Series on the Modern Lukewarm Evangelical Church – No. 10
In Part V we shall examine the last two periods of the Church Age – Philadelphian (the faithful church) and Laodicean (the lukewarm church).
• Philadelphia – The faithful church (AD 1720-1870). It was a church of revival and spiritual progress. The church had proved itself faithful and obedient to the Word. As its name implies, it was a church of love and kindness to each other. Because of their excellent spirit, they were an excellent church. They kept the word and did not deny His name. No fault was attributed to the church, only mild reproof for having only a little strength or power. The Philadelphian period began about 1720 with the early stirrings of the First Great Awakening in America and the British Isles.
The sixth period is named after the church at Philadelphia (1720-1870). For the first time since the first half of the second century (the early-mid 100s) the universal church, comprised of all born again believers, created a society that made possible a substantial return to the doctrines and the design, organization, and operation of the first century New Testament church. This return came of age at the beginning of the Philadelphian period in 1720, almost exactly one hundred years after the Pilgrims landed on the shores of America. The faithful church of the Philadelphian period was made possible and was sustained by the Three Great Awakenings that occurred over the next one hundred and fifty years.
Prior to 1720, there were a number of isolated revival outpourings of the Holy Spirit in the late 1600s and early 1700s. Out of these early stirrings came a renewal movement called evangelicalism that fundamentally changed many churches and denominations and helped birth the First Great Awakening in the 1720s. The churches that embraced evangelicalism emphasized a revivalist style of preaching, personal conversion, personal devotion and holiness, individual access to God, and de-emphasized the importance and authority of church government.[1] [emphasis added]
Evangelicalism in its outworking essentially followed a congregational form of church government as described by B. K. Kuiper.
Each local church is self-governing. It chooses its own pastor, teacher, elders, and deacons. Churches have no authority over each other, but it is their privilege and duty to help each other. It is highly desirable that from time to time they hold assemblies in which all the churches are represented, and in which matters of concern to all are carefully considered and discussed. The churches, however, are not required to adopt the decision of the assemblies.[2]
The exact date of the beginning of the Great Awakening in America and its conclusion are a matter of supposition. If the long view is taken and correctly includes the revivals in the early 1720s and concludes with the waning of the Awakening’s long-term effects on society, then The Great Awakening can be said to span from about 1720 to the American Revolution in 1770s.[3] There were even some revivals that occurred during the years of the Revolutionary War.
Thomas Kidd points to an extraordinary series of revivals in towns along the Connecticut and Thames Rivers in 1720 and lasting until 1722. The Connecticut revival was “the first major event of the evangelical era in New England” and “…touched congregations in Windham, Preston, Franklin, Norwich, and Windsor.” One of the largest of the Connecticut revivals occurred in the Windham church during 1721 with eighty people joining the church in six months. Over the three-year course of the revivals, several hundred new members and possibly more conversions were reported. The significance of this revival has been generally forgotten because of its lack of publicity through print media which may also account for the revival not spreading beyond its regional borders.[4]
In A History of the American People, Paul Johnson again distills the essence of The Great Awakening and its importance in the founding of America.
…There was a spiritual event in the first half of the 18th century in America, and it proved to be of vast significance, both in religion and politics…The Great Awakening was the proto-revolutionary event, the formative moment in American history, preceding the political drive for independence and making it possible…The Revolution could not have taken place without this religious background. The essential difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution is that the American Revolution, in its origins, was a religious event, whereas the French Revolution was an anti-religious event.”[5]
If one considers the one-hundred and fifty-year history of the faithful church during the Philadelphian period (1720-1870), the three Great Awakenings and their continuing influence on the nation covered the entire era with the exception of three brief periods of spiritual decline: The First Great Awakening (1720-1760s), the two phases of the Second Great Awakening (1794-1812 and 1822-1842), and the Third Great Awakening (1857-1858).
