Ed Vitagliano

AFA Journal news editor

September 2013 – There is a growing awareness in America that our nation is morally adrift and heading in the wrong direction. That view is not just limited to pro-family groups like AFA.

Instead, it is the view of a majority of Americans, according to a Gallup Poll released in May. The survey found that 72% of people felt that the morals of America were declining. That perception, in fact, continues to spread.

Many Christians attribute such a moral decline to the waning influence of their faith.

“We are living in a very secular, hedonistic kind of culture in the West where traditional Christian denominations are in pretty sharp decline,” itinerant minister Andrew Davies told AFA Journal.

An ‘ethos’ of resistance
Davies, whose ministry has been primarily in the U.K., said a culture that rejects God or even simply ignores Him develops an ethos – or atmosphere – that makes preaching difficult.

How did this atmosphere develop? In the U.K., as in the U.S., this ethos of resistance to the gospel arose because of a combination of factors.

Davies noted especially the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the aggressive atheism of Darwinists and the corrosive influence of the media.

Within the Christian community, there was the rise of liberal theology as well as the idea that Christianity is just a private matter in which people engage, like playing golf on the weekend.

Moreover, Davies said, Christians living in such a culture often get discouraged “by the sheer weight of resistance and opposition and apathy to the gospel.”

A salt-less church
While God obviously holds sinners responsible for rejecting the gospel, Davies lays a great deal of blame at the feet of American pulpits.

“‘Like people, like priest,’ that’s an English saying,” said Davies. “The congregations don’t rise above the level of the ministry of the preaching.”

It is also true that the ethos of the world has a firm grasp on the minds of many people sitting in the pew. In the opinion of missionary Paul Washer, many people attending church in the U.S. don’t even know the real God of the Bible.

“I have had people get up in the middle of my preaching about, say, the justice of God, the wrath of God or the holiness of God, and tell me, ‘I could never love a God like that. That is not my God!’” Washer said. “That is pure idolatry. They are worshipping a god that they have created in their own minds. It is not the God of the Bible that they love.”

For Jordan Thomas, a pastor in Memphis, Tennessee, it is a constant struggle in evangelism to separate what people think they know about God from what the Bible actually says.

“Everybody I meet in Memphis knows Jesus,” Thomas said. “Everybody I have evangelized knows God. They all belong to a church; everybody has been baptized at least once. The question is not ‘Do you follow Jesus?’ The question is ‘Which Jesus do you follow?’”

Whatever the causes, Davies said the consequences are clear: A weak and ineffectual church in America that is failing to impact the culture.

“When our Lord speaks about the disciples as salt and light, what He is really saying is that if society is corrupting, there is something the matter with the salt,” Davies said. “Or if society is becoming dark, there is something the matter with the light.”

Awakening in the future?
As the spiritual atmosphere in the U.S. turns against Christ more and more, all four ministers saw a time of trouble on the horizon, trials that will especially impact the church.

“History would point to the fact that true Christians in America are coming into a time of great, great crisis,” said Washer. The result, he said, will be a split within evangelicalism.

“Most of the Evangelicals will be on the side of the world persecuting the believers for being exclusive, for hate crimes and for all sorts of things,” said Washer.

While that might seem like a frightening prospect for true believers, Virginia pastor Anthony Mathenia said sometimes that’s what it takes to awaken the church.

“The encouragement is that Christians would hit the bottom faster, spiritually, and then they realize that Christ is really their only hope,” he said.

Washer believes that desperation has already taken root in pockets of the church. “I’ll see a group of men who have banded together and they are crying out for revival,” he said. “It’s genuine. I’ve seen that.”

In fact, he said, this passion for prayer might actually be a part of an awakening that is already unfolding. These prayer warriors “should realize that the fact they are banded together is a work of God in the first fruit of revival,” Washer said. “It is God who wills. It is God who works in us.”

The impact of historical awakenings is that the atmosphere in a culture is actually altered as the revival of the church spills into the broader society.

“Revival is when God actually begins to change that ethos,” Davies said, “when people become aware of Him and His presence and the reality of God.”

For such awakenings, God certainly chooses to use men and women who stand out in the Christian community. But revivals are not driven just by the better known folks that we’ve read about in history books.

Mathenia said, “God also uses little widows who are sitting around with an afghan thrown on their head begging God to open a door for the gospel ….”

For Christians, it should be a great consolation to remember that God is often working behind the scenes, sometimes decades in advance of what turns out to be a spiritual awakening.

“I often think of what happened at the beginning of the 18th century when little boys were born into families here in America, in Scotland, in England, in Wales,” said Davies. “And within 25-30 years, God had raised some of these men up and made them mighty, mighty preachers of the gospel, like Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, John and Charles Wesley. … Who knows but that at this very moment God may be bringing into our families the children who will be mightily used by Him in the future.”

While Davies has not traveled extensively throughout the U.S., he has gotten a taste of the American condition, from the spiritual hardness and “left wing radicalism” of Massachusetts to the often lukewarm atmosphere of Mississippi. His Christian brothers and sisters in the U.K. have taken note.

“We do pray regularly, daily, for the work in America and for those particular people we have come to know and love,” he said.

It should be a great comfort for Christians in America to know that they are not alone in the prayer battle for their nation and, moreover, that God is listening. 

“Sometimes God brings His people low,” Davies said. “This is the story of the Old Testament, after all. Then they cry to Him and He intervenes.”