A Successful Christian School

By David Hobbs

What is the measure of success of a Christian School? To look at many of their websites, you would think it was the percentage of their graduates who went on to college somewhere. “Eighty percent of our graduates went on to college.…” We are so taken by statistics. How about the school’s graduation rate? Or how about the percentage of the teachers with higher degrees? “Eighty-five percent of our faculty have advanced degrees…” Are these the measures of a successful Christian school?

Our church was visited last weekend by the students from a post-high school discipleship program called Generational Leadership from Maple Valley, Washington. These kids were on fire for the Lord. They were happy, they spoke of the things they had overcome and the joy they had found serving Jesus. It was great having them in the service.

One thing that stood out (though it wasn’t really a surprise), was the number who testified they had been raised in a Christian home, grown up in church, gone to Christian schools, but had never met Jesus for themselves. They knew all about Him, had lived moral lives, prayed over their meals, probably went through countless devotions and said many prayers, but had never had a personal, life-changing encounter with the Lord until they went to this program.

So what is the measure of a successful Christian school? Or a successful church youth group? To keep them happy with activities and pizza? Make them better students of Aristotle and Latin than public school students? Prepare them to be successes in this fallen world—good jobs, families, faithful contributors to their local church? Are all these the true measures of success? Or is success bringing them to know Jesus? Not know about Him, but knowing Him, meeting Him, encountering imHim in a way that revolutionizes their lives.

As you can see from my book Out of the Fire, A Life Radically Changed. I was an atheist in high school and college. I tried to talk Christians out of their faith. But when I met Jesus, it turned my life upside down and inside out and set the course of the rest of my life. The world would not say I was successful. I lived in a Christian commune for 5 years on $4 per week, then painted houses and sold insurance for most of my life. The world would sniff in disdain but I could care less. I found everything I was looking for and much more besides. I live in relationship with God who has me writing books, preaching, blogging, singing, praying, yes and even suffering trials to increase the coming glory.

Is that what we want for our young people? Or do we hope they will merely get enough of Jesus to have a lower divorce rate than the world? Or to have higher SAT scores? Or produce more PhDs per capita?

Any graduate from a Christian high school who goes on to college without knowing the Lord and being truly born again will graduate from college a humanist and a secularist. George Barna has tracked it: something like 80% of entering Christian freshmen will lose their faith while in college. (And I have to think the 20% who don’t lose their faith are those who are the most grounded in it.)

The colleges and universities in this country are set up as indoctrination centers for liberalism and secularism. And yet a college education remains the goal of way too many Christian schools and parents. Why do we have this obsession to throw our kids away to the world?

As I was watching and listening to the on-fire young people from the Generational Leadership program  I found myself thinking, “We need a thousand such young people, 10,000, 100,000! With kids like these, we could turn this culture and this country around! Here is the future of the church!” But instead of putting our young people in a program where they will meet Jesus, get healed of the brokenness of this world, and then become a force for turning this world to Christ, we trade that all in for hoped-for worldly success in what we call “higher education.”

The Bible says, “love not the world nor the things of the world.” Wouldn’t that include worldly success? Yet we’re sacrificing our young people on that very altar of worldly success by sending them off to ungodly colleges where most of them will be turned into successful heathen, much as the Israelites sacrificed their sons and daughters to Baal. Wasn’t it for the same reason? To ensure a good harvest and fertile fields? Isn’t that the mammon Jesus said we couldn’t serve if we wanted to serve Him?

I plead with Christian educators and parents to rethink this thing!

21st Century Evangelism--The New Wine

By David Hobbs

A few years ago I was in a small church with an old-line evangelist who wanted to get back out on the field. He liked to tell stories about the old days: when crowds would come, God would move, and people would be healed and converted. Many times he lamented that it just didn’t work that way any more. One Sunday morning in church I felt I had a word from the Lord and prophesied to him not to worry about trying to resurrect the old days because they weren’t coming back. Rather, God was going to do a new thing in evangelism and it would be done through the Holy Spirit. He didn’t say much at the time, but later called me in the middle of the Super Bowl (yes it was that Sunday) and railed on me for perpetrating false doctrine and not to “ever do that again.” “You’re a liar!” he shouted, “God doesn’t change! Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today, and forever!” (I guess that’s why God still uses the King James version of the Bible up in heaven [and yet what did He do during the first 1600 years of the New Covenant when it hadn’t been written yet?].)

God doesn’t change. But His tactics change all the time, as they must. We are at war with the devil for the souls of men, and in war, tactics change as situations and technology changes. It would be a foolish general who would send his soldiers out on horses carrying swords to meet the enemy today!

The hardest part of evangelism now is getting through the barrage of noise and other messages constantly vying for people’s attention. How many advertising messages do they calculate people are subjected to every day? I’ve quit answering my phone unless it’s our local area code; I don’t watch TV (except for the Super Bowl), maybe 1% of the emails I get are personal rather than bulk (not counting the tons of junk emails screened out before getting to my inbox). We are bombarded with messages trying to get our attention, if only for a moment. How can the message of the Gospel get through? Do you think this is by accident? Or is it part of a demonic strategy to insulate people from the message which could deliver them from the kingdom of darkness?

