I know a person who often speaks up in a study class I’m in; this person is considerably older than I am, and wiser; but the things they say make even the study teacher roll their eyes. There is no doubt this person is a Christian, but their idea of how God is and what He can do is severely warped.
As our little study group was discussing the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, proving scientifically that evolution is false, the person stood up and began to speak out in agreement that everything is wearing down and not “evolving” to a better level of existence- “Just look at all the humans dying earlier, culture getting secularized, economy losing momentum, plants not growing as well, food making us fatter, the sun burning out, and even God’s power.”
Say whaaaa?
While I can’t agree with the logic of some of those points, and a few are matter of opinion, the final example made me turn and look at the speaker with an eyebrow raised.
This person went on to explain that they remember street preachers saving entire neighborhoods and going to the Billy Graham crusade and seeing thousands of conversions. “You just don’t see that anymore… God’s hand is leaving His people.”
While I’m not speculating if God’s hand is, indeed, “leaving His people”, I do find it odd and wrong to measure God with physical laws.
What are your thoughts on God’s power? Has it changed? Is His power diminishing? In what way? How would you explain the decline of “conversions”? 
I’d imagine there’s a lot of factors. When it comes to the decline of mass conversions at staged events, I’m inclined to think that part of the issue is that each successive generation is exposed to more and more advertising, so it just isn’t as easy to manipulate a large crowd all at once with a few singers and a sweaty preacher running up and down a stage and shouting.
If you want to talk about the possibly related question of why so many churches are struggling, that’s a bit more complicated, but I blame (1) pietism and an obsession with “spiritual issues” to the detriment of concrete issues, (2) antinomianism — a basic disregard and eve disdain for God’s laws in the Old and New Testaments, (3) quietism — a belief that the believer’s principal duty is just to show up for church, (4) underfunding due to lack of insistence on the tithe, (5) institutional timidity and a desire not to offend due to underfunding, (6) tolerance toward public schooling, (7) belief in the myth of religious and politiical neutralities, (8) fear that hard work will somehow destroy happiness, (9) television, (10) birth control, (11) overly democratic church governance, and last but certainly not least (12) an eschatology of defeat.
If these twelve issues get dealt with, I think we’d again see a church on the march, visibly powerful and changing culture. But all twelve are going to take a lot of work — institutional inertia doesn’t change overnight.
People aren’t responding to the power of the gospel because we are preaching to them without making them see their need or making them realize they have a problem. The church has a very reputation out there today, too many people saying too many things. It’s like the Republican candidate mess we’re in: lots of people, too many options, split population on what direction to take. So, the average lost person sees the confusion and automatically thinks “Peace? Love? Look at all this crap and division. Look at all the hypocrisy. I don’t want that.”
We aren’t making the gospel real because we don’t speak their language: the language of science. Science hasn’t “killed” God, but the church has allowed themselves to be shoved into a corner. We should be keeping up with the culture, not being of, but keeping up. We need to be more aware of what’s going on. We can’t cut ourselves off and rely on the power of the gospel alone. You’ve got to make that power real and understandable to them. Remember Acts 17 and 2 and learn from those examples. We can’t sit in the pews week after week listening to “God is
love.” How can that be applied to someone who believes God is not love, God lets bad things happen, or that God doesn’t exist? We have got to teach our people how to live Biblically and not so secularly. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the mediocrity that the average American Christian has fallen to. While teaching the proper foundations and the right ideas and the way of life in accordance to God word, we can easily see both reform in the church and cultural redemption.
But the church has issues of division- they’re too weak, too strong, too small, too big, too diverse, too plain, too indecisive, too eager, too young, too old, too-too. We have got to get back to basics and plan out a strategic plan. We can’t have a couple preachers hold those street meetings because people today are tough. They are used to mind-mushing cultural-soaking fun and entertainment. When some guy in a suit gets up and talks about damnation and hell kids laugh. I see it all the time myself. Kids don’t get the language of a century ago because they are taught from culture, public school, and their peers that new is better and their parents (and hence parent’s beliefs) are dumb, outdated, and uncool.
We often lose sight of what we really should be doing- reaching souls for eternity, not just rescuing immoral youth from a life of destruction.
God’s power isn’t diminishing, we are just losing sight of a glorious hope in a highly industrialized society where hope and comfort abound. In other words, God isn’t unfaithful. We’re faithless. We’re not thinking. As you have already stated in many other posts.
You’d make a good apologetics writer.
Good day.
Thank you.
God can’t lose his power because he’s not fallen like we are. Things that we take for granted everyday, such as laws of science, clothes, meat, toe stubbings, gas stations, and other things, have all come about as a result of the fall. But God isn’t of the fall.
This makes me wonder how many others are out there thinking like this. Thanks for posting again. Been wondering if you were still blogging.