Hello, and welcome back to Christian leaders Institute. I'm your instructor for this class on church and ministry revitalization. I'm John Kenny, and thanks so much for sticking with us and continuing on this journey to bringing health and vitality and renewal to the place where God has called you to serve Him. And I realized that the things that we're talking about are difficult or challenging, they're slow, and they're messy. And yet, as we begin today, I want to just remind you, of what could be a think of, imagine your ministry, your church, wherever you're serving, where the people are, flourishing, and God is moving in the Holy Spirit is present in undeniable ways. And just keep that end goal in mind, because that can be a reality, and the Lord's Spirit blows where it does. But I do believe that if we put ourselves in the right position, to work with the Lord, to follow His commands, and to follow the template that he has for what ministry is to be, then it's very likely that God is going to respond in a powerful way. So don't forget about the end goal in mind as we go through all of these things. Now, going back a lecture or two, we've talked about doing an assessment for your ministry, and then also doing a bit of a historical study, so that you can understand in greater detail, what it is, that has contributed to the current state of ministry, at your location. A big point that we had made, that I want to remind you of is that the problems that your church and ministry are facing, are not from outside the church, it's within the church. It's with, you know, the problem is in the camp. It's not outside, it's so easy to blame the world. And, well, if if the society was a different way, or if our government was this, or if people didn't believe this. There's no perfect world, there's no perfect society, there's, it's not out there, the church has always stood outside of the rest of the world in a number of ways. And the church has thrived in that. And so we can't just assign blame outside and and say, well, there's nothing we can do, because we can't change all the circumstances around us. That's not the problem, the problems are the circumstances, within the camp within the church or within your ministry. And that's why we are spending so much time really trying to understand why things are the way they are and diagnosing that. So up until now, we've worked very specifically on your ministry context, you know, an assessment that's unique to you and studying a history that's unique to you. This next three lectures, what we're going to be doing is kind of pulling back a little bit, and we're going to be talking about from a much more broad perspective, what are the underlying causes for decline? These are things that are repeated over and over and over again. And the reason we're going to do that we're actually going to look at four underlying causes very significant underlying causes for church and ministry decline. Because my hope is that in looking at that, you will be able to identify one or multiple things that are going on in your ministry, but we're going to kind of pull back and see like, what are the most common things that go on. And so, as always, before we get started, we're gonna pray we're gonna lift this whole time up to the Lord and ask for him to lead us in my teaching and you and you're studying. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we thank you for the gift of your church, Lord, that it is in your great sovereign will and plan that it would be people, your people who would change the world. And Lord, we grieve. Truly we grieve for the state of our churches and our ministries that are not reflecting your glory and your grace and your love and your kindness and your power to the world. And so Lord, we stand ready. Right now even as we're listening to this Lord, we stand ready to follow your lead, to hear what your word has to say. And Lord to transform our ministry by by being changed ourselves. Lord, would you please help all my brothers and sisters listening to this now? Give them a spirit of strength and encouragement, and wisdom, and understanding. Amen. Okay, so as I have done a few times in the past, let me tell you a little bit about my experience going through church revitalization. So as you know, I was in a ministry context where I was struggling quite a bit, and really didn't know what to do. And so I started on a program of study on revitalization. And in that study I do, which took six, seven years, I would have to travel and go to lectures at a seminary. And I had to do reading, I mean, reading, like, you wouldn't believe dozens and dozens of books every year. I mean, literally 10s of 1000s, of pages of reading on Church Health, church revitalization, leadership, renewal, all those kinds of things. And as I was implementing them, I wrote literally hundreds of pages, hundreds and hundreds of pages of reflections of, you know, planning things out, and then reflecting on those. With my church, with my leadership team, we had countless meetings. It just felt like we were meeting all the time to talk about these things, and what I was learning and what they were learning and what we could do together. I was meeting a couple times a month with a coach for a couple of years, going through all these same kinds of things, all the learning