The New Pandemic of Church Stealing

The New Pandemic of Church Stealing

November 4, 2025

Host: Dr. Jamie Mitchell

Guest: Jon Harris

Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 11/4/25. To listen to the podcast, click HERE.

Disclaimer: While reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate transcription, the following is a representation of a mechanical transcription and as such, may not be a word for word transcript. Please listen to the audio version for any questions concerning the following dialogue.

Jamie Mitchell:

Welcome again to Stand in the Gap. Today I’m your host, Jamie Mitchell, the director of Church Culture at the American Pastors Network. Part of my task at APN is to study the landscape of the church here in America to see and discover any trends or patterns that are affecting the evangelical community. One of the interesting phenomenons that has been happening this past decade or so is the idea of church mergers. It goes like this, A church that once had a rich history falls into decline. Attendance drops under a hundred, making it financially and programmatically impossible, continue. But in the same area, there’s a new younger growing church. The younger church approaches the struggling church and suggests emerge after lengthy discussion, prayer and seeming compromise. They strike a deal, the two become one. However, in short time what was supposed to be a marriage relationship seems more like a hostile takeover, and many of the agreed upon decisions go to the wayside.

What becomes even more clear is the vibrant younger church really didn’t want to blend together with a failing congregation. They just wanted the building. A matter of fact, if some of the former members don’t stay, the newer church is relieved. It sounds hard to believe, but I will tell you it’s happening across the country. It is one of these sad tales that got the attention of the nation. When today’s guest, Jon Harris, produced a three part documentary that went viral across the internet. The story tells the account of a smaller, older, declining church in North Carolina that had to fight against a megachurch who attempted to steal their facility today. Want to hear that story and the story behind the story? Jon Harris, welcome to Stand In the Gap Today.

Jon Harris:

Thank you so much for having me, Jamie. It’s good to be here.

Jamie Mitchell:

Jon, I tried to be brief. I didn’t want to give too much of the storyline of your documentary and the incredible drama that unfolded about a year ago. Can you summarize in a few moments the story of Faith Baptist Church in North Carolina?

Jon Harris:

Sure. Faith Baptist Church was a smaller church compared to the megachurch that tried to take it over the megachurch, which was Summit Church had about 10,000 to 12,000 members, Faith Baptist at about 350, and they were facing a transition point where their old pastor was retiring and they needed to find a new pastor. And what happened was the guy who came in ended up forming a connection, or he had previously formed with Summit, attempted to drive the church into a position where it would be in a financial crisis and would need outside help. And Summit was more than happy to provide that outside help. And so this would’ve probably gone undetected and this megachurch would’ve received this property that’s valued at 25 to $30 million depending on the market. They would’ve gotten it for pennies on the dollar except for the fact that there were some courageous church members who decided to stand up and they eventually went to court and they beat Summit. Well, it really was the eldership or the leadership at Faith Baptist, but they were being backed by and coordinating with Summit Church. And so it’s a great story because it has a happy ending. The good guys win, but it took a lot to get there, a lot of sacrifice.

Jamie Mitchell:

Jon, this is not an isolated issue. In your research and some of the work that you have done and some of the documentaries that you’ve produced, this idea of church stealing, it’s happening broadly across the country, isn’t it?

Jon Harris:

I found a pattern, it seems like I’ve done two other documentaries that were similar. I wrote an article called Silent Takeover, which was posted at American Reformer a few months ago just with my observations about how this works. But generally what happens is there’s a point where the church is moving into a transition, usually a leadership change or there’s a new ministry or something is requiring the church to make an adjustment. And during that adjustment, some opportunists come in usually with a consulting firm. In this case it was a firm called The Unstuck Group, and they try to end the Legacy Ministries. And what that does is it takes out all the people who would normally object to a bad kind of change because they’re the backbone of the church. They’re the leaders who have been there for a while, and then it replaces those legacy ministries with new innovative forms of ministry.

And so I could give examples, I don’t know if we have time in this segment, maybe we can do that in the next segment of what that looks like. But in this whole process, a lot of the legacy members end up leaving and the church is a sitting duck for a new cast of characters to come in and fill the boards, fill the leadership roles, and then steer the church in whatever direction they want. And churches have a lot of assets, whether that’s property or financial assets, and I think with megachurch models and multi-site campus models, there’s always the hunger to incorporate another location into their steam. So it is happening. It’s happening all over the place, and sometimes the church might find it mutually beneficial to partner with another larger conglomeration, but I think a lot of the time there’s members who are upset and they don’t really have much of a voice. They’re not organized, they don’t know what to do.

