“Another cause back of our top-heavy and ugly over-organization is fear. Churches and societies founded by saintly men with courage, faith and sanctified imagination appear unable to propagate themselves on the same spiritual level beyond one or two generations.
The spiritual fathers were not able to sire others with courage and faith equal to their own. The fathers had God and little else, but their descendants lose their vision and look to methods and constitutions for the power their hearts tell them they lack. Then rules and precedents harden into a protective shell where they can take refuge from trouble. It is always easier and safer to pull in our necks than to fight things out on the field of battle.
In all our fallen life there is a strong gravitational pull toward complexity and away from things simple and real. There seems to be a kind of sad inevitability back of our morbid urge toward spiritual suicide. Only by prophetic insight, watchful prayer and hard work can we reverse the trend and recover the departed glory.”
~ A.W. Tozer
Rethinking Hell
As a PK of many generations, and observing the ministries of the pastors and missionaries with whom we associated, it appeared that success was met with this attitude: “Hmmm, that went really well. What did WE do right? We did this, this and this. So lets make those things into a formula and repeat them over and over and then God is guaranteed to repeat HIS performance and we will have the same exciting results again and again.” So the formula was repeated but instead of success everybody was bored and there were no thrilling results. But nobody ever learned. Instead the prescribed formulas were repeated and the pastors and leaders yelled at everybody for not trying HARD enough to repeat the pattern exactly as it had been performed the first time. And so, until the ministry died utterly and completely (and most of the members had drifted off in search of churches where the members were properly performing the formulas) everybody invested themselves in trying to repeat that first success over and over again, all the while singing perpetual praises of the Good Old Days when things were as they should be and we USED to do and be what we were SUPPOSED to do and be before we all became such wretched sinners. And all the pastors and missionaries I knew spent most of their time wondering what they were doing wrong and felt like failures.
Excellent Tozer excerpt.
Here are 2 amazing authors and I love them both. I have read all of Viola books. Brilliant! He is a gifted man. The Christian live is not about having things our way and getting what we want but to be a mirror reflection of Him for all the world to see, not only individually but corporately and in this it will take a lot of dying to ourselves so Christ can have more of his way. His strength is made perfect in our weakness for I can do nothing with out him and I know this for a fact, he shows this to me every day.
Frank, thanks for sharing this quote. It resonates deeply. In sharing this quote out with others, the latter portion of it reminded me of 2 Corinthians 11:3: “But I am afraid that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds will be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.”
As an aside, I re-listened to your podcast on the Kingdom of God with Nicole on a recent drive, enjoying it all over again. I’m curious, did you ever read George Eldon Ladd’s book, “The Gospel of the Kingdom”?
Thank you for all you do, brother, as always. You are a great blessing to the body.
Yes, it’s a classic, though rather academic. Thanks for the kind words.
This quote is so utterly convicting and challenging especially this part –
The spiritual fathers were not able to sire others with courage and faith equal to their own. The fathers had God and little else, but their descendants lose their vision and look to methods and constitutions for the power their hearts tell them they lack. Then rules and precedents harden into a protective shell where they can take refuge from trouble. It is always easier and safer to pull in our necks than to fight things out on the field of battle.
We so desperately need a fresh infilling of the Holy Spirit coupled with the reality of our utter dependence on the Life of Christ within in order to truly be salt and light within our own families, communities and society at large.
I am reminded of Acts 4:31, “After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.”
I see a deep need in my own life and the body of Christ at large especially in this hour for a fresh movement of the Holy Spirit producing a bold presentation of Jesus Christ.
Thank you for posting this it really stirred me.
What a great quote from Tozer!
I grew up in a main line church in which all forms of church behavior and ritual were strictly codified…
Only later when I read the history of the church did I realize it had been founded by a couple of “rebels” who were so on fire for Jesus that they broke nearly every church convention of their time…
“Departed glory” indeed!
Sadly, there is nothing in your short block which deals with your subject and I looked forward to reading it.
I’ve dealt with it extensively in “From Eternity to Here,” “God’s Favorite Place on Earth,” “Reimagining Church,” and “Jesus Manifesto.” https://www.frankviola.org/books – Tozer’s words are the perfect preface for those four books. Hence why I resonate with them so strongly.