Maybe It’s Time for a New Way of Doing Things
I can’t sleep tonight. My brain is on overload. Actually, it’s been that way for several days now. I really can’t eat either. It’s not that I’m not hungry, it’s just that eating seems so trivial compared to what I’m feeling. My spirit is restless and troubled.
It started last Thursday. Or maybe it all ended last Thursday. It depends on how you look at it. I was praying with our elders as I do every Thursday. We were lamenting in prayer over yet another troubling report from our church body–another divorce, another affair, another drug addiction, another porn habit, another series of bad choices all in the name of getting more money or more things, another man who thinks that frequent trips to Vegas with the guys somehow won’t affect his marriage. And then there’s the really troubling ones, the ones in our youth–the pregnant teen, the abortion, the poor self-esteem, the anorexia, the sexting, the kids whose parents are more interested in being friends than being parents, and the kids whose parents seem to want them to be as busy and frenzied and as over-committed as they are.
It was one of those–one involving our kids–that helped us see the painful truth: What we’re doing isn’t working. It was the tiny piece of proverbial straw that broke the backs of our elders: We have to look at our leadership, our approach to discipleship, differently. It was one too many reports of yet another family or life exploding and leaving no survivors: Rome is burning.
It’s not that God isn’t doing good things, he is. And it’s not that lives aren’t being changed, they are. But it feels very much like we are trying to walk up a down escalator–every step of progress we make seems to evaporate under us. Or in a much more graphic image, it feels like we’re trying to climb uphill in the midst of a raging avalanche.
And so I and the godly men I serve with are all wondering what needs to change. Because every week we hold services and preach the Bible and worship with enthusiasm and give money away and meet in small groups and attend Bible studies, and yet we have to now admit that even with our progress and even with the best efforts of so many committed Christians, we are losing ground. We have to admit that for every believer who is sold out to Jesus there are many more who have somehow gotten the message to Jesus is more of a consultant than a King, and that following him is more of a matter of convenience than a matter of complete surrender.
And because of that, because the Christian faith is being redefined and recast by the very ones who claim to embrace it, our culture is dying. The Church is the thermostat of culture. As the Church goes so goes the society around it. And if, in the words of Jesus, we lose our saltiness, if we cease being a thermostat that is set on righteousness and godliness, then we condemn ourselves and all those around us to a life where the lowest common denominator becomes the standard. Where the brute and the violent and the sexually perverse and the selfish and the greedy and the unkind and the unfaithful and the unbelieving become what is expected and accepted. Where we, left to follow our own devices, slowly commit cultural suicide.
In other words, when the lifestyles of those who claim to follow Jesus have no discernible difference from those who don’t, the game is already up. And when the light goes out in the people of God, then the pervasive darkness that lurks in the shadows is free to take over. And the people whom God loves and Jesus died to save, because they have no revelation of the Holy God to whom that are accountable, perish.
And that, my friends, is simply unacceptable. Not my our watch. Not on my watch.
So we’re rethinking our strategy. We’re thinking about how we can turn the heat up a bit. We’re wondering how we can shed more light on the foolishness of sin and the refreshing grace that comes with repentance. We’re praying and fasting and seeking God for the spiritual breakthrough that our church, our city and our nation so desperately need.
We’re asking God to do whatever necessary to get our attention, to bring us to our knees and to renew our love and passion for him. We’ve crossed the so be it line. So be it.
Will you join us and the other believers around the country who feel as we do? Will you throw caution and conventional wisdom and convenience to the wind and seek God for the healing of the Church that will lead to the healing of our land? Will you pray for an awakening in our churches and for a radical change of our religious status quo, no matter what the cost? We have no other options.
If this were a simple fix we surely would have discovered it by now. Maybe it’s time for a new way of doing things.
