I am growing increasingly concerned about the genuineness of some of our Pastors and the apparent absence of the authentic apostolic spirit of Christ in some of our churches.
There seems to be an ever-growing need in the pastoral ministry to meet the world’s expectations and secular benchmarks of success.
Many worship services disguise their organization’s real purpose of raising money by calling it a church service. They have a hidden agenda of captivating and capturing individual members to teach them about financial stewardship to the church to increase the church’s fiscal strength and visible attractiveness. Church seems to be more about business, entertainment, choir performance, physical attractiveness and political correctness than about genuine salvation. Salvation is the cover story while finance is the goal. I know that his assessment doesn’t apply to all churches but an ever-increasing number of churches seems to be purposely headed in that direction. After all, it is attractive and offers many perks that holiness doesn’t.
They have brought the elements of the night club into the church to artificially influence the congregation to “dance for the Lord.” They have disguised club music as praise break music using the fast tempo and heavy beats to manufacture an atmosphere of excitement and joy. If the joy is real, I don’t need no music to praise the Lord in dance.
Artisans of religiosity and motivational speech have taken the stage as pastors spinning webs of nonsensical yet poetic rhetoric that persuades intrigues, intoxicate and captivates but not save.
Many pastors and churches are more concerned about what men think about them than what God thinks of them. They attend seminary more out of a general need to impress prospective employers (Churches) with their credentials than out of a need to impress God wit their hunger to know Him. Why would God need them to go to seminary to learn of Him as if seminary could tell them about Him? (1 Cor. 1:21) That’s not happening.
Many so-called Christian pastors tolerate improprieties and immoralities among their fellow clergy and in their churches in exchange for financial consideration, popularity, pastoral prestige and job security. They cover one another’s sins up not out of concern for quiet rebuke and eventual correction but out of a sense of fraternal loyalty and shared risk.
No one seems to be concerned about saving souls anymore. I’ve seen a number of church services where the pastor ceremonially took in several new church members without them ever repenting, being baptized in Jesus’ Name or receiving the Holy Spirit. They just prayed a prayer and danced around or fell on the floor and rolled around a little or gave a story about their so-called conversion experience, usually involving something personal, emotional, strange and unsubstantiated. They usually ended up saying that they loved the Lord and the church votes them into the body or the pastor accepts them as members. They walk away thinking that they are saved because they joined a religious institution. This is so sad and it breaks my heart. I so much want to interrupt the service but that wouldn’t be productive or prudent.
There appears to be no standard of holiness in many of the churches that I have visited these days. I have personally witnessed practicing fornicators with live-in lovers singing on church choirs, serving as missionaries, ushers, ministers, musicians and in other various capacities in the church. Adulterers and drunkards are Pastoring and conducting communion services. Open homosexuality is very visible in the church and no one dares to address this abomination and affront to the Kingdom of God and its message of sexual purity.
As long as the finances come in, the bigger buildings are being built, the larger pastor salaries are being made, the prestige, power and honor are being bestowed, everyone seems to go along with the program as business as usual.
But one day, God is going to require that all of these pretenders and false prophets and false prophetesses give an account for their behavior. What an eternally sad day that will be.
“‘Therefore this is what the Sovereign Lord says: Because of your false words and lying visions, I am against you, declares the Sovereign Lord. My hand will be against the prophets who see false visions and utter lying divinations. They will not belong to the council of my people or be listed in the records of Israel, nor will they enter the land of Israel. Then you will know that I am the Sovereign Lord.’” (Ezekiel 13:8-9)
REPENT!
“… I have made you a watchman for the people of Israel; so hear the word I speak and give them warning from me. When I say to the wicked, ‘You wicked person, you will surely die,’ and you do not speak out to dissuade them from their ways, that wicked person will die for their sin, and I will hold you accountable for their blood. But if you do warn the wicked person to turn from their ways and they do not do so, they will die for their sin, though you yourself will be saved.” (Ezekiel 33:7-9)
Save yourselves pastors!
Obey God’s Commandments and feed God’s sheep.
Repent!
O. W. Prince Ministries 