Classic Summer 2020: How to Shrink Your Church

Welcome to No Compromise Radio a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ based on the theme in Galatians 2 verse 5 where the Apostle Paul said, But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the Divine Trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio a ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth. Still a little stuffy today, and it's not from the New England pollen. It's just I got some weird, funky thing on the airplane.

I knew when I sat down next to that guy who was sick, thought I'm going to get sick. You know, there's nothing you can do about it. The flight's full, and there you sit. And so, regularly and often when I get sick, I think to myself, Mike, have a good theology of sickness.

That is to say, alright, be glad that one day you'll get a glorified body. Be glad that the reason for your sickness, ultimately the fall of Adam, consequently my own sinful nature, has made a way for sickness to be in the world, paved a way, bulldozed a way.

Not all sin is going to manifest itself in sickness. I want to say it the other way around. Not all sickness is because of personal sin. You know, you were complaining, and therefore you got sick. But some of it can be.

And so, it's always a good question to ask yourself, I'm sick, and am I getting disciplined? Is this for a disciplinary reason by my Heavenly Father? So, when you are sick, it's no fun. But when you're sick, you're supposed to drink lots of liquids.

And so, here's Pete's coffee for you. I heard Steve Cooley, when he filled in for me, admirably, over the summer, that he knew it was my desk because I had my coffee mug, my Do Not Be Surprised coffee mug, that's all grody on the bottom.

Let's see, I want the grody, because then it gives you some enzymes in your gizzard so you don't get sick as much. Oh, see, it must not work. There goes my pragmatism. Miscellaneous today. Number one, I received a letter.

And so, I want to read part of the letter. And it's actually a nice letter. I appreciate the letter. It's dated back in August. It's from Lori. Lori, thanks for writing. I, Pastor Mike A., I read your book, Things That Go Bump in the Church.

I enjoyed reading it, especially the chapter on hell, and that God is in hell, shows His omnipresence. And she's referring to Revelation 14. And I wrote the book with Byron Yawn and Clint Archer. And those two men are good amigos when it comes to writing and ministry and promoting the truth.

However, Lori says, but you know what I like about this letter? It's just a Christian way, a gentleman's way, a gentlewoman's way, of expressing her thoughts and opinions, and we can differ on things.

And, you know, so often today, if people are not in complete agreement, then there has to be a rub somehow, or an ad hominem somehow. And so, Lori, I commend you. You talked about alcohol consumption, she said.

I'm blaming boo. That's Byron's chapter. I'll take the credit for the commendation on the hell chapter since I wrote that. But this is all Byron Yawn's fault. Now, of course, I'm jesting. My role in the book was to write one-third of it, and to interact with the publisher and the, I don't even know what you call it, literary agents.

And I was to oversee the project. So I have to take credit. Somebody showed me there was a typo in there, too. Patience of Job, and we put the Patience of Moses or something. Patience of John. So I don't think that was our fault.

Wait a second, I think that was Glenn's fault. Patience of John. I think John the Apostle, he had a lot of patience. John the Baptist, he had a lot of patience. You said, page 54, the Bible says, It's allowable, that is, alcohol consumption, and also it's a matter of conscience, from one person to the next.

I would challenge you to read Cracking the Wine Case. Didn't they just do that in Napa with the earthquake just a couple weeks ago? Cracking the Wine Case by Scott Smith, Amazon. You'll never look at the subject the same again.

People can misinterpret the Hebrew word for wine, onen. Sincerely, Laurie. And so, Laurie, I'm thankful for this. You even gave me a recommendation. You should have sent me the book for free, then I probably would have read it.

But I'm thankful that you would write the tenor, the tone, the kind of way that you write. I really appreciate it. Glad you got the book. Glad you read it. And this is Byron's email. We've talked about alcohol some on the show over the years.

As most of you know, I don't drink alcohol unless it's in Nyquil form, I guess. I also drink alcohol if it's served in communion. But recreationally, I don't drink. I often want to drink. Maybe it's an old association of sitting together around a table and enjoying fellowship.

Some of it's a cultural issue when I'm in the European culture, and everyone's sitting around having a glass of wine and beer. And it's part of just what they do, even as Christians. And my generalization for overseas missionary travel is, if you're an evangelical, if you're born again, if you're a real Christian in India, you don't drink alcohol.