Jamie Mitchell:

Jon, in a minute or two that we have left, the story of Faith Baptist was really complicated because they not only had to deal with the larger, more prominent church, but there was betrayal by some of their own leaders. Didn’t that make that really complicated? Jon, are you there?

Jon Harris:

Yeah, I think I heard half your question. You were asking if there were leaders who betrayed the church in the church,

Jamie Mitchell:

Right?

Jon Harris:

Yes, absolutely. So I think a lot of the legacy members who were leading ministries ended up leaving, but there were certainly people that the members trusted who ended up turning on them in their minds. And so yeah, there was a feeling of betrayal, which drives more people away, and then you feel isolated. You feel like you’re not with the plan when the senior pastor has a whole plan for where the church is supposed to go.

Jamie Mitchell:

Friends, I would like to say, and I only wish that Jon was making up a story, but he’s not. You can check out this documentary about Faith Baptist Church by going to YouTube, or you can go to ww.church reform initiative.com and see it for yourself. But this is a new pandemic. It’s a new epidemic within the Evangelical church. We’re seeing it and watching it across the landscape and sometimes merges work, but other times it’s just all about taking the building. Don’t go anywhere. Stick with us. We’re going to talk about how to fight back and how to keep your church from being stolen here. Stand to the gap today. Welcome back friends. My guest is writer and producer, Jon Harris of a number of revealing documentaries, but one of them caught my eye and that was the chronicling of the story of Faith Baptist Church in North Carolina and how they almost had their church building stolen by another church in complete disregard to the concern of the members. Jon, as I was thinking about this and watching the documentary initially, the church and the church members started to move forward considering this merge, but then it became clear that the concerns and the worries and the desires of the members were being either overlooked or completely discounted. What were some of those concerns that the members had as they began to consider this whole idea of a merger?

Jon Harris:

Well, when Pastor Jason Little took over, he started cleaning house, meaning he was replacing staff that had been there with staff that he wanted in there, and this created a lot of concern for the members. This was already something that was causing people to leave. The music director left who was very popular, they had a very thriving choir, and that was eliminated and other legacy ministries started ending like Sunday school, and they started getting rid of even things like the American flag and the Christian flag in the auditorium and just seemed like everything was changing. They had a children’s ministry that was very successful and they just gutted the Children’s Ministry Center, which had all kinds of fun things that had been there forever. That worked into the theme of the room. And this was, I think concerns were raised because of how fast this all was taking place, and people felt like their church was already slipping away.

And then there was a meeting, and this was in 2024 where, or 2023 rather, the end of the year, where the congregation was told by leadership that they had a financial crisis. Now it turns out it was not as dire as it seemed, but during this financial crisis, the pastor ended up actually taking, not necessarily leave of absence, but he was preaching less. He had another associate come on named Matt Bets, and he started preaching and nothing seemed to add up to the congregation. Well, within, there was already rumors floating around, but within a few months it became widely known that this financial crisis, the solution for it was already predetermined.

They weren’t going to do a fundraiser, they weren’t going to sell off part of the property. I mean, there was all these other solutions that were brought. There was actually a donor who wanted to help them by donating a very large quantity of money. None of this was acceptable to the leadership because they had a prearranged plan that they wanted Summit Church to come in and rescue them, and they would merge with Summit Church, except it wasn’t a merger, it was a dissolution. So Faith Baptist would cease to exist as an entity, and Summit Church would simply take all the resources that had been Faith Baptist Church. That was really the option the congregation realized was on the table in early 2024, and this caused a lot of problems. There was an attempt at mediation. The church rejected that, the church leadership, and so it ended up going to court.

Jamie Mitchell:

Well, we’re going to talk about that in a moment, the whole court issue. But Jon, as you interviewed these members, I get the sense that they would have been open to joining forces and becoming a more vibrant or a more solidified ministry if they had just been listened to, but it basically, their voices were silenced and they didn’t feel they had anywhere they could go to make their concerns known. Was I reading that right? As I listened to the documentary,

Jon Harris:

Yes. They were leaderless. They didn’t see this as a mutually beneficial relationship. They didn’t think that the leadership at the church was necessarily listening to their concerns, so they had no recourse essentially. But yes, if Summit Church and the leadership at Faith Baptist would have done this slower and more gradually, they probably would’ve been successful. But thanks be to God, to be quite honest, because the reason that they were caught was because of how fast they tried to pull this off, and it showed the true intentions. It showed what was going to happen to their church. I mean, their church would no longer have a pastor preaching on Sunday. They would have a screen where another pastor, JD Greer would preach to them and they wouldn’t even know him. They would not have, now they would have a campus pastor, but it is not the same. They would, their choir was already gone, but this would probably end up being more contemporary. JD Greer had a reputation for a woke politics sense, so trying to diversify leadership, and it would have changed the whole entire character of the church even more than it had already been changed under Jason Little.

