The great challenge for the future church won’t be filling pews on Sundays, but rather living and speaking authentically into the cultural pain and ache of our day. Jesus is leading the church where religious hype and cultural callousness cannot go. Our worship before God can never justify our poor relationships. Jesus calls us to restore the broken altars of our families, friendships and relationships before we bring our worship to the altar of God. Reconciliation begins with hearing. Healthy church creates safe, vulnerable, disarming space to hear and be heard by others. A wounded church desperately needs a revival of hearing.
Authenticity
Lysa TerKeust
If writers don’t show me their struggles. I can’t trust their advice. I don’t want theories that smell like a library. I want advice to smell like it has some real life in it. I want to know that what they are writing about has worked on their own issues. So I can believe it might work on mine. Take away the struggle, and you take away my trust.
Philip Yancey
Philip Yancey tells the story of a rabbi who listened for hours to a man’s complaints until he finally asked, “Why are you so angry with God?” he asked. Stunned by the rabbi’s question because he had not even mentioned God during the course of his long outburst, the man replied, “All my life, I have been so afraid to express my anger to God that I always directed my anger at people who are connected with God. But until this moment, I did not understand this.” The rabbi led the man to the Wailing Wall, away from the place where people pray, to the site of the ruins of the Temple. When they reached that place, the Rabbi told him that it was time to express all the anger he felt toward God. Then, for more than an hour, the man struck the wall of the Kotel with his hands and screamed his heart out. After that, he began to cry and could not stop crying, and little by little, his cries became sobs that turned into prayers. And that is how the Rabbi taught him how to pray.
Pete Greig
I’m coming to the conclusion that to be used by God we must be weak and foolish rather than all-conquering heroes. I reckon God is sick and tired of people posing as overcomers with permanent grins, as if they somehow avoided the Fall and went hang-gliding instead.
Cindy Butrow
There is a company of believers, and the number is growing, who have been stripped down to nothing. And in this place have found everything. Everything that is pure, authentic, and raw. Where the shiny lights of ministry and showmanship have lost their flavor and become a clanging symbol in the midst of a world in pain, that are hungry and thirsty for authenticity. For love. Out of the ashes, we are rising, not shiny, but beautiful as ever. There is a move of God coming up from the dust of life, leading us all into the arms of the Father, and teaching us how to lead on in His love. For such a time as this.
Reinhard Bonnke
Power does not come by working up emotions. We may shout, sweat, get excited, and whack the pulpit when we have the anointing of God. But without that anointing, we are actors, and the platform is a mere stage. God does not want theatricals. Get God’s love into your heart and true emotions flow. Anything else is emotionalism, imitation feeling. It reminds me of a man trying to speak from one city to another by shouting when the telephone line was dead. If the line is live, and there is power in it, his voice will reach the other city quite easily. If the Gospel is live, it will reach the hearts of hearers.
Thomas Beckingham
At some point, the two worlds of who we pretend to be and who we really are must collide. It is, however, better to let those two worlds collide rather than have everything snap under the tension of keeping them apart.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
I would sooner possess the joy of Christ five minutes than I would revel in the mirth of fools for half a century.
Jack Frost
You teach what you know… but impart who you are.
Graham Kendrick
Worship in truth is worship that arises out of an actual encounter with God, a response to the experience of knowing God’s real presence and activity in our daily lives. This has nothing to do with sentiment, thinking religious thoughts or having aesthetic experiences in church buildings; any religion can give you that sort of thing.