I’m not advocating a return to the past, I’m just wondering what the future will hold. The delivery system is not in question if the purity of the message is maintained. Are there conversions? Are people following the Lord in baptism? Is the congregation maturing in the Lord?
I’ll leave you with four questions to consider:
1. Have the post-moderns become the elitists of the day?
2. Are we meeting the needs of our people who are struggling with sin or just giving them a venue to assuage their consciences by attendance at “church”?
3. Are we provoking our God to wrath by our syncretistic approach?
4. Whose mantle are you taking up and why?
What the church needs today is not more machinery or better, not new, organizations or more and novel methods, but MEN whom the Holy Spirit can use. … The Holy Spirit does not flow through methods but through men. He does not come on machinery but on men. He does not anoint plans but men. Natural ability and educational advantages do not figure as factors in this matter; but capacity for faith, the ability to pray, the power of thorough consecration, the ability of self-littleness, and absolute losing of one’s self in God’s glory and an ever-present and insatiable yearning and seeking after all the fullness of God—men who can set the church ablaze for God; not in a noisy showy way, but with an intense and quiet heat that melts and moves everything for God. God can work wonders if He can get suitable men. —E.M. Bounds, January 1971
