By Oyewole O. Sarumi
“Success and numbers doesn’t determine the truth. Churches are filled up with people today, but they have hardly been taught the truth. The Miraculous does not signify that it is the work of God, so don’t rejoice yet. Are you being taught the truth of the Scriptures or the doctrines of your church?”
A Question That Shakes the Comfortable
There is a particular kind of courage required to ask the question embedded in the text above. It is not the courage of confrontation for its own sake. It is the courage of a shepherd who loves the flock enough to disturb its comfort. It is the courage of Jeremiah, weeping as he spoke. It is the courage of John the Baptist, whose voice was wilderness-forged precisely because the temple precincts had grown too polished and too political for the raw truth that God needed spoken.
And it is, I submit to you, the courage of every genuine spiritual leader reading this article today — leaders who sense, with increasing unease, that something is fundamentally wrong in the house of God, even when the house appears full, even when the music is loud, even when the miracles are reported, even when the crowds return Sunday after Sunday.
The words in our anchor text are few but seismic. They do not merely raise a theological point. They raise a pastoral emergency. They ask us to examine not the size of our congregations but the substance of what is being served within them.
They ask us not whether the miraculous is occurring but whether the miraculous is being properly understood or catastrophically misread. They ask, perhaps most penetratingly, whether the average believer sitting in the average church today is actually being formed by the truth of Scripture — or by the preferences, traditions, and doctrinal peculiarities of the institution they happen to attend.
These are not comfortable questions.
But they are necessary ones. And as those of us who have served in pulpits, seminaries, and leadership classrooms for decades will readily acknowledge, the questions are not new. What is new is the urgency — and the data — that demand we answer them with greater rigour than ever before.
The Seduction of Size: When Numbers Became the Verdict
Let us begin at the beginning of the text’s argument: “Success and numbers don’t determine the truth.” This is a statement so obvious to the trained theological mind that one might wonder why it needs to be said. And yet it needs to be said — loudly, repeatedly, and without apology — because an entire ecosystem of Christian culture has quietly, insidiously, built itself on exactly the opposite assumption.
In contemporary church life across Africa, America, and much of the Global South, size has become the primary validation of a ministry.
The number of Sunday attendees, the square footage of the auditorium, the reach of the livestream, the subscriber count of the YouTube channel — these metrics have become the church’s equivalent of quarterly earnings reports.
They are the KPIs of modern ministry, and they are, spiritually speaking, some of the most dangerous numbers in the world.
The Bible, remarkably, is not impressed by large gatherings. Consider the ministry of our Lord Jesus Christ Himself. In John 6, after the feeding of the five thousand — a crowd-gathering miracle if ever there was one — Jesus deliberately preached a message so demanding, so theologically dense, so utterly contrary to what the crowd wanted to hear, that “from this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him” (John 6:66). Jesus watched the crowd walk away.
He did not chase them. He did not soften the message. He turned to the Twelve and asked: “You do not want to leave too, do you?” The Son of God, the greatest communicator who ever lived, was willing to preach to a crowd of twelve when the alternative was misleading five thousand.
“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”
— Matthew 7:13-14 (NIV)
This text from the Sermon on the Mount ought to dismantle, once and for all, the theology of numerical validation. The road that leads to destruction is described by Jesus as the road that “many” travel. The road that leads to life is travelled by “only a few.”
If we use attendance figures as the measure of doctrinal soundness, we have not only misread the Gospel — we have inverted it. We have called the broad road narrow and the narrow road broad.
The great Reformer Martin Luther understood this with harrowing clarity. When he stood before the Diet of Worms in 1521, facing the combined weight of papal authority, imperial power, and the overwhelming institutional consensus of the Catholic Church — every seat of power in Christendom arrayed against him — he said words that have echoed through five centuries: “Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me.” Luther was not looking at the crowd. He was not counting the numbers on his side. He was looking at the Word. The crowd was almost entirely against him. The truth was entirely with him. These two things were not in contradiction. They were simply evidence that the crowd is not the verdict.
