Church it’s time to get in the fight ‘Hell is coming after our Children’: Warns Anti-Sex trafficking expert

Romans 1:28 “And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.”  2 Timothy 4:3-4 For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears;  4 And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.

Important Takeaways:

  • ‘Hell Is Systemically Coming After Our Children’: Anti-Sex Trafficking Expert’s Warning About Dangers of Pornography
  • With the growing pervasiveness of pornography comes a greater comfortability with nudity at increasingly younger ages — a concerning issue for parents trying to protect their children.
  • In just one year’s time, from 2019 to 2020, the number of children ages 9-12 years old who perceive it as normal to share nude pictures and videos with each other jumped from 13% to 21%.
  • Even higher percentage of 9- to 12-year-old boys (26%) see the illegal trend as commonplace.
  • Elizabeth Fisher Good, an expert advocate against sex trafficking and founder of The Foundation United said root causes of this escalating issue is pornography. “Our children are being taught by the world, and it is not pretty,”
  • “Hell is systemically coming after our children, systemically dismantling the ability for intimacy, for family. If we don’t do something, in one decade, everything will be different — and we have the power as the church to speak to it.”
  • As a survivor of sexual abuse — first by a same-sex peer as a child and later by a worship leader — Good, a former pastor and author of “Groomed: Overcoming the Messages That Shaped Our Past and Limit Our Future,” struggled for years to open up about the ways she had been exploited. Those secrets, she said, fed a pattern of abuse that lasted for years.
  • We have to enter this conversation, lead it, speak to it intelligently and not as if it’s taboo because, you know what, your kids are on the school bus every day and whoever’s educating them is not pretending that it’s taboo.”
  • Christians, she added, “need to get in the ring and take this on.”

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Once again the Church stands on the Brink: a Perspective by Dean Dwyer

2 Timothy 4:3 “For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.

Important Takeaways:

  • The Church In The West Stands On The Brink Of Destruction
  • (Queensland, Australia) — “An open and professed disregard for religion has become the distinguishing character of the present age. Christianity is ridiculed and railed at with little reserve, and the teachers of it without any at all. There is no such thing as religion in England. If anyone speaks about religion, everybody begins to laugh. It has come to be taken for granted that Christianity is no longer a subject of inquiry, but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious. Accordingly, it is treated as if, in the present age, this were an agreed point among all persons of discernment, and nothing remained but to set it up as a principal subject for mirth and ridicule.”
  • Many might assume that the above comments were recently written in a left-leaning newspaper. Wrong. They were made in 1730’s England. Various Christian heresies were fashionable among the upper classes at the time.
  • However, a 2022 survey by Ligonier Ministries and LifeWay Research found that many American evangelical Christians now hold a concerning set of beliefs. For example, 38% considered that religious belief was a matter of personal opinion and not about objective truth.
  • Among the evangelical pastors surveyed 39% considered that there is no absolute moral truth and that each individual must determine his/her own truth
  • 37% said that having faith in general is more important than the question of in what or in whom that faith is placed
  • 30% did not agree that their salvation was based only on having accepted, by faith, Jesus Christ as their Savior!
  • From these surveys it is clear that the Church in the West stands once again on the brink of destruction – not from without, but from within. We have now reached the stage where Christianity in the UK and much of the West is once again a laughing stock, as it was in 1730s England.
  • If God were to abandon the West how could we complain, given that we have contemptuously pushed Him away so often, so publicly and so shamelessly?

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In the US are we losing our religion or failing to reach the youth: Churches continue to close their doors

Church Decline

2 Timothy 4:3 “For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.

Important Takeaways:

  • Churches are closing at rapid numbers in the US, researchers say, as congregations dwindle across the country and a younger generation of Americans abandon Christianity altogether – even as faith continues to dominate American politics.
  • About 4,500 Protestant churches closed in 2019, the last year data is available, with about 3,000 new churches opening, according to Lifeway Research.
  • It was the first time the number of churches in the US hadn’t grown since the evangelical firm started studying the topic. With the pandemic speeding up a broader trend of Americans turning away from Christianity, researchers say the closures will only have accelerated.
  • The Survey Center on American Life and the University of Chicago found that in spring 2022 67% of Americans reported attending church at least once a year, compared with 75% before the pandemic.
  • “Since the 1990s, large numbers of Americans have left Christianity to join the growing ranks of US adults who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular’,” Pew wrote.
  • by 2070 that number will drop to below 50% – and the number of “religiously unaffiliated” Americans – or ‘nones’ will probably outnumber those adhering to Christianity.
  • “A church will go through a life cycle. At some point, maybe the congregation ages out, maybe they stop reaching young families.
  • “If the church ages and doesn’t reach young people, or the demographics change and they don’t figure out how to reach the new demographic, that church ends up closing.

