Preface

The Christian Church is in a time of transition, evolving, transformation, re-evaluation, and some say even dying. Some churches have indeed died, and their buildings have now been transformed into restaurants, museums, art galleries, motels, schools, parking lots, or just torn down. I have served as an interim pastor in several churches that could seat five hundred or more in their sanctuary and that now struggle to have fifty persons present for worship in the same building. What is the cause of this decline in church attendance today? Countless reasons are given. For some, it may be a part of their general distrust of all institutions like the government, the news media, etc. Many persons are just not interested in going to worship on Sunday. They had rather use the time to relax, participate in recreation, visit family or friends, shop, sleep late, travel, watch television, go to the mountains or beach, or dozens of other reasons could fill the page. The “nones” and many of the millennials seem little concerned about institutional religion. They may claim to be spiritual but not religious, certainly in the sense of attending a church service on Sunday morning. In a 2018 survey, the number of “nones,” those who don’t affiliate with any specific faith tradition, now are tied with Catholics and evangelicals in the largest religious groupings in our country.1 Some have vacated the church pews because of what they call the “two-faced” version of the Christian faith among many church goers and the moral contradictions in their everyday living. Another reason for others is the attitude some say that the church has toward the LGBT persons, the role of women in the church and society, and the sexual immorality of many of the religious leaders, priests and ministers, in the church today. Referring to the early Church’s anointing at Pentecost, Barrie Shepherd raises the question of what has happened to that “bright descending light” in this question:

      But that bright descending fire

      that melted hearts to kindness sent them

      out across all gulfs to spend themselves for

      others’ sakes, what put it out? Or why has it

      flamed fainter, ever fainter with the years?

      Is there a sacred oil can yet rekindle such a spark?

      Or are we doomed to batter one another with

the truth through the encroaching dark? 2

      This book is one minister’s efforts to challenge the institutional church to finds ways to ignite that Pentecostal flame again, to discover how the Church can be “re-born” again, to reach out to the non-churched today, also