Jesus Called – He Wants His Church Back: What Christians and the American Church are Missing

By Ray Johnston

As early as 50 AD, Christians had gotten away from knowing who Jesus really is. Our generation is no different.

In every decade we, as Americans, lost something important that we couldn't afford to lose:

• In the 1950's, we lost innocence
• In the 1960's, we lost respect for authority
• In the 1970's, we lost love
• In the 1980's, we lost values
• In the 1990's, we lost faith
• In the 2000's, we lost security
• In the 2010's, we lost hope in the future

 

What can restore what we've lost? Only Jesus. Jesus gave us His name, His friendship, and a commission to accept responsibility for ourselves and for the world. When introduced to His wordsandways we'll rediscover the Jesus who:

• Wants His enemies won over, not wiped out
• Wants you to stop playing it safe
• Believed great things were possible no matter what things are like right now
• Was full of grace and truth
• Unleashed compassion
• Believed no one was too far from God to return to Him
• Came to seek and to save that which was lost
• Loves the church                                                                    

Pastor Ray Johnston shares the Jesus of the Bible and how we can be Christians without being jerks. He reveals how the radical message of the gospel calls us to love and serve not only our neighbors but our enemies as well. That’s the Jesus the American Church has missed and needs to meet.

Jesus' mission is clear—risk everything in order to take care of people, starting in our home, neighborhoods, cities, and those in need around the world. That's the Jesus the American Church has missed and needs to meet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Release date: Mar 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9780718079925

Ray Johnston

Ray Johnston has a rich, varied background as a speaker, writer, and founder of Thrive Communications and the Thrive Leadership Conference. Author of the bestselling book The Hope Quotient, he is the founding pastor of Bayside Church, one of the largest churches in the United States, with more than twelve thousand people. Ray has spoken to more than four million people over the last ten years and served on the board of trustees at Azusa Pacific University, his alma mater. Ray and his wife, Carol, have four adult children.

Book preview

PART 1

A World Without Jesus

CHAPTER 1

Finding Jesus in South Africa

Behold, I am making all things new!

—JESUS, REVELATION 21:5 ESV

SOUTH AFRICA WAS HEAVY WITH ANTICIPATION. NELSON Mandela was free. The constitution was being rewritten. Decades of suffocating apartheid were over, and nobody knew what the future would hold. Carol and I got off a plane in Cape Town, prepared to spend two tension-filled weeks training pastors and leaders in South Africa’s Dutch Reformed churches.

The teaching of the Dutch Reformed Church had formed the ideological basis that inspired apartheid. They were the oppressors. All the prime ministers during the apartheid era had come from the Dutch Reformed Church. Then times changed, apartheid died, and the church desegregated in principle—but it stayed segregated in practice. Church leaders officially apologized for their role in apartheid, but old habits die hard.

As a result, Carol and I became more and more depressed going from one dead, segregated church to another. Tradition reigned. Pastors were frustrated. Change seemed impossible. Youth pastors kept telling us, It’s a nightmare and It’s hopeless! And it was. The situation was a total disaster.

Then everything changed.

On our last weekend there, I was invited to preach at the largest Dutch Reformed church in the country. We pulled into the parking lot expecting another segregated, lifeless, uptight, condemning, all-white, old-fashioned, tradition-driven church.

Instead, we were stunned.

We walked in and saw thousands of people joyfully worshiping together. The atmosphere was electric. We were shocked to see the crowd was diverse. Whites, blacks, teenagers, adults, rich, and poor were all standing side by side, singing in English and other languages. I couldn’t believe it. This place didn’t look like anything we had seen in the entire country.

I leaned over, elbowed the pastor, and asked, How long have you been pastor of this church?

Ten years, he said.

Was it this way when you got here?

Oh no, he said. It was like every other church in the country.

I had to know. What happened?

