Lack of Fire: The True Crisis in the Contemporary Charismatic Church

Lack of Fire: The True Crisis in the Contemporary Charismatic Church

Making a difference. Evangelism. Part 1:

I had the privilege of being raised in a Christian home and being part of a Christian family, I remember spending a lot of time with my Grandmother,  Mildred Whitton in the latter years of her life, and she used to tell me stories of her early Christian Life, she told me one story out of many that impacted me greatly,  in the 1930’s my great grandmother took my Grandmother and one of her Sisters to hear the Evangelist George Jefferies in Swansea, both my Gran and her sister had issues with their eyesight, and both were healed at the meeting held by George Jefferies.

My mum’s parents Frank & Mildred Whitton were both Christians and very involved in their local church in Resolven, my dad David was not raised in a Christian family, and had contacts at a local Church in Pontardawe; through them he went to hear Billy Graham in Swansea in 1958, where my Dad became a Christian. My Mum, Alison, became a Christian as a child.

I was at my church’s Bible Week recently where we alongside our related churches throughout the UK where inspired by Godly Speakers such as Andrew Hughes, David Lavery and Keri Jones and of course others as well, I’ve mentioned my friends Andrew, David and Keri because God used them specifically to speak into my life, something Keri said we had to evangelise or we would die!

Throughout my Christian Life, I’ve seen and have been part of many evangelistic outreaches and strategies, I remember being an eager and enthusiastic teenager and being part of an evangelism team in Bradford, and seeing God save people and lives being changed by the Good News of the Gospel, my dad was part of an evangelism team in the 1970’s and early 1980’s, I used to go with my dad, I think I was more of a team mascot than part of that team but I loved being part of both teams.

For many years,  Church Growth here in the United Kingdom has been mostly transfer growth where people leave one church and join another church, transfer growth can be successful it also can be unsuccessful,  I’m not going to say something positive or negative about transfer growth, this is not the purpose of this post,  for many churches, evangelism is done through the spectrum of the Alpha Course and similar courses,  I think Alpha is great, but evangelism isn’t spelt alpha, alpha can be part of an evangelism outreach programme but it isn’t the entirety of an evangelism outreach programme/strategy.

There have been countless evangelistic programmes/strategies some have been successful and many have been unsuccessful, we invent strategies and ask God to bless our strategies, and we wonder why they don’t work or fail our expectations, we read books attend conferences on evangelism, research evangelism yet we don’t do any evangelism or reluctantly evangelise.

 We have superstar or celebrity Christians who bring evangelistic outreaches to our towns and cities, we pray that evangelist a will come to our town, then countless people will be saved,  when this doesn’t happens we pray for evangelist b to come, and this cycle repeats itself for years and sometimes decades. Yet while we sit in our comfortable pews, playing our self-indulgent games, people are going to a lost and Christ less Eternity, The Lord hasn’t called us His Church to be full of active and committed spectators rather he has called us and is calling us to be active and committed participants in His Great Commission.

Matthew 28:18-20 New American Standard Bible.

And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

 Mark 16:15ff New American Standard Bible.

¹⁵ And He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. ¹⁶ He who has believed and has been baptized shall be saved; but he who has disbelieved shall be condemned. ¹⁷ These signs will accompany those who have believed: in My name they will cast out demons, they will speak with new tongues; ¹⁸ they will pick up serpents, and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.”

I have often wondered, why here in the United Kingdom, our evangelistic outreaches/programmes/strategies have either failed, or are less effective than we hoped or dreamed, is our message the same Gospel Jesus preached or is it either a watered down or wishey washy presentation of The Gospel?

What Gospel did Jesus preach ?

Matthew 4:22-24 New American Standard Bible

23 Jesus was going throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness among the people 24 The news about Him spread throughout all Syria; and they brought to Him all who were ill, those suffering with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, paralytics; and He healed them.

See a breakdown of The Gospel of The Kingdom here

http://www.charismamag.com/spirit/spiritual-growth/17652-the-difference-between-the-gospel-of-salvation-vs-gospel-of-the-kingdom

I will continue this in Part 2:

For the Sake of the World, Bethel Live

You're Beautiful, by Phil Wickham

Rend Collective, " Build your Kingdom here. "

My husband is not my soul mate. Posted on July 22, 2013by Hannah It might seem odd that on this, our one-year anniversary, I am beginning a post with the declaration that my husband is not my soul mate. But he isn’t.

