Sermon Video: A Remnant Chosen by Grace - Romans 11:1-6

When his Covenant people rejected the Messiah, how did God respond?  Did he reject them and walk away?  No, God continued to be faithful by working with the remnant that did accept Jesus.  God did the same thing in Elijah's day, working with a faithful remnant to continue through a period of darkness (i.e. the reign of Ahab).

The same thing holds true in the Church Age.  During generations of turmoil or faithlessness, God has held true with his remnant.  Whatever comes in the future, God will continue to keep his promises to the Church, continuing to work with those who by grace have been called.

Sermon Video: If the Lord permits: Making Plans - 1 Corinthians 16:1-9

2020 has been, thus far, to say the least, a time of changed plans. First the pandemic cancelled things, rearranged things, and left us wondering when it was safe to reopen. Then, on May 25th, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis and our focus as a nation shifted abruptly from Covid-19. As the people of God, we must plan for the future and we must be ready when it surprises us. The Apostle Paul planned a collection from the Gentile Churches of Asia Minor and Greece to save Judean Christians from starvation. In doing so, he (1) used what worked in one churches in other churches, (2) encouraged each church (and each family within) to consider their resources and act accordingly, (3) prepared for success, (4) was a specific with his plans as possible, (5) retained flexibility, (6) and most importantly, remembered that the Lord holds the future. As we look ahead, as long as we are dedicated and hard working in our service to the Lord, whatever comes next, we will be ok.

To watch the video, click on the link below:

Sermon Video: At the Last Trumpet: We will all be changed

When Christ returns, we will all be changed. All those who have faith in Jesus Christ, whether then living or already dead, will be resurrected or gathered (as needed) by Christ and will receive the transformation to Christ-likeness that has been promised. But when will these things occur? There is not on single interpretation of the totality of prophetic literature, some view the Rapture as the next event (Pre-tribution, pre-millenial), others see the millenial kingdom being established first (amillenial or post-millenial). However one interprets the Scriptures, this much is certain, Christ WILL return, and we won't know about it ahead of time. God has not given us the time, lest we look at the world with excessive optimism or pessimism, only the knowledge that these things will one day occur; and that's all we need. We can safely ignore those who claim to see signs of the impending End, and those who offer advice based on those supposed insights. Instead, let us continue to serve the Kingdom of God, and continue to live as though today may be our last day (as it may be for any of us) and plan as if God has many things left for us to accomplish here on earth.

* In addition, the message touches explains the flaws in the notion that COVID-19 is a sign of the End Times as well as the error in equating a potential vaccine with the Mark of the Beast.

To watch the video, click on the link below:

Sermon Video: When the dead are raised to new life - 1 Corinthians 15:35-44a

Having striven to establish confidence at the church in Corinth regarding the reality of Jesus' resurrection, and the certainty of our future resurrection, Paul now explains a little bit about what that resurrected life will be like. Four things will disappear: perishable, dishonor, weakness, and natural body. Four things will replace them: imperishable, glory, power, and spiritual body. What exactly does this mean?? Beyond our comprehension, but rest assured that which makes immortality as we are now a curse not a blessing will be removed, to be replaced with glorious Christ-likeness.

To watch the video, click on the link below:

Sermon Video: Set your hearts on things above - Colossians 3:1-4

Having refuted legalism and asceticism as being illegitimate paths to piety for disciples of Jesus Christ, Paul turns his focus upon the appropriate direction for God's people, that is, their need to set their hearts and minds on "things above".  Instead of spelling individual things out, Paul focuses upon the direction and focus of the passions and thought processes of those who know that they will one day appear, with Christ, when he returns in glory.

What does it mean to have your heart or mind set upon things above? For the Christian, this means living here and now as a citizen of heaven.  Having the perspective of someone who knows the future and lives today in light of it.  It means having a spiritual perspective as well, one that sees beyond the material and one that invests in eternity (though self-sacrifice today).

To watch the video, click on the link below:

The future of the Church, why do I keep worrying about it?

We spend a lot of time and a lot of energy worrying about the future of our own local church.  We also spend a lot of time and energy worrying about the future of the Church in America, or in the West, perhaps even globally.  Is my church heading in the right direction?  Is my denomination heading in the right direction?  How will the Church respond to the increasingly secularized culture of the West?  What about millennials, everybody keeps saying they aren't going to church anymore?...

