It is sad to watch the decline of churches, whether close up or from afar. We can reg­ister it best from a distance and over time. What makes churches decline?

There are many reasons from the Scriptures as to why churches decline. The book of Revelation among other books of the Bible speaks of false teaching, failure to combat heresy, a tendency to compromise with the world, etc. There is, however, one reason that I wish to focus on in this brief edito­rial. It is the decline in the church as a result of the decline of the faith experience of her members.

Reformation Faith⤒🔗

Christianity entered the world in an era in which a great change took place within the culture and consciousness of the surround­ing world. But it was the Christian faith that overcame the world. The Reformation took place in a time similar to our own. The time was ripe for it. And the Reformation brought about a new consciousness of faith and an experience of faith that can still astonish us today.

If today there were strong church life, then the church would not merely function as a community but also as a mother of believers and their children (cf Gal 4:26). If the mother is not sound, how then can her children be sound? The apostle Peter writes about grow­ing in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour and tasting that the Lord is gracious, attributing this to the sincere milk of the Word of God (2 Peter 3:18, 1 Pe­ter 2:2), which the mother gives to her chil­dren. There must be a connection between the church and her spiritual condition, her experience of faith.

Related to this is how the church interacts with society. There would not be decline in church life today, if there were depth and unity in faith. The church is not only the mother of believers, but also the congrega­tion of believers and their children. The church does not consist of walls and roofs, but of believers and their children. Their condition in a way determines the condition of the church. We can think of it in terms of cross-pollination. Where the life of the faith of church members is strong, there the church blossoms. Where it declines, the church herself suffers loss and harm. But conversely, where the church knows her duty, and fulfills her functions with respect to believers and their offspring, there the Word grows.

Paul brings this out with respect to the church at Thessalonica. 1 Thessalonians 1:2, 3:

We give thanks to God always for you all, making mention of you in our prayers; remembering without ceasing your work of faith, and labor of love, and patience of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ, in the sight of God and our Father.

The apostle mentions faith, love, and hope as fruits of the preaching of the Word of God, as God's blessing on the ministry in the church.

Symptoms of Decline in Faith←⤒🔗

In an attempt to trace the symptoms of spiritual decline, we take the above as a starting-point. There is a decline in the at­titude to the church, her preaching of the Word of God, the administration of the sacraments, and the pastoral ministry of the office bearers. It is evident that a radi­cal change has taken place in this respect. Church attendance is an appropriate gauge. It has declined in many churches. Particularly the second church service on the Lord's Day is poorly attended. Many consider their attending church once instead of twice on the Lord's Day as a sign of their free and conscientious practice of faith. To many, the church no longer has a central place in life. Church is an institution of the past. The central place that preaching had in church services from the 16th century Reformation on has shifted to something else. Many prefer an hour of entertainment. And in various churches, where the preaching of the Word still has a central place, it turns out that the members afterwards rarely speak about the Word proclaimed and sense little impact in their lives. To many, church at­tendance has a compulsory aspect. To some, sadly, there is the sense of performing a duty twice a Lord's Day, but the rest of the Lord's Day they relax and abstain from the things that build the life of faith. The above has affected church life specifically from the angle of church members.

Decline among the Church's Officers←⤒🔗

There is still another angle to consider, namely that of office bearers. Hebrews 13:17 speaks about the ministers, who "watch for your souls". One day they are to give an account of their ministry. But do they per­form it as they ought? Do they perform it with joy, or while sighing? Are they there­fore perhaps "unprofitable"? Why is it that at times sermons sound like lectures – too academic, too theoretical? In preaching – as well as in pastoral visits – there is to be a 'feeling' with the congregation? Preaching is to serve pastoral contact, and pastoral con­tact preaching. What I am writing concern­ing ministers also applies to elders and dea­cons. So often our prayer life, our visits, our meetings, our love and concern for souls, our evangelism is performed so coldly. The chill of death lies over it all.

What is Our Great Need in Terms of Our Life of Faith?←⤒🔗

Let me remind you of what was the heart of the Reformed Confessions for the life and experience of faith that these Confessions speak about so emphatically. They call at­tention to the sovereignty and particularity of Christ's redeeming love (which is also, to be sure, the love of the Father and the Holy Spirit: the Persons of the Godhead are always at one).

The doctri­nal implications of 'who loved me and gave Himself for me.'Galatians 2:20

Christ ... loved the church, and gave Himself for it.Ephesians 5:25

God commends His love to­ward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.Romans 5:8

They confess that biblical religion is God-centered, not man-centered. To get the love of Christ in focus changes one's whole existence. The Confessions teach us to see and feel the transitory nature of this life, to think of it, with all its richness, as essentially the gymnasium and dressing-room where we are prepared for heaven, and regard readiness to die as the first step in learning to live. Here is an historic Christian emphasis, with which the current church has largely lost touch.

