My dear friend Bill Nicoson, Executive Director of CPN - Cornerstone Pastors Network sent me this: “Pastors prioritize Evangelism when asked to list up to 5 ministries in order of importance. 24% identified evangelism and outreach as #1.
These were followed by Sunday school, Bible study and small groups (17%); worship and specific worship services (13%); preaching, proclamation and teaching (10%); children and youth (9%); discipleship, spiritual growth, mentoring and counseling (7%); and prayer, prayer ministry and prayer groups (5%).
When a list of the 5 most often mentioned ministries was compiled, children and youth moved to the top and was identified as one of the 5 most important by 85%.
The other 4 most-mentioned ministries were evangelism and outreach (68%); Sunday school, Bible study and small groups (53%); discipleship, spiritual growth, mentoring and counseling (37%); and worship and specific worship services (33%). (LifeWay Research, LifeWay Communications 4/7/09)”
These statistics bring a lot of inquietude to my heart. Only 24% identifies evangelism as # 1 priority and only 5% identifies prayer as # 1. Evangelism is 68% the most mentioned ministry on the most mentioned ministries and prayer don’t even is cited.
I don't know if it is the way the survey was done, which makes pastors prioritize things in detriment of others activities, but the way it is, it means we, as pastors, can do all the work depending on ourselves and really almost nothing depending on God. Any way this is a staggering discovery for me!
Prayer was the first priority on Jesus ministry. He spent many nights long praying and praying and having fellowship with His Father, depending on Him to do the works that He did.
I am sadly positive about one thing: We are a lost church in a lost world. We have not really lost the sense of our mission! We don't really ever have one! We are lost as much as the world!
We don’t pray! God, help us!
We don’t even know how to pray!
We are professionals, religious activists, personal task oriented laborers and not ministers.
Ministers minister to the Lord, and not to men; they pray, they intercede, they talk more to God than to men.
Even though we get paid millions of dollars per year to do our work religiously, very few people are really saved. Maybe we are not saved. And I will tell why. We don’t pray! We don’t seek God’s Kingdom first and His righteousness. And we don’t bear fruits.
Jesus said: “Remain in me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in Me. "I am the Vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not remain in me, he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you. This is to my Father's glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.” (John 15:4-8)
Only Jesus true disciples can make true disciples. To be a disciple of Jesus means that we do exactly what He told us to do, we do everything the way He did.
To be a disciple of Jesus is that we exclusively are dependent on the Holy Spirit power, wisdom and guidance, like He did.
And to become true disciples today we have to be honest enough to measure what we are doing according to Jesus teachings - not to our traditions, not to the way we have learnt - and renounce everything we find it is not His.
Maybe we will find out that our name on the “church weekly payroll” is not His will for us. It may have been our spiritual confinement and we will resign it immediately. We must be set free of all love of money, doing things for money. What I mean is that the ministry can not be our employment, because we would not be servants (ministers) of Christ if we were to please men. Thousands of ordained pastors don’t do what they should do or even preach what they should preach out of fear of loosing their jobs.
I was invited by a denomination many years ago to what they called “discover the family”. They brought us to a very nice place, like a four stars hotel, located in a wonderful piece of real estate, a marvelous landscaping, with lots of delicious food, practically served four times a day.
For three days we were oriented in all the good things the denomination had, the departments, the programs, the pastors’ assistance options, retirement plans, the access of all the books and education for everything we could imagine. We heard how wealthy and powerful we had become after hundreds of years and what a history of accomplishments like no others!
On first day it was promised that we, at the end, would have experienced different “worship services styles” from Native American to Contemporary. We discovered “our denomination was a home” for all kinds of people, all races, all colors, all sexes and sexual orientation.
A denomination all-inclusive, for conservatives and for liberals, a theological miscellaneous permeated with the offer of resources without limit and people to assist you at the touch of your fingers.
And as they told us constantly, we deserved all leisure and entertainment we could have. I joked with two other friends that we were being brain washed. And everything was paid for.
Before the end of the three days after hearing to all that the denomination had to offer I was convinced I did not need God at all to do ministry in America.
It is considered to be extremely radical to say these things, but the Truth is that lost people can’t help lost people, as Jesus asked once: “Can a blind man lead a blind man?”
I find very humbling in dealing with pastors, most Brazilian pastors, almost every day, we are no different than anybody else. We all are not accomplishing anything when it comes reaching the lost. We are failing! With all the good things about our ministries and our big and modern structures the great majority of people are still lost. We may find comfort saying that God may not want to save them, but it will be only an affirmation of our ignorance of God’s Love.
Bill Nicoson also shared with me these thoughts:
“I think that the church and pastors are thinking this: We talk about mission and evangelism. But our structure is making us do other things.