The old methods no longer work. An evangelist preaching against sin sounds a lot like a car salesman shouting about the latest once-in-a-lifetime sale. We’ve trained our minds to tune them out, just like we used to tune out our parents’ words no matter how loud they shouted.

Flyers, newspaper ads, radio spots… nothing has the ability to break through the competing messages out there. (That’s true for us Christians too. That’s why God tells us to “be still and know that I am God.”) Let’s face it—the world has it down with advertising. And we have one hand tied behind our backs already because we can’t use the world’s favorite attention-getting tool—scantily-clad women!

So how do we get our message out? And how do we overcome that other barrier: message fatigue? It’s not a new and fresh message for most people; they have heard it in some form over and over; in many cases hearing just enough to immunize themselves.

Enter my evangelist friend Joy Gartman. Joy goes down to the river bottoms with a feeding team once a week. While they are feeding the homeless, Joy is being led by the Holy Spirit to talk with individuals of the Lord’s choosing. Joy is a grandmotherly type, gentle and soft-spoken. But when God shows her something about a person, she is not afraid to speak it. (She asks permission first.)

To one man recently she said, “I see that you are a violent person. I see you snuffing out people like you would grind out a cigarette butt under your heel. And God wants you to know that the people whose lives you’ve snuffed out were people He loved and cared about. And though God loves you very much, He loved them too, and He’s telling you that you need to repent for those lives you’ve taken.

Whew! That’s a long way from “The Four Spiritual Laws,” and “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.”

To another man she said, “I perceive you are a man in a lot of trouble. I see this huge net suspended over you that’s about to fall on you and take you away. God has given you a lot of chances but you blew them off and now it’s all caught up to you and you’re not going to escape.” Tears came to this hardened man’s eyes and rolled down his cheeks because (as he told Joy later) he was facing a long prison stretch and was afraid he might never come back as one of his many enemies caught up with  him and snuffed him out there.

Can a supernatural word of knowledge break through the noise and penetrate a man’s heart? Can the Holy Ghost still “read a person’s mail?” That’s what it’s going to take for evangelism to succeed in the 21^st century. For too long the church has tried to do it alone. In this day we need the Holy Ghost.

Visions in the Fog: Hindrances to God's Glory Being Poured Out

By Joy Gartman, as told to David Hobbs

[There are many Christians who walk in the Spirit. Many have had far more powerful experiences than I, but I suppose it’s all relative. One person I have much respect for is Joy Gartman.

Pastor Joy is one of the most spiritually sensitive people I know. With her husband, she has pastored throughout the coun­try, mostly in the Episcopal Church. Now retired from pastoring, she travels as an evangelist and also ministers to the homeless. The following is her account, as told to our prayer group--DH]

   

    Recently I was caught up to a face-to-face encounter with the Lord. He spoke with me and allowed me to ask Him questions. One of the questions I asked was “Lord, why don’t you pour out Your glory as You have promised? How long must we wait?”

The Lord answered, “I long for that even more than you do, but where can I pour it out?”

Not long after this I was driving from Yuba City to the Rock of Roseville Church across the Central Valley. It was winter, and as often happens in the winter months in the cold mornings there were dense patches of valley fog. As I was driving, I felt the presence of the Lord fill my car and I noticed that strange things were happening to the fog. I rea­lized I was having some kind of vision. The fog seemed to congeal into squares or blocks and they began taking on dif­ferent colors. “What is this? What am I seeing?” I asked the Lord.

“The fog represents My glory,” He responded.

I noticed off toward the horizon a block of gray, dark, dirty looking fog. “Why is that fog gray?” I wondered aloud.

“The gray fog is My glory contaminated with sin,” He said.

[When Joy said this I thought of Simon the Sorcerer who offered Peter money for the ability to lay hands on people and confer the gift of the Holy Spirit.]

A little farther I saw in another direction some brown fog. “What’s with the brown fog?” I asked.

“The brown fog is My glory contaminated by the flesh.”

[When Joy said this, I thought of those who used their spiritual giftings to subtly promote themselves—building up their ministries, raising money,  merchandising products, and boasting in their newsletters of their many accomplishments, all in the Name of Christ.]

Then I saw close at hand some pink fog, which looked unlike anything I had ever seen before. “Wow! What’s the pink fog?”

“The pink fog is My glory contaminated by false doc­trine.”

[When she said this I thought of those who teach that we can go on sinning after salvation, that spiritual gifts died out with the early church, that unless you belong to their group you can’t be saved, those who cri­ticize every move of the Spirit in our day….]

Then right before me, towering in the sky to a great height, was a pillar of dazzling white fog, stunning in its beauty and brilliance.

“That is My glory, pure and undefiled.”

But even as I was watching in awe while trying to keep my car on the road, I noticed some tendrils of the pink fog beginning to drift toward the pillar of pure fog, as if to wrap themselves around it and intermingle with it.

“Even when I find a safe place to pour My glory out, there is ever-present danger of contamination by those who dwell on the earth,” the Lord concluded and the vision ended.

See the book Walking in the Soirit for more supernatural encounters.

http://walkinginthespiritbook.com