“A church which has ceased to be embarrassed by the presence of the unconverted in her midst has also ceased to take the Gospel seriously.” — Martyn Lloyd-Jones
The Puritan divine Richard Baxter, whose monumental work The Reformed Pastor remains one of the most searching pastoral manuals ever written, observed that the chief danger to the church in every generation is not external persecution but internal corruption — and that the most insidious form of internal corruption is the substitution of the approval of men for the approval of God.
A pastor who counts heads rather than examining hearts has already crossed a line that, without repentance, will eventually cost him everything — and cost his congregation far more.
The research bears this out with sobering precision. A 2023 survey published by the Christian Standard found that emerging megachurches — those with weekly attendance between 1,000 and 2,000 — reported the lowest percentage of biblically literate attendees among all church size categories, at just 48 percent.
In other words, the larger the church, the less likely its members were to demonstrate foundational biblical literacy. This is not a coincidence. It is a consequence. When the architecture of ministry is designed primarily around attraction — around drawing the crowd — the content of what is offered will inevitably drift toward what the crowd finds palatable, and away from what the Spirit of God demands.
The Famine Within the Feast: Full Churches, Empty Doctrine
“Churches are filled up with people today, but they hardly been taught the truth.” These words carry within them the particular grief of a shepherd who has been watching from the watchtower. They describe a condition that has a name in the prophetic tradition: a famine not of bread, but of hearing the words of the Lord
“The days are coming,” declares the Sovereign Lord, “when I will send a famine through the land — not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord. People will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the Lord, but they will not find it.””
— Amos 8:11-12 (NIV)
Amos spoke these words to a prosperous, religiously active, outwardly thriving society. Israel in his day was not in decline — at least not by the metrics that mattered to her political class. The temples were full. The festivals were well attended. The offerings were abundant. And God looked at all of it and said: I am about to send a famine.
The famine He described was not the absence of religious activity. It was the absence of genuine divine revelation — the absence of truth — in the midst of all that activity. Amos was describing a condition in which the form of religion continued while the substance had quietly departed.
We are not far from that condition today. The American Bible Society’s State of the Bible 2024 report found that Bible engagement among Americans had dropped a full ten percentage points beginning in 2022, falling from approximately 50 percent of the population who engaged Scripture meaningfully to just 38 to 39 percent.
More disturbing still was what LifeWay Research discovered when they looked inside the church doors. Among regular churchgoers, nearly one in five say they never read the Bible. Over 40 percent read it only occasionally — perhaps once or twice a month.
And yet they attend church weekly, sing the worship songs, lift their hands in the appropriate moments, and go home feeling spiritually satisfied. They have had a religious experience. They have not necessarily encountered the living God through His revealed Word.
“The Bible is not a self-help book. It is not a book of inspiration. It is the charter of the Kingdom of God, the revelation of the character of God, the story of the redemption of man, and the standard against which all doctrine, all miracle, and all ministry must be measured.”
The theological consequence of this biblical disengagement is catastrophic. The Ligonier Ministries State of Theology Survey found in 2022 that 53 percent of American adults agreed with the statement that “the Bible, like all sacred writings, contains helpful accounts of ancient myths but is not literally true.” This was not a survey of atheists. It was a survey of the general public — which includes the churchgoing public.
Furthermore, while 67 percent of Americans believe heaven is a real place, 45 percent believe there are many ways to get there — including, shockingly, one in five evangelical Christians. More than half of evangelicals surveyed believed the Holy Spirit to be a force rather than a Person — a view directly at odds with orthodox Trinitarian theology that the church has confessed since the Council of Constantinople in AD 381.
These are not peripheral issues. They are foundational. And they represent the fruit of decades of preaching that has prioritised emotional engagement over theological substance, personal application over propositional truth, and motivational appeal over the careful, systematic exposition of Scripture that alone produces spiritually mature disciples.