As the worship team started a new song, the pastor told me the whole story. He said the change took place with just one conversation. He walked into his first church board meeting, went to the head of the table where a chair was reserved for him, and turned to his leaders.

I’m not sitting in that chair, he said. "No one will ever sit in that chair again. That’s Jesus’ chair. It’s supposed to be His church. From what I can tell, this church has been running without Him, and that’s going to stop right now. Since it’s His church, why don’t we give it back to Him? And since it’s His church, from now on we will only ask one question: What does Jesus want us to do?

Our decisions will no longer be determined by South African culture or our own tradition or our own preferences. Beginning this moment, we are recommitting our lives and our church to Jesus, and from now on we will do only what Jesus wants to do!

Two hundred years of cultural conditioning and church history had been thrown right out the window—gone!

The pastor put his arm around my shoulder and said, None of our traditions or preferences mattered anymore. We just gave the church back to Jesus. Then he swept his arm across the still-worshiping congregation and added, And this is just what Jesus wanted to do!

The greatest need of any Christian is to rediscover the power unleashed by reconnecting with and actually following Jesus.

I have never recovered from that service.

Walking away from that amazing group of South African Christ-followers, I was more convinced than ever that the greatest need of any Christian is to rediscover the power unleashed by reconnecting with and actually following Jesus.

I wondered if the same thing could happen in America.

CHAPTER 2

Seven Lost Decades

You are the earth’s salt. But if the salt should become tasteless, what can make it salt again?

—JESUS, MATTHEW 5:13 PHILLIPS

RECENTLY I WALKED INTO MY HOUSE AND INSTANTLY THOUGHT something was on fire. The whole house smelled like smoke. I walked into the kitchen and saw that something was burning. A thin layer of smoke hovered under the ceiling. Everyone in my family was at home, but no one had noticed the smoke because it happened so gradually.

People fail to notice toxic stuff all the time because it can be even more gradual and less obvious than smoke from a fire. It’s nearly invisible. Sometimes it’s even underground.

The famed Niagara Falls were threatened in 1898 when developer William T. Love started digging a canal nine miles away to divert water and create hydroelectric power. An economic downturn ended his project and saved the falls. But then the city repurposed the abandoned mile-long ditch as a dump, allowing layer after layer of chemicals, twenty-one thousand tons in all, to be deposited over decades. In 1953, they closed and sealed the dump, then covered the area with dirt. The school board built two schools on it, and developers built neighborhoods there. In 1962, an expressway was built on the site. Happy residents filled the area. But as the water table rose, the chemical seals, broken by construction, started seeping chemicals. Pools of oil and poisonous puddles began to dot the neighborhoods. In 1978, the federal government declared the area a disaster, relocated residents, demolished many of the homes, and then resealed and fenced the land of what is now the infamous Love Canal.¹

The frightening thing about this situation, considered to be one of the worst environmental disasters in America, is this: the cause of the danger was not visible. Decades passed while chemical toxins gradually built up and made a deadly foundation on which people built their lives. But nobody knew it—until the damage was done. Thousands of people had their lives disrupted or destroyed by something under the surface that they were completely unaware existed.

In the last seventy years, America has accumulated layer upon layer of toxins upon which our spiritual, emotional, and relational lives are built. For the most part, people have felt the impact but are unaware of where the causes originated.

SEVEN DECADES THAT HAVE CHANGED EVERYTHING

American culture is changing—and changing fast. And during each of the last seven decades, Americans have lost something that they desperately can’t afford to lose.

The 1950s—Americans Lost Innocence

In the 1950s, Americans lost innocence. World War II was over. The population grew rapidly. Rock music was born. Teenagers were liberated from their parents by cars. And in the fifties an entertainment explosion resulted in Hollywood becoming the number one shaper of values in America.

