Several years ago I walked through an old church building that had been mostly abandoned, and thoughts flooded my mind. The sanctuary and pews were still there. There was a piano near the platform that looked like nobody had touched it in years. Hymnals were in all of the racks. Dust covered almost everything. It was a strange feeling because all the pieces were still present. The building hadn’t disappeared, but the life that had once filled the place was gone.
I remember wondering how many prayers had been prayed there and how many people had come to Christ. I thought about how many funerals, weddings, baptisms, and ordinary Sundays had happened within those walls. The room itself was full of reminders that something had once happened there, but it was obvious that not much was happening there now.
I’ve thought about that moment more than once over the years, and for some reason it came back to me recently when I ran across this quote from A.W. Tozer.
“If the Holy Spirit was withdrawn from the church today, 95 percent of what we do would go on and nobody would know the difference.”
I don’t know if Tozer’s percentage is right, and honestly, I don’t think that’s the part that matters. What keeps nagging at me is the image of that empty church building, because it occurs to me that it’s possible for the evidence of life to remain long after life itself has left. That sounds dramatic, I know. Maybe I’m being too dramatic. But I’ve seen enough in life to know it can happen quietly. I’ve been in multiple church facilities over the years. That image from years ago, is not too uncommon.
Think about this… A person can keep a house exactly the way someone left it. The same pictures on the walls, and the same chair in the corner. That same old Bible on the nightstand. Everything in place, and yet the room feels painfully empty because presence is not the same thing as the arrangement of furniture. The room still looks the same, but the loved one’s presence is no longer there. It’s just not the same. At all!
I wonder sometimes if churches can learn to arrange things so well that we stop noticing what is absent. That is a hard sentence for me to write because I love the church. I love gathering with God’s people. I love preaching. I love seeing volunteers show up early and stay late. I love the ordinary faithfulness that nobody claps for. So this is not me standing outside the church taking shots at it. I’m standing inside it, in the trenches of ministry every single week.
And maybe that’s why Tozer’s words bother me.
There is a kind of church life that can keep moving by force of habit. The announcements still get made and the songs still begin on time. The sermon still gets preached. Somebody still knows where the offering plates are, or the QR code, depending on how modern the church is trying to be that week. The potlucks continue. The friendships are still there. Every week the doors are opened, the lights come on, and everyone smiles at each other. We are doing church, and most of that is good. But somewhere underneath all of it, there is this question I don’t really know how to escape: are we depending on the Lord, or have we just gotten familiar with the routines?
I don’t think that question can be answered just by looking at the room. A full room can be spiritually empty, while an empty room can be full of prayer. For the most part, we usually don’t know as much as we think we know.
As I’ve been studying the book of Acts, what I do know is that the early church seemed almost painfully aware that they could not produce spiritual life on their own. When they were threatened, they prayed. When they were confused, they waited. When the doors were opened, they still needed direction. Their confidence was never in their ability to keep the movement going. It was in the God who had started it.
That’s the part I keep circling back to. It was all started by God, and now it’s sustained by God. But, unfortunately it becomes too easy to try to manage without God once things become familiar. We don’t say that out loud. We aren’t processing the thought of “we got it from here God”. Nobody puts that in the mission statement, it just happens in the hidden places of the heart. Our prayers slowly become shorter because our experience has made us efficient, and our dependence gets replaced by whatever worked last time.
I hate to admit it but I’ve done that more than I want to admit. There have been multiple times when I prepared more than I prayed. There’s no other way to say it than “I leaned on my own understanding”. Too often in sermon prep I have thought through what needed to be said but didn’t sit long enough with the One who needed to say it through me. That is uncomfortable to confess, but it’s true. I suspect it’s not just true in my life.
I think this is where true revival has to begin. In a place of honesty. It’s a place that is much smaller than a platform and much deeper than a church calendar. I truly believe it begins when a pastor, a church member, a worship leader, a Sunday School teacher, a tired believer sitting in the back row finally admits, “Lord, I know how to do the routine, but I don’t want to do this without You.” That kind of prayer probably won’t impress anybody, and it may not sound like much. But, I know God hears this prayer!
I still think of that old sanctuary from time to time. The settled dust, and the quiet strange sadness of seeing a place that still carried the shape of worship but no longer held the sound of it. I don’t want my life or the church to become that. I don’t think the answer is panic or guilt or trying to manufacture some emotional experience so we can reassure ourselves that God is present. The answer is probably much simpler. We return to our first love, by slowing down enough to notice what we’ve been missing. We ask God to make us hungry again. Maybe, before we start asking for revival in the church, we let Him ask what has grown cold in us. (Ouch that one stung!)
The scariest thing about Tozer’s quote is not that it might be true somewhere else, it’s that it might be true closer than we think. And, if that’s true, revival doesn’t begin with looking around… it begins with looking within.
I walked through that abandoned church years ago, my prayer is that I never become one!