Yes, the above is a “church.” A Christian church. In America. And what would modern-day “church” be in America without the big production? The light shows? The rock bands? The entertainment!

“To great sections of the Church the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the `program.’ This word has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for worship among us.

“Sound Bible exposition is an imperative must in the Church of the living God. Without it no church can be a New Testament church in any strict meaning of that term. But exposition may be carried on in such way as to leave the hearers devoid of any true spiritual nourishment whatever. For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself….”

~A. W. Tozer

Segment of preface from his book “The Pursuit of God”

From Over 50 Years Ago It Was Said;

By A.W. Tozer

“Let me go out on a limb a little bit and prophesy. I see the time coming when all the holy men whose eyes have been opened by the Holy Spirit will desert worldly Evangelicalism, one by one. The house will be left desolate and there will not be a man of God, a man in whom the Holy Spirit dwells, left among them…

I hear Jesus saying…Mat 23:37-38: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to her,
how often would I have gathered your children together, even as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not!
Behold, your house is left to you desolate”

As the Church now stands, the man who sees this condition of worldly evangelicalism is written off as somewhat fanatical. But
the day is coming when the house will be left desolate and there will not be a man of God among them. I would like to live long
enough to watch this develop and see how things turn out. I would like to live to see the time when the men and woman of God – holy, separated and spiritually enlightened – walk out of the evangelical church and form a group of their own; when they get off the sinking ship and let her go down in the brackish and worldliness and form a new ark to ride out the storm.”

“Christians don’t tell lies they just go to church and sing them.”

~A. W. Tozer

Church-Going

by Pastor Cornelius R. Stam

There is an important passage on church-going in Hebrews 10:23-25:

“Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering…. And let us consider one another, to provoke unto love and to good works; not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is… “

We are often urged, these days: “Go to the church of your choice.” The implication is that one church is as good as another — just so you go to church. But this is not so.

The Scriptures teach that the true Church is composed of those who have placed their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as the Savior who died for their sins. Such are told to “hold fast” the faith which they have professed, without wavering. This must come first, for it is only those who have first exercised such faith who can meet together with unity of mind and purpose to encourage each other “to love and to good works.”

It is a truly blessed experience for those who have been saved by the grace of God, to assemble to express their praise together in song, to lift their hearts together in prayer and to join together in the study of God’s Word so as to “grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

In these days of tension and confusion there is a tendency for even the most sincere Christians to be so occupied with temporal things that they deprive themselves of the encouragement and spiritual uplift that comes from getting together with other Christians. But these are just the times when true believers need the encouragement of each other’s company and should particularly remember the admonition of Scripture not to forsake “the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is.”

Lest We Forget This Man of God Died OVER 50 Years

Ago…

Alone With God

“And when He had sent the multitudes away, He went up on the mountain by Himself to pray. Now when evening came, He was alone there.” Matthew 14:23

“Modern civilization is so complex as to make the devotional life all but impossible. It wears us out by multiplying distractions and beats us down by destroying our solitude, where otherwise we might drink and renew our strength before going out to face the world again.

“The thoughtful soul to solitude retires,” said the poet of other and quieter times; but where is the solitude to which we can retire today? Science, which has provided men with certain material comforts, has robbed them of their souls by surrounding them with a world hostile to their existence.

“Commune with your own heart upon your bed and be still” is a wise and healing counsel, but how can it be followed in this day of the newspaper, the telephone, the radio and the television? These modern playthings, like pet tiger cubs, have grown so large and dangerous that they threaten to devour us all. What was intended to be a blessing has become a positive curse. No spot is now safe from the world’s intrusion.”

~A. W. Tozer

Excerpt from his book “Of God and Men”

Why We Must Think Rightly About God

By A.W. Tozer

Excerpts from various books

“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. … Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God.

For this reason the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God. This is true not only of the individual Christian, but of the company of Christians that composes the Church. Always the most revealing thing about the Church is her idea of God, just as her most significant message is what she says about Him or leaves unsaid, for her silence is often more eloquent than her speech. …

Were we able to extract from any man a complete answer to the question, ”What comes into your mind when you think about God?” we might predict with certainty the spiritual future of that man. Were we able to know exactly what our most influential religious leaders think of God today, we might be able with some precision to foretell where the Church will stand tomorrow. …

A right conception of God is basic not only to systematic theology but to practical Christian living as well. It is to worship what the foundation is to the temple; where it is inadequate or out of plumb the whole structure must sooner or later collapse. I believe there is scarcely an error in doctrine or a failure in applying Christian ethics that cannot be traced finally to imperfect and ignoble thoughts about God….

