Rev. Aaron Long: Evangelize, Educate, Empower
The Church is in a weird state today. We are hearing on the TV and on the computer that America is still a Christian nation, but at the same time we are seeing Churches all around us close. Why is this? We all got ideas about it and I am one of them. From twenty-three years of being a pastor I have seen most current churches have become holy huddles, they come on Sunday at 11AM, sit for an hour, then go home and check the box off for the week that we have fulfilled our duty. We treat our pastors as hired hands rather than as spiritual guides, and a lot of pastors have become lazy and soft minded, more concerned about tickling ears rather than boldly proclaiming Jesus Christ. We see churches constantly abandoning biblical principles even in worship in order to promote entertainment over praise of the all Holy God, and programs over truth.
Outside the Church we see a culture that has become hostile to anything that is solidly Christian or even moral. Culture has become hedonistic and weak; it has given itself over to what it wants rather than what it ought to do. It defends destructive lifestyles and celebrates a culture of death. Our governmental leadership has created an atheistic or agnostic civil religion that gets pushed through the control of education and the media under the false constitutional construction of separation of Church and state which is based off of a lie because that concept isn’t in the constitution at all.
What shall Christians do? What can we do in this environment where the Church has become a toxic hospice and the world around us has become completely hostile? I’ll tell you what we need to do, get back to first principles. The early Church faced the same situation, with both Judaism and pagan religions built to please men rather than God and the civil government making the population more and more dependent upon them with their bread and circuses. The early Church grew off the back of three simple concepts:
1. Evangelize: Not the modern concept of a Billy Graham getting up in a pulpit and preaching to thousands, I mean real biblical evangelism. Christians talking with, working with, helping their neighbors. Simple people day by day living out their Christian witness and giving all glory to God in the process, then inviting others to come to Church with them, giving the unsaved their reason for their hope. Making it less about personal testimony and more about Jesus Christ and His power to save and transform.
2. Educate: In the early church people tended towards one to three years in what they called the catechumenate, the new members class before they would be baptized and received into the church. They were taught by pastors completely sold out to Jesus, that put Jesus before everything risking their lives for the sake of the gospel and when these new Christians truly understood the faith they were called to believe, then and only then were they baptized in the water and fed at Christ’s table. This ensured that those coming to the church were saved, completely sold out to the Lord because the early church understood something the modern church has completely forgotten, grace isn’t cheap and you cant have Jesus as Savior unless you also have Him as Lord. There is no such thing as what we call a carnal Christian today.
3. Empower: Once received into the church it was understood that these new Christians knew the faith and could make a difference, so the church empowered them to go out and do the work of the gospel. Their voices were heard, their ideas accepted, and if they were willing, they could go out and sacrifice their time, talent, and money for the sake of the gospel with the support of their church family.
Read the beginning of the book of Acts, read Paul’s Epistle, look up the Didache online, its free in several places and was written before about half of Paul’s letters, all of these documents point towards a faithful, committed church willing to sacrifice all, going against the culture, going against the government, giving up even family as Jesus said they must for the sake of their Lord and God who died to redeem them. If we ever want to save the church this is the one and only way we can.
Jesus said that even the gates of hell would not overcome the church, but He didn’t say all the individual churches would survive. If you want your children and your children’s children to know Jesus this is the only way it’s ever going to happen.