These worries, or "concerns", if we want to feel better about what we call them and avoid admitting that we're worried, are probably unavoidable, to some extent.  We all want to know that our contribution and sacrifices will stand the test of time, that they are "worth it" and not wasted, and we have a natural and appropriate place in our hearts for our own local church, our denomination, and the Church in our nation.  If any one of those levels fails, or seems to be failing, it will be emotionally brutal for those for whom much of their identity is defined by being an American Christian, from this particular church, in that denomination.

Our emotional investment is natural, and for the most part a good thing, but it may also be somewhat misguided.  The Church, from the local one that you are attached to (hopefully), to the denomination to which it belongs, to the collection of churches throughout this nation (or any nation), doesn't belong to you.  The Church is the bride of Christ, the object of the New Covenant, the subject of Jesus' promise to his disciples that, "the gates of Hades will not overcome it." (Mt. 16:18)  The Church in our generation will have its ups and downs, it will win some and lose some, it may shrink in one area only to grow in another.  Through it all, from this generation to the next, and the next after that, the Church will continue to be the instrument of the will of God for declaring the Gospel and making disciples here on Earth.  And as an instrument of the will of God, it cannot be defeated, our worst or best effort notwithstanding, for its success or failure is not predicated upon our power, but God's.

Does what we do matter, then, at our local church?  Absolutely, for we have been given charge over the sheep of this particular pasture, we have been entrusted with the words of Life, and we have been tasked with making disciples here in our midst.  We have, as a local church, much responsibility of the utmost importance.  What we don't have, what we can't have, is responsibility for the future of the Church, from the local to the universal level, that power rest, thankfully, solely in the hands of God.

Is the Church shrinking in the West?  Statistics seem to say yes, but you and I will not be judged by God according to statistics.  What we will answer for is the quality of our prayer, worship, and service in the name of Jesus.  It has always been the work of the Holy Spirit to bring salvation to the Lost, to spur revival among the people of God, and to overcome the forces of darkness in this world with the light of Christ.  If the Spirit of God sends revival upon our local church, our denomination, or our nation, God will deserve the glory, for the power of God will have been the cause.  What then does the future hold for us?  As our church here approaches its 150th anniversary in July, we can't help but wonder.  God knows, God alone has the power to shape the future.  Our task, our responsibility, is the present.  Our own lives, our own discipleship, our own community and our role within it as servants of the kingdom of God.

How does the story end?

"Hallelujah!  For our Lord God Almighty reigns.  Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory!  For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready." (Revelation 19:7)

God will have the victory, his Church will be victorious, for the uncountable throng of redeemed saints who comprise it are the bride of Christ, and their celebration of his victory in the glory of heaven is already certain.

Am I optimistic about the future of the local church where I serve?  Yes.  Am I optimistic about the future of our denomination, the American Baptist Churches?  Yes.  Am I optimistic about the future of the Church in the United States or in the West?  Yes.  But my optimism or pessimism alone won't determine anything.  There will always be reasons for optimism and reasons for pessimism, regardless of them, we have a task to accomplish, a mission given to us by our Lord, and we are responsible for our effort on behalf of that cause, God, and God alone, is responsible for tomorrow.

"at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." (Philippians 2:10-11)

Sermon Video: Who knows what tomorrow may bring? - James 4:13-17

We all make plans for the future, some of us more wisely than others, some with more efforts than others, but we all make plans, we have to.  We live moment by moment, the future will always be unknown to all of humanity, we may think we know what tomorrow will bring, but in the end it may be far better, or far worse, than we anticipate; and, in the end, we may not be there to see it.  How then do we plan, how do we live know when the future is so uncertain?  The answer is simple.  We recognize and acknowledge that God knows the future, that God deserves our gratitude as our Creator, and our allegiance as our Lord, and we live our lives humbly in service to the kingdom of God.  When we live now as we ought, our plans for the future will likewise reflect the purpose of God in this world: the development of the fruit of the Spirit in our own lives, and the spread of the Gospel's message of God's love and reconciling forgiveness awaiting our repentance.  What we cannot allow ourselves to do is live in pride, cultivating a facade of independence, for this is a dead-end, our only hope for meaning and purpose in life is to acknowledge God's rule over it.