all the instructions. So the very, very intense process that I went through over quite a period of time. And when I got to the end of it, one of my challenges was to try to really clarify what was the single most important things that I learned in all the reading all the writing, all the meetings, all the coaching, if I could distill what was the most important thing? What would it be? And I'd like to start off by sharing that with you now. But I have to warn you, the answer is so simple. It's so basic, you would wonder how did I ever miss this in the first place? It is, it's so Elementary, that I'm almost embarrassed to say after all these years of study, this is the thing that I found out. So what's the most important thing in ministry? And what is limits lacking? What is the cause of decline? Well, let's turn to the Old Testament. In Deuteronomy 6:4-5, hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the Lord is One, Love the Lord your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength. After all, my study gang, that's what I learned was the most important thing of all. So the most basic purpose of human life. And our highest goal is to love God. That's why we're, we were created. That's why the Lord put us here. That's why Christ came is to restore that relationship we have with him. And so after years of studying, what I found out to be the most important thing in the Christian life, and the biggest thing, perhaps missing from churches in decline, is a lack of a love for God. Now, here's why that that is just so, so important and so critical, because love of God is the building blocks of our relationship with Him. It is the the essential building block for every church, in every ministry, a just authentic, genuine, sincere love for God for His character, for who he is. His nature, his being his, his majesty, His sovereignty, his wisdom, His his rule, His righteousness, His Holiness, all these amazing things about the Lord We love him for that. And we love him for the gospel of Jesus Christ that He gave His one and only Son that we might believe in Him and have eternal life and that his kingdom might come into our world, we love him, because he has saved us from an eternity of punishment, in the very pits of hell, and he's raised us up into his glorious kingdom, and he's going to raise our bodies up one day and to glory and, and Heaven and Earth will all come together. And we'll be there forever with all the saints in the angels in, in our natural response to God's character. And the work that he's done in the Gospel is love, just pure love for the Lord, who he is and all that he has done. Now, what I'm saying was this, that it's the eroding of this love, it's the lessening of this love, it's the decline of this love. That is really the heart of the problem in so many places, and in so many churches, because you think about it, what happens when love grows, cold? Let's imagine a marriage, a couple, they start off very much in love, and they decide they want to get married. And so they get engaged, they they get married later. And in as over time, the the love grows cold, and they feel differently about each other. And they begin to get further and further apart. And the love that once drove them together is becoming less and less of a factor in their life. And they started living together in the same house. But now it's like they're just going through the motions of living together. And so when they do things, they're doing it more out of duty, they're doing it more out of obligation than a love and a desire for that other person. And often, situations like that people were very unhappy in their marriage, or they decide to end their marriage. Now, thinking of that illustration, I want you to like draw a comparison to churches. The church is the bride of Christ, and what happens to churches, when our love towards the Lord Jesus Christ grows cold? Well, it's the same kind of thing. We, we, the love and the passion that first drove us to be together well, we start moving apart. Now obviously, it's not the Lord moving apart from us, but it's us drifting from him. And, and we find ourselves now more and more going just through the motions of serving or being a Christian or being part of a church. ministries are done more out of duty or obligation, because nobody else is doing it or because it just has to get done. Rather than I do this, because I'm so in love with the Lord. And I want to give him everything I have. So if we look at Revelation, we've touched on this passage before. When Jesus speaking through the apostle John confronts really the church of Ephesus on where they're at, and how they have fallen, how they've slid, how they've declined, he says this, I hold this against you, you have forsaken your first love, which was the love that they had for Christ himself at the very beginning. And they were amazed at this gospel of grace. And they, they were consumed by it, and they loved him, and they, they adored him. We read in Ephesians 1:15. When Paul was writing about them, he says that they've been commended for their faith and their love. So there was a time we know where there love was just full and like in full bloom and blossoming and overflowing for the Lord for other people. So much that Paul was commending them, he was congratulating them in a sense