This is a small extract from Jack Deere's book "Surprised by the voice of God"
We all agreed that evangelism was an important aspect of the work of the kingdom. At that time, our church had anywhere from four hundred to five hundred people attending on Sundays. We asked ourselves how many people had been led to Christ through the ministry of our church in the last eighteen months. We could only come up with four names, and the leadership of the church had led none of these people to Christ. It was almost as if they had accidentally fallen into the kingdom of God and ended up in our church. We concluded that if our church didn't exist, there would be no great loss of evangelism in our city. Then we asked ourselves how many people had been physically healed through the ministry of our church in the past eighteen months. After all, healing was important in the New Testament. It was certainly a sign of the coming of the kingdom. The Lord commanded the elders of the church to pray for the sick so that he could heal them (James 5:14-16). Although we had begun to pray for the sick in our church, at this point we couldn't count very many people who had been healed through our prayers. We concluded that that the healing ministry of the Holy Spirit would suffer no great loss in our city if our church no longer existed. Then we asked ourselves how many people no longer had to take antidepressants or no longer visit the psychiatrist's office on a regular basis because of the ministry of our church. We couldn't count anyone here. We could, however, count a few who had started taking antidepressants. We couldn't count any failing marriages we had saved. But we could count some we had lost. Next came addictions to drugs, alcohol, and sex. From our private counseling sessions we all knew people in our church who were struggling with these sins, but none of us could point to one person who had been conclusively delivered from one of these sins. We also realized that if our church ceased to exist there would be no missionary who would be forced to come home from the mission field, nor would there be any significant loss in the social care programs for the poor in our own city. We were forced to conclude that without the existence of our church the kingdom of God in our city would suffer no appreciable loss in evangelism, in the healing of bodies, spirits, emotions, marriages, in the care of the poor, or in the support of missionaries in other lands...."What! What have you three guys been doing?" the elders asked. "Praying" [about their church]...I realized that the church I had built had more in common with a country club than it did with the church of the New Testament.
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