Reaching Our Generation

What we should be attempting to do is to evangelize the community. We should not be doing our own separate, esoteric thing apart from the community. In evangelizing the community, we should be trying not only to get people to accept the Bible and say yes to Jesus. We should be seeking to fold them into the body of the church, the family of God, and lead them to follow Jesus with us. In doing so, we would be presenting to them the claims of Jesus from his Word with the expectation they will follow Jesus in the way we teach them.

But that is not what we are doing in the Reformed Churches, we are not presenting the claims of Christ in his Word, we are presenting claims from a period of European church history which we love to call the, "Reformed tradition." We are presenting a platform from what we consider the ideal period in the history of the church. It is considered the period of ultimate theological development. The 16th century reformation, not the Scriptures, become the touchstone of all subsequent reformation. We are saying to people, it is not only God's Word to which you must submit, it is with this historic ideal you must comply. People who are not intellectuals or antiquarians simply, and wisely, are not interested. They are more interested about what God says in his Word. Perhaps somewhere down the learning road some of them will become more interested in church history. For the present time, the whole Reformed presentation seems too abstruse. It demands they master many things more complicated than the Scriptures demand. And so they leave us after one or two visits and move onto the other church that will keep it simple, more relevant and more contempory. We are content to condemn them as being not "truly saved", too immature in their faith or being interested only in entertainment. There is a conceit in thinking, "If God was really drawing them, they would stay with us." There is an unspoken mind-set that we are fishing for quality conversions. There is a misguided pride in being an intellectual church. There is almost prideful resignation to being a church for the intellectual. It is tantamount to saying, "We are the people and the truth is with us." It never enters our minds to criticize ourselves and say, "Maybe the problem is with us. What are we doing wrong?"

Contemporaniety in music and in the message is the most effective way to communicate the gospel. Once again, we are too prone to pull the language of worship from some ideal period and place of the enshrined historic past.

Too much is expected of those we are initiating into the faith. Presenting the Five Points of Calvinism, is one thing, expecting them to embrace them and master them before moving on is another thing. It is placing a burden on them too heavy to bear. I know sincere, faithful believers in Christ who struggle for years with that particular theological formation. I know others who simply cannot accept them. If you show them a verse from Scripture -- for example, John 6:44 -- they receive it. However, they are unable to receive it as it was stated in the 17th century by Hollanders who were attempting to answer the Remonstrants. We forget that John Calvin didn't express those teachings in that way. Those teaching are found in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, but not in same paradigm and not even with that emphasis.