and saying, you know, boy, this is an example of what a church should be. And yet some years later, maybe 30 years or so later, depending on our timeline of how we date some of the books of the New Testament, but let's say ballpark about 30 years later. Jesus says, You have forsaken your first love. So something happened in that gap where they went from being commended for their love to being chided or chastised by Jesus, because they had lost that love. Their love had not remained, they had lost it and And now they were a church that was simply going through the motions. And again, as we think in terms of revitalization, this is everything. This is everything, that if your ministry, or your church, the people you work with, they don't have an ever increasing love for the Lord. Let me tell you, you're not going to get anywhere, you can throw every program, you can read every book, you can get every coach, you can do every assessment, you can do anything you want. It's your it's not going to happen. And certainly, I found out for myself, and it wasn't that the people in my church, like hated Jesus, or they didn't care. It was just that. Over time, I think they had just kind of like the love had grown cold, and almost like they had taken Jesus in the Gospel for granted. And we had to go back to a place where we have to, once again fall in love and be like, Hey, do you know who Jesus is? I mean, do we really appreciate what he has done and, and what he's done for our past and how he's present in our, in our lives today, and what he's going to do in our future, and, and it was revealing to recast this whole idea of who Christ was, and fall in love, once again, and in a deeper way than we've ever had before. Now, here's why. We have to really focus on this first more than anything else. In the love of God. It really is the headwaters for everything in the Christian life. Now, we talked about headwaters. Think of like, you know, where a big river begins. That's the headwaters, whether it's like at the top of a mountain or a spring, it's, it's the very beginning point of a river, you know, it might start as a little creek or stream, but it'll grow and get bigger and bigger and bigger. And the love of God is really the starting point for everything in the Christian life. So let's talk about the other things that we'll often think about when we're trying to deal with revitalization, like missions or evangelism, prayer, Bible study, life, giving small groups. Those are all wonderful things in the church should be engaged in doing all those kinds of things. But those all come after the love of God is established in our hearts. They're all downstream. That's why I said, if you don't have the love of God, what's the fuel for evangelism? Where's the passion in worship? Where's the desire for Bible study? Where's the commitment to pray? It could because if I don't have the love of the Lord to start with, and that's what drives everything, all those other things are just going to be duty and there are going to be draining, and they're going to be tiresome, and I'm not going to want to do it. And you can see what happens there. We're going to be a very uninspired group of people, and we're going to be very ineffective. Now, the love of God, recapturing that is really the starting point. For revitalization. That's really the where we want to get things going. But I think it's important to note that it's not just our starting motivation. It's also the end goal. It's not like we, we want to get everybody to love Jesus, and then we're gonna go on to all these other things. No, we want we want people to love the Lord in a new, you know, deeper way and you know, recapture that first love. But that's also our end. I mean, we don't like graduate from that we just want to sink deeper and, and deeper into this love relationship that we have with our Savior. So it's also like our it's our starting point. And it's also our end point. And that's a really, I think, important thing. Because again, apart from love, have been truly a love for Christ. And it's just a deep passion for him. Anything we do with revitalization, it's going to amount to no more than another program, that there's little impact on the vitality of your church. Again, love of God has to come first. And even revitalization is downstream from that. So we need to recapture and reclaim that first love. And again, I think that's just, you know, preaching and teaching and studying and not taking for granted. You know, really understanding who Jesus is and what he's done and all the glorious pieces of the gospel. So to help us understand what, what, what a church would look like that has this love, and what a church that might have lost it. I'm going to do just a quick study with you a little comparison, and we're going to use a passage from Luke 10. And I'm going to be in verses 38-42. It's a familiar story of two sisters. So here's what our scripture says. As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet, listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, Lord, don't you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me. Martha, Martha, The Lord answered, You are worried and upset about many things. But only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her. If you notice, in that reading, what is the one word that