I frequently hear my fellow Christians complain, not without merit, about the sordid condition of Christianity. They want to roll back the calendar, but of course that’s impossible. Many of them believe that they can push the creeping apostasy back into its box by returning to the good old days when people were more engaged in church meetings and revivals. Oh, those were the days! I remember them well.
In the denomination I was ordained with, Cheryl and I were involved in many great revivals as evangelists. I remember conducting several 5-week revivals and they could have gone on longer. People shouted, praised God, many were saved, filled with the Holy Spirit, healed, and much more. Broken marriages, parent and child relationships, severed friendships, were put back together at an altar. As people got right with God, they got right with each other.
However, at the same time all of that was occurring, there was an epidemic of church disputes. Many of them resulted in splits, open contention and strife that spilled out into communities. The fruit of some of the best revivals were destroyed by conflict. Pastors were driven out of their pastorates by church boards and their accomplices in the membership. Many of these churches were serial offenders. In every district, scores of churches were looking for a new pastor each month. The average tenure of a youth pastor was 6 months. It was all indicative of unhealthy churches and weak leadership in the denomination. In fact, if a pastor decided that he would stay and try to rid the church of the serial offenders, most leadership would not support him.
Maybe we should consider why it all went wrong in the first place. It began with a quest for numerical growth and social prominence. In spite of the many warnings, the leadership refused to look down the road at ramifications of what they were initiating. From every level of leadership, church growth was promoted. They handed out awards, exalted the pastors with the most numerical growth, while ignoring the fact that the methods used were not biblical. It was okay because after all, “behind every number, there is a soul.”
The quest for numerical growth became so powerful that it drowned out the calls to maintain the distinctives that brought the denomination into existence. Truth, anointing, conviction, and the moving of the Holy Spirit were marginalized to placate those who favored being dignified over being sanctified. The truth is that the denomination was being decimated from within by carnal church boards and pusillanimous denominational leaders too wary of crashing the numerical statistics to do want was right.
When the paradigm shift was complete and its ramifications reached critical mass, numerical growth replaced ministry as the motivating factor for pastoring and evangelicalism. This flung the door wide open for hirelings to rush in. It brought the called and anointed people of God into direct conflict with the ones who had submitted to their flesh. The hirelings were more than willing to take the reins of leadership and give everyone what they wanted. Spiritual, godly, pastors were rejected as too fanatical and dogmatic. The result was the decimation of a Movement by mollifying, rejecting, or ejecting every anointed pastor that refused to go along with the new wave. They certainly left no room for a prophet or a pastor with prophetic anointing. They wanted hirelings skilled in public relations. They wanted large buildings. They were fixated on bringing the denomination out of the gutter of what they viewed as ignorance and emotionalism and into the new age of tolerance, acceptance, compromise. Historical distinctives were and continue to be modified for seeker friendliness.
A significant number of pastors left the ministry during that period. Some of them were excommunicated for attempting to take sectional and district officials to task for their duplicity and weakness. The methods used by some of those leaders in retaliation were underhanded, merciless, and even diabolical. Their main weapon was the denominational tribunal. There was a lot of blood on the battlefield. Most of it was shed by the ones who claimed to be Spirit-filled vessels of God. To my knowledge, none of those leaders repented over their sins. They even forbade any other ministers to take the oil and wine and attempt to heal the ones they (the leaders) had crushed. Incredibly, some of these same individuals are still in leadership.
Did they really believe so much wounding of God’s anointed could occur without retribution from the One who sees every fallen tear? Are the ones now crying for revival so deceived as to believe that they can reverse consequential judgment and restore the desolate places with some emotionally charged meetings and human determination?
Thus, it needs to be clearly defined what is meant by bringing back the good old days. If that means simply to put things back to the order they were during the aforementioned period, I can tell you with all sincerity and certainty that it will not happen. Christianity can not simply go back to some point in the past that appears better than the apostasy of today. There must be willingness to go back much further than that.
When we need revival, going back halfway is not an option. We have to return to the day when we first realized that we were sinners in need of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Ministers and denominational leaders need to remember how it was before they became professionals, dependent on their positions for their livelihood, and before they became too callused to weep at the thought of breaking someone’s heart.
They need to pray and long for a revival of tenderness, of empathy with suffering people, and the realization that we all are nothing more than spit and dirt without God’s Spirit. If they’re going back, let them return to the days when they’d rather lose a church full of hypocrites than to wound or lose a godly man, instead of vice versa. They need to pray for broken and contrite spirits. Many of them may have forgotten the anointed and godly ones who were impugned and driven out, broken and rejected, but God has not forgotten. Forgetfulness is no excuse for the failure to right a wrong. The Holy Spirit is the Great Reminder as well as the One who convicts of sin.
If we want God’s Spirit to return upon our churches and denominations, there will have to be repentance over what was done to grieve the Holy Spirit and caused Him to depart. Current leaders will have to pour out the oil and wine, heal the broken hearts. They will have to vow and purpose never to allow lust for prominence, for acceptance by intellectuals, for large buildings with all the trappings of Churchianity, to cloud their minds. They need to reject the professionalism that hardens hearts as stone. Shouting, dancing, high energy music, and emotionally charged preaching, is not going to make that happen. Only when we lay prostrate, broken, and sincerely repentant on our faces before God will such a revival occur.
God declares in Isaiah 57:15, ““I dwell in the high and holy place, With him who has a contrite and humble spirit, To revive the spirit of the humble, And to revive the heart of the contrite ones.”
He says in Isaiah 66:2, “But on this one will I look: On him who is poor and of a contrite spirit, And who trembles at My word.”
Someone might protest, “But I didn’t commit those sins, so why should I have to repent?” Neither did Jeremiah, Nehemiah, and Daniel, but they repented just the same. Are we any better than them?
This confirms what many of us have been feeling for years. We can’t simply ask for revival without being willing to get on your knees and repent, confessing our failings and shortcomings and getting right with God. Churches today often schedule what they call revival, but repentance and confession have no part in it.