And that's just kind of the M .O. I mean, nine times out of ten, if I meet a Christian, I know they don't drink in India. And so, when I meet someone in Europe, Switzerland or Germany or Poland or someplace, nine times out of ten, if they're Christian, they do drink.

The other day, I was even reading Psalm 104 about God giving a wine. And so, we won't revisit that issue. Although, if I get the book someday for free, I would read it. And I don't think Christians are wise when they're promoting drinking.

I don't think Christians are wise when they do a lot of drinking of hard alcohol. I don't think it wise. You know, you don't get sued, you just say, in my opinion. In my opinion. So, you have to be careful.

And for me, my father's life, my grandfather's, my other grandfather, my mother-in-law, my father-in-law, there is a long, tragic line of the misuse of alcohol. And so, I am careful. And I know my personality.

I just can't hop on the bike and ride for 20 minutes. I have to go for a long time. I just can't have a little coffee. I have to have a lot. And the list goes on. And so, we want to think Christianly about this.

Clint Archer actually wrote a great article. I don't know what it's called, but do some Google searching. A great article on this topic. And so, we just have to think through it clearly. I think many of us come from fundamentalist backgrounds.

Fundamentalist Bible college kind of backgrounds. Tent revival backgrounds. Keswick movement backgrounds. King James only backgrounds. Bible temple tabernacles. And so, we, in those situations, a lot of the times, we just hurt a lot of moralism.

Don't do this and don't do that. I remember when my son was at a private Christian school, a King James only school. They had like a little preach off. And so, the girls couldn't do the preach off. They could do poetry or sing or give a speech or something.

But the boys, the little boys could do preach offs. And they asked me, the school did, if I would be a judge. And so, I voted my son number one. I think I probably ended up wanting to vote for him number one.

Because he was the only one that really talked about Jesus. And, of course, I helped him with that. And he might not have figured that out on his own. But most of the other young boys talked about the dangers of dancing.

And the dangers of drinking. And the dangers of smoking. Stuff like that. And so, anyway, I just am thankful for the tenor. People can disagree with me all day long. That just comes with it, for the most part.

We have listeners that agree with us. I guess, otherwise, they wouldn't listen. So, anyway, Lori, thank you for that. Item number two. How to shrink your church in one easy step. By the way, before I forget, you can write us at info and nocompromisedradio .com.

You can write me at mike at nocompromisedradio .com. And we're still having room for you if you'd like to go to Israel. Don't be afraid. Oh, Israel's chaotic. It's always chaotic. A flight's chaotic. You might sit next to a sick person, for all I know.

And we're going to go February 17th through the 25th. It's about three grand. You can look online. I think it's a hair more than that. Depending on how many people go, the price can go down. Anyway, that's from Boston with a 3-day extension to Jordan the 25th through the 28th that you can go if you prefer and want to pay the extra money to go to Petra and Jordan.

So, in Jordan. All right. How to shrink your church in one easy step. This I printed back on the 22nd. It was August 21st from TheFederalist .com. Now, I normally don't quote or interact with The Federalist very often.

If it were Federalist .com, I might, but The Federalist. See? Then somehow I begin to think with a definite article. The. The Federal. Whenever I think of The Federal, I think of Romans 5. And Genesis 2 and 3.

How to shrink your church in one easy step. So, here's the amazing thing that Alexander Griswold says. Our Griswold. He said, how to shrink your church in one easy step. Here you go. You ready? By now, we've all heard the refrain that U .S. churches need liberalize their teachings on sexuality and homosexuality or rapidly decline.

The logic behind the argument is simple. More and more Americans are embracing homosexuality and same-sex marriage, including growing numbers of religious millennials. So long as churches remain the face of opposition to gay marriage, those churches will shrink into irrelevancy when gay marriage, in quotations, in parentheses now, inevitably we are told, close parentheses, parentheses, becomes a settled political issue.

So, in other words, the author in The Federalist, Andrew, says, since so many people are changing their views, the church better change their views or you're going to have a smaller pool from which to attract followers.

Now, here's the amazing thing. This is The Federalist. This is not, you know, World Magazine. This is not Reformation 21. These arguments often see church acceptance of homosexuality as a carrot as well as a stick.

It isn't so much that denouncing homosexuality will drive people away from the church, but that embracing it will also lead people into church. LGBT individuals and their supporters, many of whom hold a dim view of religion after a decades-long culture war, will reconsider church if denominations remove their restrictions on gay marriage and ordination.