Jamie Mitchell:

The fact that’s really important in here is that the Summit Church had a satellite campus nearby. They just wanted a building, they wanted a facility, and that was the single focus intent of why they needed that merge to take place.

Jon Harris:

That’s right. Yes. There was a school nearby where Summit Church already had a campus in Nightdale, and this would’ve presented them with facilities of their own and a property. And I mean, there’s so many things to talk about. It’s very hard because it’s a three-part documentary. There’s a lot in there. But I mean, one of the big thriving things at Nightdale, Faith Baptist Nightdale was their school. They had a preschool for kids, and Summit Church was going to eliminate that. So I mean, there are things like that that really just ruffled the congregation and they didn’t feel like anyone was listening to them.

Jamie Mitchell:

Jon, you mentioned about court Faith Baptist had to retain a lawyer, and we understand what one Corinthians six says about that we shouldn’t take our church disputes into the public court. Why did they do that? How did they justify that, and would they encourage other churches to consider the same route if they were facing a similar situation?

Jon Harris:

I think it’s important to remember that that was not the first recourse that they went to. They did try to other avenues, and when they even first retained a lawyer, it was what lawyers typically do. They send a letter of intent and they try to rectify it. They actually offered to do mediation through a Christian ministry, and it was all rejected, so it wasn’t necessarily what they wanted to do. I think it’s also worth noting that Summit Church had actually, this shows you how involved Summit was in this process. They had paid for someone to come be essentially a parliamentarian to help the process of voting on this quote merger. And during that particular process, and this was the initial challenge in court, was that they had taken away the voting rights of members without cause. There was no reason for them to strip members in good standing of voting rights, and so they couldn’t trust the outcome of this rigged vote. That’s how the summit members, sorry, some of the Nightdale members saw it. In that process, the leadership at Nightdale decided to bring in police, essentially, they already had brought in the civil magistrate Caesar into this dispute by bringing police in to oversee this process, bringing outsiders from another church in to oversee this process and this retaining the lawyer was more or less a response to all of that.

Jamie Mitchell:

And the real fascinating issue, it was the members of the church who didn’t want this merger and this turning over the building to this other church verse, the pastor and the elders who had already made the decision that they were moving towards this merger. And so it was the members versus the leaders to stop this from happening. And when constitutionally the church’s options were gone, the only option they had was to go to court and say, Hey, we need help in deciding is this really the direction we’re going? And that’s an essence of what happened at the end of this whole thing.

Jon Harris:

Yeah, I think that’s an accurate depiction. It ended up producing leaders that I think the leadership didn’t quite expect. So there was a guy named Brian Hopper and another guy named Bill Lin. And Bill Lin especially had been very patient. All these guys had been, but he was in the music ministry and that was taken away from him. They weren’t going to have a choir anymore. They weren’t going to have orchestra instruments anymore. It was going to be more of a rock band set up. And so him and his wife were very involved in music, but they couldn’t be anymore. And they just kept attending. And Brian Hopper was upset about some things. The Sunday school classes essentially ending and he just kept going to the church. He was patient, but there just kept being more and more egregious violations. And so both of those guys who were not in leadership positions per se, they weren’t elders, at least at the church. I believe Bill White. Bill had been a deacon and Brian’s wife had been the treasurer. So they had some connection, but they ended up being the ones to stand up and rally the rest of the congregation.

Jamie Mitchell:

Wow. Well, friends, when you hear about lawyers and judges being involved, I know it makes you uneasy, upset, nervous, unsure of what you would do, but this is why we’re having this discussion because these problems are falling at the feet of churches all over the country. You’ll need to know how to respond and what to look for. Now when we return, I want to talk to Jon about merging of churches. Are they all bad? So don’t go anywhere. Your church may be facing the same issue. Well, our topic today is church stealing. It seems to be happening a lot across the nation. Smaller, struggling churches essentially talked into joining with a larger, more successful church, turning over all their property and assets with the promise to be partners in ministry only to discover that they are a minority partner. Jon Harris produced a fantastic documentary capturing the Story of Faith Church, but what we have discovered that what almost happened to them is actually occurring to many well-meaning innocent, loving churches. Now Jon, I think it’s important to take a moment and say that there are situations when churches are failing to the point that they need help and maybe even need to dissolve or actually join with another church. Do you believe that a church can and should consider combining their efforts and actually merge with other congregations?

