For years I have heard the claim of those who want to tailor the church to fit the prevailing culture. The claim is that this would attract more people to the message. Now we are more than twenty years into a post modern culture that says, nothing is right, nothing is wrong, and our churches are emptying. Southern Baptist, of which we are a cooperating church, comprise the largest segment of protestant churches in America. Church membership and attendance was on the rise in the 1980s, plateaued in the 1990s and through the first ten years of the 2000s I have read and heard that over 90% of Southern Baptist Churches are declining.
Our seminaries are theologically sound for the first generation in years. Our denomination is standing for the right things, but our churches are not going forward. Something is drastically wrong. The culture no longer fears God or respects His Word. And we seem to have lost the power and in some cases, the will to communicate it.
It is not what is wrong with America; it is what is wrong with God's people--each and every one of us. That is where it has to begin. We must have people who come back to that obedience to God and His Word and His commands. We have been secularized by society. We have become so much like the world that we think like the world and act like the world. Many in the church today think they don't have time for the things of God. We don't have time for worship, but we have time for just about anything else. That is the way the world thinks.
The Bible teaches that believers are not to be of the world. The Bible says we have been washed, we have been cleansed, we have been changed, we have been born again, and we have been transformed.
The church today needs revival. We need an old-fashioned, fire from heaven, sin convicting, life transforming, Christ honoring, soul saving, Holy Ghost revival. I wonder will oceans of blood and rivers of tears and seas of sweat be the price that a Holy God will demand of this nation?
