An easy answer for an important question for the church …

Don’t you just L-O-V-E it when you’re “blessed” with an easy answer to a very important question you face in life?

Doesn’t it often seem like getting good or right answers to “big” or tough questions sometimes seems — or at least feels — difficult?

The thing about those “big” and tough questions is the heightened need to have a right answer. For the plethora of unimportant questions that have little to no impact on life, not having the best answer may not matter. But when answering a question that results in deep, long-felt impact in life, it’s critical you get it right.

Those are big questions like, “What really is important and what is trivial?” Art Good shared a story about a guy who got the answer to that big question wrong, and it ruined his life:

• Christmas night 2002, Jack Whittaker had five out of five numbers in the West Virginia Power ball drawing. Jack Whittaker had just won $314 million, the largest undivided lottery jackpot in history. He took the one lump payment and received $113 million after taxes.

Listen closely to this part. He tithed, gave 1/10th of his winnings to his church. That’s $11.3 million … to his church.

Jack was a solid church attender and respected member of his church. Over the next few months he frequented a strip club called the Pink Pony, and was picked up for a DUI.

Over the next two years Jack’s marriage would dissolve, his granddaughter, who he had raised, would die from a drug overdose, his business deals would lead to numerous lawsuits, and close friends would abandon him as his winnings changed him to the point where many couldn’t stand to be around him any more.

If I only had more money, I would be happy. Ever said it?

Man, if I won the lottery, I would be set.

What is important, what is worth wanting, chasing, pursuing?

What is important is a big question. Some questions are so big, you simply must not get it wrong, like this one as told by Sandy Perry in 2008:

• Today’s paper had an article about the decision of Hope Presybterian to host a tribute to Isaac Hayes. Christians were opposed to the idea of hosting a tribute to a prominent, active Scientologist. One of my coworkers mentioned that all religions are true, so what’s the big deal?

I responded, “That’s not logically possible.”

“What do you mean?”

“Doctrines that teach contradictory ideas can’t all be true. It’s not possible.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Take Jesus. Christians believe he was God. Jews think he was a nut and a blasphemer. Muslims believe he was a prophet, but not God’s son. They can’t all be right. He’s either God or he’s not.”

“Well, he was a great moral teacher regardless.”

“Sorry, that won’t work either.”

“Why not?”

“Jesus claimed to be God. If he’s not, that’s a lie. You can’t be a great moral teacher and lie.”

The response? A blank stare and a change of subject.

There is a BIG question, an important question, perhaps even a tough question that has been nagging the church for a long time, and the church has been avoiding it. But in 2022, the question is becoming so big, so important, that to continue to avoid it will result in an increased negative impact on the church.

What’s the question?

How can the church stop, and reverse, it’s serious decline?

It’s no secret that the church in America has been in serious decline for a long time. A new study released by Pew Research Center forecasts that if the church continues its current trajectory of decline, Christianity will become a minority group in the United States by 2070. I think given the current condition of the American church, that is an optimistic forecast.

But there’s good news regarding that question!

The good news is that there’s an easy answer to that big, important, tough question.

Here’s the answer: Make disciples.

Put another way, become obedient to God’s command to carry out the mission of the church as given by Jesus himself:

“Jesus came and told his disciples, ‘I have been given all authority in heaven and on earth. Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you. And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age,'” Matthew 28:18-20.

The truth is the American church has been negligent in carrying out the church’s mission for decades now. Making disciples, and specifically evangelism, has not been important. Decades ago, a majority of churches in America dropped their “evangelism programs” and stopped staffing “Minister of Evangelism” positions in favor of adopting — and then becoming addicts of — the attractional model. Instead of “going” into the world (especially locally), churches adopted an approach of trying to entice spiritually dead people to gather in a building for a religious service. To make that invitation more alluring, those religious services increasingly began to look and sound like concerts, or night clubs, with a short “felt needs” seminar tossed in, and often with the Gospel tossed out (or watered down).

Other recent studies report from pastors that evangelism hasn’t been important to their local congregation, and to them, for a long time (at least several years).

If the church is neglecting its primary mission of making disciples, you can only expect precipitous decline. That’s what we have been experiencing, and that will only worsen if the church doesn’t answer — and answer correctly — the big question, the important question, the tough question of what can the church do to stop, and reverse, its serious decline.

Simple: Make disciples.

That specifically DOES mean evangelism. Incredibly, even the few ministers who, in a stiff-necked manner, acknowledge that it is essential that the church get serious about making disciples, still try to argue that making disciples is “more than evangelism.”

Yes, it is, but it’s not less than that, and it begins with it.

Making disciples of non-believers is the starting point to making disciples.

We are told to GO into the world and make disciples of the people there, the non-Christians. Then we’re to baptize them and THEN to “disciple” them — to teach them everything that Jesus commanded.

While we’re making new disciples, and then discipling them, we’re to be discipling the church members we already have, who, according to several surveys and studies, are currently woefully undiscipled, biblically illiterate, and lacking in any type of biblical worldview.

If the answer to the church’s pressing question is to make disciples, it follows that a pressing need from church leaders is that they get busy — and get focused — on equipping the saints in how to share the Gospel with non-christens so they can be about the essential work of making disciples.

The truth is, most churches don’t do anything — nothing — to equip their members in how to share the Gospel with unbelievers. Yet, equipping the saints is a primary responsibility of church leaders (in fact, it’s a key reason why we have church leaders!):

“Now these are the gifts Christ gave to the church: the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, and the pastors and teachers. Their responsibility is to equip God’s people to do his work and build up the church, the body of Christ,” Ephesians 4:11-12.

There is no more important work of the church than to make new disciples of the lost; in that case, equipping Christians to do that work should be a top and ongoing priority of church leaders.

But it doesn’t stop there.

Once someone enters into a covenant relationship with Jesus Christ, we’re to teach them — a.k.a. disciple them — but we’ve been horrible at that, or we short-circuit the discipleship process by stopping short. Just how far are we supposed to take this whole “teach them” thing?

“This will continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God’s Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ,” Ephesians 4:13.

Unto spiritual maturity.

One measure of spiritual maturing is that the disciple has become a disciple-maker.

This answer to the church’s very serious, very important question is incredibly easy to see in scripture. We might be at a place that if a church leader cannot see God’s design for the church as revealed in scripture, then maybe they shouldn’t be trying to lead a local church.

We’ve a big question we must deal with regarding the church. What answer will your local church give?

Scotty