Monologue #9: THE CHALLLENGES OF HOME MISSIONS TODAY (02/04’17)

Pastor Bill Shishko here with you. It’s great to have you with us for today’s Visit to the Pastor’s Study.

It’s not the same America as it was half a century ago. While God graciously drew many young people to Himself toward the end of the counter-cultural 1960s, the seeds of our national moral decline were sown in that decade, and we taste the bad fruit in our own day.

We’re in a secular age. It’s an age of naturalism – what is real is only what I can see, taste, smell, feel, and hear. To believe in God, the soul, and realities beyond what is around me is – at best – unthinkable. At worst, it’s dangerous. Religion is the source of all that is toxic in the world. We live in a closed universe. We make our own meaning of reality. Church and established religion must be kept out of the public square. Vague “spirituality” is OK; but commitment to religious dogma – especially Christian dogma (with what is regarded as its arrogant claim to exclusive truth) is a challenge to my autonomy – my self-chosen way of doing things. And, besides, it’s simply not relevant to life in our fast-paced, technologically-driven society. The future is a world in which robotics, the capacity to amass information in tiny chips of silicon, and the mathematical capacity to put that information to use instantaneously replaces a Divine Being who is all knowing, all wise, and to whom we have been enslaved. Man is not captain of his soul – for he has none. But he now can be Master of his fate. We don’t need the “God thing” any more.

And no doubt in part as a side-effect of this – though we don’t want to face the fact – the Christian Church in the United States (not far from its counterpart in Europe) is in decline. It’s in a statistical free fall. Over the past two decades nearly 3,500 churches close their doors each year. And it’s estimated that of the 88 – 91 % of the churches with their doors open, the congregations are aging and the church corporate life is either plateaued or dying. Only 1% of churches in the United States are growing by reaching people who do not know Christ as Lord and Savior. As church attendance has declined to about 14% of our national population, the projection is that 55,000 churches in the United States will close in the next seven years.

It’s not the same America as it was half a century ago.

One cannot but think of Jesus’ prediction that peoples’ hearts will fail them with fear because of what is coming on the earth.

Yet Christians are not meant to live out of the cultural picture they see before them. We are meant to live, as Christ Himself did, out of “every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.” And that word tells us that Christ Himself will be with us “always, even unto the end of the age.” The truth of the word of God endures to all generations. God, the Apostle Paul tells us, will get glory in Christ Jesus throughout all generations (not excluding our own). And that glory – in every generation – will be displayed in the Church. Never forget that God the Father has put all things – including the juggernaut of our secular culture – under the feet of King Jesus; and that for the sake of His Church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who is ordained to fill all in all.

Spiritually healthy, pastorally led, wisely governed, churches of “living stones” – people reached and transformed by the life-giving power of God through the resurrected Jesus Christ – are precisely what the victims of our secular age need to see. Their longing for meaning – what is sometimes called “fullness” – can be satisfied in Christ, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, as He is proclaimed, explained, and illustrated in biblically faithful churches. Here, in healthy Christian churches, they can find the honesty – the transparency – that is artfully masked by a secularism that, in reality, suppresses the truth that in God we all live and move and have our being. And in Christian churches that earnestly live out of their commitment to be expressions of the body of Christ, those desperate for real community in our “Face Book Friend” age can not only find real friends, but brothers and sisters united to one another by their union with our great Elder Brother, Jesus Christ.

Whether we or those around us realize it or not, in our day we need churches – living, vital, truly counter-cultural expressions of the life of Christ in the souls of men, women, boys, and girls – more than ever. What makes a church living, vital and truly counter cultural? How can we be God’s instruments to bring those truly refreshing things to existing churches? And how can we plant churches that, right from the beginning, display the marks of true, authentic Christianity – not formal religion wearing a Christian mask? Those are among our greatest challenges as today’s Davids face the Goliath of modern secularism.

And what I want you to see is that our national time of unprecedented opposition is, in fact, our time of greatest opportunity. That is, if we respond in faith rather than in fear.

While youthful zeal with a handle on the world today is indispensable to tackling these challenges, it’s good to learn from the older and wiser who have watched the developments of the past half century and reflected on them with a view to giving us lessons gleaned from experience. In every age, thoughtful children give attention to godly fathers and mothers. “Hear, my son, your father’s instruction, and forsake not your mother’s teaching”, exhorts the inspired writer of Proverbs. And that applies to matters of church and church planting just as it does to every other sphere of our lives as we seek to walk in the fear of the Lord.

Today on A Visit to the Pastor’s Study we begin to explore the challenge (and the opportunity) of the planting and the development of healthy churches in our secular age.

Our guest today not only has the experience of more than 27 years of faithful pastoral ministry in local churches, but he also had 15 years of experience helping with church planting and church development. Rev. Richard Gerber formerly served as Associate General Secretary for Home Missions and Church Extension for the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He currently serves as chairman of the Missions Committee of one of the Regional Churches of the OPC – the Presbytery of Connecticut and Southern New York…

Here’s a link to the program:

Yours in the King of Kings,
Pastor Bill