ENGLISH / CHURCH LIFE Do you sit in church and wonder ‘WHY AM I HERE’?
This happened to me quite a bit. My earliest memories were sitting through Brethren church services, where my grandparents served as missionaries. Us grand kids referred to the morning meeting, as the boring meeting.
Then I sat through hundreds of evangelical meetings in my growing up and teen years, wondering why the messages seemed so disconnected from what I did each day.
Next as I grew older, I sat through packed charismatic and Pentecostal church pews wondering — ‘Why am I actually here?’ Finally, I became dissatisfied with church in general.
The reason was that despite the seeming differences between the church denominations, there was one common message: ‘You should attend the meeting each week, sit in the pew and do what we tell you to do.’
After some time attending a church, it seemed inevitable that you’d get roped into teaching Sunday school, looking after the cars, inviting people to their seats or some other relatively pointless task.
No wonder church attendance numbers are down in traditional churches around the world. This church model is DYING!
Instead of trying to resurrect the dead church model, let’s see what we should be doing instead.
Firstly, let’s work on a common set of assumptions. If you are going to invest 1,000 hours of your life, wouldn’t you like to see some progression? I have no idea why, but many people literally seem content attending exactly the same church service format every week for decades.
For example, if I was going to study at university for four years, I would want to know that I will come out with a degree. I will want to know that I have learned something that is valuable to society.
If I choose to work for an employer, I would like to believe that my time would be well spent. That I would be working with interesting people, and that my soft and hard skill set would be expanding.
Instead, the messages that we get from sitting in most churches is — ‘Come and sit here, pay your tithes and have some coffee afterwards.’ Where is the progression???
Secondly, if God is real and Jesus is helping us – wouldn’t you like to see real results for the time that you invest in God? The results could be anything from being more peaceful, loving people more or being able to making greater impact. The vast majority of people who religiously attend church seem to not change at all.
Thirdly, if you are going to join a club, wouldn’t you like to know that you are going to find passionate people, who you could work with and potentially could become life-long friends. While I would want to work with smart, interesting and active people, most churches seem to be breeding grounds for passivity.
It is interesting that nowhere in the Bible does it say ‘sit in the pew, and do as you are told,’ or ‘trust your pastor to represent God,’ or ‘give up the need to progress in your Christian career with God in favor of following a Church teaching.’
The church in Acts was certainly not passive. It was dynamic and growing. Nor was the Acts church stereotyped into the types of activities that were done in church versus what was outside of church. They didn’t have fancy buildings, and for the most part they didn’t even have full-time pastors. The were just ordinary people, like you and me fulfilling what God asked them to do.
So then, why do so many people still keep going to traditional churches, despite their shortcomings?
Firstly, we could believe that despite the problems in the church, there is no real alternative to finding a Christian community. This is why part of my mission is to create an alternative — working communities of Christians around the world.
Secondly, we might think that a bit of Christianity every week on Sunday is better than nothing at all. Switch your brains off, enjoy the show and hope everything will turn out OK. If this is the type of Christianity that you are looking for, good luck to you — but I am looking for something real!
So what does the Bible say? Ephesians 2:10 (NLT) says;
“For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.”
This verse does NOT say that God created us to sit passively packed in church pews, but TO DO things. The things he created us to do were PLANNED LONG AGO, and probably has nothing to do with looking after cars, collecting money on Sunday etc.
This verse has important consequences for the types of Christian communities that we should be looking for, as we let traditional churches die. Instead of asking ourselves, ‘Which church should we attend,’ we should be asking, ‘What community of Christians will help me discover what God created me to do, enable me to serve in my unique calling and allow me to encourage others do the same!’
This community preferably meets locally, but failing which — it could even be online!
I am convinced that God created us to live actively by interacting with Him directly. We were born to see progress. We were born to see real results when we give our whole lives, including our careers, to Him.
Main photo:
CHURCH ATTENDANCE. People stop attending church when entering youth due to increasing irrelevance. But why? Photo courtesy of: Michael D. Thomas.
This article was originally published on Michael Thomas’ own site, the POWER PEACE PERSIST site, with the same title; ‘Why People Stop Going to Church.’ Minor corrections to punctuation and paragraphing, as well as lay-out, has been made. Article will also be published in Norwegian.
[PHOTO] Michael Dean Thomas is formerly an investment banker who currently heads an international network of prayer leaders, The International Network of Kingdom Creators. Thomas is a several times published author (link needed), married and the father of a son. He is originally from South Africa, has spent his formative years in Singapore and currently resides with his family in Eastern Europe, where he serves as a leader in the emerging church.
CHURCH LIFE © 2019 Victor Skimmeland is PREACHER.no and the author(s). All rights reserved. This text was written with the sole purpose of being publicly read and enjoyed. Any non commercial distribution is hereby freely okay’ed as long as full copyright credits are honored. Other uses? Please ask before publication.