Each of the three Great Awakenings played a decisive role in the history of the nation. The Great Awakening was the formative moment in American history preceding the political drive for independence and making it possible. The Second Great Awakening was the stabilizing moment whose effects lasted until the 1840s and saved the new nation from political and moral destruction. The Third Great Awakening was the sustaining moment that prepared the nation to endure the national conflagration of the Civil War and made possible its reunification and survival in the war’s aftermath. The revival of the late 1850s caused men and women, in both the North and South, to be spiritually prepared for the coming struggle in which the nation would exorcize the demon of slavery and recover its national unity.
One of the most remarkable occurrences of the Philadelphian period was the significant rejection of the episcopal form of church government and a return to the practice of local control of the organization through a congregational form of church government. Part of the reason for the changes can be attributed to the Pilgrims and Puritans. Although the Puritans were wealthy, claimed far greater numbers in the Massachusetts colony, and came with a staunch Church of England episcopal form of government, they soon exchanged the episcopal form for the congregational model supplied by the radical, much despised Pilgrim Separatists. The Pilgrims set the standard of church government in the Bay Colony.[6] As previously mention, this de-emphasis of the importance and authority of church government was a strong characteristic of the evangelical renewal movement born at the beginning of the Great Awakening and which fundamentally changed the form of church government in many churches and denominations to the present day.
One of the outstanding features of the Great Awakening in America was the beginning of a broad belief by evangelicals that the heart of the Christian faith was the “new birth” of an individual soul. Inspired by the preaching of the Word, the doctrine of the “new birth” invigorated even as it divided churches. The Evangelical supporters of the Great Awakening who championed the “new birth” were the Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists, and they became the largest American Protestant denominations by the first decades of the nineteenth century. These denominations held a predominantly congregational form of church government. Opponents of the evangelical supporters of the Awakening and their call for a “new birth” were either wholly opposed or were split in their response. These were the Anglicans, Quakers, and Congregationalists that generally declined towards the end of the 1700s.[7]
It is important to understand that the congregational form of government did not mean that all churches embracing congregationalism were in favor of the revivalism of the Great Awakening. Congregationalism more readily makes possible revival but does not insure that it will occur. Other factors may play a role. For example, a church with a congregational form of government that allows false doctrine to remain within the church will not see a move of the Spirit that leads to revival. However, it is an obvious conclusion that churches who follow a congregational form of government and rigorously hold fast to and defend the inerrant truth of the Scriptures are most likely to seek and receive periodic outpourings of spiritual revival by the Holy Spirit.
The Philadelphian period in church history is a remarkable expression of the grace and goodness of God poured out upon a people who sought to establish His kingdom and a nation upon the inerrant and indestructible Word of God. The great blessings of God were the result of a return to the doctrines and patterns of organization and operation of the first century New Testament church.
By the end of the American Revolution and establishment of the American republic, the populist wing of evangelicalism had become the dominant branch of Christianity.[8] These denominations predominantly held to a congregational form of government most similar to the first century New Testament church.
• Laodicea – The lukewarm church (1870 to the Rapture of the Church). Laodicea was the worst of all of the seven Asian churches. There was nothing good to commend it. Its great sin was that it was lukewarm—neither hot nor cold. Its indifference arose from self-conceitedness and self-delusion. It believed itself rich and in need of nothing but in reality was wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. Christ reminded them of where true riches may be found, without which severe punishment would follow.[9]
As it has been for two thousand years of church history, the central conflict within the church is the truth and authority of the Bible. Recall that the forces of the anti-religious Enlightenment exploited the two hundred years of strife within the church following the Catholic-Protestant split that began in 1517. Those same anti-religious forces dressed in the clothes of modern humanism and secularism also exploited the division between the liberals and fundamentalists between 1870 and 1930. During those six decades, the American church surrendered to secular humanists leaders and institutions a significant majority of its power and authority to direct and influence American culture.
