What if when Jesus returns, there is nobody to meet him in the air? What the church needs is Jesus. Jesus was a Jew who came to change Judaism. Today Jesus is needed to change Christianity.

It is not just SBC churches and other fundamentals that are declining. All denominations and non-denominational churches are declining, and will continue downhill to get to the 11.7% in 2050 of people who are still attending church. Many of these churches in decline already embrace women fully (or they say they do) and many tell their members that God and science can co-exist.

However, these churches are also chasing their tails trying to figure out how to keep their members and draw the younger generation into a worship relationship with God.

They have the answers, but they do not know what to do with it. They are succumbing to wringing their hands because the big boys – Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists – cannot seem to stop the decline, causing them to think they cannot either. The truth is that they cannot stop the decline as long as they shy away from what makes them different in the first place from Catholics and Baptists.

I want to close this by recounting the story found in Acts 3, 4:1-18 when the church was just getting started.

It was destined to be an extraordinary day at the temple. Peter had just healed an adult man who was crippled from the time he was a child. And now he and John were telling people about Jesus and his resurrection. The people assembled there were listening because of what they had seen.

Guards always get suspicious when a group of people are intently listening to one person speak, so they slipped closer to hear what was being said, and then reported back to their captain. As you can guess, the captain of the guards did not like what they were saying so he came over to have a little chat with them. They not only chatted, but the guard took them and put them in prison overnight.

“By what power are you doing these things?” they asked Peter and John the next day.

Peter looked them in the eye and said that it was by the power of Jesus Christ, who they had killed, but who had resurrected and now they were able to do this good deed in his name, (based on Acts 3, 4:1-18).

Uh, oh.

If these unschooled and untrained men were able to do this, then what else could they do? After all, these men had been with Jesus.

So they talked, and they talked some more, and came up with the only thing they could think of: “in order that it may not be spread any further among the people, let us warn them to speak no more to any man in this name.”

Peter and John said: “Whether it is right in the sight of God to give heed to you rather than to God, you be the judge.”

Like Peter and John, we women cannot stop speaking what we have seen and heard.

Women are powered by the same Source. Like Peter we, too, have walked with Jesus. Peter and John could not quit telling about Jesus. They were told to stop, but they could not because they were just getting started. We, who believe in equality, cannot quit now as the battle is not yet won for women’s equality. We, too, have been with Jesus. Saved by the blood of the lamb and a witness to what he has done through his Word, and to how he has spoken to us.

Jesus is our standard, and since Jesus did not commit women to husbands, or to males, and because Jesus did not deny women anything based on their being women, then we cannot in good stewardship of the gospel, do so either.

What the church needs is Jesus.