What To Preach To A Dead Church

Student Question.

"What passages of scripture would you preach to a dead church, and what passages would you not preach to a dead church?"

Dr Steven Lawson Reply.

"I think you can preach anything to a dead church. All scripture is inspired by God and profitable.

I've preached to a dead church. You know, I came to realize a few years ago, not my present church, I was Pastoring an unconverted church. That is literally what a dead church is, an unconverted church. They didn't need John 3: 16. They had had that every Sunday. I preached first John and the necessary marks of the new birth, the distinguishing marks of one who is born by God, and a dead church has got to come alive in Christ to begin with. I saw over a hundred adult conversions in one year just among church members coming to faith in Christ. So preaching First John had power. It works in the South, you know, where everyone thinks they are saved; that there are necessary evidences of the new birth, and without these evidences you can be assured you are not saved.

If the church was just languishing, I don't know, I might go to the seven letters to seven churches. And Revelation two and three. There are some some kick in those verses and those letters; from "I have this against you, you left your first love", to, "but I spew you out of my mouth." I mean, that is just kind of a wake-up call right there. And then everything in between, "I have this against you, you tolerate the woman Jezebel", "you have a name, but you are dead" to the church at Sardis. So those Immediately come to mind.

Plus the demands of discipleship from Christ, "Except a man hate his own father and mother, brother, and sister, and yes, even his own life."

I would want to jolt them a bit, off the fence, help them see their lost condition, or just their languishing or backsliding.

A right diagnosis is half the cure.

Help them see where they are."

- Dr. Steven Lawson

Misdiagnosis Of Church

"When any species undergoes a reproduction crisis, a name is giving it: "endangered." Arguably Christianity has entered such a crisis; our inability to reproduce the faith is the number one problem facing our families and churches today. Christianity in the West has become a sterile, exhausted religion. . . .

The dominant means of addressing the church's reproduction crisis has been to devise new methodologies and strategies for how we do church. This is a misdiagnosis of the problem, however, and without the right diagnosis of the disease, I cure is difficult."

-Leonard Sweet. From Tablet To Table.

Burn Down Our Church We Worship

"If you burn down the church building and drive away all the people, you have not disturbed Christian worship at all. Keep a Christian from entering the church sanctuary and you have not in the least bit hindered his worship. We carry our sanctuary with us. We never leave it."

- A.W. Tozer -

When Church Buildings are a Target

HOUSE CHURCHES

The uniform evidence of the NT is that the church in the first century met together for worship in domestic houses (cf. 16:19). Houses were used not because other options were unavailable (for example, a lecture hall) but because the house provided what was necessary for the gathering: kitchen space to prepare and serve the common meal. Houses were also by definition private space, allowing Christians to gather together as a community and drop the social boundaries that otherwise defined their daily lives. The host may have only provided

the space; this is the case in Philippi, where Lydia hosted the

"brothers" while Paul was leading the assembly (Acts 16:40).

Almost any house could have hosted a gathering, from small

flats in large Roman block apartment buildings (insulae) to

expansive urban villas. The size of the available rooms would

dictate the size of the worshiping congregation. Only once does Paul explicitly state that the whole church in a city was present in a single house (Rom. 16:23).

A house church was a domestic residence used at least weekly by the Christian community; therefore, by definition. a house church would be almost impossible to identify archaeologically unless it was altered to accommodate

Christian worship. A possible house church has been identified

in Capernaum, venerated in later generations as the site of Peter’s home The first architecturally defined house church known in the Roman Empire is from the mid-third century in Dura-Europos, a frontier city on the Euphrates River. This house was altered to include a large assembly space, a special space for baptisms, and special decorations. A third-century prayer hall has been found in a Roman military camp at Kefar Otnay in Israel. A floor inscription mentions “the God Jesus Christ.”

Pretend Initiators

" Gutenberg culture encouraged one-sided events in which Spectators pretended to be initiators."

- Leonard Sweet. Viral

House Church Is Biblical Church

Acts 2:46 - Breaking bread in their homes.

Acts 5:42 - House to house taught and preached Jesus.

Acts 10:2,24 - Feared God ith whole household, invited all relatives and close friends.

