From the TeachingtheWord Bible Knowledgebase

Part 2 of a series. Read part 1.

Postmodern Evangelicals are trying all kinds of approaches to the problems of the nations - except the one that God says will work. Today we continue the true story of a man who took God at His Word, despite opposition from the Evangelicals of his day. His commitment to the authority of the Bible revitalized a church, revolutionized a city, and rescued a nation from disaster.

In the first article of this series, we saw an unlikely man come to an unlikely place for the start of a revolution in the church. But today we shall see that the flame was quickly kindled as the new man rejected failed church-growth strategies and relied strictly on the power of God and His Word.

A Church Fallen on Hard Times

When the new man came to Sandfields, the church had fallen on hard times numerically. Sandfields was part of a denomination comprising nearly 1,500 congregations. The denomination had struggled with steadily declining membership and attendance for over twenty years. Its church sanctuaries could hold nearly 560,000 people on Sunday mornings, and many of them had once been full or nearly full. But membership was now only 189,000 and falling. Actual Sunday attendance was even less. The situation was the same in most other Evangelical denominations and independent churches of the day. In recent years, they had lost hundreds of thousands of members.

Sandfields itself was no exception. On most Sunday mornings, its large sanctuary was barely 15% full. It was difficult to recruit enough teachers to have a viable Sunday school program. The church was in debt, and the deficit was growing. The building needed repair. Sandfields only survived with the help of regular financial aid from the denomination.

Rejecting Failed Church-Growth Strategies

Yet the new man who came to Sandfields rejected conventional wisdom on how to stimulate church growth. Over the years, other men had tried a variety of ideas and programs to grow the church numerically. They had made changes in the worship services, such as shortening the sermon or replacing it with a talk that was more like a fireside chat, and by giving a more prominent place to special music. They had introduced church sports teams, sacred and secular music concerts, clubs, a dramatic society, and church-sponsored organizations promoting traditional moral values, among other initiatives.

To the puzzlement of some and the consternation of many, the new preacher at Sandfields did away with all of these things within weeks of his arrival. He expressed no interest in numbers as such. He dismissed the existing array of programs and initiatives as a waste of the church's time and resources. When the men of the church board asked what they should do with the stage that had been constructed for the church's entertainment programs, the new minister replied that they could tear it down and heat the building with it! (Instead, they donated it to be reconstructed in the local YMCA.)

He believed that the real problem of the church was not ignorance of the needs of contemporary society, but ignorance of the power of God and His Word. He said that the confused array of outreach programs, relying on the power and ingenuity of man, were a poor substitute for genuine Christian ministry in reliance on the power of the Word and the Spirit. He re-focused the church's attention on the simplicity of prayer, Bible study, and Gospel preaching. This was a radical approach for the time, and it would produce radical results.

Returning the Right Kind of Preaching to Its Rightful Place

The new man backed up this revolutionary change in focus with revolutionary preaching. He returned the right kind of preaching - the only kind the Bible prescribes - to its rightful place.

Many contemporary pastors attempted to attract an audience by attempting to be relevant to the perceived needs of modern man. In many Evangelical churches, Bible-based, doctrinally-rich sermons had given way to far lighter fare - Sunday morning talks on current social problems, how to improve interpersonal and family relationships, how to manage your money, leadership, ethics, and so on. Pastors were just as likely to take their subject matter from a magazine or newspaper as to speak from the Bible. They were more likely to give a talk promoting world peace than to tell their listeners how to have true peace of the soul.

The most successful pastor, in the contemporary view, was the man whose "sermon" did not sound like one. The model pastor of the time tossed the occasional Bible passage into the Sunday morning mix alongside quotations from poets, philosophers, politicians, novelists, educators, and newspaper columnists. It was not uncommon for pastors to invite leading politicians and public figures, even though they might not actually be Christians, to speak in their services. These things, they said, would draw a crowd.

In the words of a biographer, the new man's approach was "staggeringly different." His preaching was expository in the true sense of the term: exclusively from the Bible, sharply focused on the text, highly doctrinal, penetratingly practical. From his first Sunday in the pulpit, the new man taught the people of Sandfields church how to think - to base their thinking in every area of life on the infallible Word of God, not the wisdom of fallen man. On that first day, he preached from 2 Timothy 1:7, "For God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind."

This was revolutionary preaching, and people soon began to take notice. The pulpit lecturers of the time, despite all their efforts to be "relevant," gave their hearers nothing so truly relevant. The fact was, they lived in fear of approaching the world on God's terms, and that fear had come to pervade their churches. This man's preaching took his hearers in a completely opposite direction, one that sought - and would soon see - an outpouring of spiritual power.

The new man based his approach to preaching on an unshakeable belief: Only right doctrine can produce right living, not the other way around. This was a return to the New Testament model. Look at Jesus' teaching in the Gospels, he said, or Paul's epistles, or the epistle to the Hebrews. The Lord Himself and His inspired writers spent more than three fourths of their time laying the foundation of right doctrine, before they turned to the issues of practical application in right living. The new man emulated their method, and he never varied from it through fifty-three years of pulpit ministry.

The Message: Never Dumbed-Down But Always Understood

He employed the same approach, whether he was speaking to a congregation of coal miners or an assembly of university professors, whether he was speaking to senior citizens or school children. He believed there is no greater fallacy than to think that a man needs to preach a different gospel to different types of people. He never "dumbed down" his message, but he never preached above his hearers. Everyone went away from his sermons knowing exactly what he had meant. During a time of serious illness in later years, one of the most treasured get-well letters he received expressed the hope that he would soon be back in the pulpit, because "you are the only preacher I can understand." He especially prized this letter because the writer was an eleven-year-old girl.

From day one, the people of Sandfields church realized that the new preacher was challenging them to the core of their souls, in a way that few of them had ever experienced. Slowly at first, but with increasing momentum, God used such preaching to bring about results that the church-growth experts could not imagine. But always, the new man reminded his people that the results were the work of the arm of God, not the arm of flesh.

The Right Thing: Also the Most Practical Thing

The new man's approach to politics, human needs, church growth, and preaching was not unconventional merely for the sake of being different. The revolution at Sandfields was highly practical. He understood that the conventional wisdom could produce near-term numerical success in some circumstances. But he also saw that it produced long-term spiritual failure in all circumstances. The new man at Sandfields understood the simple but profound reason why the conventional wisdom ultimately produced failure: It was plainly contrary to the Word of God, and God only truly blesses what He ordains in His Word. The new pastor was placing Sandfields church back under the authority of Scripture.

Just as the Lord Jesus Christ had violently driven the merchants and moneychangers out of the temple, the new man unapologetically cleared Sandfields of the trappings of conventional human wisdom. He was setting the stage for the only kind of success that would mean anything in time or eternity, success not on human terms but on God's terms - the growth of a Scripture-driven church.

Next: The Man Who Came to Sandfields

sac0016