The Winds of War Within

It's been several years since my last blog post.  That tells me two things: 1) Life has been insanely busy and 2) I've not been processing the deeper issues and concerns of my life.  By profession I am a mental health therapist, and writing is my own personal therapy. So to see a two year gap from the last post to now is revealing.

So prepare for the deluge of recent thoughts and concerns that have led me here to this keyboard tonight....looking for some way to just process through my own thoughts and feelings.

From the time I was saved at 18 years old, the Church has been as integral a part of my life as my blood relatives. I went through several growth spurts of understanding of what it meant to be a part of a body of believers.  I also wrestled and struggled through misconceptions about the church as well.  Some I still wrestle with to this day, but through it all-- abandoning the church was -- and never will be-- an option.

Through the years, my understanding of the what the church is (and its mission) has evolved to different levels of understanding. Some are far away from my early understandings of church and yet others are still strangely familiar and comforting.  The most revolutionary conclusion I came to as I matured in the faith is that church has nothing to do with a brick and mortar building where people congregate for corporate worship!  Church is a lifestyle you live in community with other believers-- not a place you go.  It is accountability, it is being willing to be teachable as well as to be corrected.  Church can often be experienced from house to house and in fellowship. It can be experienced inside the counseling office when a client asks you to pray for them in their area of struggle. It can be experienced when God calls you to stand in the gap in an area of injustice and you have to be willing to take a few hits so that a situation truly gets the attention that it needs.  There are times that walking with Jesus can be warm and fuzzy.  There are other times where He asks you to flip a few tables with Him. There are times to teach and time to rebuke...but at all times it must be done in love.  Some days we win. Some days we lose. But as long as we remain teachable, consistently seeking the empowering of the Holy Spirit, and willingness to walk in faith-- God will consistently move us out of our comfort zones.

I have been dealing with some issues over the last several months that have significantly alerted me to the fact there has been a shift-- a shift I cannot quite put a finger on yet. But something in my spirit has definitely been called to attention. I pray for wisdom and discernment. I am constantly reminded that we battle not with flesh and blood but with principalities and evil rulers and authorities of a demonic nature-- spiritual warfare.

I was recently listening to an audio book titled Breakout Churches. The Baptist General Convention spends great time and resources studying trends and patterns in local churches and then begins to draw conclusions from the data. This book was a result of one of those studies.  It focused on the decline of the American church and how more and more millennials are finding the church irrelevant-- even among believers.  Millennial believers are 100% relationship focused. They desperately want to serve a good cause-- but they don't necessarily see the current way church is done as the best ways of accomplishing their ministry goals and callings-- so they just don't go to the local church.  The research is showing that when churches take on some drastic paradigm shifts in how they communicate and carry out the mission of the church-- that millennials are ready to show up! They just want to be part of something significant that will ultimately change their communities and the world.  Strangely enough-- the very mission of the Gospel message! These breakout churches that were once declining are now growing and thriving and making disciples and changing their communities.

An interesting thing I have noticed over my years as a counselor is how absolutely comfortable I have become around the broken and bruised soldiers in the body of Christ.  It is not that I am content to leave them there-- but I am very comfortable meeting them where they are, no strings attached, no agendas. I hear heart wrenching stories on a daily basis. I have learned how to professionally keep an emotional distance so I am not consumed in the other person's pain and still maintain objectivity to be able to help them navigate their circumstances. But I would not be human if I were completely unmoved by the pain and heartache I see on a consistent basis.  I think God has gifted most counselors with an abundance of compassion, tempered with the ability to tell the truth in love-- which often brings a sting of pain.

One of the issues that I have been dealing with at the counseling center in our small rural community in west Texas is that many of my adolescent clients are dealing with extreme levels of bullying at school that are leaving them feeling that suicide is a good option.  The number of clients kept growing with this same problem.  Then I began to get random calls from people in the community facing this with their own children. I had another mental health facility in town tell me they were experiencing the same thing at their center as well. I began doing some research, talking to parents, talking to school administrators, even held a town hall meeting on the issue with tremendous results. The bottom line is that we have a pretty severe problem in our small west Texas town with bullying.

As the momentum was building and I began to hold support groups for parents and students, I was met with great opposition from school administrators who preferred to cling to the story of "we don't have a problem with bullying in our school" even as I worked with several students each week who teetered on the edge of suicide due to the bullying they were experiencing.  I even encountered resistance from some local church leaders.  I was becoming more and more baffled at the dissonance surrounding this issue.  The missionary in side me just wanted to shout at the top of my lungs, "Look at the fields right here in our back yard-- they are ready for the harvest!!" But alas-- I was told we needed to be about the mission of the church.

Our community had a few mission trips where they sent missions teams to a town just an hour a way to minister to the needs of the people there. We sent missions teams to another country to minister and help build a church there if a foreign land.  And all the while some local churches here in our small town did not see the relevance or need to help what is right here before our very eyes.  I am still haunted by the student who said to me, "Dawn, if it takes a suicide to make them pay attention to the problem -- I'll take one for the team."

I am struggling here, friends.  In the core of my being.... I cannot wrap my mind around how helping repair a church BUILDING in a town over fits in with the mission of the church, but helping suicidal students in our own town is not a mission of the church.  The sanctity of life should always be a mission of the church.