Seven decades later the results look like this:

• 96.7 percent of American homes have at least one television set.²

• The average American consumes almost 60 hours of digital content each week across TV, radio, computer, and mobile devices.³

• By age five, the average American child will watch 8,190 hours of TV—almost one full year of life.⁴

• By age eighteen, that same kid will view 200,000 violent acts and 16,000 murders on TV.⁵

This exposure to media continues to shape values and lifestyles in ways no one anticipated. Six professors at Calvin College studied the impact of this media explosion and discovered it has resulted in these things:

• Immaturity—Television culture rewards youthfulness and criticizes maturity.

• Materialism—Media creates the idea we can buy happiness.

• Passivity—We do television by watching. (That carries over to church. How do we do Christianity? Go to church, sit, watch.)

• Teaching and entertainment have become inseparable.

• Personalities are more important than ideas—This is impacting political elections in ways we are just beginning to understand.

• Instant gratification is now accepted as the norm—Everything on television is condensed and resolved now. Today’s American child has no concept of the future.

• Television provides people with their value structure.⁶

American kids and teenagers today are growing up in a brave new world with unlimited access to everything. As one parent told me, My kid recently watched one hour of music videos and in that hour saw more sex and violence than his grandparents could have ever imagined.

We have lost innocence. Maybe that’s why we are now dealing with the first generation in history that is sophisticated but not mature.

The 1960s—Americans Lost Authority

In the 1960s, America seemed to be on the eve of destruction. It was a decade of significant events:

• The Vietnam War

• Massive protests

• Haight-Ashbury and the Summer of Love

• LSD and psychedelic drugs

• Woodstock

• The riots in Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, and Memphis

• The assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy

The result? People lost respect for authority. People stopped trusting authority. In short, people lost faith in authority in almost any form.

The battle cry of the sixties was, Don’t trust anyone over thirty! In the song of the era, Pete Townshend’s My Generation, The Who lead singer Roger Daltrey sang that he hoped he would die before he got old. Pete and Roger, incidentally, are both grandfathers now, many times over. But the total lack of respect for authority they put into song in the 1960s became the national mood.

Unfortunately, that attitude has never changed. This is why Jesus’ prescription for spiritual health, which requires submitting to the authority of God and the authority of Scripture, is a foreign language to today’s generation.

The 1970s—Americans Lost Love

Some historians refer to the decade of the 1970s as the decade that never happened.⁷ As comedians have quipped, If you remember the seventies, you weren’t there.

The seventies was a decade of excess and self-centeredness. As the Vietnam War fizzled out, Americans stopped thinking they could change the world, and, freed from all restraints, people started following Timothy Leary’s mantra: Turn on, tune in, drop out. Dress, disco, and drugs exploded into the culture.

During the me decade, television, movies, and magazines (like Self magazine) promoted a new era of sensitivity and feelings, but self-actualization turned into self-absorption, and families in the 1970s came apart (despite reading Jonathan Livingston Seagull). Americans learned from Love Story that love means never having to say you’re sorry, but ironically it was during this free love decade that they lost the one thing talked about most: love.

Americans were bombarded with the message that sexual purity is for prudes and losers. To paraphrase what social scientists said in following decades, Americans starving for love settled for sex. This poisonous idea has robbed future generations of the kind of commitment and integrity essential for developing lasting relational intimacy.

The free love gift from the 1970s is a gift that has never stopped taking!

The 1980s—Americans Lost Values

As people became preoccupied with glamour, fashion, wealth, and media, the 1980s introduced them to the fast lane of rapid change.

• Hollywood helped everybody get in touch with his or her inner Valley girl.

• The launch of the first space shuttle led to global communications.

• The rapid development of technology sparked cultural and social revolutions that went on to impact the world.

The rise of technology and communications led to an expansion of wealth and the use of easy credit, which created the most intense consumer culture in history. As Americans worked harder, we consumed more. Houses filled with consumer goods, and people began parking in their driveways because the garage was now full. Storage facilities popped up everywhere to keep up with our demand for places to put more stuff.

