Absence of church and the voice of God?

Recently I've been reading a book called Surprised by the Voice of God by Jack Deere. I am absolutely in love with this book. It outlines how God speaks to His church outside of scripture. He references scripture at every turn and in every issue, then using the experiences of himself and others as illustration. He even goes into the negative issues and problems that common happen, and tells ways of preventing and handling such issues. One thing that I love, is the testimony of Jack himself. He was the old testament prof at Dallas theological seminary at the time, and didn't believe that God spoke to us directly outside of through the bible, and he didn't believe in modern day miracles. Then through circumstances and situations, he came to believe otherwise. I reccommend it to anyone wrestling through issues of how God speaks and works. It has been very enlightening and encouraging for me.

One story in particular stood out to me. Jack was a leader of a church in Texas. The leadership forsaw a possible split in the church due to some "charasmatic tendencies" that were arising. Leadership was wise and decided to take a weekend retreat to pray about the future and direction of the church. His prayer that changed his outlook was "Oh God, don't let this conflict escalate so that our church gets wiped off the face of the map." He said the very second he prayed, a voice went off inside his head, "What would be so bad about that?" He knew the question came from God and he couldn't wait for the other pastors to finish praying so he could talk with them about what it could mean. Heres the rest of the story in Jack's words.

"As soon as prayer time ended, I asked, "what would be so bad about our church being wiped off the face of the map?" They stared at me in disbelief. How could I be so dumb and calloused?
"Well, it would hurt a lot of people, " responded one of the pastors.
"I'm sure it would," I responded. "But eventually they would find another church and get over the hurt. What I'm really asking is, What would the kingdom of God lose in our city if our church didn't exist anymore?"
We all thought for a minute. What was important to the kindgom of God? What things happened in the New Testament when the kingdom of God came?

We all agreed that evangelism was an important aspect....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. We concluded that if our church didn't exist, there would be no great loss of evangelism in our city.

Then we asked how many people had been physically healed through the ministry of our church in the past eighteen months. 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 prayers. We concluded that the healing ministry of the Holy Spirit would suffer not great loss in our city.

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. We could, however, count a few who had started taking antidepressants.

We couldn't count any failing marraiges 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 knew there were people in the church struggling with these sins. But none of us could conclusively point to one person that had conclusively been 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 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 evagelism, in the healing of bodies, spirits, emotions, marriages, in the care of the poor, or in the support of the missionaries in other lands.

We looked at each other and said, "Well, what do we do?"


Quite a humbling question that I think we, as the body, we need to ask ourselves and be brutally honest about the answers. Are we truly effective....or are we decieving ourselves? What DO we do?