The Second Coming of the Church

 All my life I‘ve heard people who were convinced that the time for the second coming of Christ was just around the corner. Today, with the turmoil in the world and the rejection of Judeo-Christian values by our society, that teaching is especially loud. Those teachers could be right. This might well be the time. I’ve even heard some folks say they wish Jesus would come now and put an end to all this tumult. I can understand their point, but we, the church, have a job to do, no matter what the circumstances are. We are still under orders to love God, love others, be witnesses to the love, hope, and salvation we have received from Him, and make disciples of people from the world over and from all walks of life. 

Perhaps, instead of wishing and praying for the second coming of Jesus right now to bail us out of this wicked world and to punish the wicked ones, we should be praying for a second coming of the church. Isn’t it time for the church to redouble its effort to accomplish the mission Jesus gave us before He ascended? I think the church needs to quit worrying about less important things like our comfort, Starbucks’ cups, worship styles, and our difference over the methods we use to share the Gospel message. Instead, we need to get on with being the church Jesus wants us to be.

I can hear some folks say, “But it’s so hard today. People don’t hold the church in high esteem and they don’t know the Bible. Besides that, our culture seems to be marching away from biblical principles as fast as it can.” My response to that is a very profound, “So what.” The church was born into the 1^st Century Roman world, which knew absolutely nothing about the church, nothing about Jesus or the Bible, and their culture was built on paganism and secular philosophy. This is precisely why what is needed now is a second coming of the church. The tiny band of Jesus’ followers ignited a complete cultural change. The church gathered so much influence in the relatively short time of 300 years that Emperor Constantine felt it necessary to declare Christianity the religion of Rome to keep his army together. Remember that the church was able to do that in a day without mass communication, without the printing press, without the computer, without air travel or powered sea and land travel. By simply relying on the yielded lives of Christ’s followers and the power of the Holy Spirit the church spread the Word through the entire Roman world and far beyond. Just imagine what the Holy Spirit can do today through Christ-followers who are fully yielded to Him and have access to all the communication and transportation tools of the 21^st Century.

Could such a “Second Coming of the Church” happen? Could a New Great Awakening come across our land and the entire world? Of course it could! Is that God’s will? I believe it is, because the Great Commission has never been rescinded! What I’m afraid is lacking is a church that is motivated to accomplish it. Jesus challenged His disciples with reaching every person with the Gospel and, finally, in this century, it is possible to answer that challenge. However, making disciples is more than simply telling the story. It’s helping people choose to believe and then learn to follow Jesus. The second coming of the church will not happen until the church turns its focus to fulfilling Jesus’ commands. Let’s quit fretting over minor things and make the main thing, making disciples, the main thing. To accomplish this He must be the main thing, not only in our church program, but also in the fabric of our everyday lives. I want to see the Second Coming of the Church.

Please Father, Steal My Show This Sunday

Last Sunday I was bopping down the road with a contemporary Christian radio station on and was blown away by a Toby Mac song I had not heard before: “Steal My Show.” The lyrics are basically a prayer before a concert asking God to take over the “show.” Here are the lyrics of the chorus:

If you want to steal my show

I’ll sit back and watch you go

If you’ve got something to say

Go on and take it away.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=149eaHcrPHA&list=FL9ob471u_BJ8O-VN1SCau8w&feature=share)

It reminded me of my prayers when I first started preaching. I was always very nervous and I would ask the Lord to calm me and take over, because whatever I did or said was His show and I felt Him remind me that if I truly made it His show, He would not sponsor a flop.

Thanks, Toby Mac, for giving me such a great reminder. In recent years, production values have become much more important in morning worship. Not that we didn’t try to do our best back in the day, but now there are so many more things at our disposal: worship bands, music videos, illustration videos, funny videos, etc. And sound systems are now unbelievable in their complexity as well as their quality. Teaching pastors and worship leaders, even in relatively small churches, spend a lot of time with the production of the service. This is not a criticism. Worship should be the best we can make it with what we have. But, the pressure these days to “put on a good show” is tremendous.

I guess it was always like that. In the past, the pressure was on the choir director to get his group to make a harmonic sound, and the organist did her/his best to make the old instrument sound worshipful, but now the emphasis is a bit different. Sometimes leaders feel like they’re in competition with the church down the street. That may be true, but only for a few church s-hoppers—not for the majority of prospects. Our competition for them is an easy Sunday morning in bed. So, we still need to make sure we do our best.

First and foremost, our worship is supposed to be aimed at God. The object is not to glorify you, but to glorify Him. After all the hard preparation work, worship leaders and pastors should take a moment and remember why they worked so hard to produce an excellent time of worship. Make sure the focus is on our Lord. (I spoke at one church where the worship band was in a stage pit instead of front and center. It was a brand new church auditorium, so it was by design to keep the focus of the service on the cross, not on those serving in leadership.) He gave His best for us, His Son, so He deserves our best. Any applause should be for Him, not for us. This should be obvious, but is it always?

