A friend of mine who has cabinet level connections in Israel recently shared with me that they believe that radical jihadists may have already smuggled small nuclear explosive devices into Tel Aviv, a major city in Europe, (possibly London), and you guessed it, into the United States. Further their intelligence reveals that ISSA and others have been researching how to destroy an entire city.
I suppose that it might take a catastrophe of that level to wake some folks up. It seems that the dire circumstances in the dangerous world in which we reside have little impact on folks and they seem oblivious to what is going on around them.
Our President is a prime example of many in the United States. At 12:57 at a hastily arranged press conference in which he donned a snappy blazer, he announced dire warnings to those involved with the beheading of journalist James Foley, and seven minutes later at 1:04 he was high fiving his buddies with a huge smile on his face, and getting ready to tee off for a round of golf.
Business as usual?
Yesterday we had a disappointing small turnout for church. What a shame that they missed such a Spirit filled moment. We had a group who call themselves “The Catalyst” who drove all of the way up from the Naples area and they sang and gave testimony and we had an outstanding worship service.
I don’t know why folks elected to stay away. Did they prefer to go to the beach, or play a round of golf? Was it too hot to venture out? Did they have hangovers? The leaders of our little church wish we knew. In fact we have spent many hours praying about it and trying to discern how to reach those in our community for Christ.
Recently a friend sent me the article below entitled:
Church, Here’s Why People Are Leaving You.
Being on the other side of the Exodus sucks, don’t it?
I see the panic on your face, Church.
I know the internal terror as you see the statistics and hear the stories and scan the exit polls.
I see you desperately scrambling to do damage control for the fence-sitters, and manufacture passion from the shrinking faithful, and I want to help you.
You may think you know why people are leaving you, but I’m not sure you do.
You think it’s because “the culture” is so lost, so perverse, so beyond help that they are all walking away.
You believe that they’ve turned a deaf ear to the voice of God; chasing money, and sex, and material things.
You think that the gays and the Muslims and the Atheists and the pop stars have so screwed-up the morality of the world, that everyone is abandoning faith in droves.
But those aren’t the reasons people are leaving you.
They aren’t the problem, Church.
You are the problem.
Let me elaborate in 5 ways . . .
1) Your Sunday productions have worn thin.
The stage, and the lights, and the bands, and the video screens, have all just become white noise to those really seeking to encounter God. They’re ear and eye candy for an hour, but they have so little relevance in people’s daily lives, that more and more of them are taking a pass.
Yeah the songs are cool and the show is great, but ultimately Sunday morning isn’t really making a difference on Tuesday afternoon or Thursday evening, when people are wrestling with the awkward, messy, painful stuff in the trenches of life; the places where rock shows don’t help.
We can be entertained anywhere. Until you can give us something more than a Christian-themed performance piece; something that allows us space and breath and conversation and relationship, many of us are going to sleep-in and stay away.
2) You speak in a foreign tongue.
Church, you talk and talk and talk, but you do so using a dead language. You’re holding on to dusty words that have no resonance in people’s ears, not realizing that just saying those words louder isn’t the answer. All the religious buzzwords that used to work 20 years ago, no longer do.
This spiritualized insider-language may give you some comfort in an outside world that is changing, but that stuff’s just lazy religious shorthand, and it keeps regular people at a distance. They need you to speak in a language that they can understand. There’s a message there worth sharing, but it’s hard to hear above your verbal pyrotechnics.
People don’t need to be dazzled with big, churchy words and about eschatological frameworks and theological systems. Talk to them plainly about love, and joy, and forgiveness, and death, and peace, and God, and they’ll be all ears. Keep up the church-speak, and you’ll be talking to an empty room soon.
3) Your vision can’t see past your building.
The coffee bar, the cushy couches, the high tech lights, the funky Children’s wing and the uber-cool Teen Center are all top-notch . . . and costly. In fact, most of your time, money, and energy seems to be about luring people to where you are, instead of reaching people where they already are.
