Winston Churchill famously said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” During our revival, Blake Wilson preached a timely sermon from this text and Acts 11 about the church being scattered. He remarked that the pandemic did not so much stop the church as scatter it. The church was not shut down, but deployed. We took the church outdoors. I met many of my neighbors and spoke with them about the Lord in Hershey Park. Forcing us outside the walls created new opportunities.
The first church in Jerusalem faced a similar challenge. A great persecution scattered them. When Stephen was killed, the believers in Jerusalem were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria. Everyone except the apostles left. Why did the apostles stay? They were willing to sacrifice their lives and go down with the ship. But we will see that the ones who were scattered did not waste the crisis.
As godly men buried Stephen and mourned deeply, Saul led a full-scale persecution. He dragged off Christians and put them in prison. But Tertullian observed that the blood of the martyrs became the seed of the church. The church of Jesus Christ often grows strongest and fastest when it is persecuted.
When Hurricane Ike decimated Galveston, my friend Pastor Tillmon at West Point Baptist stayed even as the flood waters rose in the church. He stayed to care for his people. He did not waste the crisis, but demonstrated his love for his congregation.
In my lifetime, as far as I can tell, the church in the United States has not faced great persecution. Nobody stops us from going to church. Nobody tells me what I may preach. Nobody is being imprisoned for preaching Jesus. After the Engel vs. Vitale ruling stopped government-sponsored prayer in the schools, I still prayed every day in school. As long as there are tests, we will have prayer in school. I led a Bible study on my high school campus my sophomore year. Our students still can. But the school cannot make people stop and pray. As long as we have a democracy and a constitution with a bill of rights, I believe the church will experience religious liberty. But for anyone to have religious liberty, all must have it.
The Government does not make Christians, nor can it stop people from being Christians. People must be free to believe or not to believe. No one can make Americans believe, pray, or share their faith. If the rights of religious minorities are curtailed for the majority faith, then when the majority faith is no longer the majority, the new majority could curtail our faith as the new minority. So we must not trade in our freedom for the momentary illusion of power.
Someday we may be scattered again for some reason. I pray when that happens that we will not miss the opportunity to share our faith with others. Some may believe. Others may reject our message. But we must not waste the opportunities God gives us. What are we doing with our freedom of religion today? Will we worship this Sunday? Will we pray in our churches and in our homes? If Christians don’t go to prayer meetings, we should not complain about the lack of prayer in schools.
