My friend, do not read this title and lament. There are most certainly real successes in the church, Praise God! There are souls that are saved, relationships healed, forgiveness granted, faith evident, God's glory exalted. God is at work among His people to accomplish the great redemption of lost sheep. No one should walk away from what follows with sour discouragement. We can thank God as long as we have breath for the ways in which the Gospel is faithfully preached and souls effected by the Holy Spirit all over the world.
Yet we must also beware what often passes for "success" in local churches. The most common form of this is obvious- the number of people that were "saved." I remember going to an evangelism conference for youth where some form of invitation was given, and every single person who stood up for it was pronounced (prior to any counsel at all) "saved." Really? How would you know? How could you be so sure, when Matthew 7:21-23 gives the sternest of warnings against those that will claim to know the Lord, yet are eternally lost?
Perhaps this is most telling by common results after many revivals. People who 2 days or 2 weeks ago claimed to have been saved by God want nothing to do with the church. This is often not just a person here, a person there- in some cases, it has been reported to be an overwhelming majority of "saved" persons. How could a person truly be saved if they do not love the family of God? John wrote half a book of the Bible devoted to that one subject!
I am afraid this mentality exists in America today that every single person who ever takes one step forward in a sanctuary during an invitation or raises even one hair on the finger is, without a doubt, saved and secure for eternity.
As one person put it, we have turned the church into a birthing station (or perhaps, a pre-mature birthing station) and forgotten it is to be the lifelong mission and ministry center of all who claim to have received the new birth.
Even pastors who appear to have the most "success" in terms of #'s of baptisms and so forth are in many cases seeing steep drops in the attendance of their worship services- despite pulling out all the stops to have all the laser lights, instrumentation, and cutting edge music.
The bottom line: people we affirm as Christians are hardly being led, encouraged, or taught the disciplines of living a Christian life. And even worse, we are quick to affirm them as Christians even before we have talked to them to ensure they know and understand the Gospel themselves.
Most invitations today are void of talk of sin, hell, death, rebellion, or the cross. It is more of an invitation to try to live God's way or just feeling guilt over your life- it is a salvation of works.
The bottom line is this: you can know that you are saved, if you know how you have been saved. True salvation comes by grace alone, not religious gestures or magic prayer words. How can you know if you've been saved? Your heart has been changed and you are different! And that is a success I hope we will see more and more of as the Word is preached, and as God moves in our land. The greatest threat to the church is not secularism. It is a quite careless, selfish shadow of Biblical Christianity.
I am not God (you knew that!). I do not know, in the end, who is truly saved and who isn't. But I do know what God's grace is like in another person's heart, for I have experienced it myself. When such grace is absent, I can't help but strongly doubt (actually fear is the better word) that it was never there to begin with.
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I'm am so glad God has placed within our church a pastor who preaches, teaches, and encourages us weekly to take our church membership seriously. But even more so his desire is to preach and teach the gospel so that the youngest to the oldest understands it's more than saying a prayer that saves us.
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