More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
June 25 - August 27, 2020
They praised God when three thousand people were saved in a single day. Evidently, they counted.
An attractional church conducts worship and ministry according to the desires and values of potential consumers. This typically leads to the dominant ethos of pragmatism throughout the church.
What you win people with is what you win them to. The best motives in the world cannot sanctify unbiblical methods.
A ministry guru who says, “If you will employ these principles, you will have an increase in attendance,” is promoting pragmatism. In nearly every circumstance in church ministry, no matter the results, pragmatism is a sinful way of thinking, if only because it does not rely on the Holy Spirit.
But the application-heavy approach of the attractional model fails to address that while the negative (prohibitive) law is powerless to change people, the positive (prescriptive) law is equally powerless. Whether you are prohibiting (negatively) or commanding (positively), the law of God cannot change a single human heart to honor God. Only the grace of God can do that.
When the gospel is peripheral, occasional, or incidental to our mission and our preaching, we cannot trust that the gospel is truly drawing and shaping those who respond. Pragmatic methodology is legalistic because legalism is what happens when you disconnect the Christian’s “do” from Christ’s “done” in the gospel.
If you win people to biblical principles but fail to win them to the biblical Christ, you will simply create religious people who lack the power to change. We create tidy unbelievers.
But the issue is not the use of technology or innovating new ideas; it is the lack of authenticity they sense in an overproduced spirituality. They tend to respond negatively to pop-song covers, movie-clip illustrations, and cheeky sermon series titles.
A while back, I sat down with Craig Groeschel, pastor of Life Church in Oklahoma. I asked him what has changed about his preaching over the years. He explained that, to preach to the unchurched, he had to start preaching deeper because even the unchurched want deeper content. In other words, those for whom sermons were being dumbed down aren’t dumb. They are interested in the truth or else they’d be out golfing.
as even more people become irreligious, the churches aimed at reaching irreligious people by appealing to their “felt needs” risk becoming more irreligious themselves.
The way a churchwins its people shapes its people. Consumeristic values and pragmatic methodology will win consumers and pragmatists. If they aren’t won by the glory of Christ, they aren’t won to the glory of Christ.
Edwards prefaced his list of “distinguishing marks” with a list of things that may or may not be signs of a genuine move of God. It’s a curious collection, including things like charismatic experiences, the stirring up of emotions, and the fiery preaching of hell.
The discipleship processes in many “count the hands” churches seems to end right there—with the counting. This is nothing new, however. The Victorian-era London pastor Charles Spurgeon also criticized this practice, routine even in his day: Some of the most glaring sinners known to me were once members of a church; and were, as I believe, led to make a profession by undue pressure, well-meant but ill-judged. Do not, therefore, consider that soul-winning is or can be secured by the multiplication of baptisms, and the swelling of the size of your church. What mean these dispatches from the
...more
People coming to know Christ is always a good thing, no matter what kind of church they’re in and no matter how they hear the gospel. But the “effectiveness” of the gospel message does not sanctify any and every evangelistic method. A simple counting of “decisions” does not prove genuine fruitfulness. A genuine decision is itself the first tiny bud of life that will one day ripen into fruit.
The size of your church is a neutral matter because out of all the exhortations in the New Testament Epistles, “Get bigger” doesn’t appear among them. Paul never asks the Galatians or the Colossians, “How many you runnin’?”
“Not everything descriptive is prescriptive.” In other words, we should feel free to count, just as the early church did, but we should not assume that employing their methods will lead to the same results.
In Isaiah 6, the Lord tells the prophet Isaiah to go preach to hardhearted people. Extrapolating from Isaiah’s context, this would include both the churched and the unchurched. And what was the promised result of his preaching? The result, the Lord says, will be that ninety percent of his audience will fall away. In this case, God promises Isaiah a radical decline in numbers. The decline is just as much a move of God as a radical increase might be.
My point is that Jesus repelled just as many as he attracted. And he did not base his ministry efforts on drawing the big crowds. When we come to the end of his earthly ministry, his closest disciples were one fewer than when they started—a net loss.
The Bible does not measure spiritual health in terms of size. It’s not about bigness. It’s largely about transformed character.
Third, don’t equate success or fruitful ministry with people having emotional experiences. Church worship today is now effectively synonymous with music. It has become a cottage industry in the United States, something to be produced, packaged, and marketed. This music is widely accessible outside the context of a church gathering, and even in the context of a church gathering, it is often executed in a way that caters to our individualistic, consumeristic impulses.
