In this series of posts, we explore four paradigm shifts that can awaken churches to a new experience of spiritual health and power. Each transformational shift can be summarized by a single word – Own, Assess, Discern and Confess.
Own (our role in a broken and divisive culture)
Let me state my premise for this article plainly: Churches can only find hope of a spiritual awakening if they own their complicity in our nation’s divisive culture and moral decline. Walt Kelly’s cartoon character Pogo said it best: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” This may seem harsh but bear with me for a moment.
The Devil has worked to delude the Body of Christ into believing that the root of society’s problems lay in our culture and outside church walls. William Wilberforce, the British statesman who helped end the slave trade in England, is closer to reality when he writes, “The problems we face as a society should be viewed as spiritual problems rather than merely political issues.” He shared that sentiment back in 1797!
Unfortunately, God’s people have accepted that solutions to our nation’s problems are primarily political, a function of ideology or who is on the Supreme Court or in the Oval Office. This leaves believers sharply divided along political lines, and bitterly angry toward one another. If Wilberforce is right and society’s ills are spiritual problems, then the solution to those problems lay within the walls of the church. If our societal problems are primarily spiritual, we must examine (and own) the condition of the church to find the real reasons for the decline in the moral and spiritual climate.
Charting North America’s great revivals, societal transformation occurred whenever the church experienced one of these fresh outpourings of God’s grace. As the church lost steam after these Awakenings, the same moral decline occurred, and the church faded in influence.
North American culture and the North American church sit on opposite sides of a see-saw. When the church’s influence rises—not in terms of political power but spiritual authority and God’s working through it, the corrupting influences of the world drops. But as the church’s influence drops and spiritual authority and God’s working through it declines, the world’s corrupting power increases. In recent decades we’ve watched the world’s influence ascend and the church’s in steep decline. We must own this!
2 Chronicles 7:14 says the first condition of God’s people receiving a new outpouring of His grace is: “If my people . . . will humble themselves.” God’s people needed to humble themselves, taking full responsibility for what was wrong in their nation. God holds them responsible! God saw something they failed to see about themselves. It is not the Supreme Court’s problem. If we fail to understand the reason behind God’s call to humility, the remaining exercises of this verse He summons us to–revival praying, seeking His face, and turning from wicked ways–will remain unlikely, as will His promises to hear, forgive, and heal our land.
Every school shooting is a call for churches to humble themselves. Every profanity in movies and TV, every pornographic image our culture flashes at us, every act of child abuse or sexual abuse, every time someone of another race or ethnicity is denigrated or devalued, we should own it as evidence that our churches have failed to stem the tide of evil that threatens to undo us. Every national disaster has a divine message in its pain, and not just one to warn the world. Scripture teaches that catastrophic events signal God’s people to humble themselves (2 Chron. 7:13!).
Every divisive political issue should stir churches to consider their ways. Instead, we fail to provide evidence that Christians have a clue about love and unity! Who would listen when we face an epidemic of split churches? We need to own this!
Is it preposterous to believe that Jesus finds fault with North American churches and Christians in this age of grace? We need only to recall that five of the seven churches Jesus addressed in Revelation 2-3 were summoned to repent. One wonders how our churches would fare under divine scrutiny.
Wilberforce says: “We need to see our true state as God sees it. Because of His perfect purity and His ability to know us better than we know ourselves, it is likely that He sees problems and failures we are barely conscious of – if we recognize them at all.”
We must forsake the lie that the problems we face lay beyond church walls and are solved by politics, and we must OWN IT OURSELVES. We will never embark on the kind of sober examination of our ministries that leads to spiritual awakening unless we do, and worse things will lay ahead.
How does seeing problems in our culture as spiritual, rather than political, problems challenge your thinking?
Rev. Mark Barnard serves as President of Blessing Point Ministries which helps churches experience breakthrough moments in ministry that transform their impact for the kingdom of God. Mark authored, The Path of Revival – Restoring Our Nation One Church at a Time (Churchsmart.com)