Quotes from "This Little Church Stayed Home: A faithful church in deceptive times" by Gary Gilley (Book 2)

Preface

“…despite all the claims of spiritual interest, despite the runaway numerical growth at the celebrated megachurches, despite frequent ‘sightings’ of revival and despite the rapid succession of fads (from Promises Keepers to the ‘Prayer of Jabez’ to ‘Forty Days of Purpose’ to ‘The Passion of the Christ’), each promising to reform the church, the fact is the church’s light is flickering.”

“Megachurches (worship attendance of 2000 or more) are springing up weekly (There were 842 in February of 2004) church buildings are rapidly being constructed, Christian concerts and rallies are well attended….”

“However…George Barna…informs us that since 1991 there has been a 92% increase in the number of adults in America who do not attend church (from 39 million to 75 million).”

“Then U. S. News and World Reports in its 19 April 2004 issue stated, “Surveys confirm that the percentage of Americans attending a weekly worship service fell appreciably during the past four decades. From roughly 40 percent in the 1960’s, it today hovers at about a quarter.’ Something just does not add up.”

Barna writes, “Unchurched people are not just lazy or uninformed. They are wholly disinterested in church life.” Gilley adds, “This analysis should come as no surprise in light of Scripture” (Rom. 3:11 – “There is none who understands” and Cor. 1:18 – “For the word of the cross is to those who are perishing foolishness”).

“What are the followers of Christ to do? Barna suggests that the church reinvent their core spiritual practices while holding tightly to their core spiritual beliefs.”

“This strikes me as the same rhetoric that the seeker-sensitive church has been propagating for years. For two decades the church-growth experts have told us that if we are to attract the unchurched, we must change the way we ‘do church’. We must offer them new ‘settings and experiences’. We must meet their perceived felt-needs. We must do away with biblical exposition and focus on stories. We must eliminate dogma and become relevant. We must do away with hymns and major on contemporary music.”

“Now, after two decades of church leaders buying and implementing everything that the market-driven qurus have offered, we find far fewer people attending church services (of any kind). Their methodologies have failed, yet Barna encourages us to keep it up.”

“But this is the wrong approach. The church cannot, as Barna has noted, compete with the world system.”

“The Christian community has something to offer that no one else has: the truth as found in Jesus Christ and the Scriptures.”

“I want to discuss what God says a church should be….”

“If much of the modern church has sold its birthright and gone ‘to market’, what would a church look like that resisted these trends and ‘stayed home’?”

“This will be the approach that will be followed in this book.”

What do the Scriptures say?

“Harvard professor Kirsopp Lake [writing in the 1920s and representing the emerging liberal wing of Christendom] made this insightful observation: “…the fundamentalist may be wrong. I think he is. But it is we who have departed from the tradition, not he….”

“Fundamentalists (those who adhere to the fundamentals of the faith) had not, and have not moved. Their authority continues to be the Scriptures. They attempt to develop their personal lives and local churches according to the instruction and model found in the Bible.”

“The classic liberal, lacking confidence in the Word, marching to the tune of modernity, developed a quasi-Christianity created in the image of man – they have reaped what they sowed.”

“The so-called new paradigm church movement today has not bothered to dispense with the Scriptures.”

“The problem is they lack confidence in the Scriptures and have therefore co-mingled it with a plethora of supplemental sources.”

“In the infant days of the church, as outlined in the book of Acts, we find a newly regenerated people, with no money, no buildings and no program having an astonishing impact on their world in a very short time. As the newly born church began, what was important to them?”

1) Evangelism (2:41, 47) 2) Worship (2:46 – 47) 3) Prayer (2:42) 4) Truth (2:42) 5) the ordinances: Baptism (2:41) and communion (2:42) 6) Purity (5:1 – 6).