What you probably won’t hear are comments describing a new or growing appreciation for Jesus or an increased awareness of the nearness of the Spirit.4
It’s good when people get emotional in church. But that is not in itself a sign that your church is doing something right. As Spurgeon says, “[It is not] soul-winning, dear friends, merely to create excitement.”
the more important a metric is the more difficult it is to quantify.
Edwards was looking for growth—that Jesus “seems to beget in them higher and more honourable thoughts of him than they used to have, and to incline their affections more to him.”
But grace doesn’t just supply feelings. Grace supplies faith.
Is your church growing in its affection for Jesus? Is he actually more important than everything else? Don’t just reflexively say yes because that’s the right answer. Take time to think about it.
Are our sermons giving people five things to do, or are we reminding them that the essential message of Christianity is something God has done?
Musically, is the church focused on creating an experience for people or on adoring the Creator? Do our songs tell the story of the gospel? Are we, the people, the stars of the show, or is Jesus?
People have lots of problems, and the church can help with many of them, but if we are not helping our people comprehend, confront, and confess their sin, we are failing them.
the ironic failure of the attractional church is its embrace of the positive law (“Do these things”) apart from the gospel. We trade sin avoidance for works righteousness.
We cannot see how good the good news is if we don’t see how bad the bad news really is.
“Affirming inerrancy in principle, while rejecting its sufficiency in practice, is like saying your wife’s perfect while having an affair.”
Appealing to post-Christian people on the basis of the authority of Scripture has essentially the same effect as a Muslim imam appealing to you on the basis of the authority of the Quran. You may or may not already know what it says. But it doesn’t matter. The Quran doesn’t carry any weight with you. You don’t view the Quran as authoritative.9 This is an important point here. My point is not to attack Andy Stanley. Honestly, he is not the problem here. I am referencing him because he is a leading practitioner of the attractional movement, and many leaders—perhaps even a few reading this
...more
The typical attractional approach to the Bible often puts the felt needs of the lost in the driver’s seat; they have the authority. This doesn’t mean our preaching shouldn’t address questions and objections skeptics and doubters have. It simply means you don’t let the questions move you off reliance on the gospel’s power.
The church has not endured for two thousand years on “spiritual feelings.” The grace of God empowers the church by inflaming the desires of people toward greater interest in theology and doctrine. But how do you get there? The seeds of this are planted in corporate worship and watered and nurtured through the process of discipleship.
People loving a great program is not the same as people loving each other.
If your church closed tomorrow, would the neighborhood care? Take some time to wrestle with that question. If your church does not have relationships with those outside the church body and leaves little mark in the community, it may not be a fruitful church.
Yes, the early church counted. It’s fine to count. But the biblical marker of success is never high attendance or a focus on decision-producing. That doesn’t exist in the pages of the New Testament. What we see is faithfulness.
The church is not called to be successful by attaining certain numbers or meeting a preset standard of growth, but we are called to be faithful. And that faithfulness will lead to fruitful growth.
1. Are those being baptized continuing to walk in the faith years down the line? 2. Do we have a clear way of discipling people? Why or why not? 3. How many of the attendees of the worship gathering participate in community groups? If the percentage is small, what are some reasons for this? 4. Can our members articulate the gospel? How would we go about finding this out? 5. If we asked ten people in our community who do not attend our church to describe what they think of it, what would they say? If the church shut down tomorrow, would our community care?
The gospel is always an interruption. It interrupts our lives, our sinful habits, our selfishness and rebellion, redirecting our attention away from ourselves to God and his work and Word. Sometimes the gospel even interrupts our ways of “doing church.”
To be clear, our creativity and intelligence can certainly adorn the gospel of grace, but no amount of creativity and intelligence can awaken a dead soul. Sacrificial good works and biblical social justice can affirm the power and truth of the good news, but neither can awaken a dead soul.
Only the foolishness of the gospel (1 Cor. 1:18), the good news that God forgives sin in Christ and transforms sinners by grace, can do that.
“For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power” (1 Cor. 1:17). Paul knows that all too often our creativity and intelligence don’t adorn the gospel but obscure it.
Prayer is expressed helplessness. When we’re not engaged in prayer, it’s because we feel like “we got this.” The extent to which you are not engaged in prayer is the extent to which you are relying on your own strength.
We honor the Spirit with our reliance, not with our self-centered know-how.