Acts 12:12 - Houseof Mary wheremmany were gathered to pray.

Acts 16:32 - Lydias House.

Acts 18:7 - Tutius Justice house? Family and many others there.

Acts 20:20 - Taught house to house.

Romans 16:5 - Greet the church at their house. Prisca & Aquila.

1 Cor 16:19 - Together with the cburch in their house.

Col 4:15 - Greet Nymoja & church in her house.

Phil 1:2 - Philemon & the church at your house.

Broken Church- 70-80% Of OUR Kids Never Return.

We are full of it.... we are full of hot air, bologna, theology, hyper-spirituality, and the fact is that we aren't doing anything other than congratulating ourselves on the profundity of our revelations.

Between 70 and 80 percent of evangelicals in America, by the time they are twenty-one, will leave the faith and never return. Did you hear that? We are not even reaching our own children.

It's like we have a broken down car and we're trying to sell it to the world, saying, buy our product.

Our product stinks. We have nothing to sell but our Bible opinions. And how is the world responding to our bible opinions?
But we're going to keep doing it because we've got the "Bible."
But we're not delivering on the life, the love, the power, the truth, the Incarnate....(sigh!) ..... we are not delivering on Jesus as a general rule."
Seventy to eighty percent of our own children should be a terrifying statistic. It should cause us to sit back and say,

"Dear God how many hours, how much money is being poured into this thing called Christianity, and my own children aren't even serving the lord?"
This is broken Saints. It's broken! It's broken, broken, broken! But we're going to have an evangelism outreach, we are going to pass out... [pamplets or flyers]
Oh my!
- Stephen Crosby!

Read this Book as it gets to the real issue below the surface that we never talk about in church.

This insight in how our history, our past, our emotions, and our emotional responses and mechanisms affects us today,  is simply extraordinary.

I found the book to be the typical  slick marketing and packaging  to make a "Program" to sell to churches. So the writing is the usual dumbed own style of language and writing of typical evangelical  programs,

but in no way is this books HELP and INSIGHT shallow.  

He hits  subjects not talked about. 

It is VERY well written.

Every leader should read this book. 

 

The Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, Peter Scazzero 

A Prayer For Fellowship

Father, to whom have you assigned me,

At this season in my life,

For their benifit and mine?

Suggested prayer for fellowship

- Stephen Crosby -

Let's Call Church what Church Is

“Let’s make a pact to use the term church only the way God uses it, not for humanity’s faltering institutions, but for the living, breathing family that thrives in the earth.”

- Kevin Smith

Are You One Of Us Or Not? Communion

In the little tin church in Page the desert sand serves as the floor. Bert Layman , the iron-worker cum preacher who built the church, prays over the rough hewn communion table he has crafted in his own rough hewn image. Grandma Yakashigi, Nakagawasan, Nishikawasan, from Japan are there. Cecil, who baptized me when I was 13, the most gentle of souls, is kneeling up front. Some way Pastor Sheets from the Baptist Church has strayed in – Bert will not be happy. The ordinary folk, the only kind I know, fill the little house of worship.  The journey from dust to dust does not seem so far in this dusty crowd melding into the sand floor. Roy, the local prison guard, comes bearing the emblems and as he bends down he brings me fully awake, I look at Roy who is silent but I hear the question from the emblems: “Paul, are you one of us or not?”[2

[2] The title and ending are from a Fred Chappell novel with a different meaning worked out here.

https://paulandfaithwalking.wordpress.com/2015/01/24/i-am-one-of-you-forever/

Agenda

“Systems and institutions move at the speed of agenda, family moves at the speed of the slowest.”
~ Wm Paul Young

Seperating Ourselves From The Church Universal

"But if the church is something we are, not someplace we go, how can we leave it unless we abandon Christ himself? And if I think only of a specific congregation as my part of the church, haven’t I separated myself from a host of other brothers and sisters that do not attend the same one I do?"

- Wayne Jacobsen 

"People often asked me, "Since you're so smart, why are you still in church?" and I say to them, "Well, you know, Christians are supposed to love their enemies and they will find a few of those a church. But actually that's true."