Jon Harris:

I think there’s definitely a place for that. I quoted in the article I wrote for American Reformer on this topic, one of the leaders in the Unstuck group, Jim Tomberlin, who said that nearly 40% of the multi-site churches that are created are created through this merger process. That’s kind of a high number. It’s probably higher now because I think he said that around a decade ago. So roughly half of the churches from multi-site campuses or the buildings, the campuses are created from former churches, then it makes you wonder what’s actually happening because it seems to parallel other market forces we see in other arenas. The mom and pop business goes out when the Walmart comes into town. We’ve all lived through that. And if that’s what’s happening here, if we have a situation where the big conglomerate from the city with all the resources and people and experts comes into your church, it will no longer be your church. It will be their resources, their teaching. It’ll be a pastor probably on a screen that won’t be there. Personally, the legacy ministries you’ve had, like the quilting ministry that Knightdale had won’t be there anymore because they will have other innovative, new, well-researched, expert led ministries that are supposed to take those places. And so I would just caution against it. It doesn’t mean it’s not always good, but especially if it’s a multi-site model and you’re just one of the members of this larger conglomeration, you likely will lose your identity in that process.

Jamie Mitchell:

Jon, I want you to weigh in on some stipulating factors or agreements that the weaker declining church should ask for when combining with another church. But from my observation, and I may be wrong, but from my simple observation here is what I’m seeing are pressure points. Music is a big issue, finding agreement on what our musical style is going to be. Missions, we have this whole group of missionaries we’ve been supporting, and a lot of times a newer church says, yeah, we’re going to have to get rid of them. Membership. What membership means? Does membership have meaning and authority method and style? You’ve already mentioned some of that. And then finally I just labeled it matured how they view senior citizens and the older population. Those are some of my pressure points, but from your perspective, when the weaker church looks to combine with another church, what kind of factors should they be expecting or demanding or asking for?

Jon Harris:

Well, it’s important to remember for the purpose of the story we’re talking about, it was technically a dissolution it a merger, and so it was called that. And I think it’s good to figure out first what exactly is happening. A merger and a dissolution are not the same thing. So in a dissolution, you lose everything and it’s given to another entity in a mutually beneficial merger, at least the ones I’ve been aware of. Generally, there is some kind of agreement that both parties are coming together and sharing assets and sharing leadership and resources, but there’s been extensive talks about what that’s specifically going to look like, who the leadership is going to be, who’s going to make decisions. I think music is definitely a flashpoint. I mean, in this case of First Baptist Nightdale, I know I’ve already said it, but I think having a preacher on a screen is much different than having a preacher who’s there close and personal to counsel you through the issues of life.

I think another thing is specifically what ministries are going to stay and which ministries are going to go. I know there were people in the evangelism ministry who told me that they didn’t like the change in the focus, what people they were going to reach, where they were going to reach them. There was a different strategy that the new leadership when they came in at Nightdale, and this would’ve continued under Summit, wanted to enact. So there’s a number of factors in all this. It can be mutually beneficial to have a merger, but make sure it’s a merger and make sure that the leadership and the congregations are well aware that nothing’s being hidden, that they know exactly what they’re going to get.

Jamie Mitchell:

Jon, my belief is in any region or area of a town or a city or a state, we need to have different types of churches. I mean, we got to have the gospel, the Bible doctrinally. We need to have clarity on that. But in regards to style and size, some people like a smaller church, some people like a larger church, some people like more traditional style of worship. Some people love the contemporary. I’m not against any of that, but when we start to eliminate some of these styles and some of these, as you called them, legacy ministries, we’re really cutting our nose off despite our face because we’re cutting off the possibility of reaching a group of people who, for preference or style’s sake would have chosen that church. Isn’t that one of the sad aspects of some of this that’s happening?

Jon Harris:

Well, I’ll ask you, when was the last time you heard about a church merger going in the direction of a traditional model? So it’s a contemporary church and they’re going to now all sing hymns and everyone’s going to dress more formally. It never goes that way. We know the way it goes. It’s always towards dumbing down standards, more casual, more contemporary styles of worship. I understand putting that in the category of taste and a community is going to reflect different tastes. I do think it’s interesting though that it only goes in one direction and it seems to be engineered by people that are more ideologically driven. In my three documentary experiences, it was all three times by folks who were more social justice minded on the left, who thought they could strategize in order to reach the world in some way, reach young people, usually reach ethnic minorities.

