Please Come To Boston ...

I could be wrong. Maybe I’m just feeling a wee bit pessimistic (not my usual caliber fo’ sho’), yet I’ve had something on my heart for a while and tonight it seemed only to deepen.

I’m sitting in a Radisson in the greater Boston area. I’m here for a conference where a lot of pastors/church leaders gather annually. And tonight I heard Henry Blackaby speak. Now a lot of you probably don’t know who he is, but he’s an older fella who, around the late 80’s, was really used by God to ignite churches across the US with a study he did called “Experiencing God.”

More on Blackaby in a minute.

The thing I’ve had on my mind … I believe the church is just losing the war. Now this is no shocker, and it’s not as if we’ve all be “unaware” of it until now! I’ll bet you’re going, “Wow, Cruise, you’re some gifted prophet – to recognize the decline of the church, as if there were no evidence prior to today!”

We’ve all known this, but I believe God has been dealing with me some on a few of the reasons where all of this stuff got started. Not that I’m a historian, nor do I want to be, but there’s something bothering me which I believe has something to do with the state of the church today and how we got here.

If I were to bottom line it, I’d say that we’ve been far down the road of playing “religion” – and it’s a “learned habit.” And we’ve been taught how to do it by our elders; not necessarily senior citizens, but in general many who have come before us who led our churches over the past 40 years.

I’m not blaming all of them because I for one don’t like placing “blame” nor do I like to use sweeping generalizations. Yet the truth of the matter is that in every church I’ve ever served the many of the people who were the “oldest” in the faith were the least spiritually mature. Now please don’t get me wrong. I’ve had many of older people, many in the WW2 generation, who’ve been great mentors to me. Shared much wisdom, and some great attitudes they possessed. Even still, I kid you not when I say that every single pastor I know has a difficult time getting his older crowd to embrace anything that doesn’t look, feel, taste, smell, and remind them of 1955. Every single pastor I know or have ever known does not enjoy dealing with his older crowd. Yet they won’t say it publicly. Because they fear the backlash.

I had one fella, who is 67 years old, tell me that our older folks have been the lifeblood of the church financially, and through holding much of the power in mainline churches, the direction of the church in general has been steered by them. Therefore, they never passed the torch to the younger crowd. Thus, we now have generations of people who have no real leadership maturity in the body. Wanting to preserve a way of life they once held dear, they did what church growth gurus often call, “Circle The Wagon.” That is, when threatened by the enemy (pop culture or a changing culture), you circle the wagon (the church) and keep the enemy out until they either quit bothering you (ain’t gonna happen) or until they come around to your way of thinking (really ain’t gonna happen because they are lost!).

Tonight Henry Blackaby said that the reason we can’t see a movement of God in our churches is because God’s people won’t repent, and they have “settled for being religious.” To the point that “we can’t even recognize when God is moving anymore.”

I want to make something clear: I realize that some folks will see me as picking on “old people.” If they do, that’s there right to be wrong! I’m not doing that in any way. I’m simply saying that at some point, we’ve got to recognize that the church can no longer try to sell nostalgia as genuine worship.

America isn’t coming back to God. Read the last book, it’s pretty clear!

What I’m dealing with is the fact that I believe the state of the American church today is basically like that of the children of Israel in Numbers 11-13. The older generations had to die out before any of the new could experience the promise. And at some point those of us in the “next generation” are going to have to say, “enough already … we are not afraid of the giants in that land. We want the best of what God has promised.”

Reggie McNeal in his book “The Present Future” prophetically said that today’s church has basically become a spiritual club where the club members (Christians) pay membership dues (tithes) and expect member services (ministries that serve ourselves).

If you treat yourself honestly, you’ll agree that the vast majority of what we do in the church today is self-serving. I had that revelation at the last church I pastored. I looked hard at where our budget money was going … and it was, for the most part, going to feed ministries that served those already saved. We may give money to missions, but our daily ministry life is, for the most part, serving our own needs. Not that we don’t want the outsiders to come in, but we’re expecting them to value what we value, like what we like, sing what we sing, and think what we think. Then, they can be in the club, too.

So here I am at the Radisson solving all the church’s problems. I know. Yet still I’m bothered by the fact that we’ve so easily admitted that culture has left us, when the hard reality is that we left it. So we cry out to God to do something about it. While we sit, stand, sing, listen, give, and pray. Then go home as if He’s just not ready to move yet. So we move on with our Sundays. Right over to lunch after church, only to face another week, and then do it all again.

At some point, today’s young leaders are going to have to choose to live life differently. Perhaps best said last night by Henry Blackaby that we must choose “to have a qualitatively different relationship with Christ Jesus.”