- Dallas Willard -

"The problems caused by the idea of full-time Christian service, and the view that ordinary occupations are not full time-time Christian service. This  is one of the greatest problems that we have. It's a very old problem."

- Dallas Willard 

They Cannot See The Bird

But beware: No one is stranger than a person who “sees” in a community that is “blind.”

- Leonard Sweet. 

"....Bob Olmstead....one busy afternoon driving on a Reno, Nevada, city street when a small, wounded bird wandered out into the highway. It huddled on the pavement as the cars whizzed past it and over it, tires somehow missing it. I glimpsed the bird just as the tires of my car straddled it. At that moment I made a rash decision. I decided to rescue the bird. I stopped the car, jumped out, and held up my hands to stop traffic. If I could “shoo” the bird over the curb and into the hedge of bushes, it would be safe, at least from traffic. When I approached the bird it scooted away, but it didn’t scoot in a straight line. Whether it was too young to fly, whether its wing was injured, I do not know. But every time I bent down and waved my arms the bird would half hop, half fly in a crazy circle and end up back in the middle of the road. I could not catch it and I could not get it to run into the bushes. By this time I had a considerable amount of traffic backed up. The close drivers were watching me with quizzical or suspicious expressions. Farther back, horns were honking. I kept thinking, “Just another minute and I’ll catch the little bird or it will run off into the bushes.” So I continued running around in the street, stooped over, flapping my arms, chasing that little feathered thing. It was only then that I realized the other drivers could not see the bird!

 Visionaries are like that. Others cannot see what they see."

The Church Through Time

"The incarnational Christian realizes that the gospel travels through time not in some ideal form, but from one inculturated form to another. In the words of one theologian, the “fiction” of a “‘pure’ and ‘naked’ Christianity” has done much damage. What missiologists call “the culturally indigenous church” is the aim of the incarnational church. Max Stackhouse makes a distinction between the “textuality” of the church—its faithfulness to the gospel—and its “contextuality”—its faithfulness to the world in which it finds itself. That distinction is absolutely critical." 

- Leonard Sweet. AquaChurch 2.0

Are We Really a Church Above Our Times?

"The problem with the countercultural model is that it creates an artificial wall between Christians and the world God loves—a love so deep and wide that God sent Jesus to die for it. Jesus did not ask God to take us out of the world. In fact, Jesus’ opposition to the temple-based religion of his day, which led more than anything to his condemnation and death, was precisely because he opposed the temple cult’s concept of holiness as separation. We are not somehow grandly “above” the political, economic, scientific, technological, or artistic influences of our times."

- Leonard Sweet. AquaChurch 2.0 

The New Spirit Or The Now Spirit?

"These churches become so painfully “politically correct” that any attempt to articulate a transcultural value judgment, a moral absolute, or a biblical truth is quickly shuttled away to a committee or task force (a representatively correct one, of course) instead of witnessed to the world. 

The church is to identify with the world’s needs, but not its desires. As St. Augustine pointed out, “We move spiritually not by our feet, but by our desires.” When our desires are shaped by the culture and not by the Spirit, we become children of the times, not children of the Spirit. The “new spirit” promised by the Scriptures becomes a “now” spirit. We are to be “at home” but not “at peace” with God’s chosen place and time for us. There is a basic incompatibility between the church and whatever time in which it lives.

- Leonard Sweet. AquaChurch 2.0 

Golden Retriever Churches

"Everyone knows these “golden retriever” churches. If the culture throws a stick, “golden retriever” churches go bounding after it, slobbering and eager to please. Even those who happily own these indiscriminately accepting animals bemoan the fact that if a burglar broke in, the dog would just hold the flashlight for him. Too many inculturated churches are holding too many flashlights for too many burglarizing forces and figures."

- Leonard Sweet. AquaChurch 2.0

A Church That Understands Culture

“...... "the destiny of the world” hinges on “the Church’s dialogue with the cultures of our time.....
A faith which does not become culture is a faith which has not been fully received, not thoroughly thought through, not fully lived out.”


- Polish Pope John Paul II on establishing the Pontifical Council for Culture in 1982