The Apostolic Father Polycarp of Smyrna, writing to the Philippians in the second century, issued a warning as relevant today as it was in his own time. “For whosoever does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh,” he wrote, “is an antichrist; and whosoever does not confess the testimony of the cross is of the devil; and whosoever perverts the oracles of the Lord to his own lusts, and says that there is neither a resurrection nor a judgment, he is the first-born of Satan.”
Polycarp was not a man given to understatement. He understood that the perversion of the Lord’s oracles — the distortion of what Scripture actually says — is not a minor ecclesiastical error. It is a spiritual emergency of the first order.
John Calvin, writing in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, articulated what we might call the principle of doctrinal primacy: that the entire health of the church depends not on its external appearances — not on its size, its wealth, its ceremonial beauty, or its public influence — but on the faithfulness with which it preaches and teaches the pure Word of God.
Remove the Word, said Calvin, and you do not have a different kind of church. You have no church at all. The building may stand. The congregation may gather. The worship team may play. But if the truth of Scripture is not being faithfully taught, what assembles there is a religious gathering, not the ekklesia of Jesus Christ.
Do Not Rejoice Yet: The Grave Danger of Misreading the Miraculous
We come now to the most explosive line in the text — the one that will generate the most controversy among those shaped by certain streams of contemporary Christianity: “Miraculous does not signify that it is the work of God, so don’t rejoice yet.”
This is not a statement for the fainthearted. It is a statement forged directly from the anvil of Scripture, and it deserves to be treated with the same seriousness with which Jesus treated the matter in His most searching sermon.
“”Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!'””
— Matthew 7:21-23 (NKJV)
This passage is among the most terrifying in the entire New Testament, and it is terrifying precisely because of what it does not say. It does not describe people who claimed no relationship with Jesus. These are people who called Him Lord — not once, but twice, with an urgency and emphasis that the Greek construction underscores as passionate.
They are people who prophesied in His name, cast out demons in His name, and performed many wonders in His name. By every visible, measurable, externally verifiable standard, these were successful ministers. Their services were supernatural. Their credentials were impressive. Their testimonies were dramatic. And on the day of reckoning, Jesus said to them with awful finality: I never knew you.
Notice that Jesus did not say their miracles were fake. He did not contest the reality of what occurred.
What He said was that the relationship was fake — that these works, however spectacular, were performed in the absence of genuine, transformative, life-shaping relationship with Him. The miracles were real. The ministry was fraudulent. The crowd was impressed. Heaven was not.
This truth was not novel to Jesus’s hearers. The Old Testament had already established it. When Moses appeared before Pharaoh in Egypt, the magicians of Pharaoh replicated his signs. When he turned water to blood, they turned water to blood. When he brought frogs from the Nile, they brought forth frogs.
The miraculous was not, in those moments, a distinguishing feature of divine origin. It was terrain that both the Spirit of God and the powers of darkness could occupy — though not indefinitely, and not equally. When Moses and Aaron brought lice from the dust of the earth, the magicians could not replicate it, and they said to Pharaoh: “This is the finger of God” (Exodus 8:19). But up to that point, the counterfeit and the authentic had appeared to operate in the same miraculous register.
Deuteronomy 13 addresses this reality with extraordinary prophetic foresight. Moses instructed Israel that if a prophet arose and gave a sign or a wonder, and the sign came to pass, but that prophet then said “Let us go after other gods” — the prophet was to be rejected and executed, regardless of the accuracy of the sign.
The test of a true prophet, Moses declared, was never the miracle alone. It was the miracle plus the message plus the consistent alignment of both with the revealed will of God. Miracles authenticate nothing by themselves. They must be read in the full light of Scripture.
