Gospel Reset – Salvation Made Relevant by Ken Ham

I, for one, am a bit frustrated at the lack of interest in the Gospel in today’s world.  I fully understand we cannot live in past glory days – the days when we would go out to concerts and put tracts on all the cars and hear wonderful stories of conversion after someone picked up a “smiley” tract that said Jesus loves you.  Those days are gone!

We are living in a different day now, still with obvious broken and lost people – but are we reaching them?  Do the same methods work that we used 10-20 years ago?  Tent Revivals? Gospel Sing Night?  Does what works in the Bible Belt necessarily work in Baltimore or Detroit?

Research done by Ken Ham through America’s Research Group is thought-provoking for the Christian who cares about reaching the lost and unchurched.  One of the questions the research group asked in 2015 was, “If you attended church regularly as a child, do you still attend most Sundays or did you stop attending?  Twenty-two percent of the people, in their sixties who were surveyed, attended as a child and have stopped attending church.  For Millennials, that number was over half (53%).  Their research revealed that two-thirds of our young people are leaving the Church in America by the time they reach college age.

Ken Ham writes, “If that exodus trend continues we will end up like England, where only 4-5% of the total population are attending Church”.   I have read this and heard from various speakers that this in fact is the direction America is headed and at a fast pace.  Ken Ham had previously written on this trend in his book, Already Gone.  “The Church in America needs to wake up now and begin by praying, repenting, and returning to our First Love so that we may carry His heart of courage and compassion for the lost and unchurched communities.”

Ken Ham likens Peter’s preaching to the Jews in Acts 2:14-36 to the days when Billy Graham and Billy Sunday would preach to multitudes of Americans – most were church goers and had some morality and basic Bible understanding.  But in today’s culture, it requires Paul’s preaching to the Greeks, an Acts 17 type culture.  Ham suggests that the generation that we must reach with the Gospel has not been raised in the Church!  They are not familiar with Bible stories.  Most have never heard of Jesus unless it has been used in profanity. Most of our young people are being taught from a very early age the Evolutionary Theory within a totally secular worldview.  The vast majority of students attend government schools right up through university.

I do believe that as Christians, we must be willing and able to change our methods as Paul did in Athens – “To the Unknown God. What therefore, you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.” (Acts 17:23)

Pastor Greg