That’s at least what they say they’re trying to do. I don’t think it usually works that way, but that’s what the strategy is. And so they’ve developed these things in seminary. When I was in seminary, I remember being exposed to this how to diversify your church, and one of the reasons that the pastor Jason Little said he was getting rid of the choir was to make it more welcoming to newer kinds of people. Well, really all he is saying is he doesn’t want people who come in to think it’s an actual church. He doesn’t want it to look like a church. We don’t want graveyard, steeples, choirs, formality. I mean, that’s just too church-like that might remind them that I don’t know, God holy or something. That’s kind of my maybe cynical read of it. But instead, what ends up always happening is the change is in the direction of being more casual, of being more on the left.

If you even get involved in politics, taking out the American flag, taking out the Christian flag, it’s in with the new out with the old as if it’s bad because it’s old. And that’s actually the opposite, I think of what scripture tells us. Paul even instructed twice actually in the New Testament, he instructed to follow the traditions that he had laid down. I was actually reading today in Jeremiah to find the old paths to honor the fathers. I mean, these things are actually, you need to take a pause When someone starts saying, we need to give old people and their traditions the shaft, they might be there for a reason.

Jamie Mitchell:

Jon, you just asked, I have only heard of one church that really did a merger. Well, there was equal representation. Now on the new leadership team, they really spent time talking about what this would now look like. They even agreed that both of their former names would go away and they had a new name because it was really a new entity that was being formed into one. But it’s what I always say, unity can be forced, but oneness takes oneness of mind and oneness of heart. There needs to be a lot of conversation, a lot of dialogue, a lot of agreement, and it’s just not contriving a relationship and saying, yeah, we’re going to get along because ultimately somewhere along the line, our one mindedness is going to be tested and probably put on the chopping block because it’s too hard or too inconvenient, or it goes against the ideological ideas of the stronger or more healthy church.

Well, obviously we hope that every church would be strong, healthy, growing and not needed to consider the hard decision of merger coming together. Nevertheless, many churches are finding themselves in that tough spot. But when we come back, I want to conclude with going back to the Faith Baptist Church story, hearing about that conclusion and what can we learn from their experience? Stay with us for the last segment of today. Stand in the gap today. Well, I’m so grateful to have Jon Harris with us today. Thank you so much, Jon, for making the time and being willing to tell this intriguing story of a church that nearly had, its building its facilities, its church stolen by another church, and really looking at this in a nationwide problem. Now, it could have been a very sad ending, but in many ways this was a story of redemption. Jon, can you finish what happened with Faith Baptist and where are they today and how are they doing?

Jon Harris:

Absolutely, Jamie. Thank you. So what happened was there were actually two court cases. So the first one was over membership and whether or not the voters who had been stripped of their membership were allowed to vote, and they actually were in the process of winning that the vote was not able to be counted, and this was a defeat for the leadership who was working in tandem with Summit Church at Faith Baptist. Well, they had a plan though, and what they did was they filed for bankruptcy, the leadership at Faith Baptist. And what this did was it actually changed the place where the case would be heard because instead of it being a case over the church bylaws and membership, it was now going to be in a federal court where they would, if the members wanted to pursue still taking their church back, they would have to go to a bankruptcy court, and this would pause all of the state court proceedings.

And so it didn’t really matter that the members who were trying to take their church back had won the case. They now had to go to bankruptcy court and win another case. And this is basically a miracle because James Lawrence, the lawyer, told me the chance of them winning in both courts was very low. It was basically a 20% chance that they would get out of this and win. And they ran the table, they won in bankruptcy court, and they were able to finally, and this is actually kind of interesting at the end, which was in 2024 in December, they were able to cut a deal with the leadership at Faith Baptist Nightdale to come back into their building. They had already been kicked out at that point, there was no services, and they found the building different than it was before, but they at least had it back.

And the reason was they were about to depose the senior pastor of this megachurch, JD Greer. That’s at least the timeline appears to it makes it look that way. They were going to depose JD Greer, they were going to depose Amy Whitfield, the communications director for Summit Church, who was very involved in this whole process and last minute Summit Church didn’t want them to post. And so who knows what would’ve been revealed, but we do have some of the depositions of others who were involved. And it was a real scheme. It was a real scheme to try to obtain this property, and the legacy members were able to fight it, win it, and it was a happy ending. I was there at the service that they all came back for and the first service I think they had had there in almost a year, and it was jubilation. People were so excited, and so I love happy endings. My other documentaries don’t always have those, but this one does.