“The truth of a teacher’s words is determined not by the feats he can perform but by the orthodoxy of what he teaches. We are never to follow anyone who perverts the truth of God’s Word, no matter how large their organisation or how amazing their works seem to be.” — R.C. Sproul
Jesus in Matthew 24:24 is even more direct in His warning to the end-times church: “For false christs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect.” The words “if possible” have been wrongly read by some as a comfort. They should be read as a danger signal. Jesus is saying that the deception will be of such quality — the signs so convincing, the wonders so dramatic — that only the preserving grace of God will keep the elect from being swept away by it.
He is not saying the elect are immune from the temptation. He is saying they will be preserved through it, not around it. And the instrument of their preservation is not their emotional discernment or their spiritual sensitivity — it is their deep, tested, comprehensive knowledge of the Word of God.
Paul’s warning to the Thessalonians adds a further dimension that should chill every uncritical admirer of the spectacular: “The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie” (2 Thessalonians 2:9).
Paul explicitly identifies Satan as a worker of signs and wonders. He does not say Satan works counterfeit miracles that are obviously fake. He says Satan works signs and wonders — the same vocabulary used for genuine divine intervention — that serve a lie. The purpose of the miracle, not the reality of the miracle, is what matters.
The implications for contemporary charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity — and indeed for any tradition that has elevated the miraculous as its primary authenticating credential — are sobering.
A healing that occurs in a service may be genuine. A word of knowledge may be accurate. A demonstration of power may be real. And yet none of these, alone or together, constitutes proof that the teacher through whom they come is an authentic servant of the living God. The Bereans of Acts 17 were not said to be suspicious of Paul because they tested his teaching against Scripture. They were called “noble” — more noble, Paul says, than the Thessalonians — precisely because they did not let even an apostolic speaker go unchallenged against the Word. That is the model. That is the standard. That is what genuine spiritual formation looks like
Doctrines of Your Church or Truth of the Scriptures? — The Defining Question
The final question in the anchor text is perhaps the most personally confronting: “Are you being taught the truth of the Scriptures or the doctrines of your church?” This question assumes — rightly — that these two things are not always the same. And the fact that they are not always the same is one of the most important and least discussed realities in the contemporary church.
Every Christian tradition, without exception, carries within it a body of inherited interpretation, theological emphasis, ecclesiastical practice, and cultural assumption that has been shaped not only by Scripture but by history, by personality, by social context, and by the particular battles and breakthroughs of previous generations. This is not inherently wrong.
Tradition, properly understood, is the wisdom of the communion of saints transmitted across time. The great creeds of the church — the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Chalcedonian Definition — are tradition. The Reformation confessions — the Westminster, the Heidelberg, the Augsburg — are tradition.
Tradition is the church’s memory, and to despise it entirely is to render oneself vulnerable to every novelty and error that has already been identified and refuted.
But there is a form of tradition that becomes a cage. There is a form of doctrinal inheritance that calcifies into unexamined assumption — where the practices and emphases of the founding generation are taught not because they have been tested against Scripture and found faithful, but because they are what this church does, what this denomination believes, what our founder taught.
When this happens, the tradition has ceased to serve the Scripture and has begun to compete with it. And the believer who sits under that tradition, never encouraged to test it against the full counsel of God’s Word, is not being formed by Scripture — they are being formed by institution.
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”
— 2 Timothy 3:16-17 (NIV)
Paul’s instruction to Timothy is not merely that Scripture is inspired. It is that Scripture is useful — specifically useful for four functions that are each, in their own way, a form of challenge. Teaching is not merely the transmission of information. Rebuking is confrontation. Correcting is redirection. Training in righteousness is sustained formation.
All four of these functions require that the Scripture be allowed to speak on its own terms, not filtered through the interpretive preferences of a denomination, a pastor, or a tradition before its challenges can land.
The early church father Irenaeus of Lyon, writing in the second century against the Gnostic heresies that were tearing the church apart, articulated what he called the regula fidei — the rule of faith — as the standard against which all teaching must be measured.
But even as he appealed to tradition, Irenaeus grounded his appeal in the apostolic Scriptures. The tradition he defended was not the tradition of any particular church’s cultural practice. It was the tradition of what the apostles had received from Christ and faithfully transmitted.
