God's Match: How to Light a Fire in Your Church

By Debbie Salinger

Today's Church is preoccupied with legalism, institutionalism, and operational management without that reliance on the Holy Spirit. A business model replaces the Spirit as the guiding force behind church business. The priority on control stifles the Spirit's inflaming power. Symptoms include our declining attendance and erosion of our social influence.Dr. Debbie Salinger highlights the common thread of historical revivals, such as like The Great Awakening, the Welsh and Azusa Street revivals and the Hebrides revival. That thread: individual people fervently and persistently praying, seeking God for the Holy Spirit to bring about revival. The author argues eloquently that the Spirit should be the driving force fueling the Church. This book specifically references the United Methodist Church as an example, but the challenges addressed are not unique to Methodism. Many churches, both independent or denominational, are experiencing membership decline. And yet within those churches there are Christians who are eager, even hungry to experience more of the Spirit's power and presence.Dr. Salinger will fire you up with the guiding passion you need to play your part. She argues eloquently that the Spirit is the only fuel for Christians and their churches-and reveals the part you can play in restoring that explosive fuel in your fellowship. She demonstrates how to admonish effectively, with both understanding and love, and you will be equipped wherever you are.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HigherLife Publishing
• Release date: Apr 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9781958211878

Book preview

Chapter One

WHERE’S THE FIRE?

To the angel of the church in Laodicea write:

These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation. I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other!…

Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches.

REVELATION 3:14–15, 22 (NIV)

IN 1908, J ACK L ONDON WROTE A SHORT STORY, PUBLISHED IN C ENTURY M AGAZINE CALLED T O B UILD A F IRE . In the story, an unnamed man hikes the Yukon trail along with his dog in subzero temperatures despite urgent warnings about the dangers of the extreme cold issued by the residents of Sulphur Creek.

Thinking he can surely light a fire whenever he wants if the cold gets too harsh, the man’s overconfidence becomes tested by various challenges. Still, he persists, refusing to acknowledge the clear signs of his endangerment. In the end, he is unable to light the fire he needs to survive, due to his numb hands and face. Realizing his error too late, he panics, and soon falls asleep eternally in the snow.

Overconfidence and denial—the ability for us as human beings to actively avoid facing the reality of imminent peril in our lives until it’s too late, even when danger clearly looms right in front of us, is a typical human reaction to grief, stress, or threat. We have an intriguing tendency to completely ignore, to block out, signs of our own death or decline, to pretend they don’t exist. We avoid facing the truth, the struggle, or the cold reality of our condition. Rather than putting a plan in place that requires us to change our current trajectory, to face our threat head on, or to create an alternative way, we imagine that we are somehow invincible in our current state, and that our ability to survive just as we are now must in the end pull us through.

Surely, the terrible reality presented before us can’t be true! Surely, if we keep on going as we are and ignore the phantom danger facing us the same way we always have, we will of course be fine.

Our way has always worked before.

Why not now?

This self-created illusion will always end badly, will always result in the realization that we have simply waited too long to circumvent our impending truth. Eventually, we will come to a point of no return, in which we no longer can find a way to overlook reality. By then, it’s too late. Certain that circumstances have simply worked against us, we do not change our belief that if only outside factors had been different that we would not be in our perilous position. Even in the throes of death, we still believe that our own vision could have—should have—prevailed. If only.

This kind of magical thinking has pervaded the American church for the last sixty years. As the climate of culture grew colder to the rigidness and traditionalism of American Christianity, the church ignored the signs and didn’t light new fires. We were once confident that culture would come to its senses, and that things would revive and reboot without the need for introspective change or reassessment. But today, the institution—the denominational Methodist church in particular—appears paralyzed in shock with the realization that its worst fears have come to pass. The body of Christ is slowly freezing to death.

The fire has gone out of American Methodism. The denomination is dying. But not because we don’t know how to start a fire, to keep it burning, or to strike a fresh match. We’ve heard endless advice, ideas, and warnings of our need to heat things up, relinquish control, change course, and fire up our catalytic converters. Countless books have been written on the urgent problems we face. Solutions have been offered. No, the fire has gone out of American Methodism not because we don’t know how to light things up, but because we fear fire more than we fear death. We fear and avoid whatever threatens our sense of control, power, stasis, and our need to believe in our own autonomy and correctness. That fear will keep us frozen and paralyzed in place unless and until we understand and accept for ourselves the freeing, dynamic, transfiguring, and rejuvenating power of fire—Holy Spirit fire.

THE SACRED ART OF FIRE

Ironically, while Methodists bear the fire symbol as their signature icon, we have become fire-averse as a church. We are obsessed with controlling, taming, and putting out our fires. We have created an unnatural habitat for Christians, one in which the Holy Spirit’s flame is squelched at all costs for fear of conflict, danger, sparks, and uncontrollable change. The fire has not gone out of western Christianity on its own. We have been deliberately smothering it. Churches are fighting for breath and yet refuse to breathe in the creative, life-giving energy of the Holy Spirit around them for fear of igniting change. We’ve not only doused any sign of flames, but we’ve cut off our oxygen supply by focusing on protecting the kindling from the dangers of spark or