The People’s Revival

Luxury and Selfishness Have Defined the American Church

Principle

Luxury has become our liturgy. Selfishness, our creed.

The American church, once the outpost of mercy, has become the mall of self-congratulation. What we call “blessing” would have been called idolatry by any prophet worth his sandals.

We have built a nation of sanctuaries lined with LED walls, celebrity pastors, and climate-controlled sanctums while the hungry sleep against the brick faces of our steeples. We quote “Sodom and Gomorrah” as a sexual warning, when the real indictment was economic — “They were overfed, arrogant, and unconcerned for the poor.”

That’s Ezekiel 16:49. That’s us.

Stand-Out Truth

We are Sodom — not because of who we love, but because of what we hoard.

We have taken the abundance meant to heal the world and forged it into symbols of status. The modern church has learned to prosper without compassion, to market Christ while muzzling His message, to bless billionaires and bypass the beggars.

We built stages instead of shelters, brands instead of brotherhoods, campuses instead of communities. We have confused gain for godliness and called comfort the confirmation of our calling.

The church that was meant to wash feet now sells anointed sneakers. The shepherds have become salesmen, and the gospel has been traded for subscriptions, tiers, and merch.

Revelation

The sin of Sodom was not decadence — it was detachment. A people so full they couldn’t feel. So secure they couldn’t see. So entertained they couldn’t hear.

America has perfected that condition.

The church imported it.

We are a people numbed by luxury, living proof that you can fill a sanctuary and still be empty. The Spirit cannot inhabit what pride refuses to make room for.

In our obsession with success, we’ve domesticated the Lion of Judah into a corporate mascot — a god who protects the rich, defends the flag, and rubber-stamps our greed. We pray for revival while guarding the idols that make revival impossible.

The prophets warned us: when religion and empire share the same bed, justice gets smothered in the sheets.

Response

It’s time to burn the golden calf again.

The only revival worth having is one that tears the silk from our altars and the branding from our pulpits — one that smells not of perfume but of sweat, blood, and bread broken for strangers.

The true church of Christ will rise again, but it won’t look like the cathedral. It will look like a kitchen.

It will sound like laughter in a shelter, not applause in an auditorium.

It will gather beneath overpasses and in laundromats, where mercy still outweighs metrics.

We don’t need more programs. We need repentance.

We don’t need more wealth. We need redistribution.

We don’t need bigger platforms. We need smaller egos.

Until we trade our chandeliers for candles and our security systems for open doors, the church will remain what it has become — the American Sodom, praying for rain while holding the umbrella of privilege over itself.

Call to Action

Let judgment begin in the house of God — not as wrath, but as reckoning.

Let every congregation count its unused square footage and fill it with the cold, the broke, the tired.

Let every preacher who speaks of blessing define it by who eats, not who tithes.

Let mercy become the new megachurch.

Let generosity become our doctrine.

Let justice become our worship.

And when they ask what happened to the old church, we’ll tell them the truth:

We buried it under its own weight — and built something better in its place.

“The abundance of Sodom was bread, ease, and arrogance — and they refused to strengthen the hand of the poor.”

— Ezekiel 16:49

Let’s not repeat their story.

Let’s build something better.