Any teaching that deviated from that apostolic deposit, Irenaeus argued, was heresy — regardless of how ancient the teaching, how respected the teacher, or how numerous the followers.
The Reformers took this principle and sharpened it into the doctrine of Sola Scriptura — Scripture alone as the final, supreme, and infallible authority for all Christian faith and practice. This was not an attack on the church. It was a defence of it — a defence of the church against the tendency of every human institution to accumulate layers of tradition that eventually obscure rather than illuminate the original revelation. Luther did not reject the church’s authority. He rejected the church’s authority to contradict the Scriptures. These are fundamentally different things, and confusing them has caused untold damage on both the progressive and the conservative sides of contemporary Christianity.
“The Bible was not given to increase our knowledge but to change our lives.” — D.L. Moody
In the African church context — and this must be said with both love and candour — the question of doctrinal authority has a particular complexity. Many of the fastest-growing churches on the continent are built around the prophetic and apostolic authority of a founder whose personal revelations, pronouncements, and practices carry, in practical terms, the weight of Scripture — or more. Congregants are taught to receive the word of the man of God as the word of God Himself.
To question the pastor is framed as rebellion against the Holy Spirit. To test the teaching against Scripture is treated as evidence of spiritual pride or demonic influence. This is not Christianity. It is religious authoritarianism dressed in a Christian vocabulary, and it produces not spiritually formed believers but spiritually dependent subjects.
John Wesley — the great revivalist whose method gave birth to Methodism and fuelled one of the most transformative spiritual movements in modern history — was also one of the most methodical students of Scripture that the 18th century produced.
Wesley read his Bible in Greek and Hebrew. He wrote extensive commentaries. He taught his followers not merely to experience God but to understand what they had experienced in the light of Scripture. His quadrilateral of theological authority — Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience — was explicitly ranked: Scripture first, always. Experience, he insisted, must never be allowed to interpret Scripture. Scripture must always interpret experience. When the felt reality of an encounter with God is allowed to override the teaching of the Word, the church has entered dangerous territory.
The Spiritual Formation Imperative: What Truth-Teaching Actually Produces
We have been largely in diagnostic territory thus far, identifying the problem and its contours. But our task as teachers — as those who are called not merely to analyse the church’s condition but to build up the body of Christ — requires us to move from diagnosis to prescription. What does genuine, Scripture-grounded spiritual formation look like? What does it produce in those who receive it? And what does it require of those who deliver it?
Spiritual formation, properly understood, is not a programme. It is not a curriculum. It is not a church membership class or a discipleship module. It is the comprehensive, lifelong process by which the Word of God and the Spirit of God work together to reshape the inner life of a believer into the image of Jesus Christ.
Paul described it in Galatians 4:19 with extraordinary intimacy: “My little children, for whom I am again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you!” The Greek word Paul uses is morphoo — the same root from which we derive the English word morphology. He is describing a change of essential form — not a surface modification, not a behavioural adjustment, but a fundamental transformation of the interior architecture of a human being.
This kind of formation cannot be produced by entertainment. It cannot be generated by spectacle. It cannot be induced by the emotional intensity of a worship experience, however genuine that experience might be. The emotional encounter with God is a door — a gift, a mercy, an invitation. But walking through that door into sustained Christlikeness requires the slow, patient, rigorous work of encounter with the Scripture in all its depth and demand.
The Puritan Thomas Watson, writing in A Body of Divinity, put it with characteristic precision: “The word preached is the engine God uses to bring souls to Christ. It is called the sword of the Spirit because the Spirit of God works by it and makes it effectual for the saving of souls.” The sword must be properly handled to be effective. A sword waved carelessly injures the one wielding it as much as the enemy.
