An Honest Assessment of the Modern Church
Series: Order in the New Testament Church and Missionary Service | Article One
There is a kind of spiritual cowardice that wears the clothing of optimism. The pastors in Jeremiah’s day wore it well. “They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly,” the LORD observed, “saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14). They were not pessimists. They were not cynics. They were men who had simply decided that peace was a more comfortable message than the truth, and in doing so, they participated in the very destruction they refused to name.
I am not interested in that kind of peace. Neither, I suspect, are you.
This series of articles is written from a place of genuine concern and, I want to be clear, genuine hope. My intent is not to scold the body of Christ, nor to position myself as a voice standing above the rest. I am a pastor with a small congregation in south Mississippi, a man who has watched the deteriorating landscape of ministry from the ground level, and who has come to believe that what we desperately need is not a more polished message, but a more honest one. Before we can build, we must know what we are building on. And before we know that, we must be willing to look.
I hold equally in mind the danger on the other side. Zeal without knowledge is not a virtue. It is not good that the soul be without knowledge (Proverbs 19:2). The man who diagnoses every imperfection as apostasy, and meets every weakness with trumpet-blast condemnation, has not distinguished himself from the problem, he has simply traded one form of uselessness for another. We are not attempting a U-turn in a freight train. We are calling for honest assessment, a return to the source, and the kind of steady, faithful correction that builds rather than demolishes.
With that said, let us look.
Every Man His Own Authority
The word of God is clear that every believer has been called and equipped for service. Paul writes that we have been given the ministry of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:18). We are gifted to minister to the body (Romans 12:4–8; 1 Corinthians 12). We are to bear one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:2). These truths are not disputed here. But the scripture holds these responsibilities alongside something equally essential, and that counterpart has been almost entirely lost in our day.
When Philip ran to the Ethiopian eunuch and asked “Understandest thou what thou readest?”, the answer came with a candor that has nearly vanished from modern Christianity: “How can I, except some man should guide me?” (Acts 8:30–31). The eunuch was a man of education and influence. He had traveled to Jerusalem and was returning with a copy of the scripture in his hands. And he knew what he did not know, that he needed a guide. When the Lord wished to bring the gospel to Cornelius, He did not send an angel to deliver it. He sent Peter, a man (Acts 10:5). This is the consistent pattern of the word of God: ordained human instruments, guided by the Spirit, sent to those who need what they carry.
That pattern has been quietly overthrown. Self-esteem culture, amplified by social media to a deafening pitch, has produced a generation of Christians who have absorbed the idea that they are the influence, not the ones to be influenced. Every man now carries a platform in his pocket, and the assumption that a following equals authority has crept from the world directly into the pew. The church was designed by God to change you: through patience, through teaching, through the faithful exposition of His word. The idea was never that you would arrive on Sunday morning already settled in your conclusions, prepared to evaluate the sermon against your own private convictions and find it wanting. When the learner refuses to be led and the teacher grows afraid to teach, the body does not simply stand still. It deforms.
What We Observe
The present state of the body of Christ in America is marked, broadly speaking, by two equal and opposite failures, and most congregations tend toward one or the other.
The first is a reactionary conservatism that wears the clothing of faithfulness. It resembles, if we are honest, the spirit of the Pharisees: external compliance polished to a high shine, tradition defended with an energy that the defense of truth itself rarely receives, and a hair-trigger suspicion of anything that moves. The people in these churches can tell you precisely what they do not believe. Fewer can show you the warm, living faith that animates a genuine walk with God.
The second failure is the opposite and not better. The rush toward effeminate contemporary styles, the relentless softening of everything that might offend, the exchange of the gospel’s inherent power for something the world might find more acceptable, has produced churches that are functionally indistinguishable from the culture they claim to be reaching. The simplicity of the gospel has been traded for programs, personalities, and the kind of overbearing entertainment that keeps people returning for an experience while leaving them as spiritually unchanged as the day they first walked in.
Between these two failures, a more fundamental abdication has taken root. American Christians have largely ceased to feel personally responsible for winning the battle. In an age when rationalism, new atheism, and outright unbelief are advancing their case loudly and without apology, a lethargic church has vacated the field. We seem to expect the world to recognize the truth on its own, without the inconvenience of us having to make the argument. Paul left no such option open: “Be instant in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine” (2 Timothy 4:2). There is no recliner in that command.
And then there is the matter that polite company does not wish to raise. Pastors in adultery. Missionaries taken by pornography. Youth workers guilty of varieties of child abuse that ought to make every pew in America tremble. These are not isolated incidents from the fringe. They are a pattern, and they reflect a body whose shepherds have left their own hearts unguarded. The problem is not Christianity. It is not the word of God. It is men who have worn the name of Christ while walking in the course of this world (Ephesians 2:2), swept away by the lusts of the flesh, with no apparent awareness that “all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution” and that anything easier than that is almost certainly not godliness (2 Timothy 3:12).
How We Got Here
None of this arrived overnight. It crept in unawares, the most dangerous kind of change, and the kind most easily rationalized at each small step.
The entertainment-driven church culture of the 1980s and 1990s was a departure that many dismissed as harmless novelty. What it actually was, was a slow exchange of the highways and hedges (Luke 14:23) for the comfort of the recliner. Evangelical fervency continued in ungodly movements while Bible-believing Christians settled into a long, comfortable Saturday of cultural consumption. Those habits of heart did not improve when they met the internet. They accelerated. The sensationalism that once required a special event now requires only a hand-held screen, and the church, rather than offering a genuine alternative to the noise, largely joined it.
