The other day I received a call from a pastor from whom I had not heard for years. A long time ago the sovereign Lord performed a major operation upon a congregation of which he was pastor and I was the evangelist. Now he is in another state and pastor of another congregation. He said that the people of his congregation needed to be plowed up, busted right down the middle, and brought to an awareness of the gospel of God's glory. He asked that I come to be used, if it should please the Lord, to perform the operation. His call reminded me of a situation that I have to wrestle with each time I go for a "revival meeting. Shall I aim at the condition within the church that prevents it from truly representing Christ or just seek to pull some precious souls from the fire, as if by fire?
Increasingly it is (at least in my limited experience) becoming harder each day to do the latter. Evangelism which seeks to reach men for Christ, who are outside our churches, is essential, but I am persuaded that what is more crucial in our time is evangelism inside the membership of our churches. This seems to be the imperative for our time. Nearly everyone is a member of somebody's church. I am far from being a loner in this regard. There are two questions that are pressing for answer now and pressing more people than at any time in memory. They are, first, are we the church of Jesus Christ that we claim to be? Secondly, are we the ministry of Jesus Christ that we claim to be? We need desperately to ask and answer these questions. I believe that self-criticism lies at the very heart of a biblical ministry and church. It is no cause for satisfaction that at present in this country we are still strong on confidence and weak in self-criticism. We ought to face the fact that the very existence of most churches is under serious attack, not simply whether they shall continue but whether they should continue!
The ability to see any line of distinction between the Christian faith that has its origin in the person of Jesus Christ, and the forms of today's respectable religion that stop short of an unconditional relationship with God in Christ and stop short of an unconditional commitment to Christ, has largely been lost. One could almost say that church membership is fast becoming the best place to hide from God.
When we turn from the Gospel to the situation today, we are met by the fact that congregations have made decisions for Christ, they believe the Bible, they meet once a week for a period of "worship", and for the hearing of a sermon. Occasionally they call in a visiting preacher and hold a revival meeting, employing techniques and pressure to manipulate other human beings (for their own good, of course) to "decide for Christ." When one plays with this sort of thing, one should know that he is walking on the edge of the pit of hell.
It is still true that membership in the church is meant to be the outer symbol of inner commitment to Jesus Christ. But churches today are loaded with nominal (unreal) members, at peace with the status quo. (That's Latin for the mess we are in). They are nice, quiet, friendly folks who are totally ignorant of the word of God but quite devoted to the traditions of their fathers. They yearn for institutional security, rather than adventures of Christian freedom, come weal or woe. Their preachers have sold their evangelical birthright for a mess of pot-bellied respectability.
Back after all this to my opening remarks. Can we afford to ignore and religiously refuse to open the awful sore of powerless, popular Sunday morning religion? Shall we allow church members to go to hell unwarned or shall we set our faces toward God and cry, "Revive thy work in the midst of the years."