August 14, 2012 (Tuesday)
Jim Denison’s website has reported several times that 85,000 people per day, worldwide, profess their faith in Christ for the first time. This statistic is encouraging, but the key word is “worldwide.” In the United States, evidently, the statistics are not very optimistic. An article in today’s Houston Chronicle by Kate Shellnut quotes the following numbers for the United States: 6,000 churches close annually, 35,000 people stop going to church every day, and only 15% of American churches show growth year after year. Her article reports that “Author and pastor James MacDonald, coming to Houston Friday, notes these statistics as evidence of the struggles of the American church and proposes a solution he calls the ‘vertical church.’ It’s time, he says, for Christians to realign preaching and worship to focus on God’s glory and not themselves.”
I had the privilege of sitting under the teaching of T.B. Maston when I was in the seminary. He often repeated what he termed the “vertical-horizontal” relationships of our religious experience. As he did so, he would either trace the two with his hands or draw them on the blackboard. Either way, the class was seeing the sign of the cross or a picture of the cross. As Christian Ethics professor, it was his job to tie the two together for the benefit of future congregations who would be sitting under the preaching and teaching of his class members.
According to McDonald, for the past 30 years, we have been emphasizing the “horizontal” almost to the exclusion of the “vertical” — human feelings and relationships rather than worship of a holy God. He sees a return to the “Vertical Church” as an answer to churches’ loss of loyalty from members today. Whether he is right or wrong in believing that re-emphasis upon the “vertical” is the answer we are seeking, the fact that we need both emphases in our preaching and teaching is apparent to long-time observers of churches in America.