Has the Mallu-Penty Church forgotten the gospel? (Part 1)

I have been a Malayalee Pentecostal all my life. I love the charismatic and vibrant nature of Pentecostalism and the importance we give to prayer and fellowshipping with each other. Every fasting prayer is a time of re-dedication and submission and pot-lucks do unite the introverts and extroverts in a church. We love to worship God with all our might, speaking in tongues and our spiritual hunger (few exceptions) comes to an end when the lead Pastor delivers an energizing sermon which he has been preparing for the past 1 week. So is there any area for improvement or is our primary intention to maintain the status quo?

The main distinction of Pentecostalism from other denominations is the doctrine of Baptism in the Holy Spirit. Spirit-baptism is a separate event after conversion in Pentecostal theology. Personally I love the Pentecostal Pneumatology(Holy-Spirit Theology) and the importance it gives to the empowered work of the Holy Spirit in a believer's life rather than restricting Spirit to just the conversion experience. But on the other side, unfortunately this doctrine has been extended and has led to all kinds of heretical teaching. The self-proclaimed Spirit utterances by preachers have become common in the last 20 years and what we see is some declarations made at the Pulpit which have nothing to do with Scripture. They have no respect for the Word of God and even preach from verses where they completely contradict the context and say whatever they like in the name of the Spirit just to hype-up the audience’s emotions. Examples of Out-Of-Context Preaching can be found here.

The focus of this article is just on the singing time and preaching time of a regular sunday service so rest of the matters would be addressed in a later time. So let me start from the singing time on Sundays. There is an unwritten code that say, songs on Sunday mornings should be authored by Bethel/Hillsong/Elevation no matter what the lyrics are. We love cool songs and don’t care what the song really says. What a pathetic state have we reached? I do agree all the mentioned bands have few songs that do meet some standards of Scripture and I love singing some of their songs so do not misunderstand me. But my question is this - Are we worshipping the bands and their music or is our worship directed towards God? Is singing more about the orchestration of a song and it’s melody and less about the gospel? We have reached a state where the younger generation don’t even know what hymns are. No one cares for theologically rich gospel-driven songs.

Hymns have become old-school and the church has almost reached the state of banning them from our worship services. If the vocalist can sing in higher scale generating some response from audience, match the drum tempo and time signature along with some cool orchestration, we will conclude that our worship is a success and has reached the heavens where God has been pleased. When it comes to Malayalam songs, the criteria is just some fast numbers that should make us clap and the session should end in a final slow song that plays around with our emotions(Again lyrics would be man-centered where it is about our health/wealth/suffering and less about the work of Christ and salvation.) Is that the worship mentioned in Scripture? Romans 12:1 says – “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”

I am all for clapping/dancing/jumping if we feel led by the Spirit so do not consider me as a cessationist. But remember whatever we offer as worship should sincerely come from our heart. It should not be an act but rather genuine. Why should we worship God? He should be worshipped as he is our Creator, Lord and Savior, who is worthy of all our praise, honor and glory. His blessings for us are secondary but the primary cause of our worship is him being our Lord and Savior. The attitude of a true worshipper should be, “Even if he doesn’t bless me, I will still worship Him.” Another important point to note is that worship does not end on Sunday but it is a life-style where our entire body should be presented as a living sacrifice 24*7.

Spiritual ecstasy is a big issue in our community. All what we desire from a Sermon on Sunday morning is to hear the preacher's words that are music to our ears. We love only sermons that satisfy our emotional hunger. We don’t care what verse or portion of the Bible is being preached. Phrases like, “God is going to heal you right now”, “Your loan will be closed the next working day”, “God will make you the head and not tail in your city”, “What you are going through is momentary but a big overflow of blessing is on the way” gives us goosebumps. These kind of encouragements generate a great emotional response accompanied by tongues and strong clapping.

After carefully studying a particular passage for 1 whole week, when the Pastor faithfully exposits from the Scripture on Sunday, the response that he gets is upsetting. You can watch an uninterested emotionless audience looking as if they were watching a slow-paced award movie, some of them yawning and others taking a shameless nap. Don’t even think about preaching doctrines on Sundays because that will generate more weird expressions on their face. The reason what they say is that “Doctrine is boring”. Some are of the opinion that all we need is practical Christianity (basically christian pep-talk and no doctrines). So now the Pastor is forced to mix his sermon with a little motivation and some soft-prosperity which generates the expected emotion within audience and now both Pastor and audience are happy.😀

I wonder how we can lead a practical Christian life without knowing the doctrines in the Bible ( Practical Christian Life = Application of Doctrines) If majority of those people in our churches were alive 2000 years back and present in Churches of Corinth/Ephesus/Galatia, I am pretty sure the language of Paul would have been stronger. So unfortunately, our Pastors are forced to preach sermons that generate a strong response from the audience. Who would want an unexpressive audience while they preach? At the end of the day, our sermons are reaching a point where preaching is about entertaining the audience rather than speaking the gospel-truth in the Spirit.

So where have we gone wrong? It is our attitude towards Scripture that needs a major change. We say that we are against prosperity theology but unfortunately we do affirm and appreciate it indirectly. Instead of saying directly that God is going to give you a car or house or bank balance, we love hearing the word, “blessing”. As long as we hear “God bless you” and not “God will give you a Mercedes or mansion in Hawaii”, we are fine!! Have we realized how hypocritical we are? And then we point fingers at all types of so-called new generation prosperity preachers around the world!! It is high time for a drastic change in our attitude. 2 Tim 3:16-17 says – “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” We should not forget the fact that Scripture is breathed by God and it is not something that we should use to satisfy our emotional cravings or generate an ecstasy. But rather it should be used to preach the gospel and lead us towards a God-focused, Christ-centered and Spirit-led life. Sin should be pointed out and righteousness through works should be discouraged in our sermons.

One of my favorite theologian - Jerry Bridges says, “To preach the gospel to yourself, then, means that you continually face up to your own sinfulness and then flee to Jesus through faith in His shed blood and righteous life. It means that you appropriate, again by faith, the fact that Jesus fully satisfied the law of God, that He is your propitiation, and that God’s holy wrath is no longer directed toward you.“ But how many Malayalee Pentecostal pulpits are being used to preach the incorruptible and true gospel of Jesus Christ? Aren’t we all satisfied with the motivational sermons coated with prosperity? My dear brothers and sisters, it is high time to come back to the basics. We have reached a state where we have even forgotten the gospel. 1 Peter 2:2 says – “Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation.” So I pray and really hope that the current state of the Malayalee Pentecostalism return back to gospel otherwise we are moving into deep trouble.