But a number of Christian denominations have already taken significant steps toward liberalizing their stances on homosexuality and marriage. And now he's going to tell us what happens to those churches.

So the churches that used to say this is sex outside of marriage between a man and a woman is sinful, sex inside a marriage between a man and a woman is God-ordained and good and healthy. When people have moved toward the new stance in our society today in the Western world, it's interesting.

What do you think is going to happen? What has happened? The Federalist says, and the evidence so far seems to indicate that affirming homosexuality is hardly a cure for membership woes. On the contrary, every major American church that has taken steps towards liberalism or the liberalization of sexual issues has seen a steep decline in membership.

That is fascinating. Now, of course, since this is No Compromise Radio, we are not after the growth of the church by numbers outside of God regenerating people by His sovereign will through frail men proclaiming the gospel and frail men and women evangelizing.

We want the church to grow, right? Don't we want that? Don't we want people to get saved? We do. And we also want the church to grow when it comes to maturation, when it comes to transformation, when it comes to growing in the likeness of Christ, saying no to sin more often and yes to righteousness more often as we look to the Lord with eyes of faith.

Of course, we're after that church growth. But we want the church growth through biblical means. That is, through the fidelity of the leadership and fidelity of individual Christians as they continue to just do what God says through simple means by the preaching of the gospel, through foolish means, through foolish messages.

That is to say, Israel's Messiah was crucified. And that is foolishness to the Gentiles, the Greeks, and it is a scandal. It is a stumbling block to the Jews. Some people like the Jews, they want some sign.

The Jews want signs and people act Jewish when they want signs to have Christianity prove to them or deism prove to them. And that people think it's foolish when you stand up every week and say, let me tell you about the Messiah, the Deliverer, the Savior of Israel and mankind.

And he was lowly and he was born in a manger. And his dad was a carpenter and he lived in obscurity. And he came into Jerusalem on a lowly animal and they crucified him. So that's stuff we want to make sure we continue to do and the Lord will bless.

But in the article, How to Shrink Your Church in One Easy Step, Alexander Griswold says the Episcopalian Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, ELCA, United Church of Christ, UCC, the Presbyterian Church, USA, have all seen significant decreases in church membership.

And he thinks it's directly proportional to their stance on sexuality. So how to shrink your church as an easy step? Just capitulate to the modern demands. As the modern world yells and bellows and screams for tolerance, be tolerant of everything and everyone except Christianity and her propositional truths about the exclusivity of Christ and salvation.

And so you just need to water everything down. The church has to catch up to the age of the world and where the world is. And then things will be better. But the article, and he gives interesting illustrations with, for instance, Gene Robinson, the first openly gay non-celibate man to be consecrated as a bishop in the Episcopal Church, 2003, and having blessing ceremonies for gay couples in 2009.

It says here, in 2002, the number of baptized U .S. members of the Episcopal Church stood at 2 .32 million. By 2012, it had fallen to 1 .89 million, a decline of 18%. Isn't that amazing? And then Sunday attendance had fallen by 24 in the same time frame.

Very fascinating. The ELCA Church, similarly, the author talks about a decrease in membership that is increasing. From 1987 to 2009, it was a .62 decrease average in membership. But the author says after the liberalization of the ELCA's stance on sexuality, membership declined a whopping 5 .95 in 2010 and 5 in 2011.

So, at No Compromise Radio, and hopefully at your church as well and at your home, you're not a pragmatist. You don't say, well, if we do this, then such and such will happen. The number one reason why we ought not to affirm something outside the biblical definition of marriage is because then our church will shrink.

That's not the reason. But truth does matter. And there are corollaries to truth and what we believe and antithetical thinking. And so we find it very interesting when I say we, it's me. Why do people talk that way?

We here at the radio station. There's nobody here except me. I almost brought my dog in. Her poor back leg hurts. She hurt her front leg jumping. Her little paw is all swollen. And then her back leg from an injury of about eight years ago, she sometimes favors that.

And so the other day she was favoring her paw and it was swollen. And so I've just given her some anti-inflammatory stuff for dogs. And she was limping on three legs, but she could get around. Then for some reason this morning, I don't know if it's arthritis or it's a change of weather.

It's going to be an earthquake here or what. Her back leg doesn't work now either. And so I just set her outside to go to the bathroom and she just falls over. You know, if you have four legs and you are missing one, you kind of got the tripod deal going.

But if you've only got two and the only two work are on the same side, it's humpty-dumpty. So I don't know what I'm going to... I was almost going to bring her today because I know she just lay here and not bother me during the studio time.