It is my opinion that the Christian conception of God current in these middle years of the twentieth century is so decadent as to be utterly beneath the dignity of the Most High God and actually to constitute for professed believers something amounting to a moral calamity.

All the problems of heaven and earth, though they were to confront us together and at once, would be nothing compared with the overwhelming problem of God: That He is; what He is like; and what we as moral beings must do about Him….

The idolatrous heart assumes that God is other than He is – in itself a monstrous sin – and substitutes for the true God one made after its own likeness. Always this God will conform to the image of the one who created it and will be base or pure, cruel or kind, according to the moral state of the mind from which it emerges….

The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him. It begins in the mind and may be present where no overt act of worship has taken place. ‘When they knew God,’wrote Paul, ‘they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.’

Then followed the worship of idols fashioned after the likeness of men and birds and beasts and creeping things. But this series of degrading acts began in the mind. Wrong ideas about God are not only the fountain from which the polluted waters of idolatry flow; they are themselves idolatrous. The idolater simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true.

Perverted notions about God soon rot the religion in which they appear. The long career of Israel demonstrates this clearly enough, and the history of the Church confirms it. So necessary to the Church is a lofty concept of God that when that concept in any measure declines, the Church with her worship and her moral standards declines along with it. The first step down for any church is taken when it surrenders its high opinion of God.

Before the Christian Church goes into eclipse anywhere there must first be a corrupting of her simple basic theology. She simply gets a wrong answer to the question, ‘What is God like?’ and goes on from there. Though she may continue to cling to a sound nominal creed, her practical working creed has become false. The masses of her adherents come to believe that God is different from what He actually is; and that is heresy of the most insidious and deadly kind.

The heaviest obligation lying upon the Christian Church today is to purify and elevate her concept of God until it is once more worthy of Him – and of her. In all her prayers and labors this should have first place. We do the greatest service to the next generation of Christians by passing on to them undimmed and undiminished that noble concept of God which we received from our Hebrew and Christian fathers of generations past. This will prove of greater value to them than anything that art or science can devise.

The Knowledge of the Holy by A. W. Tozer, Chapter 1

All the following quotes are from A. W. Tozer with references to source

following each quote:

Our wonderful Lord and King

“Christianity today is man-centered, not God-centered. God is made to wait patiently, even respectfully, on the whims of men. The image of God currently popular is that of a distracted Father, struggling in heartbroken desperation to get people to accept a Savior of whom they feel no need and in whom they have very little interest. To persuade these self-sufficient souls to respond to His generous offers God will do almost anything, even using salesmanship methods and talking down to them in the chummiest way imaginable. This view of things is, of course, a kind of religious romanticism which, while it often uses flattering and sometimes embarrassing terms in praise of God, manages nevertheless to make man the star of the show.”

~ Man: The Dwelling Place of God

“We need to improve the quality of our Christianity and we never will until we raise our concept of God back to that held by apostle, sage, prophet, saint and reformer. When we put God back where he really belongs, we will instinctively and automatically move up again; the whole spiral of our religious direction will be upward.” The Attributes of God

“Nobody ever got anything from God on the grounds that he deserved it. Haven fallen, man deserves only punishment and death. So if God answers prayer it’s because God is good. From His goodness, His lovingkindness, His good-natured benevolence, God does it! That’s the source of everything.”

~The Attributes of God

  The Church

“I Thank God that the kingdom of God is not divided into areas for big, important people and areas for little, unimportant people. Every one is just as needful in God’s sight as any other!”  ~”Who Put Jesus On the Cross”

Ashamed of the Gospel?

“Many of us Christians have become extremely skillful in arranging our lives so as to admit the truth of Christianity without being embarrassed by its implications. We arrange things so that we can get on well enough without divine aid, while at the same time ostensibly seeking it. We boast in the Lord but watch carefully that we never get caught depending on Him.”

~The Root of the Righteous

Spiritual Gifts

“I say that a Christian congregation can survive and often appear to prosper in the community by the exercise of human talent and without any touch from the Holy Spirit! All that religious activity and the dear people will not know anything better until the great and terrible day when our self-employed talents are burned with fire and only that which was wrought by the Holy Ghost will stand forever!” 