Second, in our time, at least in America, Sunday morning worship has become the receiving room for the church. A healthy church will offer many doors to prospective Christ-followers: small groups, children’s ministry, student ministry, recovery ministry, sports ministry, to name only a few, but for most churches gathering together for worship is the main event. So, we need to do our best.

Third, Sunday morning worship is still a vital part of winning a prospective Christian to Christ and discipleship. It should not be all that we do, but it is an important part.

Fourth, Sunday morning worship reveals our priorities. Is God really the reason we come together? Are we interested in new people? Do we want newcomers to understand the Gospel? Therefore, we need to do our best.

But, all we can do, in this case, is not all we can do. We MUST submit our efforts to the Lord. We must ask Him to not only use what we have prepared, but do more with it than we can imagine. We must, as Toby Mac put it, ask Him to “steal my show.” After all, it’s not our show. It is His. It is for Him, from Him, and because of Him.

Please, Father, steal my show!

The Turn-Around Church Challenge: Will you take The First Step to Turn Around Your Church?

Face it. Most congregations are declining or plateaued in attendance and membership. While some churches flourish, the attendance and participation in most churches has been diminishing for years. Some churches seem to be holding their own as they work hard to stay at the same attendance level. Many churches that are growing are doing so through transfer growth. That happens when people who are already Christians move into your church from another congregation. Transfer growth is relatively easy. It may take nothing more than having a better show than the church down the street. It’s a good thing if Christians transfer to your church because they have recently moved into the area. It’s not that great if the transfers come because they are disaffected or disappointed by the church down the street. Transfer growth, while it may feel good and look good in the statistics, does little or nothing to extend the Kingdom of God. It is far inferior to growth by evangelism. That’s when people who don’t know Christ become Christ-followers and identify with your church. Way too many churches haven’t had that kind of growth in years.

Turning a church around is very difficult. The hardest part is to get the people to want to turn around. Sometimes they know their congregation is in trouble. They see the empty pews. They realize that most of the congregation is made up of old people and that every funeral further diminishes the ranks. They are alarmed, but not alarmed enough to do the things that it would take to return their church to health. These diminishing churches die slowly. Their death is slowed because they either have a lot of money in the bank that they can slowly spend on safe things that enable them to get by, or they lure a naïve pastor to work there for nothing. They convince the pastor that he will be able to turn the church around and they will help him. Too often the congregation not only does nothing to help him, they stand in the way of the changes the pastor tries to initiate. If they make any changes, they are only small ones around the edges that only serve to extend the dying process.

The first step, the most critical step, for a church to turn around or get off a plateau is to admit their condition and seek help. They have to realize that it will probably take radical changes for the church to return to health. Long time church members have to willingly make those changes. They have to accept that the changes will probably be uncomfortable and things won’t be like they have always been. The changes will make them uncomfortable, but they need to become more uncomfortable with the fact that people are going to hell that they could be reaching. These long-time Christ followers need to become more desperate to let God use them to build His Kingdom than they are for their church to stay the way it has always been. The desire for their church to return to being a place where lives are changed and people find Christ must override the desire for “the good old days.” They need to begin to see their church and their community from God’s point of view. Finally, they need to be brokenhearted over the opportunities they have missed to reach people with the Gospel, and dedicate themselves to seeing that happens no more.

God sent His Son into the world to die for our salvation; that had to be uncomfortable. Jesus died a horrible death on the cross; that couldn’t have been comfortable. The early Christ followers suffered sever persecution, torture and death; no way that was comfortable. Yet many church people today are unwilling to sacrifice their comfort for the souls of people they can reach with Gods’ help. Church people need to resolve to become Kingdom builders. That means to choose to do whatever God asks of them to help Him build His Kingdom in their community.

It’s time to step up to the challenge to be witnesses. It’s time as the old hymn says, “be done with lesser things.” It’s time for the church to rise up. The world desperately needs our Savior and His love, hope and salvation.

If You’re Not Growing Where You’re Going …

I drove past the big billboard next to a large church on a freeway each week for 7 months and it bugged me every time. It said, “If You’re Not Growing Where You’re Going, Try Us.” I think churches should advertise, but I think it should be targeted. This sign is targeted, but it’s targeted toward people who are already church members. It seems to me we should be targeting the unchurched. Perhaps, this church is located in an area where everyone goes to church and their only opportunity to grow is to pick off disaffected members of other churches, but I seriously doubt that. Aside from the fact that it seems less than honorable to intentionally try to attract church people who are not satisfied with the church they attend, chances are that any one you get that way will, after a brief honeymoon, be dissatisfied with your church too. (And probably become a pain in the neck or even lower.)