To watch the video, click on the link below:

Another day, another mass shooting, is the world going to hell in a hurry?

If you watch the news, diligently, you will hear a story about a mass shooting and/or an act of terrorism somewhere in the world each and every day.  There will be a weather related crisis, or perhaps an earthquake, or a man-made disaster too.  There are plenty of things going on in a world with over seven billion people that demonstrate the inhumanity of man toward our fellow man and the corruption of human endeavors.  We could be pessimists without much prodding.  We could despair of the future and throw our hands up in the air and say, "Come Lord Jesus!"  Many Christians do just that, they're convinced that the United States, the West, even the World is spiraling out of control and the return of Christ is imminent because things are "worse than they've ever been".  This isn't a new phenomenon, it isn't particularly surprising either, but it is sad and unnecessary because by any indication, whether that be violence, poverty, life expectancy, responsible government, and especially the growth of the Church, we are living in the most prosperous and secure generation in the history of mankind.  It doesn't seem like it, not when ISIS is shooting up restaurants in Paris or new polls show that less Americans are going to Church than in prior generations, but it is true.
Our ancestors one hundred years ago, and especially further back than that, lived in a world that was more dangerous, poorer, more corrupt, and a lot less Christian than it is today.
Your gut may be fighting against that claim, you may not want to believe it, especially is you have a lot emotionally invested in thinking like a victim or claiming that the sky is falling, but not wanting to believe a fact doesn't make it untrue.  Five hundred years ago, to pick a random spot in history, the average person lived hand to mouth, always one bad harvest or pestilence away from starvation, and always worried that a marauding army was just over the horizon, not to mention pirates and their own rapacious nobility.  The average person was illiterate, had very few possessions, may never have traveled more than an hour or two away from the place where he or she was born, could expect to bury several children who didn't make it out of infancy, and aside from Europe, lived in a world where the vast majority of the people knew not the name of Jesus, let alone believed in him.
Today, by virtually every measurable statistic, things have improved, and not just a little, by leaps and bounds.  There are still pockets of poverty, endemic bloodshed, and resistance to the Gospel, but they're pockets now, not whole continents.  Africa has been transformed in the past fifty years, millions have been lifted out of poverty and the Church has not only conquered the animism that once thrived there, but is pushing back the frontier of Islam as well.  Asia is following suit, with India and China seeing hundreds of millions of people lifted out of abject poverty and the amount of Christians in their midst growing rapidly.  The world's largest Christian population will soon enough reside in China.  The Church may be declining in the West, but it is exploding in the South and East.
We have many reasons to be optimistic about the future, and many reasons to not despair about the present.  Remember, Jesus spoke of a Church against which the gates of Hell would not prevail, but if the Church is to conquer even the stronghold of the enemy, it will be on the offensive not cowering behind high walls and a moat.

I'm not a pessimist, not because I choose to be an optimist in the face of contrary evidence, but because my faith in the power of God agrees with all of the good things that are really happening in our world today.  The future is in the hands of God, and those hands are capable indeed.

For an excellent detailed examination of this issue, please read the article below by JD King.
Why You've Been Duped Into Believing The Myth That The World Is Getting Worse and Worse

"What part of, 'about that day or hour no one knows', are you not getting?" - God