Mike Avendroth, No Compromise Radio. What else do I have here? From The Independent. Today is kind of strange news from places you'd never imagine, right? This was back in June, though, and I had printed this out from The Independent .co .uk.

So from our friends over at Great Britain. My guess is Scotland will stay with Great Britain this vote, but eventually it's probably going to happen. So who knows what happens? Maybe there'll be... I don't know.

How's that going to play out? You can go find some YouTubes if you want to go to the No Compromise Radio YouTube site. Twitter is now amped up. For a long time, I never was going to tweet, and I always condemned people who did.

Well, okay, that's a little exaggeration. I didn't condemn them, but I just thought, you know, how self-promoting is that? How, you know, I'm going to tweet things. And I still think to this day when people tweet, oh, this is what I had for lunch.

This is what I'm going to do this afternoon at the mall. I just don't get those. But I'm a man who's sinful as well, and I have my own hobgoblins of inconsistencies as well as the next. Maybe if you put a picture on there of what you had, and it was some weird thing, right?

You're in the amazing race, and it's some kind of weird thing. By the way, I just noticed Bethany Hamilton and her husband are going to be in the amazing race. So we always root for people as a family.

And so I think we're going to have to root. I mean, my daughters love Bethany Hamilton. And actually, after she spoke at the White House not that long ago, I was happy with Bethany Hamilton with what she said.

I'm not happy she goes to churches to preach, that kind of thing. But I don't think she, I don't know if she'd know the difference or not, but she knows to get up and talk about Jesus when the president's there and a bunch of other people at the White House more than some other international apologist would do.

The Myth of Free Will and the Limits of Human Choice

Free will, according to the Independent, could be the result of background noise in the brain, study suggests. So, finally, we have a scientific proof to back up this idol of free will, that God has done everything He could do, and the fall has affected maybe your mind and your emotions and your thinking and machinations and imaginations, but you've got this island of righteousness that's unaffected by the fall called the will.

Now, if you think the will as a responsibility, as a duty, well, then I would agree with you, but let's not call it free will. The term is vacuous. The term is void. Basically, the term brings into question the free will of God.

Who's got more free will, God or the person? The person's will is bound always to their nature, and so the unbelieving person has a nature of depravity and corruption and enmity with God. That's their nature.

That's their nature, so their will can only make choices in accordance with that nature. And so, if you want to say free will because your will is tied to the nature, then the second you think about nature, then you're going to realize that nature is bound and blind and deaf and corrupt and enslaved.

2 Timothy 2 makes it clear. Enslaved to do Satan's will. That's the unbeliever. Romans 6, you're either a slave to sin or a slave to Christ. Unbelievers are a slave to sin. Slave to the world system. Ephesians 2, verses 1 and 2.

So, I like it. I think it's kind of funny, free will. I know they're not trying to promote sovereign grace versus free will, but Antonia Malloy, on June 21st of 2014, with a subtitle, Scientist at the University of California, Davis, that bastion of conservativism, found that decisions could be predicted based on patterns of brain activity.

The concept of free will, the article says, could be little more than the result of background noises in the brain. It has previously been suggested that our perceived ability to make autonomous choices is an illusion.

Yeah, because if you're an evolutionist, that's what you have to think. There's no real reality. And now scientists from the Center for Mind and Brain Control, oh, excuse me, I misread that. Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis, have found that free will may actually be the result of electrical activity in the brain.

Well, that's interesting. I don't know what to say. I'm speechless. The cue to look left or right appeared at random intervals, so the volunteers could not consciously or unconsciously prepare for it.

They did this little study, look at the screen, make a decision, look to the left or right. When a cue symbol appeared, make your decision. Background noise, predict the outcome of the decision. So, see, I'm sold.

That's a done deal. That's no compromise style for you. Well, my name is Mike Abendroth, No Compromise Radio. You can pull up the iTunes. If you're listening to WVNE 760, we're thankful for that. And if you don't have a home church, we are at 307 Lancaster Street in West Boylston.

Services at 8 .30 and at 11. I know this trailer at the end is wrong. But 8 .30 and 11, we'd love to see you. Our 6 p .m. on Sunday nights. God bless you. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church. Firmly committed to unleashing the life-transforming power of God's Word through verse-by-verse exposition of the sacred text. Please come and join us.

Our service times are Sunday morning at 10 .15 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400. The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.