Rather than simply stepping out into the neighborhoods around you and partnering with the amazing things already happening, and the beautiful stuff God is already doing, you seem content to franchise out your particular brand of Jesus-stuff, and wait for the sinful world to beat down your door.
Your greatest mission field is just a few miles, (or a few feet) off your campus and you don’t even realize it. You wanna reach the people you’re missing?
Leave the building.
4) You choose lousy battles.
We know you like to fight, Church. That’s obvious.
When you want to, you can go to war with the best of them. The problem is, your battles are too darn small. Fast food protests, hobby store outrage, and duck-calling Reality TV show campaigns may manufacture some urgency and Twitter activity on the inside for the already-convinced, but they’re paper tigers to people out here with bloody boots on the ground.
Every day we see a world suffocated by poverty, and racism, and violence, and bigotry, and hunger; and in the face of that stuff, you get awfully, frighteningly quiet. We wish you were as courageous in those fights, because then we’d feel like coming alongside you; then we’d feel like going to war with you.
Church, we need you to stop being warmongers with the trivial, and pacifists in the face of the terrible.
5) Your love doesn’t look like love.
Love seems to be a pretty big deal to you, but we’re not getting that when the rubber meets the road. In fact, more and more, your brand of love seems incredibly selective and decidedly narrow; filtering out all the spiritual riff-raff, which sadly includes far too many of us.
It feels like a big bait-and-switch, sucker-deal; advertising a “Come As You Are” party, but letting us know once we’re in the door that we can’t really come as we are. We see a Jesus in the Bible, who hung out with lowlifes and prostitutes and outcasts, and loved them right there, but that doesn’t seem to be your cup of tea.
Church, can you love us if we don’t check all the doctrinal boxes and don’t have our theology all figured out? It doesn’t seem so.
Can you love us if we cuss and drink and get tattoos, and God forbid, vote Democrat? We’re doubtful.
Can you love us if we’re not sure how we define love, and marriage, and Heaven, and Hell? It sure doesn’t feel that way.
From what we know about Jesus, we think he looks like love. The unfortunate thing is, you don’t look much like him.
That’s part of the reason people are leaving you, Church.
These words may get you really, really angry, and you may want to jump in a knee-jerk move to defend yourself or attack these positions line-by-line, but we hope that you won’t.
We hope that you’ll just sit in stillness with these words for a while, because whether you believe they’re right or wrong, they’re real to us, and that’s the whole point.
We’re the ones walking away.
We want to matter to you.
We want you to hear us before you debate us.
Show us that your love and your God are real.
Church, give us a reason to stay.
Hmmm . . . According to the Bible, the church is the body of believers and Jesus Christ is the head of that church. Jesus did not recommend a particular denomination or house of worship, rather He simply instructed us to gather together in his name. The early church met in houses and all sorts of places.
He calls His church His bride and we can know that it is important to Him. In fact one commandment of “The Big Ten was that the first day of the week was ordained the Sabbath and was designated as a day of worship and rest.
So in obedience and love we gather together to worship Him in various places on Sundays. We sing praise to our Lord, we pray, and we try to make sense out of beheadings and poverty, and injustice, and the cold hearts of many by hearing His word explained.
If someone is looking for the answers in a lavish building they will not find them. The answer is in Jesus Christ. He is perfect; His church has yet to achieve that goal but we’re trying. I happen to know more than most about pain, suffering, misery, and tragedy as I’ve experienced it first-hand. I’ve learned that apart from Jesus Christ and His church a solution to the ills of the world cannot and will not be found.
My recommendation is that if you have not found Jesus at the current house of worship that you are visiting, (including ours) then find another. Time is running out for this world and the Bible clearly predicts things will get much worse before they get better. Trust in Jesus and pray about your church home. Don’t stand afar and criticize, get involved and make it better. Each of us is as much a part of the church as the head of the largest worship centers in the world. Nothing will reward you or me more than spending time with Jesus and brothers and sisters who love him.
John 9:4 – As long as it is day, we must do the work of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work”.
Matthew 24:13 – “But the one who endures to the end, he will be saved. “This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come.
August 25, 2014 – Click here to listen