This article, though not intended as a book review, is nonetheless inspired by a book I recently read. God’s Generals by Roberts Lairdon is an overview of the lives of many great men and women of God who proclaimed the Good News during difficult and often perilous times. As I read each gripping story, I imagined how it might be to walk in their shoes and feel their struggles and triumphant joys. Like many modern day churchgoers, I found myself saying, “I wish the Church today was like it was in the “Good Ole Days”. That thought brought about a great awakening for me.
The reason Church life was so exciting in the past was because the Church was the center of community life. The Church was depended on for much more than Sunday School and Church. The Church, prior to and during the great depression, was all that offered hope in a struggling society. Men cried out to God to provide food for their families. They prayed for rain, good crops and a mild winter. In short, families depended on God and each other for everything in life. The local church was there to help meet the needs of its people by providing a house of worship, learning, love, and assembly.
After the establishment of Social Security and a welfare system with an array of social programs provided by the government, we began to depend on God for less and less. Travel and communications added to our independence and jobs became more available because we could get information quicker and travel further in shorter time to get to them. The days of raising a family on the farm and living with the “Good Book” in one hand and a plow in the other were over. With the passing of a God dependent society came the dawning of a government dependent society.
For the Church to be like it was back then, people would have to be like they used to be. Imagine what it must have been like in the midst of a long drought on a farm with dried up crops that are supposed to feed your family and provide bartering goods to meet your family's other needs. Without rain your family and other families in the same area will go hungry. What you need is rain but only God can make it rain. The Government couldn’t fill a thimble with a fire hose unless God sends the rain. So you and the other families meet at the church and seek God’s mercy and life giving rain. You pray around the clock for the rains to come.
One evening while the family is gathered around the supper table, just as your father is saying grace you hear one single rain drop fall lightly on the tin roof of your home. Everyone hears it but Dad doesn’t stop praying. Maybe it was just a berry falling from a nearby tree. Then two more drops with more intensity splash against the roof and the soft rumble of thunder in the distance removes all doubt as to the identity of the sound. As dad says amen, the rain falls with authority and the drumming noise against the tin sparks sudden family joy and laughter.
You race to the window to see the rain watering the fields and bringing back life to the earth. In the midst of the excitement you suddenly realize that your father didn't join the family at the window. When you look back you find him still seated at the table, tears streaming down his weathered cheeks, praising God for His mercy and love.
Why isn’t the Church like it was in the “Good Ole Days?” Because we don’t depend on God like we did in the “Good Ole Days.”
