“When churches lose their influence, when the Christian message ceases to arrest the indifferent and the unbelieving, when moral decline is obvious in places which once owned biblical standards – when such symptoms as these are evident, then the first need is not to regroup such professing Christianity as remains. It is rather to ask whether the spiritual decline is not due to a fundamental failure to understand and practise what Christianity really is.”
Iain H. Murray, Evangelicalism Divided (Edinburgh, 2000), page 151.
My restatement of Murray’s point: If what we today call Christianity is not compelling people’s loyalty, then there is no point in hosting big events down at the Ryman Auditorium to promote it further. If our Christianity is not apostolic in power, we ourselves have no right to accept it. As long as the book of Acts remains in our authoritative Bible, we must and may find our way into that story. Let’s face honestly the distance between biblical Christianity and our own mediocrity and seek God for mercy. He will honor that humility.
