More and more, the national American habit is for citizens to merely be spectators and not active participants. We’re all now just outsiders looking in with no real get-up-and-go to creatively tackle the growing chaos.

Of course, all our country’s “leaders” have failed us. A look at this current presidential race is plenty enough proof.

“The culture we live in isn’t one where you can go and get your standards,” advised Jordan in a recent Sunday morning sermon. “You’re going to have to live independently out there and you’re going to have to do it with some confidence in what God’s Word says.

“That’s not a bad thing, by the way, because it forces you not to rely on the culture to do your spiritual thinking for you. It forces you to stand on your own independently, and think and live scripturally by faith so you’re getting your concepts and your identity in life by looking to God’s Word. That’s a good thing.”

*****

While the country’s mainstream culture—even through my childhood—once supported Christian values, at least in a quasi-sense, we now live in a post-Christian world that no longer even knows God’s thinking process about home life, marriage, how to raise children, how to work on the job, etc.

As for the thoroughly emaciated state of the church the Body of Christ, Jordan assures, “When you don’t know what God’s doing, you wind up looking for things to make your church go. That’s why the church follows fads so often.”

*****

Up until the late ’70s-early ’80s, the largest churches in America were still fundamentalist churches. There were even still a lot of Acts 2, Scofield Reference Bible-toting churches.

Jordan says, “If your my age you can remember even back before then it was, ‘We know we’re right because we’re the biggest ones!’ but in the ’80s, the biggest churches in America quit being independent, fundamentalist churches and began to be Charismatic churches. In the ’80s, the Assemblies-of-God-Charismatic-Pentecostal churches began to be the big churches.”

*****

The sea change in American religious life, explains Jordan, really got under way in the late ’70s when Jimmy Carter was running for president and “put two major terms into the common vernacular of our culture: ‘Born again’ was one and ‘lusting in your heart’ was the other.

“As you remember, it came out of an interview he had in Playboy. That was the month all the preachers bought Playboy. Yeah, sure. Of course, when Jimmy Swaggart got into trouble, all the preachers went out and bought Penthouse.

“What was before simply a Southern Baptist term (‘born again’) became a cultural phenomenon. It was, ‘Jimmy Carter and the Gang,’ and Christians thought, ‘Oooh, the media’s now using some of our terms. We’re making an impact in the world!’ And it began to get into the culture that way.

“In the ’80s, the fads began to take over. There were the Kansas City Prophets and then there was The Toronto Blessing. The laughing hysteria. Then there was the Brownsville Revival down in Pensacola, Fla.—all the barking. You know, it’s not enough to laugh, now you got to bark and jerk and twitch and that kind of stuff.

“The evangelical church—the people who were supposed to know something about the Bible—didn’t have any ability to resist that stuff and it began to take over.

“You’ve heard of Chuck Smith in Costa Mesa, Calif.? I’ll guarantee you he’s going to wind up in the annals of church history as one of the most influential people on evangelism in the ’80s and ’90s and early 21^st century. Just look at what he did with church music alone—bringing in all the ‘worship and praise’ stuff.”

*****

In the mid-’90s, Jordan accepted an invitation to audit a one-week, doctorate-level seminar put on by the Baptist Bible Seminary in Indianapolis to discuss the state of fundamentalism in America. Returning missionaries and pastors from around the country attended.

“Two veteran church planners taught the class and I sat for 8 hours each day listening to these guys—these were the people who led fundamentalism for five decades and planted 1,000s of independent gospel-preaching churches across America,” Jordan recalls. “I kept thinking, ‘These guys are scared because it isn’t working for them anymore.’

“In essence, they spent a week teaching me and the rest of the people how that, ‘What you’re going to have to do is bite the bullet and become like . . . ’ This guy just couldn’t bring himself to say, ‘You got to become like the Charismatics,’ but that’s what he was saying!

“And all of a sudden methodologies became the issue and the fads . . . Pastor O’Hair said back in the ’40s that if the church rejected—and I’m talking about the Body of Christ now, not the false church—right division and the distinctiveness of Paul, the result would be the church ‘would be scourged with the rod of Pentecostal fanaticism,’ and you and I have lived to see that fulfilled.

“You see words mean things. Terms mean things. They communicate ideas; words. I sit and am amazed by the people who get caught up in things—‘It looks like it’s a good idea’; ‘Well, everybody’s doing it.’

“Well, why are you doing it? ‘Well, because everybody’s doing it,’ and those are the things that get to be the fads.

“When the Charismatic fad first came in, I thought it was just going to stay out there in the Charismatic realm and the realm of the fringe-wackos and then all of a sudden a big movement started where everybody was going to what’s called Promise Keepers.

“And, boy, you weren’t anything if you weren’t a Promise Keeper. In just a couple of years it was a big, big thing. You had the Willow Creek (mega-church) syndrome and the ‘seeker-sensitive’ model. That’s just a man-centered marketing package.

“Back in the early ’80s, (Christian researcher George) Barna wrote a book about marketing the church and how you’ve got to use the ‘marketing text,’ and that means going out and finding out what people want and giving them what they want. And you say, ‘Well, where was God in all that?! I thought we were supposed to be Christ-centered, not man-centered?!’

“But because you can put 15,000 people in a building and they all talk about Jesus and everybody goes, ‘Oh, isn’t that wonderful,’ well, it’s a fad and people ride the fads.

“Then you had the Jump-for-Jesus stuff and WWJD. Churchwear was the big deal. Then old Ricky (Warren) came along with all the Purpose-Driven stuff and living the Purpose-Driven life.

“If you look at The Prayer of Jabez, that guy (Atlanta evangelist Bruce Wilkinson) made $40 million on that junk and you think, ‘Where’s he selling that garbage?!’ Everywhere!

“See, you ride that fad like that. You got Jim Dobson promoting the culture-wars fad and Christian talk radio carries that for you . . .”

(Editor’s Note: To be continued . . .)