Speculation is endless, and perhaps inevitable, that the End Times are upon us.  This is nothing new, the history of the Church is full of "signs" and "portends" that were sure signs that the end was nigh.  Yet here we are, the world goes on and so does the Church.  American Evangelicals, in particular, seem to be infected with the notion that things happening in our world today, and in our country in particular, are signs of the decline that they are sure must happen if their interpretation of prophecy is about to be fulfilled (A Pre-Tribulation, Pre-Millenial, Rapture is typically viewed as happening AFTER a steep and momentous decline of the Church and society).  This pessimism is an easily self-fulfilling prophecy, as there will always be more bad news than good news in the news.
Many of those who are convinced that they see the signs are the same people obsessed with taking the Bible "literally", which of course nobody does because it is full of metaphors and hyperboles, along with figurative language like poetry and proverbs.  Not to be side-tracked by the issue of Biblical interpretation, but why won't they take God "literally" when Jesus said that ONLY the Father knows when the End will come.  Jesus doesn't know, the angels in heaven don't know, so why do you think that you've somehow cracked the code and now you see that the latest earthquake or terrorist attack was a "sign" from God?
A related issue is the American overvaluation of him/herself in the will of God.  When something bad happens here, in our society or our Church, it seems bigger, more important, than what is happening in Christ's Church in Africa, South America, or Asia.  If the American Church shriveled to nothing (not something I see happening, but let's look at the worst case), but the Third World Church doubled, would Christ's Church be growing or shrinking?  Would that be a sign that the End is near, or that the Spirit of God was moving in power among his people?  Western, affluent, white, souls aren't worth any more to God than Eastern, poor, dark skinned ones.  Many American Christians would never say that they think that, they probably don't even consciously think it, but it is reflected in their insistence that a setback in the Church here is so important that it must be a sign.
Are you aware that violent crime in America is now at its lowest rate since the 1970's?  This is a decades long trend, and is matched by an ever lower trending abortion rate.  The Supreme Court ruled that same sex marriage was a right.  Which of those three facts are being touted by the pessimist that insists that America is over, Facism is around the corner, and the Anti-Christ is waiting in the wings?  The search for signs is a waste of time, and shows a lack of trust in the will of God, but even if it wasn't, why are the negative signs important but the positive ones ignored?
It has been suggested that American Christians will soon be faced with a dilemma much like that of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Nazi Germany in the late 1930's.  Unfortunately for those hoping for hysteria, the historical parallels between America in the 2010's and Germany in the 1930's are non-existent.  They had a state sponsored/run Church, our Church is independent.  They had a police/military that was willing to follow a Facist path and attack its own people, we do not.  They had an infant Republic that was easily replaced by a dictator who voted in his own "emergency" powers, we have a 200+ old Republic that has survived the Civil War, the Great Depression, and WWII.  There are Christians in many countries in the world today facing persecution on a level that Bonhoeffer would have recognized, Americans are not among them; for that we must continue to be thankful to our Father, when he's ready, he'll send his Son back, and like he said, it'll be a surprise.

Looking to the future: The Terminator movies and Christians

With another installment of the Terminator movies about to be released, I am once again reminded of the harmful attitude of fatalism that permeates much of Evangelical thought about the future.  In the Terminator movies, both a hero and a villain are sent back from the future to try to change what is coming.  The villain wants to prevent the good guys from winning after a horrific holocaust, and the good guy is hoping to not only preserve that victory, but somehow make the entire dystopic future null and void.  Each of the Terminator movies ebbs and flows back and forth with the future fate of humanity hanging in the balance.  What has this to do with the attitude of Christians regarding the future?  Quite a lot actually.  Christians ought to know what the future holds, God has given us a broad outline of what will one day happen along with a variety of difficult to understand pieces of the puzzle.  What we do know, for certain, is how the story ends; it ends in the complete and total victory of Jesus Christ over all opposition: sin, death, and Satan.
So why are so many Christians walking around with an attitude that the future is doom and gloom?  The answer is simple enough, they believe in a Pre-Tribulation Rapture, and thus believe that the future of humanity is a downhill slope that cannot be altered.  Those who believe in a post-Tribulation Rapture, or a Post-Millennial Rapture are far less pessimistic because in the first case, Christians won't be taken away before the trouble starts, in other words, we're going to have to deal with it, and in the latter, the next thing to come on God's cosmic plan is the 1,000 year reign of Christ, a time of glory not tribulation.  Because many Evangelicals firmly believe in a Pre-Tribulation, Pre-Millennial Rapture, they almost welcome bad news in the world. looking at it as a sign that Christ's return is closer.  Why try to alter the world we're living in if it is inevitable that it will decline, and why try to slow the decline if it must reach its nadir before Christ can come back?
In the Terminator movies, when the heroes know that the future is bleak, they are willing to risk anything and everything to try to stop it.  For some Christians, they believe that they're interpretation of Biblical prophecy is the correct one, and therefore there is no point in trying to stop it.
I don't know which interpretation of the Scriptures is right, those willing to have a pinch of humility will agree, so why would I live like a pessimist?  It is our job to do what we can, with what we have, where we have been placed.  We do know how the story ends, but keep in mind, we have no idea how long it will be until the final chapter begins.  Christians need to ditch the pessimism, embrace the final victory of Christ, and roll up their sleeves and get to work trying to claim our world for the kingdom of God.

