Fan the Flame: Let Jesus Renew Your Calling and Revive Your Church

By Jim Cymbala with John Blattner

224 pp. (hardback), 225 pp. (ebook)

In Fan the Flame, New York Times bestselling author and pastor Jim Cymbala offers advice to help leaders become the kind of people God can use to ignite revival in today’s church. By focusing on on Acts 20—Paul’s farewell to leaders in Ephesus—he provides tools for personal renewal that will spark a fresh love for Jesus, a deeper on God’s Spirit, and a growing love for prayer.

Along the way, Cymbala includes stories from his own experience at the Brooklyn Tabernacle, a church he has led for many years. He offers biblical, ground-level, faith-driven, nitty-gritty advice that will encourage, inspire, and equip leaders wherever God has planted them.

An excerpt from Fan the Flame:

To our shame, more than 150 years after the Civil War, racism is still a powerful force in America, and one that infects many sectors of Christ’s church. Across America, for the most part, Black churches stay Black, and White churches stay White.

When city neighborhoods change, White churches are quick to move to the suburbs. If those suburbs change, they move even further away. Often this has been done with the lame excuse that to have church growth you must have a “homogeneous” congregation. Intelligent people know that is a code word for racism. It’s just another way of saying we want to have some difference from those who are “other.”

The problem goes both ways.

Our church has always welcomed people from all races and ethnicities and backgrounds. Sadly, some of our Black members have told us that relatives and friends from other churches criticize them, saying, “I can’t believe you’d go to a church where the Man is the pastor.” That mentality is not an example of Christian love and unity.

Here’s the reality we too often choose to sidestep or ignore: When God looks down from heaven, he doesn’t see races and ethnicities and “demographics.” He sees people. People his Son died for. People he wants to save and bring into his family.

Here’s the bottom line, pastors: If you don’t want to welcome into your church everyone Christ died for, take down the cross from your building. Please. If you’re not willing to welcome and minister to everyone Jesus died to save—homeless, wealthy, poor, Black, white, Latino, gay, straight—how can you claim to be a Christian church? How can you reconcile that attitude with the love of God?