If the 1970s taught us to care about ourselves first, then the 1980s taught us to start caring about how much we owned. A movie that symbolizes the eighties is Wall Street, with Michael Douglas starring as Gordon Gekko. Gekko summarized the entire 1980s with one phrase: Greed is good. The mantra of the eighties was Life, liberty, and the purchase of happiness.

The 1990s—Americans Lost Faith

The 1990s was a jarring decade of highs and lows. The Persian Gulf War, O. J. Simpson’s Ford Bronco chase, and the LA riots kept Americans glued to their televisions. And unthinkably, in the heartland of America, bombers attacked the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma; then students massacred their classmates at a high school in Littleton, Colorado.

One parent told me, What is happening in our country? I am afraid to send my kid to school. In the 1990s, Americans lost faith.

The 2000s—Americans Lost Security

Time magazine listed the 2000s as The Decade from Hell.⁸ They had a point. As January 1, 2000, dawned, Americans feared Y2K, the computer bug expected to wreak havoc when electronic calendars clicked over to the new millennium. But after the big lead-up, when the year finally changed over from 1999 to 2000, nothing happened.

I have a friend who sold everything he owned and moved to the country. Many people stockpiled food. (My wife and I didn’t. I figured with four kids and a minivan, there was enough food stashed in the crevices of that car to feed our family for a month.)

The decade started with only a scare, but our worst fears were realized when, on September 11, 2001, terrorists took down United Flight 93, hit the Pentagon, and destroyed the Twin Towers.

The towers weren’t the only things that came down that day. For many Americans, 9/11 is the day they lost all sense of personal security. And since that day, Americans in homes with security systems in neighborhoods with security gates have thought, I feel insecure even in my own country.

The 2010s—Americans Lost Hope

By the time the year 2010 rolled around, the United States was grappling with the Great Recession, which nearly toppled the world financial system. With the economy teetering, millions of people lost their jobs, their homes, and their retirement funds. Out of work and out of luck, many Americans have lost the one thing they need most—hope.

• 63 percent of Americans today believe the economy is getting worse.

• 62 percent indicate they are very concerned for their own job security.

• 91 percent report being deeply concerned about the economic outlook for their kids.⁹

For the first time in American history, young people are predicting their lives won’t be as good as their parents’.

When people lose faith in the future, they lose hope in the present.

WHY THIS MATTERS FOR OUR COUNTRY

The past seven decades have shaken America. Largely unseen, sometimes buried deep underground, these seven cultural shifts that have changed everything have created a moral Love Canal in our country.

And the real problem is this: In each decade, Americans have lost one thing that is essential for emotional, relational, and spiritual health!

In each decade, Americans have lost one thing that is essential for emotional, relational, and spiritual health!

It is impossible to be emotionally healthy . . .

It is impossible to be relationally healthy . . .

It is impossible to be spiritually healthy . . .

without . . .

innocence

authority

love

values

faith

security

hope

• Try raising good kids without innocence . . . or values . . . or authority.

• Try leading a team, business, or country without respect for

Reviews for Jesus Called – He Wants His Church Back

[carlathelibrarian · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In this book Ray Johnston provides his opinion on what is wrong with the American church today. He also goes into the ways that his church combats the negative stereotypes against Christians today. One of the things that is really important is that we need to change as times change. Churches are just buildings unless we lead people to Jesus. As Christians we are called to love others and to serve them just as Jesus did, but in this book Johnston points out that the American people and the American Church have both drifted away from this calling over the last seven decades. I am a Canadian and the same holds true. There seems to be more attention spent telling everyone what they are doing wrong and pointing fingers rather than following Jesus' two main commandments. Our church is undergoing many changes with a new Minister, merging of a couple of churches that have closed, and some power struggles between the money people and the Spiritual leaders. Does this sound like the old times before Jesus, it does to me. This is a good book to read about what Christianity should look like today. I think everyone involved in the Christian Church would benefit from reading this book and determining what steps they need to take to give Jesus back his church.