The Dangers of Assumptions about the Future.

One of the things that most people don’t realize is just how much the underlying assumptions in their thought processes affect the way that they look at the world around them.  From this point I could illustrate what I mean using any number of fields, from politics, to philosophy, from current events to pop culture.  The area that I’m going to focus upon is the affect that a pre-millennial and pre-tribulation interpretation of the portions of Scripture that refer to the End Times can have upon Christians who subscribe to them.  A term that encapsulates these beliefs and others related to the relationship between Israel and the Church, Dispensationalism, likewise carries with it implications for how those who hold to it look at the world around them and how they interpret Scripture.

            This is not intended as a critique of Dispensationalism, although the notion often associated with it that the Church (or even America) has replaced Israel in God’s Covenant deserves to be critiqued, rather I am simply pointing out the affect that such a viewpoint can have upon one’s outlook even without the person who thinks these things being aware of where those notions originate.  Nor is this a refutation of pre-millennial or pre-tribulation interpretations of the End Times, I myself hold to both of them, though certainly not with dogmatic fervor due to the very strong warnings in Scripture that the End Times will come like a “thief”.  I have always maintained that anyone who claims to know anything about when the Second Coming of Jesus is going to happen is either trying to sell something or woefully misinformed about Scripture.

            So, what is this viewpoint altering phenomenon that happens to those who hold to pre-millennial, pre-tribulation, and/or Dispensational beliefs?  Pessimism, pure and simple.  Anyone who believes that human history MUST greatly decline BEFORE the return of Jesus Christ while not be surprised by news of tragedy in our world, will not have much hope for the future, and may even welcome news of woe as a sign that the end is nigh.  I have witnessed this twisted welcoming of tragedy, be it wars, pestilence, natural disasters, or the Church supposedly slipping toward Apostasy, on the part of people whose belief that the future can only be a downward curve precisely because they are convinced that Scripture predicts just such a trajectory to history.

            Forget for a moment that history moves in vast swings, from good to bad, from prosperity to want, and from liberalism to conservatism, such that storms could be on the horizon now, and yet sunshine could be just around the corner.  I say that because Christians continue to convince themselves that Jesus Christ will return in their own lifetimes, despite the warnings from Scripture, because we can’t help but think of our own generation as the pivotal one in history.  Even if the next hundred years are a mitigated disaster, as anyone looking at 1914-1945 would have to conclude, who is to say that the decades to follow wouldn’t be one of peace and progress?

            The point that I’m hoping you will see is that those who look to the future and see only woe before Christ will return can’t help themselves when they read the news, they see signs of decline, skip signs of good things, and confirm their own assumption that the future must be bleak.  Of course this attitude has vast implications as those who don’t believe that the future holds any hope won’t be very keen to invest themselves in project or efforts designed to alleviate things such as world hunger or disease and are likely to care little about the environment, just to name a few. 

            In regards to the Church itself, a similar pattern of pessimism unfolds.  Those who believe that the Church MUST be in a state of Apostasy BEFORE Christ can return are forever looking for signs that the Church is failing in its mission.  How can this not have a negative effect upon missions, church unity, and ecumenism?  There are far too many Christians who believe that they can write off all of the Orthodox, Catholic, mainline Protestant, and plenty of other people who call themselves Christians, who have put their faith in Jesus Christ, and who seek to be his disciples, simply because a worldwide Church that is succeeding and triumphing doesn’t fit their own viewpoint.  In essence, they look at 95% of all of the people who have called upon the name of the Lord, as Paul says in Romans 10:13, and conclude that the grace of God is incapable of saving them because only a tiny minority of the universal Church is not in a state of Apostasy.  Needless to say, I cannot understand how the Church of God, empowered by the Holy Spirit, can be thought of as being so impotent. 

