Every month at MBU religion students have their “Ministerial Alliance” meeting. These are some of the notes from today:

Lecture on Evangelism by Curtis McClain

1850-1925 we find a church who is moving away from their dependence on God and focusing on the “lost.”

1960 we see a methodology that is much “church oriented.” The question becomes, “How do I get people in the church?” Replacing a good Christian life and it’s representative and putting a 8 page fold of paper in it’s place.

1950 – Neo-Evangelicals said “lets do things that draw enough people so that the mainline denominations will want to be around them, and then they can maybe draw them back to the gospel.” But in order to get the masses, the Gospel was reduced. The Neo-evangelical moved so far toward the other denominations that they became ineffective.

1960s people had a “come and see” mentality. Everything has become about bring people in the church and creating our services for non-Christians to come in and hear the Gospel. “Church growth” is associated with “spiritual growth.” People see the Gospel as sales.

Where did the emergent church come into this?

• The church growth movement is “modernism.” The church growth movement (emergent church or modernism) has a couple problems–it asks, “what is it that the world wants?” The emergent church saw that the church wasn’t reaching it’s culture, “so they changed the drug from heroin to crack.”
• The purpose isn’t to pick on the emergent church, it’s more of a problem with the North American church. “We’re trying to just put on a better show for people to ‘come and see.’”

Institutional Church : North American Style : a breakdown of the types of Christians in the church:

• Mature Christians
• Youth Christians
• Immature Christians (Baby Christians)
• Unregenerate Christians (Dead Christians)

Average everyday north American institutional church
Out of 250 there would be:

• 1 mature Christian (may or may not be the pastor)
• 200 dead people
• 14 baby Christians
• He gave some other numbers I didn’t get (that’s why it doesn’t add up to 250)

“The reason the North American Church has the most non-growing church in the world because God doesn’t want more churches like the ones that we already have.”
“If we keep trying to do things the same way, we’ll continue to have the same problems.”
“By making everything ‘come and see’ we are cheating the Gospel. We need a Gospel that changes lives. The Gospel says ‘go tell.’”
“If the church doesn’t have any mature Christians, how is it possible to disciple mature Christians?”
“People need to be baptized on the outside and the inside (by the Holy Spirit).”

We need to allow the Gospel to change us. Evangelism is something that springs out of the heart of a true lover of Christ. Our hearts need to be burdened when people don’t know Him and are destined for damnation, and our hearts need to be filled with unspeakable joy when people come to know Him.

• “Is it possible that the joy of the Lord is our salvation?”
• “You need to have a the life changing Gospel in order to share a Gospel that is life changing.”
• “Measuring baptisms and attendances is not the measure of the Bible.
• Jeremiah preached for 40 years, and for 35 years he preached the same sermon. No converts. It produced, “nothing” but two books of the Bible.