The research consistently confirms what the Scripture declares. LifeWay Research found that 90 percent of churchgoers express a desire to please and honour Jesus in everything they do. Nearly 60 percent report thinking about biblical truths throughout the day. And yet the same research found that nearly one in five regular church attendees never read the Bible.
There is a catastrophic disconnect between the desire for Christlikeness and the engagement with the only instrument through which Christlikeness is reliably formed. People want the fruit without the tree. They want the transformation without the truth. And too many churches, eager to meet people where they are rather than lead them where they need to go, have accommodated that preference rather than lovingly, persistently, pastorally challenging it.
“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is — his good, pleasing and perfect will.”
— Romans 12:2 (NIV)
Paul’s word for “transformed” in Romans 12:2 is the Greek metamorphoo — the same word used to describe Jesus’s transfiguration on the mount. He is not describing minor improvement. He is describing a radical metamorphosis accomplished through a specific instrument: the renewing of the mind.
The mind is renewed not by emotional experience, not by miraculous intervention, not by repeated exposure to inspiring messages — but by the sustained, systematic, disciplined engagement with revealed truth that rewires the believer’s entire cognitive and volitional architecture.
The transformation of a life requires the truth that exposes what must change, the grace that empowers the change, and the community that sustains the change. All three are necessary. But truth is the starting point. Without accurate knowledge of what God requires and who God is, there is no informed transformation — only the chasing of subjective spiritual experience, which is not formation but spiritual consumerism.
Clement of Rome, writing in the first letter attributed to him to the Corinthian church — a letter dated to the mid-90s AD and regarded by many scholars as among the earliest surviving Christian documents outside the New Testament — pleaded with the Corinthians to return to the teaching of the apostles. “Let us look steadfastly to the blood of Christ,” he wrote, “and see how precious that blood is to God, which, having been shed for our salvation, has set the grace of repentance before the whole world.”
Clement’s point was not that the Corinthians had abandoned Christ emotionally. His point was that they had abandoned the apostolic teaching — the authoritative interpretation of Christ — and were consequently tearing themselves apart. Sound doctrine is not the enemy of love and unity in the church. It is the foundation of them. Remove it, and the church does not become a more loving community. It becomes a community of competing subjective experiences, held together only by personality and sentiment, and fractured the moment either of those fails.
Practical Markers of a Truth-Teaching Church: A Discernment Framework for Leaders
For church leaders and leadership practitioners reading this article, the question is not merely theoretical. It is the most practical question you will face in ministry: How do I know whether the community I lead — or the community I attend — is genuinely teaching the truth of Scripture? And how do I build, or find, a church in which genuine spiritual formation is happening?
I want to suggest seven markers drawn from Scripture and from the wisest thinkers the church has produced. These are not a complete checklist. They are diagnostic instruments — windows through which to look at the ministry around you with clear, undeceived eyes.
The first marker is the primacy of expository preaching. In a church where truth is being faithfully taught, the Scripture drives the sermon — not the sermon’s topic, theme, or felt need. The preacher works through books of the Bible systematically, allowing the text to set the agenda, the sequence, and the emphasis.
The congregation is not given a menu of inspirational topics. They are fed the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:27). Where preaching is topical by default — where every sermon begins with a question, a social trend, or a personal story and then searches for a text to support it — the congregation is subtly being trained to read the Bible in service of the culture rather than to read the culture in service of the Bible.
The second marker is the willingness to preach the uncomfortable. A church that never makes its congregation squirm with the demands of Christ is a church that has traded the prophetic dimension of preaching for the pastoral desire to be liked.
Hebrews 4:12 describes the Word of God as “alive and active, sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” A sharp sword, honestly applied, will cut. If your church’s preaching never cuts — if it never confronts sin, challenges comfort, or calls for costly discipleship — the sword may be decorative.
The third marker is the cultivation of congregational Bible literacy. The pastor’s job is not only to teach but to equip the congregation to teach themselves. Ephesians 4:11-12 makes this explicit: the apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers are given “to equip his people for works of service.”