            If pre-millennialism and pre-tribulation beliefs, along with Dispensationalism, tend to lead to these fatalistic and pessimistic viewpoints, what can we do about it?  Do we have to adopt a post-millennial belief in order to be optimistic and therefore anticipate the triumph of the Church BEFORE Jesus can return?  We don’t have to do that, unbridled optimism has similar pitfalls (such as not thinking anything needs to be done because the future of necessity must get better), although without the doom and gloom mood.  Being aware that such attitudes are a danger is the beginning of keeping yourself from falling prey to them.  I have no idea if the next 100 years are going to be a golden age or a wasteland for America, the Church, or the world; but neither do the pre-millennial OR the post-millennial advocates.  What we think the future holds, affects how we view today; since only the Father truly knows the future, why don’t we stop acting like we have inside information.

Are the End Times near?

This past Sunday morning as I was eating my breakfast I did something I don’t normally do, I turned the channel to catch a few minutes of a well known TV preacher.  If SportsCenter hadn’t been talking about auto racing this never would have happened, but they were, and it did.  It turns out that the whole series that this message comes from is about the End Times and how it somehow, in his opinion, relates to the recent financial crisis that began in the US several years ago.  It only took a few minutes of watching for this preacher to proclaim that he sees the signs described by Jesus in the Gospels happening in our world today.  This “insight” culminated in his prediction that he feels confident that he will be alive long enough to see Christ return.  If there is one cardinal sin of interpretation of apocalyptic literature it is erroneously concluding that the events described are being fulfilled in one’s own lifetime.  This same error has been committed again and again throughout Church history, notably at the arrival of the first millennium, and again as the year 1,500 approached.

            There are several things wrong with anyone who claims to know when Christ is going to return, most obviously that Jesus himself declared that “No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Matthew 24:36).  If Jesus doesn’t know when the Father will bring the Church Age to an end and begin the End Times, how can anyone living here on Earth think that he/she has somehow cracked the code and recognized the signs?

            This predictive folly is dangerous on several fronts: it discourages Christians from investing in the future and allows them to take a guilty pleasure in the misfortunes of our world as they seem like signs that Christ is coming soon.  For that reason alone, such pronouncements need to be countered by preachers everywhere who takes Jesus’ warning that it will indeed be a surprise seriously.  {I don’t have time to get into the Dispensational assumptions that this preacher is using as he interprets the Bible, these too are coloring the conclusion and have him looking for evidence of decline and ignoring evidence of revival.}

            On another level, this sort of thing bothers me personally because of the assumptions that underpin it.  Two primary assumptions that I believe are both false are part of this assessment  that the End Times are near: #1 The United States is in the midst of a moral decline.  #2 The Church in the US is the primary focus of God’s work in our world.  Is there evidence that the U.S. is in some unprecedented moral decline that will end in the ruination of the Church in America?  No, but there are plenty of negative statistics and anecdotes for those looking for such evidence.  This entire line of thinking about America isn’t based on factual analysis anyway, but rather upon a mistaken identification of the US as the new Israel in God’s plans (relates to #2).  People who takes this view are always talking about how good things used to be in some past near-utopia before the current group that is bothering them the most supposedly ruined the country.  That such a prior time of super-virtue never existed is hard to point out when memory is rose colored.  As a student of history, I know that nations as well as institutions like the Church have life cycles; that like a pendulum they swing back and forth from highs to lows.  Are we in a period of decline?  Maybe, maybe not, but I don’t see it; everywhere I turn I see Churches fighting in the trenches, working together as never before, with capable leadership and committed lay people.  Even if decline happens, why can’t God send a revival?  God blessed America with the First AND Second Great Awakenings, why can’t God do something like that in this generation?  The pessimism of those who insist that our days are numbered is certainly not helping the kingdom of God.  I have fought against those who are intent upon a pessimistic view of our nation’s future, but it seems like I’m talking to a wall; instead, I’ll simply keep working for that future by the grace of God.

            The second assumption has pride and racism mixed in with it.  If, and in my mind that’s a big if, America is in decline, doesn’t the rest of the world count in God’s evaluation of humanity too?  Even if America becomes a godless land (which it won’t, but follow me on this), does that necessarily mean the End must be near?  What if God’s work in the Church in South America, Africa, and Asia vastly overshadows the decline in the West?  Here’s some real truth that those hoping for the End Times won’t want to hear: it already does.  The growth of the Church in the Third World, among poor non-white peoples, has greatly overcome the losses in Europe and America that the Church as a whole has experienced in the past few decades.  The balance of “power” for the Church is shifting, much as the global political and economic balance of power has shifted somewhat away from the West toward the rest of the world.  According to God Word, God doesn’t value a white American believer more than a poor African.  How much of the pessimism of those who bemoan the future of the Church is really just misplaced American pride and a bit of latent racism?