My husband is not my soul mate.

Posted on July 22, 2013by Hannah

It might seem odd that on this, our one-year anniversary, I am beginning a post with the declaration that my husband is not my soul mate. But he isn’t.

I wouldn’t want to imagine life without James. I enjoy being with him more than anyone else in this world. I love him more than I ever thought you could love someone, and I miss him whenever I am not with him. I wouldn’t want to married to anyone else other than James, which is good, because I plan on being married to him forever, and he has to die first.

But I reject the entire premise of soul mates.

Do you remember those awesome Evangelical 90’s/ early 2000’s where Jesus was kind of like our boyfriend and we all kissed dating good-bye because we just knew that God was going to bring us THE ONE and then life would be awesome? And THE ONE would most likely be a worship minister, or at the very least a youth pastor, and we would have to be in college when we would meet at some sort of rally to save children from disease or something. We would know that he was THE ONE because of his plethora of WWJD bracelets and because (duh) he had also kissed dating goodbye and was waiting for me, strumming Chris Tomlin songs on his guitar as he stared into whatever campfire was nearby. We would get married and it would be awesome FOREVER. If you were like me, in devote preparation for this moment, you wrote letters to your future spouse, preferably in a leather bound journal dotted with your overwhelmed tears. Yes, I actually did that. Suffice to say that I found this journal over Christmas break and it was so embarrassingly awful and emotional that I couldn’t even read it out-loud to James because I was crying from laughing so hard.

But then my theologian biblical scholar father shattered my dreams by informing me that God doesn’t have a husband for me, doesn’t have a plan for who I marry. NOT TRUE I scolded him, attacking him with the full force of Jeremiah 29:11 that God “knows the plans he has for me, plans to prosper me and not to harm me, plans to give me a hope and a future,” and obviously that means a hott Christian husband because God “delights in giving me the desires of my heart.”  He slammed through my horrible (yet popular) biblical abuse by reminding me that the first verse applied to the people of Israel in regards to a specific time and just didn’t even dignify my horrible abuse of the second verse with a rebuttal. Nope, he said, a husband is not only not a biblical promise, it is also not a specific element of God’s “plan for my life.” God’s plan is for us to be made more holy, more like Christ… not marry a certain person. (This advice was also used when I asked what college God wanted me to go to, accompanied I think by, “God doesn’t want you to be an idiot, so go somewhere you will learn.” )

And then he gave me some of the best relationship advice I ever got: There is no biblical basis to indicate that God has one soul mate for you to find and marry. You could have a great marriage with any number of compatible people. There is no ONE PERSON for you. But once you marry someone, that person becomes your one person. As for compatibility, my mom would always pipe up when my girlfriends and I were making our lists of what we wanted in a spouse (dear well meaning Christian adults who thought this would help us not date scumbags: that was a bad idea and wholly unfair to men everywhere) that all that really mattered was that he loved the lord, made you laugh, and was someone you to whom you were attracted. The rest is frosting.

This is profoundly unromantic advice. We love to hear of people who “just can’t help who they love,” or people who “fall in love,” or “find the one person meant for them.”  Even within the Christian circle, we love to talk about how God “had someone” for someone else for all of time. But what happens to these people when the unstoppable and uncontrollable force that prompted them to start loving, lets them stop loving, or love someone else?  

What happens is a world where most marriages end in divorce, and even those that don’t are often unhappy.

My marriage is not based on a set of choices over which I had no control. It is based on a daily choice to love this man, this husband that I chose out of many people that I could have chosen to love (in theory, don’t imagine that many others were lined up and knocking at the door). He is not some illusive soul mate, not some divine fullfulment, not some perfect step on the rigorously laid out but of so secret “Plan for My Life.”

But he is the person that I giggly chose to go out on a date with in college. He is the person who chose to not dump me when I announced that I was moving to France for a year, then Kentucky for another year. He is the person who asked me to move to DC and I chose to do so. He is the person who decided to ask me to marry him and I agreed. At any step here, we could have made other choices and you know what? We might have married other people, or stayed single, and had happy and full lives.

