Looking to the Past for Insights into the Future

By Douglas Ray Shearer

I'm 77 years old, soon to be 78. I've been a pastor for over 50 years, including 28 years as a senior pastor. During those many years, I've witnessed the evangelical church negotiate its way through one change after another: changes in governance, struc-ture, direction, emphasis, and style - changes extending ...all the way back before the revival of the 1960s and 1970s, the so-called Jesus Movement, called by some the "Fourth Great Awakening;"through the Jesus Movement itself;through the twenty-year pushback against the excesses and errors of the Jesus Movement, a pushback that spanned the entire decade of the 1980s, lasting well into the 1990s;through the ever-mounting hostility the church has encoun-tered since at least the mid-1980s; and, finally,to the church's withdrawal from the public square during the 1990s and its current loss of evangelistic fervor.I could, of course, expand considerably on the changes I've wit-nessed over my long stint in pastoral leadership. But I won't. I mention this much only to lend a modicum of credibility to the as-sessments I'll be making in this article.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1793457484
• ISBN13: 9781793457486
• Release Date: January 2019
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 48 Pages
• Weight: 0.27 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.1" x 6.0"