            I shouldn’t have starting watching a TV preacher, I know better, 9/10 it just makes me angry; but maybe my insight here will help some of you realize that the future of America is not set, the work we here today do for the kingdom of God will help determine what the next generation of Christians have to work with.  If we screw it up, and leave them a Church that is weaker than the one left to us, it still doesn’t preclude God’s ability to send revival and restore his Church.  Likewise, the growth of the Church in the rest of the world is a cause of celebration in Heaven, as new souls come to accept the saving power of Jesus Christ, this is after all what the missionaries who set out from England and America had hoped and dreamed to see realized.  Is the End near?  I have absolutely no idea, and anyone who says otherwise is full of it.

Satan loses in the end, why are we so scared?

When did Americans, a people blessed by God with far greater freedom and prosperity than any other who have gone before us, become afraid of the future?  When did the Church of Jesus Christ, the institution that has overcome and withstood for two thousand years, and that Jesus promised would be victorious over the very Gates of Hell, become convinced that evil is more powerful than good?  I ask these questions because I often notice a disturbing trend of negativity and pessimism that infects both Americans in general and Christian Americans in particular.  Are there serious challenges to our nation and our Church?  Of course there are, but these are nothing new under the sun, history is full of such challenges, both ancient and recent.  Is evil trying to win; are there truly bad things that could happen?  Of course there are, but there are also righteous men and women willing to stand in the gap and fight.  The character of Tauriel in the second Hobbit movie, the Desolation of Smaug, asked just such a question of Legolas (I know it’s not from the book, relax), “When did we let Evil become stronger than us?”  That question was in response to the hide behind a moat mentality of her king, Thranduil, who is more interested in protecting his own kingdom than engaging and defeating the evil that exists in his world.

I live and serve a church in a small town in Western Pennsylvania.  There are over fifty churches within ten miles of my church, and yet rather than seeing this as a massive blessing from God, an opportunity to utilize our resources to make a big difference in our county, too many local Christians are stuck in a defensive posture that assumes that the Church is failing.

In recent weeks I have heard a variety of doom and gloom predictions, one of them from a local pastor who was told such by his bishop, and all of them ranging from unlikely to nearly impossible, yet all of them held as serious threats to our immediate future.  In no particular order: Churches will lose their 501(c)(3) status if they don’t perform gay weddings, the US government is about to give control over the internet to the UN, and Christians will soon be a minority in America because a growing population of Muslims will institute Shiara Law.  I can’t think of any reason to believe that any of these things will happen, in my lifetime or otherwise, in the United States, yet many of the people in our churches believe things very much like this.  The common thread in most unfounded fears on the part of American Christians is an intense distrust of the government (where unknown and unnamed forces are the usual bad guy, especially when it also involves the UN) and a firm belief that the future will be worse than the present.

There are too many causes for those intertwined fears to explain here, but suffice it to say that such fears assume that there are virtually no Christians working within our government, that the same things hold true of the judiciary, and that everybody at the UN is working against God.  Of course that isn’t true, but anecdotal fears outweigh evidence, and convincing people to trust that the freedom we’ve enjoyed in this nation wouldn’t be given away by a President or a Congress that they dislike is no small task.

Why are we so afraid?  Whatever happened to us to make such doom and gloom predictions feel inevitable?

I’m not participating in the pessimism party, not just because it’s an oxymoron.  I don’t believe that God just gives up on a people because of one court ruling, or one new law.  I don’t believe that decline is inevitable, and I’m certainly not going to drink that Kool-Aid based on anyone theory about the onset of the End Times.  God is more than capable of causing revival in America; he’s done it before, more than once, he can do it again.  Even if America’s best days were behind her, America is not the Church.  The Church of Jesus Christ is growing faster, more vibrant and alive, in South America, Africa, and South East Asia, today than ever before.  If we don’t want to be a part of the victory of Christ’s Church anymore, God will work with those willing to serve him still.  I, for one, am not about to give up, God is still doing marvelous things amongst his people here; the future is, as always, in his hands.