What Are the Biggest Challenges Facing the Evangelical Church in 2016?
In a recent
Ask Pastor John segment, John Piper shared his thoughts on the biggest challenges facing the evangelical church this year. Here is an excerpt:
...if you start at the beginning, the first and great commandment says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37). So I would think, since that is the first commandment, that is the first challenge in every generation. Does the church and does the world love God with all their heart and all their soul and all their mind and all their strength? ...if we don’t know God, we can’t love God.
Our worship to glorify God must be based on what we have seen of God, what we know of God, what he has revealed of himself. If we are just worshiping a haze, God is not getting a lot of glory from the warm feelings that we are having in our hearts because of the ignorance of not being in our heads because of the haze over our lives.
I have got this picture in my head of somebody who runs up to me on the road and says, “Here is $10,000. Please go put it in my bank. Here is my pin number, and here is my account number.” And I say, “I don’t even know you. What are you doing?” He just says, “I trust you.” I say, “Why do you trust me?” He says, “Oh, I don’t know. I feel inside like I should trust you.” My response is not to be honored. I feel like this guy is a nut.
However, if he runs up to me and says, “Here is $10,000 in cash. Please, here is my account number. Here is my pin number. Would you deposit it for me?” And I say, “Look, I don’t even know you. Why do you trust me?” He says, “Oh, I know you. We work in the same building. I have been watching you for a year. You are trustworthy. I will trust you, because I know you.” Then I feel honored.
That is the way it is with God. If we say, “Oh, I am just coming to God. I trust him. I don’t have any reasons for trusting him. I don’t need that theology stuff.” God thinks we are nuts. We are not honoring him. We are honoring a haze. And so knowledge really matters underneath the commandment. You have got to love God with all your heart and soul.
So today I think the biggest challenge is: Do people know God? Do people have a knowledge that is trustworthy? Therefore a huge issue is: What is the role of the Bible in the church today and is it trustworthy and are people basing their lives on it in their preaching on it? Are they getting the whole counsel of God so that they can love the whole God?
What Does this Mean for Children's Ministry?
We are excited to have Pastor John and others join us to help us explore the topic of teaching the whole counsel of God to the next generations at the
Children Desiring God National Conference,
April 14-16 in Indianapolis. Our
Keynote Sessions will include:
- Declaring the Whole Counsel of God to the Next Generation // Mark Vroegop
- Exploring the Fullness of the Whole Counsel of God // Bruce Ware
- Holding Fast to the Whole Counsel of God Under Pressure to Conform //Albert Mohler
- Believing the Whole Counsel of God: How Our Children Can Know the Bible Is True // John Piper
- Persevering in the Whole Counsel of God // David Michael
We hope you can
join us in learning how to teach the whole counsel of God to the children in your church so they can wholeheartedly love God in response to this knowledge!
Register by
11:59pm (CST),
January 31 to receive
Early Bird Pricing!