Jamie Mitchell:

Jon, as I studied the documentary, I studied this story and I’ve been looking across the country at how many times this is happening, and I’m going to be doing a program later on in the fall about some of the theological issues that are creeping into churches that are causing this conflict and ultimately churches being stolen. There’s a couple of things, the church’s polity, how decisions are being made, the integrity of leaders, especially when new leaders come in. The initial idea that I mentioned just a moment ago that there’s a real difference between oneness of mind and finding unity, but also the idea that if a conflict is occurring in a church, there needs to be a set way of dealing with the conflict. As you have looked at this, what words of encouragement, what things might you say to a church member or church leaders or people out there who might say to themselves, boy, I don’t want this to happen to our church. Are there any safeguards that we could throw up so we don’t go down this road?

Jon Harris:

Absolutely. One of them is making sure that if you’re a non-denominational church and you’re not part of a denomination and don’t want to be, make sure that’s in your constitution. Now, Faith Baptist actually did have a stipulation like that in their constitution, which was ignored, but it still gave them some teeth in court to be able to say, we don’t want to merge with a church that is part of a denomination, and Summit Church is part of the Southern Baptist Convention. I think that that’s a wise thing. I think it’s also good to obviously examine your leadership when they’re coming in, try to identify if there’s any patterns, get to know them a little bit. If you start seeing consulting firms brought in and legacy ministries ended, then you should have a yellow flag go off in your mind and you should start asking some serious questions.

Why is a consulting firm here? If you start seeing people leaving and they don’t give an explanation for what’s going on, but it’s obvious that you have a lot of people leaving, you should probably try to figure out why that’s happening. And then I would say this, if you really find yourself in a heap of trouble, don’t just leave. If you are someone who’s God’s equipped to, he’s giving you a mouth, right? Use it. Speak. A lot of the times, I think intimidation tactics work because people let them work. And I think with this particular case, what stands out and what’s unique about it as opposed to some of the other cases that I’ve done documentaries on and looked at is you had some ringleaders, you had Bill Lin, you had Brian Hopper who decided that they were going to make this a big issue before the Lord.

They believed that they were there to defend the church, and they were able to rally people and form the group that ultimately was able to take the church back. Without people like that though, these things don’t generally wind up that way. And I’ve had a lot of people reach out to me since this documentary asking me if I could come document what’s happening at their church, but in each case, it’s generally the same story. They don’t have a group like that. It’s just the takeover happened and no one really stood up. And in those cases, there’s really not much for me to do. I can document the sad story, but I don’t think anyone really wants to watch that. So I would say trust the Lord, have courage. And on the front end, you should be examining though you, your leadership, what they’re doing. Ask good questions. You don’t have to be a jerk about it. Just say, Hey, I noticed we’re ending the choir ministry. Why are we ending the choir ministry? What’s the purpose behind that? If you start getting HR style, not biblical, but more HR style comments about how it’s more welcoming and that kind of thing, explore that because there’s something behind that. There’s a philosophy of ministry that I think is rather poisonous that’s coming in.

Jamie Mitchell:

Jon, we got one minute left. The reason why we’re getting into this problem is that these older churches are declining and they’re losing their fervency. They’re not growing anymore. I guess we need to give a word of exhortation to some of these older churches that they need to be more fervent in their ministry because if they allow decline to happen, this is a logical next step for them. And so what word do you have for the older church that might be struggling?

Jon Harris:

Well be encouraged that I’ve seen churches go from physicians of struggle to thriving before, and it really takes ultimately trust and obey. There’s no other way. And so I think being faithful in the things that God’s called you and examine maybe your own traditions, and whether or not, I mean, I’m all for tradition. I think it’s good to have good traditions, but if you forget the reason for them, and if you’re just doing tradition for tradition’s sake, then you might want to reexamine some things. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I do think there’s something wrong with coming in with innovative schemes that are supposedly tested in a lab. So be patient, be fervent, and follow the Lord.

Jamie Mitchell:

Hey, make sure you go to YouTube. Check out Jon Harris’s documentaries. They’re revealing, they’re encouraging. As we close, I want to encourage you, be faithful in your church, pray for your church, your leaders, and finally live and lead with courage as members of the body of Christ, just as the members of Faith Church had to live courageously. Thanks for being with us. See you tomorrow here at Stand In The Gap Today.