To retain a modicum of social power, cultural authority, and institutional influence in the wake of the onslaught of humanism and secularism, the late nineteenth century, liberal Protestant leaders and their churches began embracing secular human sciences (psychology and sociology) to lend credibility and cultural relevance to their religious pretensions. Put another way, the focus changed from an eternal relationship with God to the health and well-being of one’s self in this life. The liberal Protestant leaders and their churches who sought survival through accommodation of the spirit of the world brought poisonous compromise to the few remaining vestiges of their long-abandoned doctrines and faith and produced a profane and powerless church that had lost its saltiness and was “…no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trodden under foot by men.” [Matthew 5:13b. RSV]
Some may suppose that the fundamentalist opponents of liberal Protestants were the original silent majority. But in reality, the conservative leaders of the once dominant populist evangelical churches (and the new holiness denominations that separated themselves from the liberal churches) were not silent but just didn’t have the cultural clout or platform from which to mount significant opposition to the liberal churches and their newly found secularist allies.
Nancy Pearcey described the mindsets of the fundamentalist conservatives’ loss of cultural dominance after their sixty-year battle with theological modernism and the emergence of their post-World War II offspring – the neo-evangelicals.
They (the fundamentalists) circled the wagons, developed a fortress mentality, and championed “separatism” as a positive strategy. Then in the 1940s and 50s, a movement began that aimed at breaking out of the fortress. Calling themselves neo-evangelicals, this group argued that we are called not to escape the surrounding culture but to engage it. They sought to construct a redemptive vision that would embrace not only individuals but also social structures and institutions.[10]
Just as the modernist churches had lost their saltiness, the fundamentalists hid their light as they abandoned the culture and its institutions, and the forces of secularizing humanism were freed to wreak havoc in American culture.
Following World War II, the evangelicals engaged the culture through church membership and evangelization. However, the beginning and rapidly accelerating dramatic cultural disorientation of the late 1960s eventually allowed secular humanists to capture the culture as faith was substantially driven from the public square. As a result, the muffled voices of the faithful were confined within the four walls of the local church. And as the fundamentalists did in the early twentieth century, a large portion of the evangelicals began to increasingly abandon the culture and its institutions beginning in the late 1960s to the present day.
With the demise of resistance from the evangelical church in a secularizing culture, Satan intensified his attack on American evangelical churches from within. Many evangelical churches, as did the liberal churches a hundred years earlier, accommodated the world as a means of survival.
Following the cultural turmoil that began in the mid-1960s, many modern evangelicals began centering their redemptive efforts on the individual rather than a powerful presentation of the truth and authority of the gospel. The truth of the gospel was replaced by a therapeutic gospel that accommodated the seeker and catered to his felt needs. These evangelicals had either forgotten or ignored Paul’s admonition to the Romans:
And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God. [Romans 12:2. KJV]
______
As we have examined the seven periods of Church Age history, it is evident that the premises set forth at the beginning of this Church, Inc. series have proven to be true. The essence of the lessons learned is this: To corrupt or abandon the operation of the leadership gifts and the gifts of the Spirit, as established in the first century New Testament church, is to damage or destroy God’s design, organization, and operation of the local church in every period of Church Age history.
In Part VI we shall continue to track the decline of the evangelical church during the Laodicean period since the 1960s which has to a great extent become the modern pattern of the first century church at Laodicea.
Larry G. Johnson
Sources:
[1] Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2004, 2005), pp. 253, 256-257.
[2] B. K. Kuiper, The Church in History, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1951, 1964), p. 261.
[3] Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening-The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in colonial America, (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 9-10.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, (New York: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1997), pp. 110, 116-117.
[6] Kuiper, The Church in History, p. 328.
[7] “Religion and the Founding of the American Republic,” Library of Congress.
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel02.html (accessed August 27, 2021).
[8] Gordon S. Wood, “Religion and the American Revolution,” New Directions in American Religious History, ed. Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp.185-188.
[9] Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, ed. Rev. Leslie F. Church, Ph.D., (Grand Rapids, Michigan, Zondervan Publishing House, 1961), pp. 1970-1974.
[10] Pearcey, Total Truth, p. 18.