Jesus uses to describe Martha? distracted, right, Jesus comes to visit these two sisters, and to stay at their house and to have enjoy their hospitality. And Martha is there. But Jesus says that she is distracted, her her attention was misdirected from the place it should have done. It was supposed to be directed on Jesus. But there were other things, there were other concerns that were making her look away from Christ. And it was making her muddle her thoughts, she was, again distracted from Jesus. Now imagine this Jesus is in her house. Now she might not understand the fullness of who Jesus was. But she certainly knew that he was, in many ways God's chosen. And this rabbi in great powers. Remember, it was her brother Lazarus, that Jesus raised from the dead. And so they understand Him to be Lord in some capacity. So Jesus is in her house, like in her living room. And I mean, what is like 15 feet away, 20 feet away from her. And she is more concerned about the casserole in the oven, than the presence of Jesus in her midst, you know, isn't it funny, Jesus is the bread of life. And Martha is worried about the dinner rolls. The Greek word here that is used for distraction means dragged in many directions at once. And it was almost a sense of like, if you have these horses, with ropes on them, and you just they, they were kind of running and pulling, and there's a person they'd be in the middle kind of getting stretched out, or whatever it is like that's the idea here is that Mary, her mind was just in so many different places. Maybe is the house clean enough? And what time are we going to eat? And why isn't Mary helping me? And is the food ready? And you know, who's going to set the table and all these kinds of things. Now, certainly, Scripture says, it shows that Martha believed in Jesus. Of course, she as much as she could, she believes in Jesus. She had great affection towards Jesus, she wanted to take care of Jesus, she welcomed him into her home. We understand that this was not the only visit but this was a place that Jesus would come to rest and he enjoyed her and seems that Martha enjoyed him as well. She had a genuine desire to serve Jesus, to honor Him and to feed him and meet his basic needs. And here's here's the thing we have to pay attention to. She had replaced activities in the kitchen with instead of, I should say, a desire to be with him, just a love of being in his presence. She had lost that. And I think, man, doesn't this sound like so many churches, we are doing everything under the sun, except loving Jesus, we are distracted, we're going in a million directions. We've got this kid's clubs, we've got the this music and the choir and the ladies' group and the men's Bible study. And we help out over at the soup kitchen. And we've got a program here, we got to visit the widows where we've got all these things going on, pulled in a million directions. And Jesus is right there in our midst. And he is not getting our attention, kind of like I think Martha almost like just just taking for granted that he is there without saying Boy, that's who received me where my attention needs to be. Now, we're not saying that what she was doing was bad. And just like all these other things we do, they're not bad, but they're lesser. So let's compare Martha to her sister, Mary. Now Mary, of course, as Martha complains, she was not in the kitchen. But she was in the other room, she was at the feet of Jesus listening to him just kind of soaking it up, just loving his presence and just adoring him, just you can we can just imagine her just really being captivated by who Jesus was. And there was nothing that was gonna keep her in the way of being right at his feet and enjoying him. Now, I think the thing is, it's so easy for us to make this an either or, either you're in the kitchen serving, or you're with Jesus, like loving and adoring him. So somebody has to be in the kitchen, or Nothing's gonna get done sort of that. But but if we read Martha's statement, in verse 40, it says, Don't you care that my sister has left me to do the work? You see, when when Jesus and the disciples arrived, work needed to be done, to welcome the guests. And Mary was in the kitchen helping out, Martha. But after a time, she untied her apron. I mean, she moved into the other room, where Jesus was, she was not going to miss out on an opportunity. Perhaps Jesus was a teaching on something, or perhaps, you know, there was a conversation and she just could not resist being a part of it. So notice, she was in the kitchen too. But there became a time when she said, being with Jesus is really the much better thing right now. And so like her sister, she, she believed in Jesus as much as she could, she loved Jesus. But unlike her sister, she expressed a desire for intimacy, a desire to be close to Jesus, I mean, close enough where you could, you know, smell him or have his, you know, Robe rub up against your arm and to, you know, see the glisten in his eyes, or, or those kinds of things or close enough where he could reach and you could feel the touch of his hand upon you. I think the thing I appreciate about Mary so much is that she wanted to be with Jesus, and there was no substitute for it. There was nothing that was going to take the place of that. And Jesus then reminds Martha when, you know, Martha storms out, and