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Helping Christians realize their full potential in Christ has been a heart burden of mine for many years. I first felt it as a young Christian at university, and it has increased over the thirty-odd years since then. I can say that today I feel it more keenly than ever.
Again and again as I travel I encounter Christians who lack joy, purpose and passion for the gospel. They say they still love the Lord and are committed to following him. But they lack zip and zest for him. They are not gripped by any grand ambition for the Lord and don't give themselves sacrificially to him. They have no idea of how they can serve him and don't particularly want to find out either. They are trapped in the humdrum of everyday existence and don't seem to count at all for the kingdom.
That's why I am so drawn to the ministry of revitalization. Don't mistake me: I long to see people being converted to Christ too. But I am convinced that this will only happen as those who already know him live in the fullness of his grace and power. The two things are inseparably linked. Healthy Christians (and churches) are the means Christ uses to reach the lost.
Helping people recover their first love of Christ, then, is a personal passion. That is why I was so glad to see Harry L. Reeder's book From Embers to a Flame: How God Can Revitalize Your Church (Philipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed, 2004) come off the press this past month. I learned that Pastor Reeder was writing this book (along with David Swavely) when I attended a revitalization conference at Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 2002. Now that it is available I am eager to share its insights as widely as I can.
Embers to a Flame is a book about revitalizing churches rather than individuals. And that is the way it should be. God brings his people to spiritual life and health within the church, the community of believers. In fact, they can't possibly be healthy apart from the church. It's a serious mistake to think we can manage alone in the Christian life. The Lord doesn't work that way. He has called us to be members of a body - his body, the church. And we will only ever be what he wants us to be as we are functioning fully within the church. If we want to look at revitalizing individual Christians, we have to look at revitalizing churches.
Harry Reeder didn't write his book as a theorist. It is the product of over thirty years of ministry experience. He begins by telling of his early days in Christian ministry immediately after graduating from seminary. He found himself as the pastor of a church that had once had 900 members, four major worship services each Sunday, and a vital Sunday school but which, by the time he arrived, had fallen on hard times. The average Sunday attendance had dropped to eighty, the Sunday school had fallen to less than twenty adults, and there were no children. A congregation once ablaze with life had been reduced to barely glowing embers. "I desperately wanted to see God ignite those embers into a fire again," he writes, "so I searched His Word to find the biblical principles that apply to church revitalization. By God's grace, we put those principles into action, though with many mistakes. And by God's grace the church came alive" (p. 4).
In the coming weeks we will explore those biblical principles of revitalization together. It will be my prayer that God in his grace will blow on the embers of our own hearts and cause them to burst into fresh fame.