Marketing the Church

by Bruce Mills

One of my significant concerns about the American evangelical church is that it has no idea what the purpose of the church as a body is to be.  It has largely abandoned the method which Jesus and the apostles used; namely, preaching the truth of the gospel, teaching the Scriptures, and exhorting believers to obedience.  Instead, it has chosen to adopt the world’s marketing methods to determine what its message will be and how it will be presented.

Afraid to offend the listeners and choosing rather to entertain them, many pastors have decided that preaching in a lecture-listener format is too old fashioned and boring for the educated, erudite American ear.  Thus, they believe it is necessary to use drama, skits, movie and television clips, popular secular musicians, and a watered down presentation of the gospel which is devoid of any serious mention of sin, judgment, repentance, or the lordship of Christ. 

Going to church is now supposed to be entertaining and, seemingly, only superficially enlightening about one’s human interpersonal relationships, rather than instructive on what God has to say in His word about who He is, what He commands, how we are to relate to Him, and what we need to do in order to grow and change to be more like Christ.  Moral absolutes are out; subjective recommendations on how to live are in.

I am now re-reading John MacArthur’s book, Ashamed of the Gospel, which has just been updated and released in a third edition.  The following is an excerpt which I found particularly pertinent regarding today’s American church culture and I decided to share it with you.

Having absorbed the world’s values, Christianity in our society is now dying.  Subtly but surely, worldliness and self-indulgence are eating away the heart of the church.  The gospel usually proclaimed today is so convoluted that it offers believing in Christ as nothing more than a means to contentment and prosperity.  The offense of the cross (cf. Gal. 5:11) has been systematically removed so that the message might be made more acceptable to unbelievers.  The church somehow got the idea it could declare peace with the enemies of God.

When on top of that punk rockers, ventriloquists’ dummies, clowns, knife-throwers, professional wrestlers, weight lifters, bodybuilders, comedians, dancers, jugglers, ringmasters, rap artists, actors, and show-business celebrities take the place of the preacher, the gospel message is dealt a catastrophic blow.  “How are they to hear without someone preaching?” (Rom. 10:14).

I do believe we can be innovative and creative in how we present the gospel, but we have to be careful to harmonize our methods with the profound spiritual truth we are trying to convey.  It is too easy to trivialize the sacred message.  And we must make the message, not the medium, the heart of what we want to convey to the audience.

Don’t be quick to embrace the trends of the high-tech megachurches.  And don’t sneer at conventional worship and preaching.  We don’t need clever approaches to get people saved (1 Cor. 1:21).  We simply need to get back to preaching the truth and planting the seed.  If we’re faithful in that, the soil God has prepared will bear fruit.

I don’t think anyone could have said it any better.  Many within the American evangelical culture have decided that it takes a skit and a slick, market-driven “conversation” to win Christ-followers.  Such a view completely ignores the fact that no one ever comes to Christ unless the Holy Spirit draws that person, and when He does, His effectual call will result in that individual coming to Christ in saving faith, no matter how “out-dated” the method of sharing the gospel may be.

Why God Allowed Sin to Enter His Creation

by Bruce Mills

Yesterday I taught on Romans 9:14-24, a passage which clearly deals with God’s sovereignty in election. In verse 22, Paul states, “What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction?” Now, I have dealt with that verse in a previous post on the doctrine of reprobation (2/18/08) so I will not rehash that issue.

However, one issue which we discussed yesterday dealt with God’s sovereignty in relationship to sin. This is a very serious issue in theology, because after all, if we have no answer for the horrendous things which take place around us, we might conclude either that God is impotent and incapable of dealing with such matters, or that He is a mean and vindictive tyrant who enjoys inflicting pain on His subjects.

So why does God permit evil in His creation? Why does He allow such events as a deranged gunman killing 32 students and faculty members on a college campus in Virginia in April 2007? What about mass genocide as has taken place in Bosnia and Rwanda within the past few years? What about radical Islamic terrorists flying commandeered airplanes into towers, killing thousands?

And why didn’t God simply wipe out Lucifer (Satan) at the very beginning when he rebelled? After all, He has the right and power to do that. In fact, Revelation 20:10 says he is will do just that someday. So why didn’t God cast him into the Lake of Fire the day after he rebelled? Why let him rampage through humanity for centuries?

What possible answer does Christianity have for such questions? Using material that I gleaned from both John Piper and John MacArthur, let me see if I can answer that.

The ultimate answer is that “all things have been created through [Christ] and for [Christ]” (Col. 1:16). Clearly God knew all that Satan would do if He created him and permitted him to rebel. So in choosing to create him, God was choosing to fold all of that evil into His purpose for creation. His purpose for creation was the glory of his Son. All things, including Satan and all his followers, were created with this in view. God created them knowing what they would do, and that knowledge was taken into account in God’s decision to create them. Therefore, the evil that Satan and his demonic forces do is simply one aspect of how God’s greatest and perfect purpose will be accomplished.

And in Romans 9:22, we learn that the entrance of sin into the world was necessary so that God could display His wrath, judgment, holy anger, vengeance, and justice. That’s why it says God was “willing to demonstrate His wrath.” His wrath is just as much an attribute of God’s nature as any other of His attributes. And so God allowed sin to enter into His perfect creation in order that He could display His holy wrath, because if there was no sin, He would have had no reason to display His wrath, and without His wrath, the fullness of the glory of God would not have been revealed.