she's all in a huff, and she's, you know, kind of yelling and pointing fingers and even kind of blaming Jesus like Jesus, you know, I'm doing all this work, right? So she's blaming her sister, she's kind of indirectly blaming Jesus, you know, all the disciples are there. What an awkward moment in that house, right? I mean, everybody's kind of like who you know it's gonna get in. And, and what does Jesus say he he reminds Martha in that moment that only one thing is necessary. Now, if you study this passage, it's interesting. Jesus does not say what that one thing is. He doesn't say he only one thing's necessary and this is but he does say Mary, is a really good good illustration of it, he says one thing is necessary. And if you look at Mary, you'll understand what that thing is. And I think this is just for us, it's a really strong indication of, you know, setting time and, you know, making priority of being with Jesus. That's really where he's getting at with us. You know, as Jesus, Jesus often does, he will kind of let us connect the dots and kind of, you know, make that last discovery for ourselves. And so what do we see here, the story that a Martha has filled up on a since this is a dinner setting, let's say, Martha is filled up on a buffet of all these different things. And there's really, almost no room left on her plate for Jesus. Mary only has Jesus on hers, she's kind of just loaded up on Jesus. And so I think when we think about the story of between Mary and Martha, kind of, we think about it in terms of churches we can think of this question is, is is your church? Is your ministry? Are you better described as a as a Martha church or a Mary Church? Are you a church that is preoccupied with getting stuff done? Or, you know, the programs and the activities kind of drives everything? Or is it a church where the first priority is simply loving Christ and a desire to be with him a desire to experience His presence. A study was done by George Barna not that long ago. And in it, it was it surveyed people who attend church three or more times a month. So basically, people were very actively involved in their church. And you know that 50% of those people said, they have not had an experience of the Lord in a physical, kind of like they had a sense of God's presence was around them in over a year. Half of Christians say that they have no experience. These are Marthas and they go to Martha churches, I don't know how else to say it, that if we're just so active, and we're so busy, and we're doing all these things, but there's no sense of like Jesus is even near us or around us, we are distracted to the point that our backs are really turned to the presence of the Lord. So I'm concerned that so many of us in an effort to revitalize to get things going back on track, our temptation, right out of the gate is going to be to do more. But activity is no substitute for devotion, for the love of God. And like I said earlier on, unless you have that no matter what else you do, if you're never going to experience the renewal and the health that you're seeking. So the story that Luke tells in chapter 10, it's interesting the way it ends, because the story is less suspended. We just know what Jesus challenges Martha with. We don't know what happened next week. We don't know if Martha went back to the kitchen she just stormed off. Or if she just kind of said, Boy, Jesus, Are you right? And she took off her apron, and she found a seat next to Mary. I think perhaps, there's a reason because that story is left open ended, because that's the choice that we all have to make in our own personal lives and with as churches, you know, as collect, when we come collectively together? Are we going to untie our aprons and just say, you know, what, before anything else, I just want to be with you Lord? Or are we going to just storm back off and try to work harder and make even a bigger, better dinner? All the while forsaking the very presence of Christ in our midst? So that's the invitation. And certainly that is the challenge for so many churches in ministry to return first and foremost, to the love of God. And I'll just close with these wonderful words from Psalm 27 That just beautifully capture this heart. And it says, The words of David, one thing I asked of the Lord, one thing, this is what I seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and seek Him in His temple. Boy, I tell you, David and Mary did they share a heart for the Lord? This one thing I want just to be with you to look at you to adore you to just sit in your presence and be near you. So let me pray for you. Father in heaven, thank you for the gift of your Son Jesus Christ, through whom we are able to come straight to you. Lord, I pray that you would even as we're listening to this lecture, Lord, You are stirring something in all of our hearts. Renewing our love and Lord bringing a word of conviction too that perhaps Lord, we have substituted activity for the more important thing of loving you. Lord, we know that it is the greatest commandment and there is no substitute for it. So Lord would you set the heart of your church on fire? And let us reclaim that first love that first brought us to you? I pray this Lord for all my dear brothers and sisters listening. In Your name, amen.

Last modified: Tuesday, April 2, 2024, 7:36 AM