Here’s another prophetic word by R. Loren Sandford:  “Recovering Our Lost Influence“(Link NLA).

Loren has some right-on counsel for the church here and points out that Christians lost their political and cultural influence in America because of hypocrisy in high places(failing Christian leaders) and because of a ‘religious’ pharisaic attitude towards unbelievers:

I don’t see judgment falling on the nation yet but rather on the church—God’s people—and it has only just begun. 1 Peter 4:17 clearly indicates that judgment begins with the house of God.

The first stage of judgment—already in motion—is that we have lost both our power as a voting block and our cultural influence. We have lost these things (1) because we have presented ourselves to the nation in the religious spirit rather than the Spirit of Christ and (2) because our integrity in high places has been badly compromised.

The second stage of judgment on the church in days to come is that the culture of this nation will continue in the direction it has been choosing to take for the last 40 years. The judgment is that we can do nothing to stop this slide into lawlessness and immorality because we’ve sacrificed our moral authority.

Sandford ends with good counsel for the American church

(Image via Wikipedia)

Found this on Monday Morning Insight-an article on Guy Muse’s blog: “How to Change Traditional Churches into New Testament Churches”

Here’s a list of 15 suggestions that does certainly sound like the NT church alright –some of which may be the direction that the American church needs to go in the future or maybe not:

1. Replace professional clergy with Priesthood of all Believers with authority to baptize, break bread and equip fishers of men. (1 Peter 2:9)

2. Replace Church building with “House of Peace.” (Luke 10:5-9; Matt. 10:11-13)

3. Replace programmed Sunday service with daily informal gatherings. The Bride of Christ must have intimacy with her Lord every day and not just for a couple of hours a week lest she become unfaithful. (Acts 2:46-47; Hebrew 3:13) Continue reading →

(Image by tillwe via Flickr)

I have been addressing this for several month now—Has God pushed a big ‘reset’ button? Some prophetic folks believe that God has grabbed the entire world system by the jaws and turned it upside down to position it for the very last days or as Grady says—hit a big ‘reset button’. Regardless, no matter how painful it is—God is definitely at work here. All the systems of the world have been thrown up in the air and where they land only God knows for sure.

The American church is particularly vulnerable because it was so tied to the old cultural and economic system of America that is now being tested and transformed. Change is ahead whether we want it or not, for better or worse. If the church tries to hang on to the old world system it will be changed into something that is clearly not Biblical.

Those churches that continue to be guided by the Holy Spirit and uphold Biblical teaching and principles will be transformed in a positive way—but not in the eyes of the world. The dominant American culture from now on will be increasingly critical and adversarial with those who are faithful to ‘Biblical’ Christianity.

(Dr. Mohler via Wikipedia)

All sorts of articles, polls, and publications have sounded the warning trumpet lately—calling attention to the ‘decline of Christianity in America. What we really are experiencing is the death of ‘cultural Christianity’—the kind that I talked about before– in the 50’s growing up with everyone in my neighborhood identifying themselves as Christians except the Jewish family down the street but they believed in the same Biblical morality as every other American.

Times have changed indeed—the culture wars are basically over and the church has substantially lost—even among a whole lot of folk who identify themselves as ‘Christian’. Here is a recent quote of Dr. Albert Mohler addressing the new cultural environment that the American church could soon be facing:

“We are going to discover that cultural Christianity is what eventually disappears in a secularized age.

Cultural Christianity has been so much a part of the environment of our ministry and of the expectation of our churches that it’s going to be a very different situation for the pastor of the First Baptist Church to worry about being arrested rather than to worry about whether he’s going to get the first seat in the restaurant.

… When you start looking at a lot of the logic of what is becoming endemic in the culture toward the future, we’re going to be in a very different situation than we’ve ever faced before.

And we’re going to discover that we are not as many as we thought we were.

… We’ve got to prepare students to be ready for that and to be able to lead churches to be able to understand what it means to be the church when we no longer have the cultural supports that we had counted on, wrongly, I think, all these years.”

—Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler Jr. [Baptist Press, 4/23/09]

(-Image by wallyg via Flickr)

When I was a kid growing up in the 50’s and 60’s it seemed like everyone in the neighborhood and everyone our family knew were Christians. But no one really called themselves Christians, it was somewhat assumed–everyone was divided up as either Catholic or Protestant.

Then secondarily if you were Protestant you were also identified as a Baptist, Methodist, or whatever. Oh yes, there was the family at the end of the street that was Jewish–they were Americans also.

I remember being asked at the start of every school year whether I was Protestant or Catholic, we had Bible study once a week–Catholics went to the Catholic class and Protestants to the Protestant. My best friend in 6th grade was Jewish, don’t remember where he went during that time.

If you went into the army in those days your dogtags reflected 3 basic choices–Protestant, Catholic, and Jew. Never really knew anyone growing up that had no religion at all. America has obviously changed in the last 50 years or so.

Somewhere along the way In the 70’s and 80’s, born-again Christians who continued to recognize Biblical authority started calling themselves ‘Evangelicals’ to be differentiated from some of the more liberal main-line Protestants.

Now according to a recent poll, the country is far more diverse and divided than it use to be when it comes to religion. Now ‘none’ — no religion at all– is a larger group in America than Catholic and Evangelical has replaced Protestant as the most popular generic Christian label and one of the largest denomination groups is ‘non-denominational Christian’.

In a MinistryToday article- “God as a Fashion Statement” –it says the following about the growing “None” classification–

they represent a growing 15% of the population but as one researcher noted:

“These people aren’t secularized, they’re not thinking about religion and rejecting it; they’re not thinking about it at all.”

The survey found that among the ‘nones’, 40 percent of them had never experienced any kind of religious ceremony (e.g., baptism, christening, bar mitzvah), and a shocking 55 percent had been married in some sort of non-religious ceremony with no religious reference or trappings at all. Even more shocking , one state–Vermont has 34% of its population in the ‘none’ category, far more than any religious group in the state.

The article ends with this observation:

“The challenge to Christianity, does not come from other religions but from a rejection of all forms of organized religion.”

I found many articles on the Internet citing the poll, nearly all proclaim and conclude that America is far less religious than it use to be. Something most of us already know. Another indication that change is ahead for the American Church one way or another.