Revitalize Your Church

Early in my ministry, I taped the following note to myself on my desk:  "If you go, they will come." In other words, if I go out to where people live Monday through Saturday, I'm much more likely to see them at church on Sunday morning. The view of the world is extremely limited from behind a desk.  Get out there and see the world from the other side.  (As a church grows, the increasing administrative responsibilities make this much more difficult - -though it is still essential for effective, transformational ministry.) In yesterday's sermon, Andreas Schroeter, missionary to the LCO Reservation who is soon departing for his home in Germany challenged us to be both missional and incarnational.  Missional means "joining Jesus in his mission field" and incarnational means "sharing your life and their culture." As my friend, Mike Engle recently noted, " The Gospels recorded 132 contacts Jesus had with people --  6 were in the Temple --  4...

John Ortberg wrote a fascinating piece at Leadership Journal about the growing diversity within the evangelical ranks: Who Speaks for You? So who does speak for evangelicals? We produce diverse voices: Jim Packer; Jim Bakker; Jimmy Draper, Jimmy Swaggart, James Kennedy, Jim Wallis, Jim Dobson—the Jim's alone will make your head spin.

“When the Greeks got the Gospel, they turned it into a philosophy; when the Romans got it, they turned it into a government; when the Europeans got it, they turned it into a culture; and when the Americans got it, they turned it into a business.” -- Dr. Richard Halverson ( from Church Whisperer)

In light of the alarm raised about the decline of the evangelicals, NAE President, Leith Anderson provided a clear and compelling response in the Washington Post a few weeks ago: The Coming Evangelical Future He provides a necessary attitude correction. I especially like his short definition of what it means to be an evangelical: Someone who takes the Bible seriously and believes in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord.

The Christian Science Monitor published a thought provoking article by Michael Spencer (aka Internet Monk ) entitled: The Coming Evangelical Collapse. We are on the verge – within 10 years – of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West. Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants. (Between 25 and 35 percent of Americans today are Evangelicals.) In the "Protestant" 20th century, Evangelicals flourished. But they will soon be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century. This collapse will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the...

Keith Drury on What's Wrong With the Church

Dr. Scott W. Sunquist, Professor of World Mission and Evangelism at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, recently wrote a powerful two-part article on how the church is not training leaders to engage the present culture. The Dangers of the Unconverted Seminary, Part 1 The Dangers of the Unconverted Seminary, Part 2

Too often, "evangelical" has been widely used to label and stereotype people of faith. I consider myself an evangelical -- but don't always "fit neatly inside the box" "Representative" evangelicals in television news interviews (both left and right) rarely represent my perspective. That's why I was delighted with the release of The Evangelical Manifesto. These guys are speaking my language.