In previous articles such as this one, I have been exploring the seemingly near fatal disease of materialism in the church — not just the materialism of individual church members, but materialism inherent in the outreach and programming of churches themselves. In challenging modern attitudes about church growth, I have gone further than to merely focus on mortar and brick and the Sunday morning variety show masquerading as worship. More to the heart of the problem, I have suggested that “Christian hedonism†is the result of our failure to develop believers trained and discipled in the Word. The epidemic affliction of the believer’s ability to be spiritual is real, progressively worsening, and spoils the lives of many believers.
The result is seen in the church. Many believers are constantly on the hunt for the next spiritual high, like an addict searching for a fix. Many believers are so spiritually depressed, they despair of ever feeling anything in worship, in Bible study, or in fellowship with other believers. The search for something to feel leads to the mentality of accepting anything that brings about a feeling, no matter how transitory. That forces churches into a constant state of hyper-marketing and hyper-entertaining, leaving them no resources to train believers, disciple believers or raise up leaders. Many believers have given up trying to feel something spiritual and just go through the motions. And, of course, many eventually abandon going through the motions.
The result is that there is very little that is miraculous about the life of the Christian. Christians in this state are forced to explain the lack of the miraculous as a reflection of God’s will, even though if pressed, the Christian has no idea what God’s will is, whether regarding the personal or the body corporate. Large churches hide this by creating events, spectacles and happenings, one after another, to entertain. The believers become paying audiences, and are essentially treated and measured as such by church leadership.
Having diagnosed the affliction of spiritual hedonism in the modern American church, I now propose the cure. It is a cure that is as old as the prophets and as certain as God’s Word. Churches must redesign themselves, elevating the importance of the Word and prayer by adding ministry staff whose sole purposes are to promote training in those two essential components of healthy spiritual life.
I have already discussed the importance of training Christians in the Word. “Graduation from Sunday School†is not whimsy; it is necessary. In addition, the church must train its members in the other ingredient of true spirituality: prayer. And in order to accomplish this increased emphasis on training Christians in the Word and in prayer, churches should add to their staff ministers called and trained in those areas.
In an earlier, simpler time, the senior pastor was perhaps viewed as the church’s specialist in the Word and in prayer, but those days are gone. The pastor of the modern American church is saddled with a full work load of duties that result from the church’s materialistic, hedonistic bent. The successful senior pastor must excel in entrepreneurship, management and marketing. When was the last time that a senior minister’s mastery of the Scriptures or the quality of his prayer were considered to any significant degree in his selection? No, what we want to know is how much attendance growth he was able to affect at his last church, and can he accomplish the same management and marketing miracles at our church.
Let us assume for a moment that the focus on goliath church “campuses” and professional-quality variety shows to fill them does not go away in the short term. In that case, churches should at least add ministers to their staffs to provide the needed focus on Bible education and prayer. Don’t the large churches rationalize their fixation on the material and hedonistic by saying that that is how they draw a crowd, in order to expose the ones they draw to spiritual things? If so, then where are the ministers of the Word and the ministers of prayer to provide that spiritual training to those thus drawn?
The modern church is certainly familiar with ministry specialization. Every church has or wishes to have ministers who specialize in the needs of children and of teenagers. Because church members demand that worship services be entertaining, churches hire professional worship leaders possessing advanced musical skills. Bus fleets, church properties, and even church businesses (e.g., day care programs), have forced the creation of other positions. Some churches have even added television directors, audio engineers, light show masters, drama coaches, webmasters, and many other service providers as paid positions. But few churches have added the kind of ministers who could address the most desperate spiritual needs of the modern American church.
Churches should consider replacing their volunteer Sunday School superintendents with Bible college-trained professionals who can develop consistent programs for the education of believers. Because the biblical education of believers is so low on the church’s priority list while other more materialistic and hedonistic concerns merit professional attention, no one ever graduates from Sunday School in the church.
In addition, churches should add to their staff a Minister of Prayer. Prayer is an utter afterthought in most churches. However, training in prayer should be the second major event in the Christian’s maturation after graduating from Sunday School. With training in the Word sufficient to know the mind of Christ (Philippians 2:1-11) and to know how to live (2 Timothy 3:16-17), the Christian is ready to learn how to talk to God, petition God, and reason with God.
Priority must be given to prayer and prayer management or there will be no prayer miracles. Asking the minister responsible for administration of the Word to administer prayer is like asking the neurologist to be the cardiologist, too. While in very small communities the police officer is also the firefighter, in most towns and communities the functions are so different that they are split. Likewise, if we need a minister to youth because the senior minister either lacks the skills or lacks the time to do that job, and if the senior minister cannot do the job of leading the music ministry, then it stands to reason that something as powerful and complex as prayer should be administered by a minister committed to that task.
Successful prayer requires wholeheartedness. Jeremiah 29:13. Prayer is planned. Psalm 5:2; Matthew 6:9-13. Prayer is not thoughtless, and can address more than we can even imagine. Ephesians 3:20. If a church were to take a wholehearted, planned, well-thought-out approach to prayer, it would find itself considering adding a Minister of Prayer.
Too many churches and too many ministers do not believe these words:
I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.
John 14:12-14 (New International Version).
Most ministers do not believe that Jesus will do “whatever you ask.†The word “whatever†is ad infinitum, bearing of no exception, all inclusive, and universal. Most ministers will not teach this text as written because they have spent so little time studying prayer that they are certain that somewhere there must be a context that somehow limits these intemperate words of Jesus. The Minister of Prayer would probably think otherwise, and would teach this and the other dozens of texts on prayer.
The Minister of Prayer would coordinate men’s prayer meetings, women’s prayer meetings, prayer chains, prayer crisis management, and intervention by prayer. The Minister of Prayer would maintain a congregational prayer notebook, prayer journal and prayer requests. Maybe it would be a church bulletin item, and maybe it would be something only seen and addressed at the prayer meetings, but the Minister of Prayer would supply the church with tools by which a congregation could identify its petitions, evaluate its petitions and thank the Author of all blessings.
The prayer experiences of many modern churches are shallow and fleshly. Churches spend most of their prayer time and energy praying for bodies to be healed or preserved from death. Prayer seems to have the primary purpose of expressing the church members’ fears of death, and prayer lists are little more than a convenient way to notify the congregation of who is sick or dying. In such churches, genuine effective prayer is an untapped resource.
Prayer is more powerful than armies and weapons. It is more powerful than politics and economies. And, though many large churches would be skeptical of this claim, prayer is more powerful than money and entertainment. Prayer is more powerful even than faith, because so often God goes far beyond what we are able to imagine. Why does that not happen more often in the modern church? Because we do not ask. Why do we not ask? Because we have not been educated and trained in prayer. Why have we not been thus trained? Because no one in the church has the job to see it done and keep it going. Prayer is an afterthought and left in the heap of spiritual ideas about which most Christians are only vaguely aware, especially those Christians who never graduated from Sunday School to become believers trained to administer the Word in their own lives.
Will an increased emphasis on biblical education and prayer bring a nice bump to the nose count of the Sunday morning service? Not necessarily. Will it enhance the spiritual lives of the church members, drawing them closer to God and bringing them into greater conformity to His will? That much is guaranteed. Surely none would deny that the level of spirituality of the modern church member is at an all-time low. But the modern church is not addressing the problem; rather, it is contributing to it. It is time for a change, and the change must begin with the church.
