There
must be more than this
Roy
Godwin - Ffald-y-Brenin
Do
you feel discouraged by the current state of your local church and denomination?
Do you feel as though you are somehow hanging in there with too few signs
of life?
Are
you generally dissatisfied with your personal spiritual life?
Are you living a life that satisfies today or are you simply holding on
for a better tomorrow?
If
your answer is “yes” to some, or all, of the above, then take heart! You
might be picking up the stirrings and yearnings of God himself.
Let
me explain. I
committed my life to God when I was a child, and over the following ye
ars began
to realise the immensity of that commitment.
When I was 21 my local church sent me to train for ministry, and there I
encountered charismatic renewal for the first time (referred to then as
neo-Pentecostalism). It
was glorious! I found that the Bible came alive and my fruitfulness as a
Christian multiplied a hundredfold.
Gifts flowed freely and I saw a wonderful harvest of souls.
Over the following years I worked with the Anglican and Free Churches and
within the New Church movement.
Life was exciting. Then the pace slowed and the cutting edge seemed
dulled and it wasn’t very satisfying any more.
Then,
like many, I was powerfully impacted in 1994 by the so-called Toronto Blessing
(it wasn’t Toronto’s, it was God’s) and life got exciting once more.
The supernatural had broken out all over again.
But it did not herald the revival many had hoped for; rather, it was a
gracious wave of blessing for a limited period of time.
Many lives were profoundly and lastingly affected, but the wave passed.
So
post-Toronto and the golden age of 20th Century renewal, what is happening
today? Not much?
From
inside the Church, a cry of holy dissatisfaction is arising from many Christians
– “there must be more than this!”
Many people, perhaps including you, are dissatisfied with the church as
they see it and with their personal spiritual lives.
At the same time people outside the church are looking at it and also
saying “there must be more than this”, and are seeking to find spiritual
answers to life’s major questions anywhere except from Christianity.
What’s going on here?
I
want to suggest that in all this, what is going on is – God!
I believe that he is totally fed up with what we have turned church into,
and desires to recapture it, to win the church back to himself.
Secondly, he is fed up with the paucity, the emptiness, of our spiritual
lives. To help
move his agenda of redemption forward he is sharing his heart-throb with us, and
the frustration we feel is simply a reflection of the frustration he
feels.
Thirdly,
there is the imperative for speedy action, for what will happen to those who are
seeking spiritual truth apart from Christianity?
So
how might we respond to all this?
A
bad response might be to agitate for the church to change, pouring effort and
energy into tackling what we perceive to be wrong, and upsetting and hurting
many people in the process.
The
best response might be to seek to become a changed person by focussing on Jesus
instead of on the church’s shortcomings, burrowing into his heart, listening
to his quiet, healing voice, and learning to fall in love with him all over
again. Our
personal change then automatically changes the church. How about repenting of
our personal attitudes towards the church, praying for it and blessing it, and
calling upon the Lord of the Church to have mercy and release his
agenda upon it in place of our own.
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