The measure of a pastor’s success is not how dependent the congregation is on him or her but how capable the congregation is of engaging Scripture independently, critically, and devotionally. Churches that produce biblically literate disciples — people who can read, interpret, and apply the text for themselves — are producing the kind of Christian that can withstand the storms of false teaching, cultural pressure, and personal suffering.
The fourth marker is theological honesty about miracles and the supernatural. A church that is being formed by truth will not suppress questions about miraculous claims. It will model the Berean approach — receiving reports of the miraculous with gratitude and openness, while testing them diligently against the whole pattern of Scripture.
This does not mean cessationism — the view that miraculous gifts ceased with the apostolic age. It means that even within a robustly charismatic theology, the miracle is subordinate to the message, the experience to the Word, the sign to the truth it is meant to signify. When miracle becomes the message — when the service is designed to produce an emotional and spectacular encounter regardless of whether any doctrinal content is transmitted — the community has drifted from formation to performance.
The fifth marker is the freedom to question. A church where members are discouraged from asking hard questions — where intellectual engagement with Scripture is treated as spiritual immaturity or threatening to leadership — is a church that has chosen control over formation. The earliest disciples asked Jesus hard questions constantly.
The Psalms are full of agonised questions directed at God. Job’s lengthy argument with the Almighty is preserved in Scripture as a model of anguished faith, not condemned as rebellion. A community that cannot hold questions is a community that cannot hold complex truth. And complex truth is what the real world constantly demands.
The sixth marker is accountability in leadership. The Pastoral Epistles establish unambiguously that those who teach the church must themselves be above reproach — not sinless, but characterized by integrity, measured by their family life, their financial probity, their management of conflict, and their relationship to their own failings.
A church where the leader is unaccountable — where questioning the pastor is equated with questioning God, where financial transparency is refused, where the founder’s authority is unchallengeable — is not structured according to the New Testament pattern. It is structured for the protection of the leader, not the formation of the congregation.
The seventh marker is the long view. Genuine spiritual formation is not measured in one Sunday’s emotional intensity or in a month’s worth of testimonies. It is measured in decades — in the faithfulness of men and women who, having been properly taught, hold fast to the truth through loss, through suffering, through the collapse of everything that once seemed certain.
The Apostle Paul’s final words in 2 Timothy were written from a Roman prison cell, not from a platform of success. He wrote: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:7). That is the outcome that faithful teaching produces — not celebrities, not performers, not spiritual consumers, but men and women who keep the faith when keeping it costs everything.
“Preach the Word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine.” — 2 Timothy 4:2-3 (KJV)
A Word to Leaders: The Weight You Carry
This article has been written for a leadership audience — for pastors, teachers, elders, seminary educators, ministry leaders, and those who influence the formation of others at every level. And so I want to close this section with a word addressed to you, not to the abstract congregation, but to you personally.
James 3:1 contains what is perhaps the most sobering sentence ever written about the ministry of teaching: “Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.” James does not say teachers will be held to a higher standard because they are more important. He says it because they are more influential.
The doctrine you teach will outlive you. It will be repeated by the people who sit under your ministry for decades after you are gone. It will be transmitted, sometimes with your own name attached to it, to people you have never met. If that doctrine is true, it will build the house of God. If it is false — even partially false, even the kind of false that sounds almost true — it will undermine the foundations of the spiritual lives of men and women who trusted you.
The Puritan Jonathan Edwards, whose preaching at Northampton, Massachusetts, in the 1730s and 1740s sparked what historians call the First Great Awakening, was asked late in his life what he considered the most important quality of a faithful minister.
His answer was not eloquence, not theological brilliance, not administrative skill. He said it was “a sense of the weight of the soul.” Edwards meant by this an acute, settled, wakeful awareness that the people sitting in front of you are immortal beings whose eternal destiny is not entirely unrelated to the quality of what you feed them spiritually. A minister who carries the weight of the soul will not take shortcuts with the text. He will not substitute entertainment for exposition.
