Ministry

Europe Mega-Pastor Gives Tips for Revival of U.S. Christianity

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I found this article and thought it was too good not to share:

Thu, Apr. 24, 2008 Posted: 09:57 AM EDT

The pastor of Europe’s largest evangelical church gave advice on how to revive Christianity and the Church in the United States Tuesday evening during a Q&A session based on questions submitted by American Christians.

Sunday Adelaja, founding pastor to the 30,000-member God’s Embassy Church in Kiev, Ukraine, was the featured guest of a teleconference hosted by Strang Communications, the publisher of Charisma and Ministry Today magazines.

God’s Embassy Church boasts more than two million converts and 600 church plants worldwide. During the Q&A, Adelaja emphasized how the Church should not be pulpit-focused, but rather concentrate on how to reveal Jesus Christ to people if they want to experience growth.

The Nigerian-born Christian leader used his own church as example, saying that his church first experienced massive growth after four fruitless years when he started to go out and fed the poor and took care of the drug addicts and alcoholics in Ukraine.

He also encouraged every single church member to influence and impact the culture for God.

“Do not let your people get comfortable with sitting down in the pews,” Adelaja advised a pastor who submitted a question during the teleconference. “You have to literally push them out of the pews and strengthen them so they can go out there and invade the darkness of the world because they are the light of the world.

“You have to really keep on pushing them to believe in themselves that they can change the world for God.” The influential European pastor said that the mayor of Kiev, the chief justice of Ukraine, and the prime minister of the country all come from his church.

Adelaja was also critical of U.S. churches, saying they were a “far cry” from real churches and that this generation of Americans have not seen the real church yet.

“The way things are now in America, the way we do church is kind of like a program,” Adelaja observed. “We are doing church as a club. We are trying to make people feel good, to entertain them, or try to keep them. So because of that concern – we don’t want them to go or to lose them – we kind of try to suit them.

“We are pleasing men instead of pleasing God,” the megachurch pastor continued. “I think we need to change our focus and our focus has to be ‘what is the heartbeat of God?’ ‘What does God desire?’ ‘Does He really want me to just make these people happy and keep them here forever until they die or I die? Or is it better for me to fire them up and encourage them to go and live their life truly for God and for kingdom?’” Adelaja also diagnosed American Christians as egocentric and said that they need to be taught that the focus of their life is not themselves, but God. Adelaja said that as long as pastors teach that the purpose of believing in God is for them to be blessed then people will never influence their culture. Earlier this year, Adelaja released his latest book, ChurchShift, which broke Amazon.com’s top 10 Bestsellers list. ChurchShift’s mission is to spark a revolution in American culture with the goal of reforming 10,000 U.S. churches so that they will in turn reform American society.

Adelaja grew up a poor orphan in Nigeria and was raised in a Christian home by his grandmother. He did not own a pair of shoes until he was 12 years old and had to earn a living from the age of six. Through the prayers of his Christian grandmother, Adelaja gave his life to Christ at 19 years of age. He traveled to the Soviet Union to study journalism on a scholarship and later founded Embassy of God Church after the Soviet Union was dismantled.

The Embassy of God Church is the largest church in all of Europe with some 100,000 total members, including those from all its satellite locations. Although Adelaja is African, white Europeans make up 99 percent of his church. The church has planted more than 600 churches in more than 45 countries, including 20 churches in the United States.

Michelle A. Vu
Christian Post Reporter

bubbling up

kevinhaglund Leave a comment

Today, I had the privilege of attending the second day of the churchplanter.com conference held at Mountain Lake Church in Cumming, GA. A big shout out of thanks to fellow Coweta County church planter Scott McInnis at Wellspring Church in Senoia, GA, for hooking Tim and I up with a spare ticket to the conference and a hotel room! What a treat!

Here is my big take away from the conference: affirmation. For the past 18+ months, God has been stirring some things in my heart. If you’ve read my blog, you know what I’m talking about (if you haven’t read my blog, feel free to peruse the archives). These things revolve around my discontent with the lack of discipleship occurring in the Church in the West and the consumeristic mentality of the Church. As a “worship pastor” for the past nearly 14 years, I awoke to the realization that I was helping produce a product that was begin consumed, but, with the absence of discipleship, had little value beyond entertainment.

Faced with this new reality, I began a desperate search for what I would spend the balance of my ministry career doing. I asked myself, “Should I become an adult ministry guy? an executive pastor? what?” I new I could no longer continue in what I was doing. God had put a “holy discontent” in my heart and I could no longer continue on the same path. Fast forward a few months and the new path for me was to help start a brand new church that attempted to address the issues that God had begun stirring in my heart. No church is perfect because it is made up of human beings. While we are excited and optimistic about the future of browns mill church, we know that we don’t have all the answers and that we will almost certainly screw some things up royally!

As we began to gather resources–books, primarily–about the church and church planting, we quickly began to find that there were certain topics and authors who had the same concerns about the Church as we had and those who were more in the “business as usual” camp. We found that the books, resources and authors that most closely matched the deep promptings in our hearts came from the missional/ incarnational model of church and church planting. Authors such as Hugh Halter, Matt Smay, Alan Hirsch, and Ed Stetzer, to name a few. We found that, for us, the attractional church model seemed to represent more of the “business as usual” approach to church and church planting that God had begun to stir the “holy discontent” in our hearts about. I’m not going to name authors of this approach because they are good men and women whom God is using. It just wasn’t the right model for us.

The amazing thing about days like today–and I’ve had many–is that God just keeps affirming what He has spoken into my heart. At the conference today (which still leans a little bit more to the attractional model of church planting), there were a number of times where the missional/incarnational approach surfaced. Almost every plenary session (with one notable exception) decried the state of the church today and that a return to the original mission of the church (making disciples) was desperately needed. A couple of breakout sessions I attended were almost entirely regarding the missional/incarnational approach.

The coolest part of the day was talking with several folks who recounted almost the exact circumstances I am currently in–that God had spoken a “holy discontent” into their hearts about the status of the Church in America and were stepping out to plant a church that returned to the Church’s missional roots. Even our purpose statement “To live like Jesus and to lead others to do the same” surfaced in one form or another. Now, Tim and I aren’t smart enough to come up with this stuff (Suzanne and Nicole will tell you that!). The only answer is that it has to be God! It is so cool to see that He is speaking directly into the hearts of leaders and it has began to bubble up everywhere we turn. As we read books and interact with other people, we are not finding “good ideas.” We are finding affirmation that what God has spoken into our hearts, He is currently speaking into the hearts of many, many people. God is up to something really, really big! It is just beginning to bubble up to the surface, but I believe that in these last days, He is going to pour out His Spirit upon all men and there is going to be revival in the land!