Wake Up, American Church! Before It's Too Late!

"Visitors to British cities can see this pattern at work, with Moslem minarets replacing Christian steeples. For some time, it has become apparent that "practicing" Muslims will outnumber "practicing" Christians within the current century. Newsweek now reports that it might be within just a few decades." This is from an article at almohler.com.

In Britain, churches are being turned into bars, restaurants, apartment buildings and Mosques.

Only a few years behind Europe's decadent spiritual decline, the US can expect the same. What started the spiritual decline in Europe? After World War II the decline was seen on the streets. However, the seeds were sown in the seminaries and universities by liberal theologians who diminished the authority of Scripture beginning in the 1800's. Barth, Schleiermacher, Bultmann, and so forth. Barth said that one had to add one's own mystical experience to the Bible in a mix. That mix, not the Bible, was the Word of God to you. Others simply said we had to adapt the gospel to current thinking.

Sound familiar? Earlier this century, Harry Emerson Fosdick stormed Princeton and New York City with his message that the miraculous elements of the Bible had to be discarded to accommodate the thinking of modernity that came to us from the Enlightenment. So, out goes the virgin birth, the inerrancy of Scripture, the bodily atonement, the deity of Christ, the bodily resurrection, and the literal bodily return of Christ. Fosdick took his cue from the European liberals. He thought we ought to adapt the gospel to modernity.

In the last few years of the last century, the Emergent was born and it, too, is an attack on the authority of Scripture. It is currently overtaking the Evangelical church in a blitz. It denies the authority of Scripture by denouncing its inerrancy and by beginning with a doctrine that states there is little or no doctrine. Like the classical liberal American religionists, and the European liberals before them, they cast themselves as authentic Christians, but they are not. They undercut the authority of Scripture. They think we ought to adapt the gospel to postmodernity. See a pattern here?

Right now in our "Christian" seminaries and colleges, liberals and Emergents are teaching the next generation of pastors. There's that pattern again.

So what? Here's what: If the Evangelical church in America does not repent of its lethargy and get back to scriptural orthodoxy, it's curtains for America. And by "repent," I mean a real individual and institutional repentance. The plumber going to a church in Peoria must put away the booze, the swearing, and the flirting with the secretary at the dispatch office. And the seminary president must put away the professor that is not orthodox. Both individual and institutional repentance is required. Denominations need to clean out their hierarchies and their colleges and seminaries. Make them biblical again or close them down. Sell the buildings and lands to fund missionaries to go into our suburban churches with a message of repentance.

Already orthodox Christian churches in America are looking overseas to find biblical leadership. Anglican churches in Virginia have had to place themselves under bishops from Africa in order to find biblical leadership that will not ordain sodomites to the clergy. I remember when, as a child in Sunday School, a "missionary" was an American who went to Africa to save black people with the gospel. Now we need to pray for them to come here and save us. I mean it. God bless the ones that are coming. Pray for more. According to Paul Washer, most American Evangelicals would be excommunicated from churches in Central America for our lifestyle. Pray for them to come here and shame us into right living again. If we refuse to repent, may God kill us and raise up true Christians in our place!

Like the Laodecians, we think we're it. God is pleased with us. We have huge churches, right? We have seminaries, right? We're rich, right?

NO! We're sick. And we're going to die, like Europe. It's prayer-and-fasting time. Right now.

Once, Christianity emanated from Europe. God has judged Europe. Do you think He will not spew you out of His mouth? He will. He's proved it over and over. He doesn't need you. You need Him.

Repent. Get in the streets and preach like your life depends on it, because it does.

In Christ,
Phil Perkins.