The Church Service
There is much criticism to-day concerning the Church which is positively unjust It is quite useless to say that there are no flaws in the present organization as men can see it, but it is also equally true that in the best ordered homes, in those households where there is the greatest amount of peace and comfort there are elements of weakness. One could break up his home in less than three months if he should parade the flaws of his home life before all who would listen to him. It is both unjust to the Church and disloyal to Christ for one to keep constantly harping upon the weakness of our church life when there is so much on the other side to arouse enthusiasm and to provoke the most generous affection, and yet without having the least spirit of harsh criticism it is alas also true that concerning the services of our Church the following may be justly stated:
First: The service is too formal. Formality io8 is generally observed at the expense of spiritual power and life. In very many of our churches from one year’s end to the other there is no variation of the service. An invocation, frequently singing by a choir which cannot be understood, three hymns by the congregation sung in a half-hearted manner in many of our churches, two prayers by the minister, one short and the other long, a sermon of varying length, a benediction, and the service is over. It is inconceivable that the man of the world who cares nothing for the sentiment of the service and who feels no special obligation to attend church should be interested by that which he knows will be the same whether he attends the service on the Atlantic Coast, on the Pacific, in the northern portion of our country or in the extreme south. It would be far from me to wish too great an informality in the worship of God and the conduct of the services of his sanctuary, but I am quite sure that the time is upon us when if we would attract attention to him who is able to save to the uttermost we must do the unusual thing.
One of our great Scotch preachers has said that the disposition which some of us have to pray regularly three times a day is well enough no PRESENT-DAY EVANGELISM
in itself but may not accomplish its purpose, for the devil knows concerning our purpose, and he says that man will pray at morning, at noon and at night, and whenever he prays I will be there to attract his attention to other things and his prayer will be lifeless and indifferent. Could he not say the same thing concerning some of the services of our churches? If he knows anything at all he must know just what we are going to do, for we know this ourselves.
John Robertson, the Scotch preacher, some little time ago preached a sermon on that text found in i Pet. 2:7,” Unto you therefore which believe he is precious,” and he said if the verse should be rightly read it would be like this, “Unto you therefore which believe,” then there is a break in the manuscript or a pause and the word, “Precious f’ might be translated,” Preciousness,” or to change it again it might be translated, “Hallelujah’ and his interpretation was that Peter is writing along in his message and finds himself saying, “Unto you therefore which believe,” and suddenly there came to him a vision of the one who had chosen him to be his follower and sent him forth to preach, had forgiven him his wanderings, and sent a special messenger after his resurrection and he is so full of emotion that suddenly he breaks forth with an exclamation of, “preciousness or hallelujah.” Such a break as this in the service of an ordinary church would be counted a most extraordinary thing, but I can conceive that there might come into a church a great infusion of new life if there should be a disposition on the part of those who preach and teach to yield themselves more perfectly to him who witnesses to Christ and allow him to have his way with us and through us instead of our own will concerning that which might be proper in our judgment
Again may it not be said that the Church is too cold. There are certain things which may cause this condition. Following Christ afar off would make it possible; coming in touch with the world would produce it as an inevitable result; even indifference would not be without influence in the production of such a state of affairs. I can think of no one thing that would so bring new life to the Church, warmth to the preacher and a glow of enthusiasm to every department of service as the cultivation of the spirit of evangelism, or in other words a devotion of the membership of the Church to the winning of souls to Christ.
Mr. Spurgeon used to tell of a census taker who went about the city of London, particularly in his part of the great city to secure such information as might be valuable to his workers. He found an old couple living in an attractive looking house, everything outside was neat and inside it was almost perfect. The old people were sitting on either side of a fireplace, so far as the visitor could see in perfect comfort, and when the questions had been answered he said to them, “I should think you would be very happy. You are away from the turmoil of life, you have fought your battles and won your victories, and you are here now in the evening time of your existence together, with naught to disturb you or make you afraid,” and the old lady made response saying, “Well we are not happy; we used to be, when we heard the sounds of children’s voices about the house, but now we are here alone, and we have neither chick nor child about us. We sit here all the day long, my husband and I; he looks at me and I look at him until we almost grow sick of the sight of each other. Oh,” she said, “if we could only hear the children again we would have joy.” This is a picture of many a church with the minister preaching to the people and the people simply looking at him until sometimes he feels that he would welcome anything if only the Church would be aroused, the formality driven away and the coldness depart. I know of nothing that would cause this result to be so quickly apparent as to hear the sound of the voices of those who are new-born babes in Christ Jesus.
