the Bible, in what the Scriptures can do!

I feel a deep desire in my heart to keep on teaching the Word, verse by verse.

I would like for us to be known as a "Bible Teaching Church".

It seems like our culture is thirsty for something deeper, something challenging.

While we still want to be "culturally relevant while maintaining consistency of doctrine," while we still want to communicate the Bible in ways that our 21st century society will understand, let us continue to be "people of God's Word"!

This is a challenge that Spencer really pinpoints to us as Pentecostals.

He writes, "The ascendancy of Charismatic-Pentecostal-influenced worship around the world can be a major positive for the evangelical movement if reformation can reach those churches and if it is joined with the calling, training, and mentoring of leaders. If American churches come under more of the influence of the movement of the Holy Spirit in Africa and Asia, this will be a good thing."

Gang, let's pick up his challenge. Let's not only be people of God's Word, let's continue to be people of His Spirit!

Here are the seven reasons:

1. Evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism. This will prove to be a very costly mistake. Evangelicals will increasingly be seen as a threat to cultural progress. Public leaders will consider us bad for America, bad for education, bad for children, and bad for society.

The evangelical investment in moral, social, and political issues has depleted our resources and exposed our weaknesses. Being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of Evangelicals can't articulate the Gospel with any coherence. We fell for the trap of believing in a cause more than a faith.

2. We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we've spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures.

3. There are three kinds of evangelical churches today: consumer-driven megachurches, dying churches, and new churches whose future is fragile. Denominations will shrink, even vanish, while fewer and fewer evangelical churches will survive and thrive.

4. Despite some very successful developments in the past 25 years, Christian education has not produced a product that can withstand the rising tide of secularism. Evangelicalism has used its educational system primarily to staff its own needs and talk to itself.

5. The confrontation between cultural secularism and the faith at the core of evangelical efforts to "do good" is rapidly approaching. We will soon see that the good Evangelicals want to do will be viewed as bad by so many, and much of that work will not be done. Look for ministries to take on a less and less distinctively Christian face in order to survive.

6. Even in areas where Evangelicals imagine themselves strong (like the Bible Belt), we will find a great inability to pass on to our children a vital evangelical confidence in the Bible and the importance of the faith.

7. The money will dry up.