Reformers experienced persecution for their faith; what we today think of as the comforts of home were unknown to them; their medi­cine and surgery were rudimentary. They had no social security or insurance. They lived in a world in which more than half of the adult population died young and more than half the children died in infancy. They would have been lost, had they not kept their eyes on heaven and known themselves as pilgrims traveling home to the Celestial City.

Reformers shaped our church identity, by imparting to us their perspective on the wholeness of the work of God that they called reformation. Today some conservative church members speak about orthodoxy, some about liturgy and corporate life, oth­ers about personal conversion and nurture, some about aspects of personal sanctity, and again others about central and congregational structures, many about national moral standards and about compassionate social witness. But each of these concerns get out­flanked, undermined, and ultimately trivi­alized if it is not linked with all the others. Reformers gave us a concern for all these things combined, as sustaining each other, and bearing on the honour and glory of God in His church.

Moreover, the Reformers made us aware that all doctrine is spirituality, in the sense that it has an effect on its recipients' rela­tionship or lack of relationship to God. If our doctrine does not quicken the conscience and soften the heart, it actually hardens both. If it does not encourage the commit­ment of faith, it reinforces the detachment of unbelief. If it fails to promote humility, it inevitably feeds pride.

Learning from the Reformers is an impor­tant dimension of that edifying fellowship for which the proper name is the commu­nion of saints. The great Reformers, though passed on, still speak to us through their writings, and say things to us that we badly need to hear.

Specific Lessons←⤒🔗

Here are some specific lessons we can learn:

• First, spiritual warfare made them what they were. They accepted conflict as their calling, seeing themselves as the Lord's soldier-pilgrims.
   
• Secondly, their Christianity was all-embracing, so their living was of one piece. There was no disjunction between the sacred and the secular; all creation, so far as they were concerned, was sacred, and all activities, of whatever kind, must be sanctified, that is, done to the glory of God. They integrated contemplation with action, worship with work, labour with rest, love of God with love of neighbor and of self, personal with social identity.
   
• Thirdly, we must learn lessons in the quality of their spiritual experience. In their communion with God, as Jesus Christ as central, so Holy Scripture was supreme. In their meditation on Scripture, they would seek to search and challenge their heart, set their affections to hate sin and love righteousness, and encourage themselves with God's promises. They knew that Scripture is the unalterable rule of holiness and sought to remember it always. Knowing also the dishonesty and deceitfulness of fallen hu­man hearts, they cultivated humility and self-suspicion as abiding attitudes, and examined themselves regularly for spiritual blind spots and lurking inward evils. Their discipline of self-examination by Scripture was followed by confessing and forsaking sin and renewing their gratitude to Christ for His pardoning mercy.

Knowledge and Love←⤒🔗

Hosea 4:6 says: "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge..." Hosea not merely reminded Israel of the things they knew. Rather, they no longer had that knowledge or ... if they did, it was dead knowledge. We are in need of knowledge, not merely an intellectual, but rather a living knowledge, an experiential knowledge. The Lord writes to the church in Ephesus:

This is what I have against you, that you have left your first love.Rev 3:4

The Lord writes to the church in Laodicea: 'I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot...'

So then, because you are lukewarm ... I will spew you out of my mouth.Rev 3:15, 16

The Lord reminds us of His norms for the true life of faith – to turn to Him and to find in Him communion with Christ, so that we are in Him and live out of Him. The Lord calls us to confess the true poverty of our life of faith, our poverty before God so that we find one another there in our debt before God. What does it mean when the Lord says to a church that she pretends to be rich? Does that refer to us?

Do we perhaps imagine that we are the kind of church that the Lord calls us to be? God is able of stones to raise up children unto Abraham (Matthew 3:9).

"What do I yet lack?"←⤒🔗

In a sense we have everything. We have God's Word. We have the Reformed Confessions. We are able to speak about the doc­trine of God and His revelation, about the holy Trinity, of God the Father and creation and providence, of the doctrine of sin, of the doctrine of the covenant, of the doctrine of Jesus Christ – His Person and work, of the Person and the work of the Holy Spirit, of all the aspects of the priesthood of all believers, and of the doctrine of the last things. But is this not our greatest need that we know about all that but are not able or no longer able to properly use it? Sometimes we are ashamed to sing together, to pray together, to speak together about the things of God's kingdom.

We need to train ourselves in two things: in being humble-minded and living in expecta­tion. Have we not lost both?

Augustine was the theologian of grace. He also was the theologian of pilgrimage. It is remarkable that the epistle to the Hebrews pictures pilgrimage as the heart of the life and the experience of faith. Being strangers and pilgrims was the confession, and it was enough. Our confessional treasure has been expanded. But this primary, this fundamen­tal confession may not be missing. Other­wise, the true value of this great treasure of the church will pass from us.

We have everything, but do we know how to use it? The best thing would be to empty all 'pots and pans'. God pours out His grace into an empty vessel of faith, so Calvin said. The more emptiness in us, the more the Lord is pleased to give, in order to remove our poverty.