Satan’s fall and ongoing existence are for the glory of Christ. Ultimately, Jesus Christ will be more highly honored, more deeply appreciated, and more deeply loved because He defeats Satan—not the moment Satan fell, but through millennia of enduring him and those who follow him “with much patience”--and decisively through His own death. A single, sudden, and infinitely holy display of power to destroy Satan immediately after his fall would have been a glorious display of power and righteousness. But it would not have been the fullest possible display of the full glory of the Son and the Father. God chose an infinitely wise way of displaying the full magnificence of divine glory by letting Satan fall and do his work for thousands of years.

The glory of Christ reaches its highest point in Christ’s obedient sacrifice on the cross where Jesus triumphed over the devil (Col. 2:15). Jesus said in that final hour of his own sacrifice, “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in Him” (John 13:31). Paul said that the crucifixion of Christ is the point where we see his wisdom and power most gloriously displayed: “But we preach Christ crucified…the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:23–24).

Satan, with all the evil and misery he brings to this planet, serves to magnify the power and wisdom and love and grace and mercy and patience and wrath of Jesus Christ. We would not know Christ in the fullness of His glory if He had not defeated Satan in the way He did.

Now, I understand that that’s not an easy answer to accept for many. But that’s the answer God gives us in Romans 9:22. Had there been no Satan and no sin, God couldn’t have displayed His wrath against sin and we wouldn’t have known that aspect of His nature. And because that aspect of His nature wouldn’t have been put on display, the full revelation of God’s glory would have been lost. So God created Satan and allowed and endured sin for the purpose of revealing His holy wrath in its judgment and its punishment. And it had to be so in order for God’s character to be fully revealed.

The text also says, “and to make His power known.” Here is another reason why God created Satan and permitted sin to enter His creation. First of all, He did it so that He could show His wrath. Secondly, He did it so that He could show His power.

How does God show His power in relationship to sin? First of all, in His judgment of sin. The closing chapters of the book of Revelation reveal the power of God in judging sin. If you read them, you will see the devastating plagues that He will one day send on the earth. You will see the great fiery judgments that He will bring upon men. And you will see Jesus Christ return as the conquering Lord, riding on a white horse, carrying a sword, wearing blood splattered garments as He comes to defeat Satan, his demonic forces, and the armies of the world and take the earth for His own possession so He can establish the millennial Kingdom. And after the final rebellion, you will see all of unredeemed humanity collected before the Great White Throne because God has the power to bring them out of the graves so that He can bring them before His judgment bar and then send them into the Lake of Fire forever. That is truly a demonstration of His unlimited power to judge sin.

And so, Satan and sin exist in order that God may fully glorify Himself and His Son, and demonstrate that part of His nature which is holy and reacts in violent wrath against sin and evil. And God created Satan and allowed sin in order that He could demonstrate His tremendous power as well as His vengeance, and His power is seen in its ability to conquer all that attempts to conquer Him.

Sound Biblical Advice

by Bruce Mills

I am about two-thirds of the way through reading a brand new book titled Right Thinking in a World Gone Wrong. It was written by members of the leadership team at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California where John MacArthur is the pastor. It is "sell your old ice skates and buy it" good!

There are few churches in America today who, like Grace Community Church, provide their flock with such sound, thoroughly biblical perspectives on the wide range of controversial issues which face believers in our society. This book deals with everything from entertainment choices, internet dating, video gaming, divorce and remarriage, abortion, birth control, in vitro fertilization and surrogacy, homosexuality, euthanasia, suicide, capital punishment, political activism, economics, global warming, racism and reconciliation, illegal immigration, suffering, the problem of evil, and more. Every chapter is solidly based on Scripture, not the vacillating opinions of human wisdom.

I think my favorite chapter of all that I have read so far is titled "God's Carbon Footprint" which deals with global warming and the environmental movement. While acknowledging the responsibility of Christians to care for every resource God has provided, and agreeing that we are not to be reckless, abusive, or irresponsible with any of the wonderful resources this world contains, this chapter takes the American evangelical culture to task for blindly accepting the secular, naturalistic, evolutionary perspective which idolizes nature by giving it a higher priority than obeying the clear commands of Scripture to love the Lord God wholeheartedly (Mark 12:29-30). The unnamed writer points out that this results in misinterpreting certain biblical texts by ripping them out of their context in order to make them fit an environmentalist understanding. He reminds believers that contrary to the National Council of Church's statement that "the central moral imperative of our time is the care for Earth as God's creation," Scripture teaches that the central moral imperative for the church in this age is the Great Commission; that is, to "Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you..." (Matthew 28:19-20). At the end of the chapter, this concluding statement summarizes Grace's pastoral approach to this issue:

While we should be good citizens (as we submit to government restrictions), good neighbors (as we are sensitive to the needs of others), and good stewards (as we invest the resources God has individually bestowed to us into His kingdom work), we should not become preoccupied with agendas or concerns that distract us from our primary mission in this world.

Well said. And anyone who picks up this book will find that it is packed with sound, solid biblical advice for anyone who wonders what God's Word has to say concerning any of the wide-range of controversial issues which are included in it. I particularly recommend it for those with young children at home, because it provides a biblically-based approach to these matters which parents can use in helping their children develop a biblical world view. As of this writing, it is on sale at www.christianbook.com for $12.98 including shipping, and also at www.amazon.com for $13.19 including shipping.