The structures of most churches are the real truth tellers. In other words, I am not against events, children’s ministries, small groups, etc., if they all are designed or structured to do one thing: WIN THE LOST.
But most of them are not structured that way. They are inward focused. Every ministry a church does needs to be given a 360 degree evaluation.
Asking questions like: Did the event do what we wanted it to do? How many people came to Christ? What was the return on the investment in dollars? Could we have better spent our money do something else that would bring more people to Christ? Was it worth the energy, time and dollars spent? Or was it just something that OUR kids could come to?
We aren’t asking the right questions, because we are to into ourselves.”
And we don't pray! We don’t cry for souls! We don’t even get afflicted with our families and relatives that are not saved! The reason is we don’t have the compassion Jesus had referred we should have for the multitudes that are lost, sheep without pastor.
We don't reach out to the lost, because we are entrapped by our fake Christianity, busy with our Christian programs, spending hours in preparing our dead sermons, entertaining the members of our congregations and planning our next events to keep the ship afloat.
If not doing all of this, we keep stressing ourselves resolving unending conflicts of people that strive among themselves because they don’t have anything else to do.
We don’t save souls; we don’t reach them, simply because the millions of souls don’t attend “our churches services”.
They are out there, in the bars of our towns, in the schools of our broken educational’ systems, in the prisons crowded by criminals we have produced with our silence. They are in the fields playing or attending games we are eager to watch more than anything else, but pray.
We build our ministries around our buildings. We call them "churches”, very organized “churches”, holes of money spending, factories of bills to be paid, products of high costs of programs, traditions, church styles, agendas, schedules, staff meetings, comfortable activities, nice lunches and dinners, buildings maintenance and on, and on. And we find time and money for them all, but not for prayer which requires no money and reaching out the lost, which should be the top priority on our budgets. Actually we should cut money for anything if not all activities that do not produce souls for the Kingdom.
We are lost. Please, believe me, we are lost!
Our “churches pews” are holding every Sunday many thousands and thousands of people very nice, but only religious. People that never met the Lord Jesus personally who are not born again and who never won a single soul for the Kingdom. Actually most of them never had heard a strong biblical message on the sinful nature of mankind which is very politically incorrect; people who need to hear the Message of the Cross, even if may become the last sermon of their pastors before they are fired by the Church Board.
We must be born again, which means sin no more, sin as a rare accident. We must get born from Above to truthfully abide in the Word, doing what it says and less talking or teaching about it. We must become doers rather than talkers.
We must repent of our inertia. We must repent of our selfishness, our men made programs, our worldly methods and strategies, our 5, 6 or 10 steps on how to become successful, our philosophers’ logics of doing God’s ministry by world thinking, our American way of doing church, our retirement’s plans, our shopping carts and you named it.
We must get on our knees, humble ourselves before the King and get converted to the point we find no pleasure in this world, but only in obeying Him.
We must find God's way of simplicity, get out of fancy boxes, our laziness, and go, two by two, depending on God alone, to share the Gospel of the Kingdom that transformed first us. Then all people of all ages will hear.
We must heal the sick; raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, cast out demons. Freely we have received, freely we have to give. Believe me, there are millions of demons in America do be cast out and even with all the medical technology we are surrounded with we must pray for the sick to be healed. We must proclaim Jesus Christ, who died on the cross, was buried and on the third day rose from the dead. We must proclaim Jesus is Lord and King. We must announce He is coming back to judge the living and the dead.
People go to Bible colleges today to learn to do the same things that are not working for more than many decades now.
Where are those professors, filled with the Holy Ghost that will teach every student to win souls through prayer and personal testimony, with the authority of those who had won souls first at their own?
Where are those pastors, filled with the Holy Spirit, that will have courage to change, first to pray fervently and constantly for a true revival transformation of their own lives and families and then for the church and then for the city they live in?
Oh! Lord! There is a cry on my soul and a desperate groaning in my heart for souls to be won, for believers to be filled with the Holy Spirit and for ministers to equip the saints in demonstration of Power and Truth.
There are about 5.600.000 People in Massachusetts going to hell right now, maybe thousands more who called themselves Christians and are members of Christian churches, deceived by false ideologies and false religions, by humanism, by liberalisms and by a fake Christianity. They need the Lord! They don’t know, but they need it desperately!
The last thing we need is more of events, more of children programs, more counseling, more of what we have been doing for years and of the same results. There will be place, a right place for these things, done the way Jesus would do it, but never as substitutes of what He came to do and command us to do “to save that which was lost”, which is more than winning souls.
The bottom line is: We need to pray! Prayer is not one of the church programs; it is The PROGRAM, because we need God’s mercy to inflame our souls to reach the lost! We need to do it: prayer and power evangelism!
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