Sins of the Preachers of America
By: Dr. Everett Ramsey
Having been led by the Holy Spirit to seek the Lord in a special week of prayer and fasting, a group of pastors and others met in Covington, Georgia, to seek the Lord for His blessings upon our lives, our ministries, and our nation in this day of great moral and spiritual crisis. Having been convicted of our sins by the Holy Spirit, we do now humbly acknowledge and confess and repent of the following sins. While each of these does not necessarily represent the sins of each preacher in attendance, nor is each sin necessarily the sin of each preacher in America, we humbly believe that these are sins that represent the great body of preachers in America.
WE FURTHER BELIEVE that these are the sins that have brought the churches of America to a desert of spiritual famine and our nation to the very brink of disaster and destruction.
AS THE PROPHETS OF OLD, we confess that our fathers have broken the laws of God and have done that which is evil in the eyes of the Lord our God, and have turned away their faces from and their backs upon the presence and power of God (Exodus 20:5; Numbers 14:18,19; Leviticus 26:40-42; Nehemiah 9:1-3; Daniel 9:3-19; II Chronicles 29:6).
1. We have sinned by exalting the laws of man above the laws of God and the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
2. We have sinned by failing to make application of the Word of God and the Lordship of Christ to every area of life. By preaching the Gospel without making the practical application to our homes, churches, and society, we have ignored the example of the prophets, the Lord Jesus, and the apostles and thus have often preached only-half truths.
3. We have fallen into the sin of pride and have placed an unholy emphasis on our academic status, ministerial accomplishments, and peer associations.
4. We have fallen into the sins of striving in the flesh and failing to appropriate God’s power according to His Word. In attempting to do the Holy works of the Lord, we have adopted humanistic, worldly, and pragmatic methods and have used Madison Avenue advertising techniques.
5. We have sinned by grieving the Holy Spirit with our inordinate emphasis upon the erection of splendid buildings and the increasing of our church attendance and membership.
6. We have sinned by allowing the frivolous spirit of the world of entertainment, amusements, and sports to enter into our lives and churches. We have then sinned by using these frivolous means to attract people to our churches and Christian schools and to keep these people involved in our programs.
7. We have sinned by violating God’s laws on unscriptural personal debt; by leading our churches into crushing, unscriptural debt; and in failing to teach the people in our congregations about unscriptural debt and how to be delivered from this sin.
8. We have fallen into the sin of selfishness because of our tunnel vision that has limited us to regard only the success of our own ministries.
9. We have sinned by our silence and by our fear and failure to cry out against the popular sins of worldliness, Hollywood influences, fornication, adultery, divorce, greed, jealousy, envy, social drinking of alcoholic beverages, drunkenness, violating the Lord’s day, etc.
10. We have sinned in our failure to exercise biblical standards of holiness in every area of our lives and to require the same of our church members. We have further sinned by not exercising church discipline when necessary.
11. We have sinned by our silence; we have failed to cry out against immorality, abortion, sodomy, and other wicked sins that have brought America under God’s judgment and to the brink of disaster and destruction.
12. We have sinned by our willful participation in an unscriptural tax system that condones, advocates, promotes, and finances immorality, abortion, sodomy, and other wicked sins. We are not opposed to paying taxes for the legitimate function of civil government according to the scriptures. But by contributing to the unscriptural, unconstitutional, and communist-designed graduated income tax system, we have aided the very enemies who are dedicated to the destruction of the family, our churches, and our Republic.
13. We have sinned by our failure to cry aloud against the wickedness of the government system of socialism and welfare-ism; we have sinned by our personal contribution to the fraudulent Social Security tax program which is the most cruel hoax ever perpetuated on the American people, including the elderly and our posterity.
14. We have sinned by our failure to teach our congregations the biblical truths and principles about their responsibilities to provide for themselves and their own. We have failed to build churches that obey God’s Word in caring for the fatherless, widows, and the helpless and needy to whom the Lord commands the church to minister.
15. We have sinned by accepting government subsidies.
16. We have sinned by neglecting our wives and sons and daughters in order to build “successful” church programs, and by allowing the world, the occult, the influences of Hollywood, and myriad of other Satanic influences through music, literature, and television to invade our homes and capture the minds of our children.
17. We have sinned by sowing discord among the brethren through a libelous, slanderous, critical tongue and pen (Proverbs 6:19b; 16:28).
18. We have sinned by failure to acknowledge, confess, and repent of our sins in the past.
WE HAVE NOW HUMBLY CONFESSED our sins and petitioned the Lord to grant us His gifts of repentance and faith. By His grace and power, we will turn from our sins and live in obedience to His Word in the days ahead.
WE LIKEWISE CALL on the preachers of America to join with us by honestly examining their own lives in the light of God’s Word and in the light of the foregoing list of sins and to unite with us in acknowledging, confessing, and repenting of sin.
Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn from His fierce anger, that we perish not. Jonah 3:9.
– Amen –
Adopted by the American Coalition of Unregistered Churches Prayer and Fasting Convocation Covington, Georgia • April 2-6, 1984
