The audacity of apostasy (3), By Ayo Akerele

To stop this bleeding, we must go back to discipleship. We said “yes” to apostasy when we said no to “discipleship.” If churches continue to spring up like vegetable plants with pastors who themselves have not really been discipled, we should bid goodbye to any form of solution to the current crisis.

D.L Moody said, “I would rather awake a sleeping church than a sleeping world.”

It was in 1984, far away in Kaduna State, the northern part of Nigeria, that my dad had an encounter with the Lord in his hotel room. This encounter changed his life and right there that night he knelt down by his bedside, and gave his life to Jesus. He rushed back home with the joy of this encounter, and for the first time in the same week, I and my siblings filed out in front of a firebrand church to totally surrender our lives to the Lord Jesus. That was in 1984, when I gave my life to the Lord Jesus at a Nigerian Baptist Church in the southwestern part of Nigeria. The light the Lord is shining through us to the world today was sparked from the encounter of that day.

There is something spectacular about this church. It was a church of less than two hundred members, but with a formidable structure of growth and discipleship that contributed in no small ways to my early spiritual development. We were drafted into discipleship classes, taught, followed up, and mentored into various crucial doctrines of the Christian faith. Before I was fifteen, I was already leading prayers at the intercessory department, going for follow ups, and actively participating in public evangelism. Church service was another branch of the discipleship class. This was in the 1980s. There were no mobile phones. There were no social media or internet. Morality in the society was top notch. Our pastor was a trained graduate of the famous seminary of the Nigerian Baptist Convention at Ogbomoso, Oyo State, Nigeria.

Our Bible studies lasted for like two hours; they were very intensive, robust, and deep. Our prayer meetings lasted for the same duration and were never devoted to praying for our enemies to die.

Years ago, Susanna Wesley called her two sons, John and Charles, and whispered this wisdom into their ears, “There are two things to do with the gospel: believe it and behave it.”

In this church, sin and its consequences were not discounted on the grounds of grace. Righteousness was promoted from the pulpit to the pews. To become a worker, your private and public lives must be above reproach. When brethren erred, they voluntarily and proudly submitted themselves for discipline. Love was mutual. When we visited one another, we often ate together in the same place. My financial problems were solved by brothers and sisters in the church. We replicated the early church’s model. The result was astonishing. Integrity among brethren skyrocketed. The power of God moved astonishingly. Prayers were answered like fire. Divorce was scarce among us. It was a taboo for anyone to dump the spouse on account of “irreconcilable differences.” The benefits of a well discipled church were clear to the blind.

See friends, let me borrow the words of Leonard Ravenhill, “the house of worship we attend is either filled with incense or with nonsense.”

Here is the solution to the audacity of apostasy in the body of Christ – the discipleship. But how can an undiscipled church leader to disciple church member? It takes a broken man to break other men. From our branch set up practices to our ordination procedures, the love of money has taken the centre stage of dominance at all levels in the Nigerian church. A lover of money is not a disciple. A disciple can’t be a lover of money. Both are mutually exclusive, they can’t happen at the same time. Here is Satan’s trick. He craftily expunged discipleship from the church syllabus and replaced it with entertainment and multi-service models. You don’t know what a multi-service model is? This is the dissolution of Sunday services into first, second, third, and many more services as the case might be.

There is nothing wrong with creating multiple meeting opportunities for a large church to accommodate everyone’s attendance of a Sunday service. But this must not be at the expense of growth-centred spiritual meals for producing genuine disciples of Christ. For the most part, what we now see is a “Coca-Cola production line” kind of a system where people are rushed in and out of church services to accommodate the next batch in a manner that produces very carnal, empty, and malnourished believers – if they are even believers in the first instance. Fifteen minutes of prayers plus twenty minutes of worship plus twenty-five minutes of the word plus ten minutes of announcements will and may never produce sound disciples of Christ in this very godless culture.

Real growth comes with time and patience. But what is actually confronting us is a new generation of pastors and church leaders with no interest in anything called, “discipleship.” All that matters to them are numbers, finance, size, social media followership and engagement, and the number of branches or parishes, among others.

And like Leonard Ravenhill rightly puts it again, “It is possible to be producing believers who rather than trembling for their sins would be preoccupied with trembling for their skins.”

To stop this bleeding, we must go back to discipleship. We said “yes” to apostasy when we said no to “discipleship.” If churches continue to spring up like vegetable plants with pastors who themselves have not really been discipled, we should bid goodbye to any form of solution to the current crisis.

Ayo Akerele is the Senior Pastor of Rhema Assembly and the founder of the Voice of the Watchmen Ministries in Ontario, Canada. He can be reached through ayoakerele2012@gmail.com