Mark Batterson is a colorful and imaginative writer and pastor of National Community Church in Washington, D.C. Batterson is the author of The Circle Maker, a bestselling book that promotes the practice of praying in circles that has become widely accepted in American evangelical churches. People are taught to draw circles around the things they […]
The Church Growth philosophy initiated by Norman Vincent Peale, developed by Robert Schuller, and massively marketed through the organizations of Rick Warren and Bill Hybels now dominates the evangelical scene in North America and many other parts of the world. The movement’s philosophies, methods, and techniques are pervasive, unchallenged, and saturate the evangelical narrative being […]
I have loved and been a part of the Assemblies of God for seven decades. In recent years I have watched as the Assemblies have followed the downward path chosen by numerous other evangelical denominations, fellowships, and churches. This is the path of accommodation and tolerance of sin and worldliness in their midst. It is […]
The theme of this three part series is that reverence for God and the things that represent His person and presence are dead or near death in many American churches and the lives of Christians who profess to be a part of the body of Christ. The church is being called to recognize and take […]
The theme of this three part series is that reverence for God and the things that represent His person and presence are dead or near death in many American churches and the lives of Christians who profess to be a part of the body of Christ. The church is called to recognize and take actions […]
Reverence for God and the things that represent His person and presence are dead or near death in many American churches and lives of those who profess to belong to the body of Christ. In some instances reverence and respect may be used interchangeably, but they are not identical. While respect is a special regard, […]
The third and final prescription for the church is to seek a broad spiritual awakening across the body of Christ as well as revival of individual Christians and the local church. The pattern of sin and falling away from God followed by repentance, revival, and restoration of His people is a recurrent theme in the […]
In Part IV, we saw that resistance thinking is an essential prescription for what ails the evangelical church in American and Western civilization and is a characteristic of God’s prophetically untimely people who have the courage to give voice to a message that stands against the church’s cultural captivity by the humanistic spirit of the […]
The American church is dying and parts of it are already dead. If one needs proof of its condition, a re-reading of Part II will reveal the severity of its illness. This is not to say that Christianity is dying for Jesus said, “And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon […]
One eminent European scholar at Oxford University asked the question, “By the end of the 1970s who will be the worldliest Christians in America?” Following the silence of his stunned audience, he answered, “It will be the evangelicals and fundamentalists.” At the time this assessment was made, it seemed almost irrational because evangelicals and fundamentalists […]