I don't know what the answer is. I wholeheartedly believe in regional and world missions--- but I just wonder if it doesn't break the heart of God for us to go overseas but yet refuse to cross the street in our town. People can claim that we don't have a problem --and it will never be resolved.  If we want to see divine intervention in our community, we need to quit claiming how well we are and admit we are sick and in need of a savior!  Jesus said, "I did not come for the well. I came for the sick!"

Maybe that is why I struggle so... over the years of working with broken and hurting people I have become comfortable with sorrow and grief to the point I can enter into it with people and help navigate them out to freedom.  But recently the refusal to acknowledge the problem means the students are almost condemned to be trapped in their current condition with no hope of intervention. That disturbs me in ways I cannot put words to.

I am disturbed. I am grieved. I feel the winds of war stir within me.  I daily remind myself that we battle not with with flesh and blood-- and that this is a spiritual battle over our community for the souls of these kids and families. The enemy is eager to offer suicide as a solution and the temptation is great for several of these kids. I have often been told I have a very passionate spirit about me.  Passion can often be misinterpreted as anger. And maybe sometimes anger is appropriate.... when I see the indifference, or refusal to see what is clearly before us-- and with 58 people at a town hall meeting on the issue-- no one left there with any illusions that we did not have a problem here because student after student told story after story and there were tears across the audience.

What is our mission church? If you simply state to teach the gospel-- you are sunk already.  You cannot preach the gospel to a hungry man.  You cannot preach the gospel to an abused student... you have to feed the hungry and bind up the wounds of the broken hearted before they can ever HEAR the gospel message. That requires relationship. That requires getting our hands dirty. It requires meeting people at the point of their need. It requires us to be "Jesus with skin on" for them so that they might truly see the gospel message in us --- and learn to trust us.  When trust is earned then hearing the gospel message is natural.

As I think back on that audio book Breakout Churches-- it was basically a very detailed research report that warned of the dangers of INSANITY--- you know...if you keep doing what you've always done, you're always going to get what you always got! Or Some people define insanity as doing the same things over and over again expecting different results.  This book showed examples of Break Out Churches that refused to continue in failed methods.  Research shows that only 4% of the millennial generation consider themselves to be Bible-believing born-again Christians.  Four Percent. Let that sink in for a minute.  So what does that say for the next generation coming up? My grandson is 5 years old.  It is highly probable that with only 4% of believing parents raising the next generation that we could see a 1% or even less salvation rate among my grandson's generation.

I am not ok with that! I mourn for the condition of the American church.  Just this week I read 2 different articles where a Baptist church hired a same-sex married couple as co-pastors of the church and also a methodist church that ordained a transgendered deacon. Apostasy is a real thing. Very real.
I want desperately to participate in my local church. I love corporate worship! But I have been so deeply grieved at the problems in our community that are going unnoticed-- even though it was brought to the attention of every church in town.  A few churches are interested in being a part of the solution and doing anything they can to help address bullying and teen depression and suicide, but I have been stunned at the silence of some of the other churches.

I remember once attending a church where we were trying to get a Celebrate Recovery program up and running. There was grumbling among some of the members that "we don't want those people in our church"...eventually the ministry dwindled down with lack of support from the people and we ultimately stopped doing the program all together. The people who had been attending often mentioned to us leaders how unwelcome they felt by other members of the church. It was heart breaking.  The people who needed a church to embrace them the most felt very unwelcome.  During that time I was offered a job at a drug treatment center as a therapist for the chemical dependency program.  I struggled at first because if I accepted the job I could no longer attend church on Wednesday nights. But I decided to accept the job.  I was never more surprised at how leading  the groups with those struggling with addiction felt more like church than actually attending church. As we worked through the 12 steps many people shared their personal faith that Jesus was their higher power and how they struggled to stay sober. I felt more at home, at church with those actively fighting addiction-- who were well aware of their fallen state and their need for a savior-- than I had been with my fellow church members who did not want "those kinds of people" in their church. They had no idea that THEY were "those kinds of people" just in a different sin.  I realized again that God had given me the gift of being comfortable entering into people's most painful life experiences with them and helping them walk out.  But once again, I was so heartbroken over the state of the church.

As I read through the new testament--- I long and wonder how that first century church must have functioned.  I read how they met house to house. They fellowshipped and broke bread together. They prayed and sang songs together-- it was intimate. They shared communion together. Relationships were built because church was living life together in community.  I sometimes wonder what we have lost by moving church to a central location and building. It seems rare to meet at anyone's house anymore.  We've been in Denver City almost two years.  Just last month we had our second invite to someone's home for dinner.  We had our fist invite for lunch at someone's home shortly after we moved here.  Last year I started inviting people over for a coffee/brunch once a week and I had 2 regular attenders until one became very ill.  I have great sadness as I realize how much is lost when we only see each other at a building once a week.

Well... I'm starting to ramble.  I'll have to keep tossing this idea around my mind until it finds a place to land.  I don't have any answers at this point. I just know that something is wrong and my spirit is disturbed. I can't bear the thought of things not changing in the way we do church in America.  Unfortunately-- as history has proven-- the church has grown best when it was faced with persecution and driven underground. When I look at how society and many apostate churches are conforming to the world-- that may very well be on the horizon for genuine bible believing churches.  If that is what it takes to bring revival to America--- then I fear it is not far off.  Just watch the evening news and cross reference it with Revelation. :-)

Until next time....
Dawn