Orthodoxy is Not Enough

Dead orthodoxy is still dead. It is not worth having. I am serious. A church that takes all the right positions, sings all the right songs, dresses just the right way, but has no true spiritual life might as well be liberal in its theology. In fact, it might be worse. If you want to inoculate your young people against the truth, take all the right positions, but have no sense of the power and working of God in the congregation. Do not pray as a congregation. Do not see answers to prayer on a daily basis. Have no overwhelming love for the lost. See no transformed lives. Do not have a vibrant personal walk with Christ. I guarantee your young people will run away from that as fast as they possibly can.

Paul warned Timothy that the one of the characteristics of professing Christendom in the last days is that there will be those who have a form of reverence, but deny the power of it (2 Timothy 3:5). I wonder if we have really taken the time to consider whether he is writing about us and about our churches. I am talking about good old fundamental Baptist Churches. We have to remember that we can look good and think we are doing well, but be completely deceived. The church at Laodicea saw itself as rich and increased with goods, having need of nothing, but was in reality poor and miserable and blind and naked.

Here are some sure-fire indicators of dead orthodoxy.

• Very little spiritual conversation in every day relationships.

There is talk about spiritual things in the pulpit and Sunday School classes, but that is about it. No one prays in the lobby after church. People do not talk about what they are learning or how they are growing at home. In a spiritually healthy church, spiritual conversations sprout everywhere.

• Lack of corporate and communal prayer.

There are public prayers in worship, but the prayer meeting isn’t about prayer any more. People do not gather to pray. They feel awkward praying. People could not name any recent answers to prayer. They even get to the point where they don’t have prayer requests anymore.

“Can I pray for you?”

“No, I’m good!” comes the careless answer. If you have no prayer requests, no urgent issues to take before the throne of grace, something is deeply spiritually wrong.

• Emphasis on entertainment.

I am not saying all entertainment is evil, but one of the distractions of this age is entertainment. A sign of dead orthodoxy is a church membership that is more interested in ball games, hobbies, home decorating, what the neighbors are doing, pets, movies, fishing, hunting, motorcycles, internet blogs, and other types of entertainment than in seeing the work of God done in the hearts of men. If you are not sure whether things are out of balance, just consider the time and money devoted to each. Your heart is where your treasure (and time) is.

• Having enough money to do everything you want to do.

Churches that are on fire for God are on their knees asking God for His provision. Usually—though I suppose not in every case—God forces us to come before Him on our knees to ask for Him to provide. That’s why we have so many passages in the New Testament commanding us to ask for our needs to be met. If we think we have no needs, it is much more likely that we are simply unaware of our desperate circumstances than that we actually have no needs (Laodicean church again). It’s not very expensive for a congregation to just sit around and do nothing.

• People are not being converted.

Lives are not being transformed. William Carey went years before he saw his first convert, but it burdened him greatly. If we can contently go week to week and month to month without seeing people profess faith in Christ or seeing lives transformed by the Holy Spirit, something is wrong with us. We often then start to make excuses. People are not as open to the gospel as they once were, we are too busy with church business etc. Eventually we start to make theological or spiritual excuses and blame our disobedience on God. No matter what your particular theological persuasion, it is never a good idea to blame disobedience on God.

• Lack of inter-generational discipleship.

In dying churches, the young people all stay to themselves, and so do the adults. A healthy church does not leave the work of youth ministry to a youth pastor or director. In a healthy church, godly adults constantly show spiritual interest in the lives of all of the young people in the church. They love them, pay attention to them, encourage them and pray for them.

• Very little use of spiritual gifts by the church members.

It takes a church to make disciples. Ephesians 4 is clear on this–every member exercising the gifts that Christ has divided among His people by means of His Spirit. If the pastor is doing all the ministering, the church is dead or headed that way. Sometimes this is the pastor’s fault. Instead of leading people and teaching people how to serve, he just does it himself. Sometimes this is the congregation’s fault. Instead of hiring a true shepherd, they have hired a servant to be their mercenary. This is a surefire path to dead orthodoxy.

God is not dead. He has not become powerless. He is actively working around the world today. People are coming to know Christ by the thousands in countries where converting to Christianity carries a death sentence. People are making huge sacrifices to carry Christ into some of the most unlikely places, and they are doing it without American evangelicals or fundamentalists to help them. It is an insult to God to say He can work there but not here.

Maybe it’s time to repent.