I have been in churches that have gone down the road of trying to be the latest thing. It is a sad thing to see the pastoral staff change from shepherds of a flock to managers of a business.
Having been in the Church for fifty years now (in the Baptist denomination), I've watched many churches diminish and die - more in the last two decades, though, than ever before. If it isn't leadership scandal that has fractured and dissolved these churches, it is a slow migration from a concrete, transformative, daily, personal experience of God. When I speak to believers today of "life in the Spirit," of "walking in the Spirit," they don't really know what I'm talking about - certainly not experientially - and often assume I mean the blasphemous garbage promoted by the WoF/Prosperity Gospel/New Thought/N.A.R. folk. But the Spirit-filled-and-led life is basic Christianity, it's the normal Christian life. That so many professing Christians around me know nothing of this sort of living and have settled instead into what amounts to Boot-Strap Christianity suggests to me that at least one of the primary reasons for the slowly apostasizing Church is an absence of the supernatural life and work of the Holy Spirit in it. And in the absence of the transforming work of the Spirit in the lives of believers, either "sound and fury signifying nothing" has filled the void, or a dry, academic, institutionalized "faith" has formed where expansive knowledge of doctrine and high-level seminary credentials equate to spiritual maturity. In either direction, churches move away from God and, sooner or later, find they are led by men who live in gross, secret sin and constituted of members who don't know what it is to be truly taught, convicted, strengthened, comforted and transformed by the Holy Spirit.
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