Back to Christ, Back to the Cross

Philip C. Flores is national coordinator for Trainers of Pastors International Coalition (TOPIC) Philippines. Recently we met in Manila to discuss and plan ministry to the 41,000 undertrained pastors of the Philippines. He writes the following:

Back to Christ, Back to the Cross
by Philip C. Flores, in Evangelicals Today

The church growth movement during the last three decades of the 20th century has brought about an explosive growth of churches worldwide. Churches are growing rapidly in Asia, Africa, South America and the former Soviet Union. Consider the following statistics:

Evangelicals are growing in number, by 4.7% to 5.3%. That figure is more than three times the rate of the world population growth.

176,000 new believers are added to the church daily.

4,000 new churches are formed each week.

Once the church was predominantly Caucasian; today, 65% of the global church is composed largely of people from various other races.

Coupled with this phenomenal growth are various programs, strategies, plans and goals designed to ensure the church growth movement's success, and rightly so. But, with all this, something is still missing, something very important. The churches appear to have a blurry center.

For the past few years, I have had this growing conviction that, if the church is to affect national renewal and global transformation, it would need a new breed, a new generation of pastoral leaders. leaders who will blow the trumpet call: "Back to Christ, Back to the Cross." They will fill their churches with Christians who are both Christlike and Cross-bearing. They will, like the apostle Paul, say, "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved , .. for too long we have mea¬sured success in the ministry in terms of mega-churches-big buildings, big attendance, big cash. These big churches have become like shopping malls attracting religious consumers, church-hoppers and the curi¬ous. They are drawn to our ca¬thedrals, but not to Christ-not to the cross, me and gave himself for me" (Gal. 2:20). This is the center that I believe the church needs to regain.

For too long we have seen many of our church leaders being entertained by celebrities and champions. As a result they have become more celebrity-conscious rather than Christ-conscious. They want to become more like John Maxwell, the leadership guru. Or, like Rick Warren, the church-health specialist. Becoming more Christlike is taken for granted, if not totally overlooked.

Also, for too long we have measured success in the ministry in terms of mega-churches-big buildings, big attendance, big cash. These big churches have become like shopping malls attracting religious consumers, church-hoppers and the curious. They are drawn to our cathedrals, but not to Christ-not to the cross. The result: we have converts but not changed lives, members but not ministers, decisions, but not disciples.

The need of the hour is a new breed, a new generation of pastoral leaders-leaders who will faithfully and fearlessly call God's people to go back to the cross. Leaders who will lead the church back to its one and only center.
In their book, Reclaiming God's Original Intent for the Church, authors Wes Roberts and Glenn Marshall quoted the Cambridge Declaration of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, which in part says, "As evangelical faith becomes secularized, its interests have been blurred with those of the culture. The result is a loss of absolute values, permissive individualism, and a substitute of wholeness for holiness, recovery for repentance, intuition for truth, feeling for belief, chance for providence, and immediate gratification for enduring hope. Christ and His cross have moved from the center of our vision."

The authors also referred to Robert Webber's book, The Younger Evangelicals, where John Green, founder of a ministry to gay and lesbian street prostitutes in Chicago was quoted:

The Christian church is so enmeshed with the American culture that it cannot see the same culture is frighteningly anti-Christian.. We are made to be a light in the darkness-calling people to the road less traveled, to a costly discipleship that rejects the materialism, nationalism, militarism, racism and sexism of/he culture for the cross of Christ.

I believe that if the church is to regain its Center, we need to pray to the Lord of the harvest to raise up a new breed, a new generation of transformed pastoral leaders-leaders in whose lives Christ and the Cross are central, not just cerebral. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: "To endure the Cross is not a tragedy; it is the suffering which is the fruit of an exclusive allegiance to Jesus Christ. When it comes, it is not an accident, but a necessity. "

The apostle Paul declares, "For my part, I am going to boast about nothing but the Cross of our Master, Jesus Christ. Because of that Cross, I have been crucified in relation to the world, set free from the stifling atmosphere of pleasing others and fitting into the little patterns that they dictate .... I bear in my body scars from my service to Jesus" (Gal. 5:14,17, The Message).

Back to the Center-back to Christ and the Cross

Any center less than this is anathema to the Church

Evangelicals Today, April-May 2006 by Philip Flores