The Autopsy of the Church

Summary

Summary prepared by Acts 2:38 Life from the YouTube recording's caption track, read through the transcript panel — published in summary form; watch the full sermon at the source.

Because of the Times 1991, The Pentecostals of Alexandria, Alexandria, LA. Godair — a pastor of thirty-two years' preaching, invited back to this conference to preach again a message the host pastor had heard him preach months before and asked him to pray about bringing here — performs an autopsy: an examination of a corpse to determine the cause of death, applied to churches that carry a name that they live, and are dead. It is a night message to a house full of preachers, and its second half turns the diagnosis into a mobilisation: the same church that can die of neglect is one awakened, soul-winning generation away from the greatest revival it has ever seen. (Two blocks stand outside the sermon's span and are seamed in packet.md: the host's welcome at the head, and the opening prayer Godair invites G. A. Mangun to pray before the preaching begins.)

A name that thou livest, and art dead

He opens his Bible to the third chapter of the Revelation and reads the letter to Sardis aloud entire — the seven spirits and the seven stars, the works not found perfect, the few names that have not defiled their garments, the promise to the overcomer — and takes his text from its first verse: a church with a reputation for life and a condition of death. His subject is the autopsy of a dead church, and the congregation is put on notice that he has not come to condemn but to learn alongside them; he has been opening his own heart to the conference's preaching all week.

Scriptures: Revelation 3:1-6

The church is supposed to be alive

An autopsy determines a cause of death, and the Amplified rendering of his text says the Sardis church was supposed to be alive but in reality was dead. The church of Jesus Christ is supposed to be alive because its Lord is alive: in him was life, and the life was the light of men — the one text of this movement he locates and voices at its full extent. Around it he builds the case in the words of Jesus and of Paul without pausing to cite them: because he lives, we live; he came that we might have life more abundantly; he is the resurrection and the life; and the life a believer now lives is lived by the faith of the Son of God. This host church, he insists, is alive — but honesty requires the next movement.

Scriptures: John 1:4

Alive in name, dying in fact

Some individuals, some members, and some local churches are dead or in the process of dying, and spiritual death is never sudden. He walks the biblical ward of the fallen: a first king whose great beginning ended sadly, a strong man who barely made it back at the cost of his life, a wise king who imported false gods with foreign wives, a fellow worker who forsook the apostle having loved this present world, a handpicked apostle who went out to his own place, and five virgins whose lamps went out. Behind him stands the week's own grief — a saint of twelve years whose hospital room he was called to the Friday before, and whose funeral he preached on Monday; dying saved and dying lost, he says, are not the same. Churches die the way people do: gradually, through sins that eat like a cancer — envy, bitterness, rebellion, gossip, strife, jealousy — and through petty quarrels over singers and Sunday-school teachers, until the manifestation of the Holy Ghost is crowded out of a house that still looks well on the outside.

Scriptures: (none new in this movement — the Sardis text returns here and is indexed at the head)

Works and labour and patience — or works of faith, labour of love, patience of hope

He has the host pastor read for him the Thessalonian commendation: a work of faith, a labour of love, a patience of hope. Against it he sets Ephesus, located and voiced from the Revelation's second chapter: works, labour, and patience — the same three things, without the faith, the love, and the hope that carry them above mechanics. A movement can learn how to do Pentecost and lose the power of it; the only thing that brings revival is the demonstration of the Holy Ghost. He then surveys the seven churches as case studies — the synagogue-of-Satan blasphemy, the Balaam doctrine, the Jezebel who was given space to repent and repented not, Philadelphia's open door, and Laodicea's lukewarmness, spewed out because it felt no need — before turning the diagnosis into a charge: stir up the gift that is in thee, and strike while the iron is hot.

Scriptures: 1 Thessalonians 1:3; Revelation 2:2

The greatest revival, if the church will wake

He is a self-confessed dreamer: the glory of the latter house will be greater than the former, and the church of the end time is glorious, spotless, and anointed — not a remnant hanging on. His own assembly is his evidence: in one January of ordinary services, fifty- two were baptised in the name of the Lord Jesus and thirty-five received the Holy Ghost, and on a recent Sunday night four tall young men who had grown up in the church and gone out into drinking and drugging stood weeping at its altar — it feels so good to be back home. What brought revival in yesteryear is the same thing that brings it in 1991: not preaching polish, not choirs, but the sovereign drawing work of the Holy Ghost, felt by people who cannot remember a text three weeks later but cannot deny what they felt where somebody had been in the prayer room.

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)

The causes of death

The autopsy report names three causes. First, lack of prayer and fasting: the kind that only goes out by prayer and fasting will not move for people who will not pray, and he sounds the church's standing prescription entire — if my people, called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face, then will I hear from heaven and heal their land — alongside the charge to build ourselves up in the most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost. The tombstone over many a heart would read: died for lack of prayer. Second, refusal to cooperate with the church and its God-ordained leadership: every sheep needs a shepherd, God did not call a committee, and a church that will not follow cannot be led into revival. Third, lack of worship: the worship text he locates and voices is the Saviour's own rule — they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth — and a church that will not clap, shout, and lift its hands, that leaves its worship to a handful of spectators' neighbours, is dying however fine its building and its businessmen.

Scriptures: John 4:24

Sleeping in harvest time

His last cause is the one he rides to the close: the sleeper in harvest is a son that causes shame. Everything alive has to sleep — cranes and whales, kings and beggars, scholars and athletes — but there are posts where sleep is criminal: the nurse at a critical bedside, the surgeon with a patient prepared, the fireman while the city burns, the engineer at the throttle, the soldier on sentinel duty, the shepherd while wolves prowl, the preacher while a dying man cries for the way. The fields are white; this is no time for lethargy. There is no limit to what God could do through the preachers in this room if they went home awake — and veterans of thirty-five years in the Holy Ghost must show, not tell, the soul-winning: the new converts who knocked on two hundred and ten doors in a Saturday and passed out two thousand tracts put him to shame, so last Saturday he gave eight hours to visitation himself, and five people from his first door were in church the next morning.

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)

The commission, the buses, and the pledge

The close is the Great Commission preached as a roll of the Master's own words — go into all the world, teach all nations, receive power, be witnesses to the uttermost part, lift up your eyes to fields already white — and then, after the catalogue of churches that die for empty prayer rooms and absent visitation, a prophetic passage sounds over the house in the first person as the Lord: an everlasting love, tools and weapons placed in the church's hands and set aside, a commission renewed. Godair takes the service up again without fear of where the people are: Jesus would be in the jails, the prisons, the rest homes, the streets and lanes of the city. His own church bought buses until it had twenty, all paid for, never fewer than five hundred riders a Sunday in six months, whole families baptised — and when the children mess up the classrooms and knock the glass out of a bus door, it is worth it: a little girl of about ten stopped him on the sidewalk to thank him for loving her and bringing her to church — she stands unnamed here exactly as he tells her: he never gives her name, and as he tells it she did not even know his. He ends with the Sardis question turned on the house — why sit here till we die — a hand-in-hand prayer that God would make the burden alive tonight, and a spot-putting pledge: raise a hand, and in the next thirty to sixty days put forth a sincere, concerted effort to win one soul.

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)