~Tragedy in the Church: The Missing Gifts

Faith:

“Faith as Paul saw it, was a living flaming thing leading to surrender and obedience to the commandments of Christ. Faith in our day often means no more than a meek assent to a doctrine.”

~Paths to Power

Complacency:
“Complacency is the deadly enemy of spiritual progress. The contented soul is the stagnant soul.”

~The Size of the Soul

God’s will & my obedience:

The only fear I have is to fear to get out of the will of God. Outside of the will of God, there’s nothing I want, and in the will of God there’s nothing I fear, for God has sworn to keep me in His will. If I’m out of his will that’s another matter. But if I’m in His will, He’s sworn to keep me.”

~ Success and the Christian

“Whatever a man wants badly and persistently enough will determine the man’s character.” ~The Root of the Righteous

“It is impossible to keep our moral practices sound and our inward attitudes right while our idea of God is erroneous or inadequate.”
~The Knowledge of the Holy

“The New Christian is like a man who has learned to drive a car in a country where the traffic moves on the left side of the highway and suddenly finds himself in another country and forced to drive on the right. He must unlearn his old habit and learn a new one and more serious than all, he must learn in heavy traffic.”
~Of God and Men

“The notion that the careless sinner is the smart fellow and the serious-minded Christian, though well-intentioned, is a stupid dolt altogether out of touch with life will not stand up under scrutiny. Sin is basically an act of moral folly, and the greater the folly the greater the fool.”
~Man The Dwelling Place of God

“What does this word holiness really mean? Is it a negative kind of piety from which so many people have shied away? No, of course not! Holiness in the Bible means moral wholeness– a positive quality which actually includes kindness, mercy, purity, moral blamelessness and godliness. It is always to be thought of in a positive, white intensity of degree.”
~I Call it Heresy

History will show that the church has prospered most when blessed with strong leaders and suffered the greatest decline when her leaders were weak and time serving. The sheep rarely go much farther than the shepherd.
~The Warfare of the Spirit

What Christian when faced with a moral problem goes straight to the Sermon on the Mount or other New Testament Scripture for the authoritative answer? Who lets the words of Christ be final. The causes back of the decline in our Lord’s authority are many. I name only two.
One is the power of custom, precedent and tradition within the older religious groups. These like gravitation affect every particle of religious practice within the group, exerting a steady and constant pressure in one direction. Of course that direction is toward conformity to the status quo. Not Christ but custom is lord in this situation….
The second cause is the revival of intellectualism among the evangelicals. This, if I sense the situation correctly, is not so much a thirst for learning as a desire for a reputation of being learned…….

One sign of His diminishing authority is that many churches have for years baptized professing Christians in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit without even asking them to commit themselves to learn to obey all that Christ commanded (Matthew 28:18-20). Consequently Christ’s supreme authority is ignored at the entrance into the membership and fellowship of His church. A disciple is a person who is committed to learn to obey all that Christ commanded, but the majority of Christians spend a lifetime in church and never even know that they should become a disciple.

A.W. Tozer said, “I am a Bible Christian and if an archangel with a wingspread as broad as a constellation shining like the sun were to come and offer me some new truth, I’d ask him for a reference. If he could not show me where it is found in the Bible, I would bow him out and say, I’m awfully sorry, you don’t bring any references with you”

“We must face today as children of tomorrow. We must meet the uncertainties of this world with the certainty of the world to come.”
— Of God and Men

“Modern civilization is so complex as to make the devotional life all but impossible. It wears us out by multiplying distractions and beats us down by destroying our solitude, where otherwise we might drink and renew our strength before going out to face the world again.”
~Of God and Men

“Wisdom, among other things, is the ability to devise perfect ends and to achieve those ends by the most perfect means….All God’s acts are done in perfect wisdom, first for His own glory, and then for the highest good of the greatest number for the longest time. And all His acts are as pure as they are wise, and as good as they are wise and pure. Not only could His acts not be better done: a better way to do them could not be imagined.”
~The Knowledge of the Holy

“Without doubt the emphasis in Christian teaching today should be on worship. There is little danger that we shall become merely worshipers and neglect the practical implications of the gospel. No one can long worship God in spirit and in truth before the obligation to holy service becomes too strong to resist. Fellowship with God leads straight to obedience and good works. That is the divine order and it can never be reversed.”
~Born After Midnight

