Dr Paul Allen

Many Christians have expressed disappointment and frustration in the last few weeks about not being able to gather for worship because of the COVID-19 crisis. Does God miss our worship? God is sovereign over all things. “Does disaster come to a city, unless the Lord has done it?” (Amos 3:6). So He is the One who has stopped our worship as the gathered body of Christ on the Lord’s Day. Perhaps we should ask if He is teaching us something that we are not yet learning. Whenever calamity strikes, I think about Jesus’ teaching that is recorded for us in Luke 13. Calamity should direct us to consider the judgment of God and lead us to repentance. Should the calamity of closed churches lead us to ask if we need to evaluate our worship and perhaps repent? Various prophets at different times criticized the worship of God’s Old Testament people . Paul criticized worship in the Corinthian church. Do we ever pause to ask if the worship that our churches offer to God is pleasing to Him

Munich, Germany. thinking about the newest statistics about Christianity in Germany. According to the numbers, Christianity is in rapid decline. The country where the Reformation began five hundred years ago will soon have a majority of the population who don’t call themselves Christians. Even seventy years ago in a post–World War II Germany, 95 per cent of the people were members either of the Roman Catholic Church or of a Protestant church. Just in 2018, the Protestant state churches lost another 2 per cent of their members. But even more alarming is that of members of the Protestant state churches, an average of only 3.4 per cent attends a church service on any given Sunday, which amounts to less than 1 per cent of the population in Germany. The number of Christians in free (non-state) churches continues to be negligible. Even more alarming is the trend toward liberalism in nearly all denominations. At times, it seems as if preaching the gospel in Germany is a waste o