QUOTE: "We are not leading people into that immediate relationship with the living Lord. If you listen to most sermons, that intimate personal relationship is missing. If you talk to many church members, they feel they are in the right relationship to God when they attend all the worship services, they tithe, they go on a mission trip. And many a pastor would evaluate a member, not from the intimate relationship with the Lord, but for how faithful he is in all the activities of the church—and does he tithe? It's activity. Many of God's people have moved from the relationship to religious activity. We are content to live without the manifest presence, power and activity of God. ... There's a huge gap in the teaching ministry of pastors. We have put on them a huge sense of the priority of evangelism. We had an evangelist in our church not long ago. He said the thing I thought he would say: that the No. 1 priority above everything else is to reach out to the lost. I would say that's not true. The priority of every congregation is the lordship of Christ and everything else will come out of that. Many a pastor would not know how in the world to guide their church under the lordship of Christ ... because his life doesn't function out of that mindset." —longtime pastor and best-selling author Henry Blackaby [Baptist Press, 5/12/09]
