Salt is good: but if the salt have lost his saltness, wherewith will ye season it? Have salt in yourselves, and have peace one with another, Mark 9:50.
My book, Who Moved the Goal Posts? is now available in paperback. Evangelist Timothy McVey who wrote one chapter of it has made it available through his Ebay store.( https://www.ebay.com/itm/332864477570 ) The book can also be ordered through Local Church Bible Publishers who printed the book, and it is available on Kindle.
The gist of the book should be troubling to every true lover of actual soul winning. The ability to go out into the world at large and to carve out a people for Jesus Christ is for all intents and purposes dead in North America. What is sad is that very few people have noticed. What is proposed in the book is that we move the goal posts back to where they were for the first 1970 years of the Christian era. A person of old was never considered to be a person carved out of the world for Jesus Christ until they were saved, came out from the world by joining the local church, and tried to live by its precepts as they learned this new life with the other saints of God.
If most of my readers would take an inventory of their own church and the closest 20 Independent Fundamental Baptist Churches nearest to them, they will notice that new families who hithertofore had not professed a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ are lacking from almost all churches. These new families garnered from the population at large are the lifeblood of actual church growth. In the last 40 years the ability to labor over such families (or individuals) until they showed clear signs of repentance, and molded their lives and hearts to conform to the precepts of God through their local church has dwindled and disappeared in most cases.
As a substitute for actual soul winning is an attempt to grow churches through attracting families that already profess salvation. Pastors today labor over varying amounts of people who they either inherited when they took the church, or who they enticed to attend through church programs or some other attraction. In almost all of these case, the people of the church professed salvation before coming, or before the current pastor arrived.
If any of my readers would like to see a family in their vicinity make a 180 degree turn around from sin to righteousness as recorded in the word of God, this book will help. If praying the prayer with hundreds of people who show almost no inclination to righteousness still satisfies you, then this book will only annoy you. I can assure you that to have a family in your church whose children once went to bed at night listening to raunchy music while their parents cursed and drank, and to now have those children singing the songs of Zion and going to bed at night tucked in with love is a great reward. To have husbands and wives who once cheated on each other, struggled with substance abuse and knew nothing of saving grace, now seated in your church and living lives of virtue and faith is a great joy. Too few of my friends in the ministry have such families in their church. Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners, I Corinthians 15:33. The form of soul winning that has been taught and practiced for the last 40 years has collapsed the ability to reproduce our faith in the population at large. I still have men who argue with me about that theologically, but have no visible fruit to back up their fruitless theory.
I have converts in my church. I have people struggling with the concepts of repentance, faith and Jesus Christ himself. There was a time when every church had such people. Then pastors were taught to run them all through a quick prayer. Since then, churches have ceased winning new converts. Are you tempted to enter such a ministry? If so, get the book.