“We modern Christians are long on talk and short on conduct.”
~Born After Midnight

“The idea that God will pardon a rebel who has not given up his rebellion is contrary both to the Scriptures and to common sense.”
~The Root of the Righteous

“The man that believes will obey; failure to obey is convincing proof that there is no true faith present. To attempt the impossible God must give faith or there will be none, and He gives faith to the obedient heart only.”
~Man the Dwelling Place of God

“The average Christian is so cold and so contented with His wretched condition that there is no vacuum of desire into which the blessed Spirit can rush in satisfying fullness.”
~Born After Midnight

“In the Book of Acts faith was for each believer a beginning, not an end; it was a journey, not a bed in which to lie while waiting for the day of our Lord’s triumph. Believing was not a once-done act; it was more than an act, it was an attitude of heart and mind which inspired and enabled the believer to take up his cross and follow the Lamb whithersoever He went.”
~Born After Midnight

“Too many of our religious convictions are negative. We act not from a positive conviction that something is right, but from a feeling that the opposite is wrong.”
~Of God and Men

“The greatness of God rouses fear within us, but His goodness encourages us not to be afraid of Him. To fear and not be afraid — that is the paradox of faith.
~The Knowledge of the Holy

“When I am praying the most eloquently, I am getting the least accomplished in my prayer life. But when I stop getting eloquent and give God less theology and shut up and just gaze upward and wait for God to speak to my heart He speaks with such power that I have to grab a pencil and a notebook and take notes on what God is saying to my heart.”
~Success and the Christian

“Worship, I say, rises or falls with our concept of God …. and if there is one terrible disease in the Church of Christ, it is that we do not see God as great as He is.”
~Worship: The Missing Jewel of the Evangelical Church

Actually, I do find Christians these days who seem to have largely wasted their lives. They were converted to Christ but they have never sought to go on to an increasing knowledge of God. There is untold loss and failure because they have accepted the whole level of things around them as being normal and desirable.
~The Counselor

“The best book is not one that informs merely, but one that stirs the reader up to inform himself.”
~Man the Dwelling Place of God

We may as well face it: the whole level of spirituality among us is low. We have measured ourselves by ourselves until the incentive to seek higher plateaus in the things of the Spirit is all but gone.”
~Of God and Men

“We must do something about the cross, and one of two things only we can do–flee it or die upon it.”
~The Root of the Righteous

“Faith never means gullibility. The man who believes everything is as far from God as the man who refuses to believe anything.”
~The Root of the Righteous

“The notion that hostile persons or unfavorable circumstances can prevent the will of God from being fulfilled in a human life is altogether erroneous. Nothing, no one, can hinder God or a good man.”
~The Root of the Righteous

“We Christians must simplify our lives or lose untold treasures on earth and in eternity.”
~The Pursuit of God

“We cannot grasp the true meaning of the divine holiness by thinking of someone or something very pure and then raising the concept to the highest degree we are capable of. God’s holiness is not simply the best we know infinitely bettered. We know nothing like the divine holiness. It stands apart, unique, unapproachable, incomprehensible and unattainable. The natural man is blind to it. He may fear God’s power and admire His wisdom, but His holiness he cannot even imagine.”
~The Knowledge of the Holy

“Prayer is never an acceptable substitute for obedience. The sovereign Lord accepts no offering from His creatures that is not accompanied by obedience. To pray for revival while ignoring or actually flouting the plain precept laid down in the Scriptures is to waste a lot of words and get nothing for our trouble.”
~Of God and Men

‘…Faith is not a once-done act, but a continuous gaze of the heart at the Triune God. Believing, then, is directing the hearts’ attention to Jesus. It is lifting the mind to “behold the Lamb of God,” and never ceasing that beholding for the rest of our lives.’
~The Pursuit of God

” I find that many men and women are troubled by the thought that they are too small and inconsequential in the scheme of things. But that is not our real trouble — we are actually too big and too complex, for God made us in His image and we are too big to be satisfied with what the world offers us!
….Man is bored, because he is too big to be happy with that which sin is giving him. God has made him too great, his potential is too mighty.”
~Who Put Jesus on the Cross?