A soul winning church is never a church spiritually cold. The two positions are positively irreconcilable.
May it not also be true that the Church is too indefinite in its work. Wherever there is a successful church to-day without exception that church will be found to be carrying on a definite work both at home and abroad. The minister plans his work and works his plan. If he preaches a series of sermons it is in order that some result may be accomplished not only in the present but in the future; if he has a social gathering it is in order that through this gathering he may accomplish some other purpose; if he makes pastoral calls it is because he earnestly hopes to bring his influence to bear upon his people to lead them to take some new position for aggressive work for Christ. If business men must plan their business, and they must, then why should not the leaders of the Church plan their work which is more important than any business in the world to-day, for the king’s business not only requires haste but requkes ingenuity and careful planning. Why would it not be possible at the beginning of the Church year for the minister and his officers to definitely decide that every aim and every effort throughout the year should be to accomplish certain definite spiritual results, and for this they would plan and pray and work.
Nothing is so inspiring as the music of the church service and nothing can be more distressing. It is quite as inconsistent to have an unconverted choir as to have an unconverted minister, for both lead in the worship of God. It is just as reasonable for a minister to preach in an unknown tone as for a choir to sing after this fashion, and it is almost the exception rather than the rule to understand many of the choirs of our important churches. Sometimes the music fails because the words and the music clash; sometimes it fails because the subject of the hymn is utterly foreign to the main part of the service, and frequently it fails because we attach too little importance to it as an element in reaching and influencing the lives of the people. It is quite true that the theology of very many people is obtained from the hymns they sing. Little children singing “Alas and did my Saviour bleed,” catch an idea of the atonement; when they sing, “Jesus paid it all,” they begin to have some conception of justification and under the influence of, “Nearer my God to thee,” they learn great lessons of fellowship with Christ. It is said that one of the most attractive features of Mr. Spurgeon’s service was the singing of his great congregation, when no choir took the place of the singing of the people and when even an organ was dispensed with in order that the people might stand together and praise God as they did in a most wonderful way, and yet what could be better than the choir of singers, consecrated to Christ, enthusiastic in their singing because they realized that next to the minister they have to do with the reaching of the people and in many cases beyond the minister they have a power over the unsaved.” It is impossible to hold the unconverted ii6 PRESENT-DAY EVANGELISM
masses without interesting them. In gaining this purpose, the power of song has, in France, proved most effective. The Moody and Sankey songs are translated and sung quite as much in Paris as in New York. The wanderers on the streets at night can be thus attracted. These songs are open to criticism on grounds of reverence and truthfuhiess as well as of aesthetics. But for their purpose of drawing and holding the masses, they are unequalled. Scores of people will come off the street to sing,
The half was never told,’
who would turn away from the most eloquent sermon.”
What power there could be for good if frequently in the Sunday evening services at least sweet Gospel hymns should be announced, the whole congregation asked to sing, occasionally a solo sung by one who had prayed over the singing as the pastor ought to pray over his preaching. If the preaching of the Church to-day needs to be turned into evangelistic channels there is far greater necessity for insisting that the singing should be more evangelistic.
“The Working Church.”
Mr. Moody was a shrewd leader of men, and there were few men who ever went beyond him in exalting the power of the singing of a hymn in which there was to be found the spirit of the Gospel. The preaching is of course the important part of the entire service, for by the foolishness of preaching God has ordained that men should come to know Christ and to understand his beauty, but there are certain points which must be emphasized in connection with the preaching which is to be evangelistic in its purpose.
First: The truth preached must be experienced. No man can talk with any success about prayer and be prayerless, about consecration and withhold his gift from the altar, about love for souls and himself be indifferent to lost men.
“No one preaches the truth with power until he has had a deep personal experience of its power. The truths which were so mighty on the lips of Luther and Wesley and Finney and Moody had first been mighty in their own hearts. Suppose we ministers begin with ourselves, and make sure that we are ready for disinterested service; make it quite sure that we ourselves have been to Golgotha, and have there ii8 PRESENT-DAY EVANGELISM
been crucified, so that we are dead, and the life in us is the life of Christ; make it quite sure that our own hearts are aglow with the love that overflows to God and man. Then we may expect that these neglected truths of Jesus will be preached to the Churches with mighty power until church membership really stands for Christian service. Christian sacrifice and Christian love. And then this Gospel of God will indeed be the power of God unto salvation to the multitudes to whom he is now unreal.