He will not trade the demanding truth for the comfortable lie because the comfortable lie is what the crowd wants to hear.
The great Ignatius of Antioch, writing his letter to the Ephesians as he was being transported to Rome for execution in the early second century, urged the Ephesian believers to give themselves to prayer and to the teaching of the apostles. “Be not deceived,” he wrote. “Neither the things which are highly esteemed among men, nor the glory of this present world, will profit you in the Day of Judgment. To be a Christian is a great thing, not merely to seem one. And those are great who both please God and conceal it from themselves.”
Ignatius understood that the visible markers of religious success — the esteem of men, the glory of position, the appearance of greatness — are precisely the categories that the Day of Judgment will render irrelevant. What will matter on that day is what was done in the darkness of the study, in the wrestling of prayer, in the careful, unglamorous work of handling the Word aright.
The research, interestingly, offers encouragement alongside its warnings. The Barna Group’s 2025 data reveals that Bible reading among younger adults — Gen Z and Millennials — has surged significantly since 2024, with weekly Bible engagement climbing back to 42 percent of US adults, a 12-point uptick from the 2024 low. Something is stirring. There is, as Justin Brierley has observed, a warming toward Christianity across the Western world that was not present a decade ago.
Young men, historically the most disengaged demographic, are now outpacing young women in weekly Scripture engagement. The hunger is returning. The question is whether the church will meet that hunger with the bread of the Word — or with the fast food of spiritual entertainment.
The moment demands leaders who will choose the bread.
Conclusion: The Verdict That Matters Is Not Yet In
Our anchor text ends with a question, not a statement. “Are you being taught the truth of the Scriptures or the doctrines of your church?” It is a question that deserves to remain open — pressing, uncomfortable, and personally confronting — in the mind and heart of every believer who takes their spiritual formation seriously. It is a question that should be asked not once but regularly, as a kind of spiritual audit of the community one inhabits and the teaching one receives.
The crowd does not determine the verdict. The size of the congregation is not the measure of the truth being taught within it. The occurrence of the miraculous is not, in itself, evidence that God is the architect of what is taking place. And the doctrines of any particular church, however beloved, however ancient, however surrounded by genuine community and sincere worship, are not automatically the truths of Scripture.
These are hard distinctions to hold. They are especially hard in contexts where religious belonging provides community, identity, and hope to people who have very little of any of these things in their daily lives. To introduce a hermeneutic of discernment into communities built on trust and emotional attachment requires pastoral courage of the highest order.
But the alternative is worse.
The alternative is a generation of men and women who stood in full churches, heard impressive preachers, witnessed spectacular signs, and were never once asked to open their Bibles, wrestle with a difficult text, or test the teaching they received against the full, demanding, comprehensive revelation of God.
The alternative is the terrifying crowd of Matthew 7:22 — people who stand before Christ on the last day with an impressive list of religious credentials and hear the words that no religious credential can answer: I never knew you.
To know Christ — truly, deeply, transformatively — requires knowing His Word. Not the Word as filtered through the personality of a favourite preacher.
Not the Word as selectively applied by a denominational tradition. Not the Word as occasionally encountered in a Sunday service. But the Word as personally, regularly, prayerfully engaged — studied with rigour, received with humility, applied with courage, and transmitted to others with the same loving urgency with which Paul urged Timothy, from his prison cell, not to be ashamed of the testimony of our Lord.
The verdict of Eternity is not yet in. But the basis on which it will be rendered is already established and unchanging. It will not be the size of the crowd. It will not be the list of miracles. It will not be the length of the ministry or the impressiveness of the organisation. It will be whether we knew Him — and whether, in our knowing of Him, we faithfully taught others to know Him too.
That is the work. It is enough. It is everything.
About the Author
Prof. Sarumi, a digital transformation architect and leadership strategist with over 40 years of cross-sector experience across Nigeria the African continent, writes from Lagos.