But now I delight in choosing to love him everyday.

I like it better this way, with the pressure on me and not on fate, cosmos, or divinity. I will not fall out of love, cannot fall out of love, because I willingly dived in and I’m choosing daily to stay in. This is my joyous task, my daily decision. This is my marriage.

Someday I hope to have daughters and sons. I am going to pray for their futures everyday, and I will pray for who they might marry, but also what job they will have, who their friends will be, and most of all, that they delight in becoming more like Christ. But when my daughters come home starry-eyed from camp announcing that they can’t wait till the day they meet the man God has for them, I will probably pop their bubble and remind them that God doesn’t have a husband stored away somewhere for them.

He has a whole life, one of rich and abundant choices. And it is awesome. 

Oh, and for the record — I like James so much more than my imaginary, obnoxiously religious, youth pastor future husband. When I asked him if he had written Future Me letters as a child, he told me he was too busy memorizing Pink Floyd lyrics. But then he ran in the next room and wrote down what 14-year old James would have said in a letter to 14-year old Hannah: “I hope you’re hott.”  That’s why boys didn’t get swept up in that movement… they knew the truth all along.

(Also for the record, I actually think a lot of the high Evangelical movement was awesome, especially in so far as it made young people do a ridiculous amount of churchy activities so that we weren’t out doing drugs or at home watching re-runs because we didn’t even have Netflix yet. I was at youth group every time those doors were open and I LOVED it.  )

*All photos are by the wonder that is Whitney Neal Photography.

Update: This was a post to share a little bit of my heart with the [normally very small group of] people who read here. However, as it has been read more widely, please know that it was not to start a lengthy debate on the Internet. If your comment is rude, vulgar, excessively unkind, or fosters bickering, it will be removed. I appreciate reading all your comments, but I will also no longer be responding on this post. 

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Preparation is the Key!, Be Prepared

I’ve spend today preparing to attend the Without Borders 2013 Bible Week/Conference which is held at The Staffordshire County Showground near Stafford which starts tomorrow 20th July 2013.

I started ironing my clothes and putting them neatly, well fairly neatly in my suitcase about 7am this morning, being a typical man, I tend to leave things to the last possible moment.  I’ve had a mental list of things  to prepare for , I had a few extra’s to get like shorts and t-shirts, I realised this morning  that  I had only 3 pairs of clean socks, so decided to go to my local Asda and buy more socks. Phew!

Many years ago, I was in the Cubs, and the motto was "Be Prepared"

I decided what books to take and have got them ready to take with, I’ve remembered to pack my mobile and more importantly the phone charger, Yes, I’ve packed my Bible, well two Bibles,  I’m taking a study Bible as well,  this morning I packed 5 pairs of jeans, 5 shirts and t-shirts, 5 tops and jumpers, socks and underwear,  2 pairs of shorts and two polo shirts, 4 towels,  my toiletries, 2 pairs of shoes and clothes and shoes to wear to travel tomorrow,  I’ve even packed a waterproof coat in case it may rain and a hat because of the sun and I’ve been to the Cash Machine to take money out.

I did wonder, had I forgotten to prepare to take  anything else apart from the Kitchen Sink! And to be honest, I thought no,  I’m looking forward to spending quality time with my friends at my home church The Community Church, Southport and catching up with friends from other churches, but I had forgotten to do something in my busyness.

 I had forgotten to prepare my heart to see what the Lord wants to do in my life next week and in the lives of others. Yes in some ways Bible Week is a Holiday,  but also in many ways I’m spending time with my Lord, Saviour, Redeemer and  Friend, Jesus and am spending time with some of God’s people many of whom, I’ve been friends with and we have walked alongside in Covenant, Fellowship and Friendship for almost 20 years.

I’m looking forward in expectation to what God will do amongest us next week, and expecting God to move and touch lives including my own, and leave better than I went.

Joshua 3:5 “Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do wonders among you.”

1 Peter 3:13 “Therefore, prepare your minds for action, keep sober in spirit, fix your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”