A Call for Pastoral Repentance
BY: Rev. Bill Cook
Jonas Clarke, the pastor of Lexington’s Church of Christ, was first in order of importance in the American Revolution. April 19 marked the 250th Anniversary of the Battle of Lexington which started the American Revolution, resulting in the freedoms that are largely taken for granted today. In 1864, historian John Weiss wrote:
“Lexington’s Congregational minister was more dangerous than all the military stores at Concord or in the Colony, and had so infected the whole district with his calm and deep indignation that, when Redcoats came marching up the old turnpike to Lexington in the gray dawn of 19 April 1775 after gunpowder and weapons, they found all the farmers converted to a doctrine of liberty which armed and provisioned a young nation for seven years of war.”
When Paul Revere arrived on Clarke’s doorstep at midnight the night before, to warn Clarke and his two house guests, Sam Adams and John Hancock, that Redcoats were marching toward Lexington with orders to arrest the two rebel instigators and impound the town’s weapons stores, one of those two Sons of Liberty asked Clarke, “Sir will your people fight?” to which the pastor calmly responded, “I have prepared them for this very hour.”
In the ensuing battle the next morning eight men of Clarke’s flock were killed, another ten were wounded. On the anniversary a year later Clark preached, “From this day shall be dated the Liberty of the World.” I dare say that the greatest threat most pastors in America have faced in the last two-hundred years, is a member departing over something they say or don’t say.
Pastor, what have you done to provision your flock and community for the protracted battle that began in earnest in with a stolen election in November 2020, aimed at destroying our sacred liberties and exterminating American Christendom? Your government has been usurped by impostors; your churches shut down by tyrants asserting authority they don’t have; your people have been murdered in hospitals using ventilators and Remdesivir; and they are still being killed with COVID shots and boosters. Have you said, “I can’t tell you what to do because I’m not a doctor?” I’m not a doctor either, but I can tell when I’m watching orchestrated mass murder. God says, “My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge.” Aren’t pastors supposed to be informed? If not, why not?
Why are only one in twenty-five evangelicals equipped with a biblical worldview, according to Barna’s latest research. Pastors who fail to arm their flocks with the critical knowledge needed to secure Liberty to themselves and their posterity, are preparing them as sheep for slaughter. What will you tell Jesus when you stand before him, and he asks how you prepared your flock to confront the assault on their liberties? Perhaps we would be more concerned about standing before Lexington’s Congregational minister. Will you be praised as a shepherd who laid down his life for his flock, or a hireling who fled at the first sign of danger?
John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg was a man of some notoriety when he was installed as pastor of Emmanuel Church in Woodstock Virginia in 1772. His father, Henry Melchoir, had founded the Lutheran Church in America. Peter, also, a member of Virginia’s House of Burgesses, was present at St. John’s Church in Richmond on March 23, 1775, for Patrick Henry’s legendary “Give me Liberty or Give me death,” speech. At the end of his speech, when the “Lion of Liberty” motioned that Virginia counties raise militia, Muhlenberg supported Henry’s “defiant” motion.
Ten months later, on January 23, 1776, Pastor Muhlenberg entered the pulpit for the last time, preached through Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, and concluded his sermon, throwing off his clerical robe to reveal his martial frame in a colonel’s uniform, proclaiming in a voice that thundered, “In the language of Holy Writ there is a time for all things, a time to preach and a time to pray; but there is also a time to fight, and that time has now come!” That day Muhlenberg inspired 300 men of his church to join his regiment and led them off to war.
In an article that appeared in the Independent of New York on December 4, 1873, entitled “The Decay of Conscience,” revivalist preacher Charles G. Finney wrote, “Brethren, our preaching will bear its legitimate fruits. If immorality prevails in the land, if there is a decay of conscience, if the public press lacks moral discrimination, if the church is degenerate and worldly, if the world loses its interest in religion, if Satan rules in our halls of legislation, if our politics become so corrupt that the very foundations of our government are ready to fall away, the pulpit is responsible for it,” and I would dare say, if the fruited plain is drenched in unborn innocent blood from sea to shining sea, the pulpit is responsible for it.”
Pastors, I know the responsibilities of a pastor. However, we are in a time that calls for resistance to tyranny more than in the time of Jonas Clarke and Peter Muhlenberg.
What are we doing to inspire our flocks to enter the fray for Liberty?
Have we even entered ourselves?