Wisdom dictates that we prepare for coming end-time persecution by reformatting our churches. Rather than vacuously and vainly attempting to salvage our traditional and denominational churches, which are doomed to extinction on a planet being enveloped by the spirit of antichrist, we need to restructure our churches, so as to make them less visible to government surveillance and less vulnerable to government suppression. It is only by restructuring our churches that we will enable ourselves to remain as formable a force for Christ as possible in the dark days ahead.
Reformatting our churches will be no easy task, especially since the contemporary church in America will recoil at any suggestion that it forfeit public attention, in order to preserve itself, in the final days of this fallen world, as the lone steward of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Believing its success, not to mention future survival, is contingent upon assimilating itself to today’s politically correct culture, in order to make itself appealing within it, America’s contemporary church balks at the biblical admonition to refrain from being squeezed into the world’s mold (Romans 12:1-2 PHILLIPS). Instead, it jumps in with both feet, believing that by doing so it endears itself to a world at enmity with God. To suggest, therefore, to contemporary churchgoers and churchmen, that the church needs to strip itself of all of its worldly trappings, which it presently, proudly, and publicly parades itself in, is completely nonsensical to them, since they view these things as ensuring the church’s success, not endangering its survival.
Most modern-day evangelicals are incorrigible in their insistence that the church’s conformity to culture is indispensable to the transformation of culture. Consequently, they are both oblivious to the fact and opposed to the proposition that the church’s only hope of remaining a pervasive and permeating force in a society becoming increasingly hostile towards it is to make itself far less targetable within it. Far from assimilating ourselves to today’s politically correct culture, so as to make the church appealing to those within it, the Bible actually teaches us to separate ourselves from it, in order to offer those within it a true alternative to it!
It is to these two critical ends that all Christians in America must now unite. First, we must unite to assure the church’s survival in our land as a pervasive and permeating force for Christ in the dark days ahead. Second, we must unite in separating ourselves from our unchristian culture, in order to offer all within it the one and only true alternative to it—CHRISTIANITY!
It is now incumbent upon us to partner together in the planting of a new kind of church in America, which is really not new at all, but as old as the New Testament. We must go back to the future, by resurrecting the New Testament blueprint for Christ’s church, along with the Master’s plan for evangelism. Just as the first century church was enabled by this divinely inspired pattern and Christ-given plan to survive and thrive during times of persecution, the twenty first century church will also be enabled by this same divinely inspired pattern and Christ-given plan to survive and thrive, as far as possible, during end-time persecution.