Yet we hear that sentence all the time. “I’m just not being fed.” The question I always wanted to ask, and now that I am older, do ask from time to time is, “Why not? Why aren’t you being fed”?

Sometimes the answer is, “The pastor’s sermons are boring.” That might be true, but rather than leaving, this person should pray for his pastor and support any efforts he makes to improve.

Sometimes the answer is, “The pastor’s sermons are too simple.” Maybe his sermons are simple, but it may be his sermons are simple to you because they are targeted at new believers. Perhaps you find them simple because you need more challenging stuff. In that case, instead of complaining about simple sermons, you should pray for the people he hopes the sermons will reach, and ask him for guidance for ways you can go deeper. He would probably love to give you some direction.

Other times, the reason the person isn’t being fed is, “The music is not to my taste,” or “too loud”, or “for another generation”, “I don’t like all the tech stuff”, or simply, “I don’t know the songs.” Again, look at whom the church is trying to target. You might say, “Well, if I’m not part of the target, then I guess they don’t need me.” That is exactly wrong! The church needs you to be on the team, to be part of the effort to reach people who don’t know Christ. All of these criticisms imply that the church is supposed to revolve around you. It’s not! It exists to glorify God. We glorify Him by obeying Him, and He has told us how to do that: reach out to those who don’t know Him with His message of love, hope and salvation; to grow up to be like Him in our actions and attitudes; to grow together in love and fellowship; and to lift up those in need without expecting anything in return. Newsflash! The church does not exist for its members; it exists to bring the Gospel to others. Members of the church are supposed to grow up to take their places in helping make that happen.

Thom Rainer estimates that “we only reach one person for Christ each year for every 85 church members in the United States.” It’s time for all of us to be too busy to complain. Churches don’t need to compete for members. A church that seeks to grow because Christians transfer to it from other churches is not building the Kingdom of God. There are enough unchurched people in America to fill all our churches several times. Our competition is Satan, not the church down the block. Let us point our efforts at him.

Church Reputation

One of my wife’s co-workers had just been hired at a church in a town that we would pass through as we drove down the interstate, so we decided to keep an eye out for it.  Since it was a big church in town of about 20,000, we thought it might be visible from the freeway.  Tina was curious about the place and we needed a break, so when we stopped at an Arby’s for lunch. I asked the girl at the counter if she knew where the New Springs Church was located. She smiled and said, “Oh yes, that’s a great church. Everybody knows it.” I asked her if she went there. She said no, but she had friends that went there and she had been there a couple of times. I asked her for directions. She said, “Well, it’s out on such and such road.” I told her I was just passing through and didn’t know that road. She called her manager over and told her I was looking for New Springs Church. She gave directions that included three or four turns. I had hoped to catch a glimpse of the church as we sped by on t, but that wasn’t possible so we decided not to look it up. However, I asked the manager if she attended New Springs. She said no, but she knew the church because her grandkids had played basketball there and attended Vacation Bible School. “It’s a wonderful church. They do lots of stuff for people.” Just then another worker walked up and said, “Yeah, they help a lot of people. I go to another church, but if I didn’t, I would go to New Springs.” I thanked them, and we went on to our destination.

We never did see the church, but I got a mental picture of it. It’s a place that reaches out to the community, has a great reputation, and serves as a great embassy for the Kingdom of God in Anderson, South Carolina. I still haven’t been there, and I don’t know the pastor, Perry Noble, personally, (although I have become a fan of his articles on churchleaders.com). I have no reason to toot New Springs’ horn. I’m just reporting what happened and drawing this conclusion: this church must be doing a lot of things right, and I wish more churches had this kind of reputation in their communities. My mentor, Dan Harman, used to say that he wanted there to be three kinds of people in our town: those who went our church, those who went to another church but said they would go to our church if they weren’t involved in that church, and those who didn’t go to church anywhere but said that if they started going to church it would be our church. From my small sampling at Arby’s that day, it looks like New Springs has been able to do that in their town.   

What would happen if someone got off the interstate in your town and asked the people about your church at the local Arby’s or McDonalds? Would they get directions or a blank stare? Would the traveler hear good things about your church? Do the people in your town know about your church and is what they know positive? The people I spoke to that day didn’t talk about the great pastor. They spoke about how the church cares about people and reaches out to the community. (One of the people did mention that the worship was great, but that was far from the first thing they said about the church.) Big church, small church, whatever size your church is, it needs to build a reputation in your town for doing the great commandments. If it does that, it will almost automatically follow that the great commission will be accomplished. Here’s the thing. There’s only way to build this kind of reputation and that’s for the members to really learn to love people who don’t come to church and who may not be anything like the church members. You can’t program that. You can only teach it and, more importantly, model it.