“When our Lord looked at us, He saw not only what we were — He was faithful in seeing what we could become! He took away the curse of being and gave us the glorious blessing of becoming.”
~Who Put Jesus on the Cross?

“Truth is a glorious but hard mistress. She never consults, bargains or compromises.”
~Of God and Men

“I think that most Christians would be better pleased if the Lord did not inquire into their personal affairs too closely. They want Him to save them, keep them happy and take them to heaven at last, but not to be too inquisitive about their conduct or service. But He has searched us and known us; He knows our downsitting and our uprising and understands our thoughts afar off. There is no place to hide from those eyes that are as a flame of fire and there is no way to escape from the Judgment of those feet that are like fine brass. It is the part of wisdom to live with these things in mind.”
~That Incredible Christian

“To be right with God has often meant to be in trouble with men.”
~Man the Dwelling Place of God

“God dwells in eternity but time dwells in God. He has already lived all our tomorrows as He has lived all our yesterdays.”
~The Knowledge of the Holy

“We have become so engrossed in the work of the Lord that we have forgotten the Lord of the work.”
~The Banner

“If God is the Supreme good then our highest blessedness on earth must lie in knowing Him as perfectly as possible.”
~That Incredible Christian

“God being who He is must always be sought for Himself, never as a means toward something else.”
“Whoever seeks God as a means toward desired ends will not find God. The mighty God, the maker of heaven and earth, will not be one of many treasures, not even the chief of all treasures. He will be all in all or He will be nothing. God will not be used.”
~Man the Dwelling Place of God

For a long time I have believed that truth, to be understood must be lived; that Bible doctrine is wholly ineffective until it has been digested and assimilated by the total life.
~That Incredible Christian

The yearning to know What cannot be known, to comprehend the Incomprehensible, to touch and taste the Unapproachable, arises from the image of God in the nature of man. Deep calleth unto deep, and though polluted and landlocked by the mighty disaster theologians call the Fall, the soul senses its origin and longs to return to its Source.
~The Knowledge of the Holy

All things being equal, our prayers are only as powerful as our lives. In the long pull we pray only as well as we live. Some prayers are like a fire escape, used only in times of critical emergency — never very enjoyable, but used as a way of terrified escape from disaster. They do not represent the regular life of the one who offers them; rather are the unusual and uncommon acts of the spiritual amateur.
~The Root of the Righteous

God formed us for His pleasure, and so formed us that we as well as He can in divine communion enjoy the sweet and mysterious mingling of kindred personalities. He meant us to see Him and live with Him and draw our life from His smile.
~The Pursuit of God

Worship means “to feel in the heart”….Worship also means to “express in some appropriate manner” what you feel….and what will be expressed? “A humbling but delightful sense of admiring awe and astonished wonder.”
~Worship The Missing Jewel of the Evangelical Church 

In the New Testament there is no contradiction between faith and obedience. Between faith and law-works, yes; between law and grace, yes; but between faith and obedience, not at all. The Bible recognizes no faith that does not lead to obedience, nor does it recognize any obedience that does not spring from faith.
~Paths to Power

“…no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God. Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God.”
~The Knowledge of the Holy

“Our pursuit of God is successful just because He is forever seeking to manifest Himself to us.”
~The Pursuit of God

“It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular, it is why he does it. The motive is everything.”
~The Pursuit of God

“There is scarcely anything so dull and meaningless as Bible doctrine taught for its own sake. Truth divorced from life is not truth in its Biblical sense, but something else and something less.”
~Of God and Men

“The abuse of a harmless thing is the essence of sin.”
A.W. Tozer – original source material unknown

“Men who refuse to worship the true God now worship themselves with tender devotion.”
~A.W. Tozer The Divine Conquest

“One of the Most stinging criticisms made against Christians is that their minds are narrow and their hearts small.”
~The Root of the Righteous

“We are called to an everlasting preoccupation with God.”
~That Incredible Christian

“Every man is as holy as he really wants to be.”
~Man: the Dwelling Place of God

Much of our difficulty as seeking Christians stems from our unwillingness to take God as He is and adjust our lives accordingly. We insist upon trying to modify Him and to bring Him nearer to our own image.
~The Pursuit of God

“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
~The Knowledge of the Holy

Time
“God never hurries. There are no deadlines against which He must work. ”
“God never hurries. There are no deadlines against which He must work.”
~The Knowledge of the Holy