At the close of each morning service, our church fellowship often ends with the resonating voices of men and women singing Amazing Grace. After more than a year in the sheltered friendship of these brothers and sisters who love my wife and I so faithfully, the lyrics of Grace have more recently stirred my heart to remember another time and another place. While many picture images of the cross, the love of our Savior, or the blessing of heavenly hope, I find myself thinking of this thing we've come to call a Grace Movement.

In the fall of 1997, among the hills of northwest Oregon, I was introduced to a patient man whose knowledge in the Word managed to humble my adolescent urgency for correctness. From that season through to the winter of 1998, he taught me the principles of critical thinking when it came to proper handling of the Scriptures. At times, my questions insisted that we find a quick answer and he would more greatly insist that we had plenty of time. Rather than rushing to know, his instruction set me on a self-controlled path to rightly dividing the word of truth.⁴

During the time that I shared in his company, we took root in a small fellowship near his home. The church, as it became known to me, was a "grace church." Although it struck me that this was a small assembly of less than thirty men and women, I was captured by the teaching and the consistently clear messages from the Word of God. Having long been attracted to large youth groups and mega churches because of how they made me feel, this was a new experience altogether.

As grace teaching ripened my muddled mind, it became my greatest passion to "get the message out there" for those who were gathered elsewhere. The home where we had been gathering for Monday night studies became a house for many youth and college age kids that I knew and loved dearly. There they were, young people beyond myself, learning the Scriptures and coming to understand the Word rightly divided. The grace message was getting out and youth were getting as excited to learn more as I was. But that came to a shattering halt almost as quickly as it had begun.

What I did not know at the time was that while the "message" was solid, the people who taught it were fractured all across the nation. In our situation, my faithful teacher was made an outcast in the assembly because the students he brought each Sunday morning were beginning to outnumber the more Biblically seasoned adults. He was perceived as a threat to the leadership and thus, a church of less than thirty became a church of less than fifteen almost overnight. Many of the young people who were eager to learn lost all desire to stick around.

This was, as many might identify, my first experience with the Grace Movement. And as it turned out, this was happening all across the country.

When faced with the discouragement of arrogant grace, I knew nothing of the men who had faithfully pioneered this movement in the 1930s. What I did know was that a message of hope suddenly became a message of rejection. And more striking than anything else, my generation of rising adults were not welcome.

For the next three years, I committed myself to isolated study and to the visiting of churches in state after state from Oregon to New Jersey and in-between. That journey afforded me the privilege of shaking hands and sharing meals with many noble teachers such as Roger Anderson, former President of the Grace Gospel Fellowship, and Joel McGarvey, the current Associate Director of Bible Doctrines to Live By. One visit to Passaic, New Jersey put me in the wonderful association of an African-American grace assembly ministering to the struggling neighborhoods of their community.

Yet, for every blessed fellowship that I entered, it was discovered that they had endured their share of hardship. And for every hardship, I found more and more churches filled with broken and angry people. At times, it was possible for me to get up around 6am on a Sunday morning, drive about 3 hours one-way to visit a body of believers, and upon my departure around lunch, realize that absolutely no one had noticed my being there. Granted, I am not much to look at, but the warmth of a welcoming assembly was not evident. If the doors merely open and close long enough to get a Bible lesson and no one genuinely interacts, what has been accomplished?

In his much applauded book, The Grace Awakening, Chuck Swindoll's cover page engraves the words, "Believing in grace is one thing. Living it is another." And quite remarkably, many within our arguably fading movement prefer to condemn Swindoll for his ignorance of dispensational matters rather than to consider such simple words. Is it not true that believing in grace is only one side of the coin while living it is quite another?

At the opening of each epistle, the Apostle Paul begins and ends on the most frequently overlooked salutation.

"To all that be in Rome, beloved of God, called [to be] saints: Grace to you and peace from God out Father and the Lord Jesus Christ." Romans 1:7

"The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ [be] with you all. Amen." Romans 16:24

This, for Paul, is neither casual nor random. He does not proceed to jump-start his writing with exclamatory frustrations or hard-hitting doctrine. It is his intention to convey from the Lord Jesus Christ just one key thing where all others may be occasional. Grace to you and grace be with you. How many letters or emails have you written to a brother or sister in the Lord where you set aside salutation in order to attack them as an enemy or pound them with doctrine? Notice that Paul never once allows the grace approach to slip his mind.

No doubt some heavy critics read this and say, "Yes, but we must understand the doctrine of grace. It is not sufficient to be gracious if we don't understand what grace means." My dear friends, what longsuffering slave did not learn over time what it meant when his master raised the whip? Believers after believers have approached me during the past ten years to tell me that they are exhausted from the charts, the timelines, and the displays of a redundant and repetitious theme that no longer has uniqueness. They can even be found saying, "I'm sick of hearing about grace!" Some of you read that exclamation and gasp at the thought. How could anyone be sick of hearing about grace?

The answer is simple: People within the Grace Movement have become "sick" of hearing about grace because it is continually taught to them as though they are hearing it for the first time or even worse, competent adults are being taught as though they were mere children. When anyone is taught the same message over and over or given no credibility for intelligent thought, the message loses his "saltiness."

"Let your speech [be] always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man." Colossians 4:6

Our little ones learn the basics of early addition, but they will make no further progress if the same basics are all that they ever learn. Successful education takes mathematics and continues to build from a common foundation. The challenge our leaders have within this movement is not to continue finding ways to repeat or regurgitate the same information, but how they will begin to teach their assemblies and their congregations about walking worthy of the grace that they've been called (Ephesians 4:1).

Our young people are facing some of the toughest worldviews and secular challenges that they've ever had to face in this culture. What will I do if I get caught up in an extra-marital relationship? What if I get pregnant? Are people born homosexual?

You see, our children in grace are being raised up to know the academics of grace, but are not being raised up to face the dangers that await them from Monday through Saturday. Instead, we train them to know the Book of Acts by age 10 and then throw them to the wolves where the world eats them alive by age 16. Faced with drugs, depression, suicidal tendencies, atheism, they buckle under the weight of such vast tribulation because we've done nothing to prepare them. When a girl that we once knew in our assembly shows up pregnant, we're devastated. When a boy once trained by our teachers claims that he no longer believes in God, we're stunned. But these losses fall on those of us who have been careless enough to ignore their needs during the critical period of their most vulnerable age. Seeking to feed our adult minds with witty debates, we lose sight of the most important group in our midst.

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, our responsibility is clear, but easily overlooked. If we do not make provisions for the children and realize the battles that they face, we will lose them and thus lose ourselves. We must give them something to sing about. We must give them a reason to rejoice. Perhaps that means we must first find our own reason to sing. Perhaps that means we must first realize what it is to have joy.

Quite possibly standing alone in these words, I must concede that we are nothing of a movement if we are not moving forward and we are nothing of grace if we are not gracious in our movement. Either we must put an end to our ministries as they bear no fruit to the next generation or we must evaluate our motions and upon finding that we have cause to proceed, let our conviction be to the advancement of grace.

The time is now. Let us no longer just move... but move forward.