Well, here we go again, in search of the elusive church where the preacher has a fire in his belly and the teachers actually know what they are talking about.
Going on nine months now, my wife and I have been in search of a church to attend and become active here in Fort Worth.
This is not the first time and it looks like it may be a while before we land anywhere.
After three tries at the previous church—fool me twice, shame on me—we finally had enough and decided to move on.
Our repetitive journey has taken us to some old stomping grounds, where nothing has changed, except in one case, where a previous pastor moved on or something that regularly happens in Baptist churches, as the smaller congregations are used as stepping-stones for bigger and better paychecks later on at more prestigious institutions of social clubbing.
Whether he resigned because the congregants finally figured out that he could not preach his way out of a wet paper bag or not, or that they finally discovered just how liberal he was in his theology, who knows?
What we did discover, though, was that the new pastor and his assistant were no better than the old one.
The associate wasted an hour in the senior pastor’s absence rambling on about how he was called to be a preacher, straight out of the Navy, but then never utilized the time afforded him to get into the Bible and prove it.
In some ways, I guess he was called, as that happens on a regular basis every Sunday morning all across America.
Needless to say, that social club is just as dead as when we left it years ago.
If we were to return in three or four years, I believe I would be safe to say that there will be another pastor who was “called” to be there, along with his associate, and that the congregation will be as dead as ever.
More recently, we stepped outside our Baptist moorings and tried a Reformed Presbyterian church.
Wooden might be the best way to describe the experience.
Reading from a nineteen or twenty-page manual is not my idea of worship.
It was almost like having to go to a Roman Catholic Church years ago for a class assignment in church history.
When the Presbyterian Head Elders did their sermonettes, it made me wonder what grades they received in Homiletics (a class taught in seminary on how to construct a sermon), because they certainly were not exegetical, nor expository, and topically, they were all over the place.
All of this kept reminding me of the Apostle Paul’s words to Timothy that “The time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires; and will turn away their ears from the truth, and will turn aside to myths” (2 Tim. 4:3-4).
Whether Paul had today’s churches in mind when he penned those words, is doubtful, but he certainly could not have been far off.
What is true, though, is that they fit too many of today’s churches, as the so-called spiritual leadership is trying so hard to please the crowd that they are completely ignoring their responsibility to preach the whole counsel of God, whether or not the crowd gives the leadership a thumbs-up or down.
Even one of the Presbyterian elders made a statement to that effect when he basically acknowledged the deadness in the ritual and how he and rest of the church staff thinks, on a daily basis, of ways to make things more lively for everyone.
Hey, I have an idea.
How about you get back to actually preaching and teaching God’s Word, even if it manages to ruffle a few feathers, and let the Spirit of God bring your congregation back to life, minus all the feigned hoopla that you’re trying to introduce as a surrogate for Him?
And if you’re not going to do that, then how about you rename your church to something along the lines of what Paul wrote about; something like Intolerant Presbyterian, Unhealthy Baptist, or Mythological Baptiterian?
At least it would make it easier for some of us to know which “churches” to avoid by seeing such titles over the door lintel or on the church sign out front.
Until such time, it looks like we’re going to have to do it the laborious way by tolerating all of the intolerance, as we slowly watch the beauty, glory, and truth of God’s Word lustfully replaced by the ignorance and myths designed to alleviate all of those itching ears.