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Today’s State of the Church: Culture is leading the Church

Pulpit Empty Church
  • Barna: Thousands Of Pastors Have Become Leaders Of A Movement Away From God, Toward Narcissism
  • Parishioners in the United Kingdom were shocked and appalled in November to hear a University of Cambridge student pontificate during his chapel message that Jesus Christ is transgender.
  • …what’s more alarming is an increasing unfaithfulness to the Scriptures by pastors of Christian congregations across the United States.
  • A 2022 survey of 1,000 Christian pastors across seven major groupings of denominations revealed that only 37% of clergy have a Biblical worldview.
  • Among evangelical pastors surveyed, 30% said they don’t believe that their salvation is based exclusively on confessing their sins through repentance and accepting Jesus Christ as their Savior.
  • 39% of evangelical pastors reject that there is absolute moral truth and instead contend that each individual must determine their own truth.
  • 37% said that having a faith matters more than which faith you have.
  • [In Conclusion]…the prevailing worldview for 88% of Americans, Barna said, is syncretism, defined as a personalized or customized worldview dictated by an individual’s preferences, desires and subjective truth claims. “Worldview is important because you do what you believe,”
  • “Because pastors teach what they believe, many churches are becoming centers of syncretism and secular thought,” Barna continued. “Perhaps without even realizing it, thousands of pastors have become leaders of a movement away from God, toward narcissism.”

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Megachurch attendance surges as an overall belief in God shrinks to historic lows

2 Timothy 3:6,7 “They are the kind who worm their way into households and captivate vulnerable women who are weighed down with sins and led astray by various passions, 7who are always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.

Important Takeaways:

  • Churchgoing and belief in God stand at historic lows, despite a megachurch surge
  • Church membership, church attendance and belief in God all declined during the pandemic years, survey data suggest, accelerating decades-long trends away from organized worship.
  • In-person church attendance plummeted by 45 percent in the pandemic, according to an ABC News analysis.
  • At least one-fifth of Americans today embrace no religion at all.
  • The rise in “nones,”… all come at the expense of a vanishing “moderate middle” of American faith said David Campbell

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Church culture changing as attendance dips

2 Timothy 3:6,7 “They are the kind who worm their way into households and captivate vulnerable women who are weighed down with sins and led astray by various passions, 7who are always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.

Important Takeaways:

  • As attendance dips, churches change to stay relevant for a new wave of worshippers
  • American Christianity is in the midst of an identity crisis. Attendance is in steep decline, especially among millennials and Gen Z who say traditional church doesn’t speak to their realities.
  • [Some say] they’re looking for a faith community, but they’re burned out on traditional religion.
  • Pastor Chris Battle walked away from more than three decades leading Black Baptist churches and turned his attention to Battlefield Farm & Gardens in Knoxville. They grow vegetables and sell them at a farmer’s market. They also collect unsold produce from around the city and deliver it to people in public housing once a week.
  • Methodist pastor Bradley Hyde, sitting at a table sipping java while the milk steamer hisses behind the counter. “I think people were already wanting to leave church, and Covid gave them a great opportunity to say, ‘Good bye.’ I’m not the only pastor who has noticed that, but a lot of people have just not come back.”
  • Baptist Pastor Chris Battle says he used to measure the success of a church by what he calls “the BPs.”
  • “Butts in pews, bucks in the plate, baptisms in the pool, and building programs. The BPs. That’s how you grow a church, right?” he says, chuckling.
  • When he was senior pastor, the question used to be how can the church change the culture? Today, he says, it’s how do we change the culture of the church?

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Current state of Theology paints a bleak picture

2 Timothy 3:6,7 “They are the kind who worm their way into households and captivate vulnerable women who are weighed down with sins and led astray by various passions, 7 who are always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.

Important Takeaways:

  • What ‘The State of Theology’ Tells Us
  • This year’s State of Theology study’s results show that not just Americans but evangelicals in particular are increasingly muddy on core truths such as the nature and character of God, the reality of human sin, the role of the Church in the world, and the exclusivity and divinity of Jesus Christ.
  • Nearly half of evangelicals agreed that God “learns and adapts” to different circumstances, in stark contrast to the biblical doctrine of unchanging nature, or immutability;
  • 65 percent of evangelicals agreed that everyone is “born innocent in the eyes of God,” denying the doctrine of original sin, and with it, the very reason that people need salvation in the first place
  • Some 56 percent of evangelicals agreed with the idea that “God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam,” in contrast to Jesus’ words in Matthew that without Him, “no one knows the Father.”
  • When asked whether they agreed that “Jesus was a great teacher …but not God,” 43 percent of American evangelicals answered yes.
  • The State of Theology paints a bleak picture.
  • It’s worth noting that these failures are not because evangelicals have a low view of Scripture. Some 95 percent, after all, still agree with the statement that “the Bible is 100 percent accurate in all that it teaches.” The implication, then, is that they simply don’t know what it teaches, either because they haven’t been taught or they haven’t cared enough to learn.