“When God becomes real to men, the guilt of sin becomes real; and, as we have seen, God is actualized when he is interpreted in the terms of present-day truth and in the every-day life of living epistles.”
Second: Christ must be preached in all his fullness. It will not do to ignore any part of the scheme of redemption. One might just as truly err in being overzealous in what is properly called evangelistic services as being indifferent on the other side to the necessity of preaching what we call the old old story of Jesus and his love. Truth is always powerful if it is preached in all of its fullness.
“The Next Great Awakening.”
“The rapid growth of * Christian Science, so-called, is a reaction from a Christianity which ignores the physical, and therefore, does not recognize the interrelation of soul and body; precisely as Unitarianism was a reaction from an orthodoxy which practically ignored the humanity of our Lord; and reactions are naturally one-sided and extreme. The remedy for them is to preach the well-rounded truth. We are slowly learning by costly experience that no great Scriptural truth can be safely neglected; sooner or later it appears in caricature.”
Yet there is this to be said and it must be said with emphasis that for one who is in sin and therefore absolutely lost there is no story which can keep and lift and save but the story of the crucified one.
Dr. Jowett, of Birmingham, England, tells the story of the late Dr. Berry which illustrates my point. He returned from his service one day to find a child waiting at his door who asked him if he would not come at once and help to get her mother in. He did not understand her request thinking possibly she was in the cold and had been turned out of her home, but at last The Next Great Awakening.”
in response to her earnest entreaties he went and found the mother dying. He did what he could to help her but seemed utterly powerless. He told the story of the Prodigal Son but she seemed uninterested. He brought to her attention the story of the reclaiming of fallen women and Christ blessing the Uttle children that she might know that there was no one so weak and no one so sinful as to be beyond the power of his love, and she was still unmoved, and at last he said to his friend, she drew out of me bit by bit the story of Jesus born in Bethlehem, living in Nazareth, preaching in Galilee, suffering in Jerusalem, dying on the Cross, rising from the dead and ascending into glory, and as I told her the story her eyes filled with tears and her lips trembled and then there came a look of ineffable peace and joy and she passed away, and said Dr. Berry to his friend, “I believe I got her in.”
This is the only story for a lost and ruined race, and we cannot be evangelistic if we nlect it nor can we expect God to bless us in the winning of souls.
Third: Preaching to be evangelistic must be done with the confident expectation of results. The unsaved people in our congregation are quick to detect our own anticipation of failure; they are equally sensitive to our confident belief that what we say is to have weight with them and may be used of God to save their souls.
Over in the almost midnight darkness of Africa toiled Robert and Mary Moffatt; for ten years they labored on without a single convert. They were four hundred miles beyond the place of civilization. They had only about them the most degraded savages and they never for a moment faltered and never for a single moment did they have any other thought than this, that they were sure to be successful. A letter was received from a friend asking if there was anything of use which could be sent by their minister. “The significant answer of Mary Moffatt was, ‘Send us a Communion Service. We shall want it some day.’ It came three years later, the day before the first converts were baptized.”
With such a spirit as this in the preaching, with supreme confidence in God and in his word, with absolute certainty that if Christ be preached faithfully God’s word cannot return unto him void, there must be increased efficiency in our church services and great numbers of people brought to Christ. Yet if the Church of Christ could only be aroused to put into practice his preaching and teaching in this present day, and other days, how men would be helped, how souls would be won and how the very wilderness would blossom as a rose.
“Let us suppose a Church somewhere, whose members have such an enthusiasm for humanity that when they lie awake nights they are planning not how to make money, but how to make men. Their supreme desire is to help the world in general and their own community in particular. They are striving daily to remove every moral and physical evil; trying to give every child who comes into the world the best possible chance; longing and working and praying and spending themselves and their substance to save men from sin and ignorance and suflFering! Let us suppose the whole Church is cooperating to this end. What a transformation such a Church would work in any community! How it would * reach the masses ‘! How it would grow! How it would be talked about and written up! Men would make pilgrimages to study its workings and its success. Yet such a Church ought not to be in the least degree peculiar.“^ And such The Next Great Awakening.” a Church as this is possible in every community in the world if only the word of God is received as authentic, if only Christ is believed on and his teachings practiced. That such a Church is not to be seen to-day in many of our cities and towns is to our reproach.