YouTube has replaced discipleship. Facebook has replaced friendship. I say this not to condemn a technology, but to name a substitution. The local assembly remains the supreme method God has given us for building men, women, and children who are equipped to take on the present evil world. No platform replaces it. No follower count produces what a faithful congregation produces: people who know one another deeply, bear one another’s burdens genuinely, and go out together with a word that cost them something to carry. The exchange we have made has produced neither the depth of spiritual growth nor the cohesiveness of assembly the church once demonstrated, and we should not be surprised by the results.
The Mission Field Reflects the Church
The decline that begins in the pew does not stay there. Fewer missionaries are being sent. The costs to deploy the few who remain are spiraling under the same inflationary pressures bearing down on everything else. But beneath the economics lies a more troubling reality: fewer are being called, fewer are being trained, and the supply chain runs directly through the local assembly. Where preaching and teaching decline, the pipeline of servants narrows accordingly.
For those who do reach the field, the modern missionary landscape has added a new dimension of complexity that earlier generations never faced. I have written on this at length elsewhere, but in brief: today’s missionary to East Africa, once among the most fertile and freely accessible regions for gospel work on earth, must first navigate international visa frameworks, governmental compliance requirements, international banking, and the practical corruption of third-world administration before he can open his Bible and speak to a soul. Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, and neighboring nations have enacted comparable complex and stifling frameworks that strain gospel liberty.
This is not an argument against going. The cost is worth bearing; the need is immense; the gospel is not stopped by a government form. But it is a plain argument that the men we send must be of extraordinary preparation, resilience, and doctrinal soundness. Those men are not formed on a screen. They are formed in strong local churches, under faithful preaching, through patient discipleship, the very things we have been steadily surrendering.
Where Is the God of Elijah?
The deepest symptom is not the cultural drift, not the moral failures, not the missions crisis. The deepest symptom is the absence of spiritual power. And the question we rarely have the courage to put plainly is why.
Since the time of Constantine, the church in whatever nation it has occupied has tended to absorb the forms of its surrounding government. American churches, quite naturally, adopted democratic forms, and for a season the arrangement was functional enough. But those same churches are now conducting congregational votes over the color of the sanctuary walls and dividing over the fabric of the pews. Denominational policy enforces the structure. The Holy Spirit is neither consulted nor awaited. Many Christians have mastered enough external conformity to their tradition to demonstrate membership in the club. Few can demonstrate their doctrine. Fewer still can plainly and faithfully present the gospel, which is, by any honest reckoning, elementary to the propagation of the faith.
The sword of the Spirit is the word of God (Ephesians 6:17). A people ignorant of the word of God are soldiers without weapons, and no organizational structure, no committee resolution, no budget line will supply what the word alone can provide. We have the democratic machinery. We have the wealth. We have the assets and the infrastructure and the media reach. We succeed or fail now like any business, by the quality of our management and the strength of our market position. But we were never meant to be a business. We are the Church of the living God.
The historical contrast is a rebuke that demands a serious answer. As recently as the ministries of Mordecai Ham and Billy Sunday, preachers moved entire cities. John and Charles Wesley, George Whitfield, men who worked with a fraction of our resources, in conditions we would today consider intolerable, accomplished things that all of our wealth and infrastructure has not approached. His arm is not shortened (Isaiah 59:1). His power has not diminished. The issue is not His willingness. The issue is whether we are genuinely with the Lord, or simply in proximity to a building He has been quietly removed from. “Quench not the Spirit” (1 Thessalonians 5:19) presupposes that it is possible to do exactly that. We should soberly ask ourselves whether we have.
A Reason for Optimism, Honestly Held
I do not write any of this in despair. I write it in the conviction that honest diagnosis is the first act of genuine faith. A man who will not name his disease cannot be treated for it. A church that will not name its condition cannot correct it.
The gospel of Jesus Christ is still the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth (Romans 1:16). The Lord who sent Peter to Cornelius is still sending men. He is still at work. There are local reports of genuine spiritual fruitfulness, and they are to be received with real thanksgiving. I remain genuinely optimistic that, with the Lord’s help, a course correction is possible. But it will begin with men and women who are willing to be honest about where we are standing before they begin to speak about where we ought to go.
The Lord is with us to the end of the world (Matthew 28:20). The searching question is whether we are with Him.
What Follows
In the articles that follow, my intention is to move from this diagnosis toward the source. The first thought, the one that drives this entire series, is that the recovery of spiritual power in the church is inseparable from a recovery of the order Christ Himself established. Not the democratic order we inherited from our surrounding culture. Not the hierarchical order borrowed from Rome. The order of the Lord Jesus Christ, working with His Apostles on earth, and directing His church from heaven.
It is my prayer that as we turn together to the word of God, the Lord will give us the clarity to see where we have erred, the humility to correct it, and the faithfulness to stay the course.
Strong churches. Faithful missionaries. A body that bears the name of Christ with something of the power that name deserves.
That is what we are after. Come and let us search the scriptures together.
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Thomas Irvin is the pastor of George County Baptist Church in Lucedale, Mississippi. This article is the first in a series examining Order in the New Testament Church and Missionary Service.