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The Temptation to Compromise starts with staying quiet on issues of today’s culture: Will Church Leaders compromise?

Matthew 24:4, 9-10 ““See to it that no one deceives you. … They will deliver you over to be persecuted and killed, and you will be hated by all nations because of My name. At that time many will fall away and will betray and hate one another, and many false prophets will arise and mislead many”

Important Takeaways:

  • Prepare To Stand: Will Church Leaders Compromise To Avoid Persecution?
  • How could deception creep into the church, and what could it look like?
  • The messaging from our culture is that pleasure and self-fulfillment are the highest values: Follow your heart. Be authentic. Be true to yourself. In practice, this means that I do what makes me feel good. My feelings determine my own truth, and I live according to my truth.
  • Many who identify as Christian deny the exclusivity of Jesus. They think there are multiple ways to God, and many don’t think Jesus’ demands for obedience apply to them.
  • Many church leaders are now hesitant to teach on the wedge issues because it will cause division.
  • Going forward, pastors will face tremendous external pressure to compromise, and those who do will be held up by society as examples of good and acceptable Christianity.
  • Some leaders will compromise to avoid persecution. But there’s a more insidious reason because it comes from seemingly good motives—the desire to protect their ministry: If I avoid certain issues, then I’ll be able to continue my ministry, which is producing fruit and serving people. But in the end, those leaders will lose their purity and their witness.
  • Jesus warned about this. He said, “Many will fall away and will betray and hate one another” (Matthew 24:10). Deceived believers will attack faithful believers. It is going to become very messy and confusing.

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Coach Dave Daubenmire warns the Church needs to speak out

Jeremiah 5:26-31 “For among my people are found wicked men: they lay wait, as he that setteth snares; they set a trap, they catch men. As a cage is full of birds, so are their houses full of deceit: therefore they are become great, and waxen rich. They are waxen fat, they shine: yea, they overpass the deeds of the wicked: they judge not the cause, the cause of the fatherless, yet they prosper; and the right of the needy do they not judge. Shall I not visit for these things? saith the LORD: shall not my soul be avenged on such a nation as this?

Important Takeaways:

  • and the Pulpits Are Silent….
  • This commentary was originally written in 2006. Not much has changed.  We wonder why evil is flourishing.  It is worth another read.
  • Despite what the political parties would like you to believe, the problem in America is not the politicians, it is the pulpits. I hate to break the news to you, but most of America’s pulpits are filled with cowardly men.
  • While our nation is killing babies, our schools are indoctrinating Christian-kids.
  • Secular Humanism, and Truth has fallen in our streets. Our preachers are attending church-growth seminars, using “self-help” books to supplement the Bible
  • Legislation is introduced to remove the rights of parents and the pulpits are silent.
  • Children are told they can become the opposite sex and the pulpits are silent.
  • Tolerance trumps Truth and the pulpits are silent.

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Approaching the Tipping Point: Eric Metaxas; Urgent Wake Up Call to the American Church

Author and radio talk show host Eric Metaxas warns that America is fast approaching a dangerous cultural tipping point, although he says it’s not too late to reverse course. In his new book, Letter to the American Church, Metaxas writes of parallels between today’s America and pre-World War II Germany.

“It is the silence of the American church on a host of issues today that many people say, ‘Oh, that’s not a gospel related issue. I don’t want to be divisive. I don’t want to be political.’ It is that silence which directly parallels the silence of German Christians.
in the early thirties, and it led to the satanic evil of the Nazi takeover of that culture where they crushed the church.”

He believes if only another few thousand Protestant pastors had spoken out, the Nazis would not have succeeded. Instead, their silence doomed the German church and nation while leading to the Holocaust.

“This was not biblical. This was not what God was calling them to do,” Metaxas explained. “But the church hesitated enough and kept silent enough, for long enough for the Nazis to utterly take over and really do things so evil that we look back and
we think, ‘well, that can never happen again.’ And what I am saying in this book is that exactly the same thing is happening again today because of the silence of the American church.”

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