After writing three points about what I have noticed church has become I knew that there were a bunch more I could point out. I was talking with my friends tonight (something think that is happening a lot this break about this subject) and I started to understand something that put a lot of things together for me. Obviously all these entries are very general and do not represent every church.
By the way: I responded to Nick’s comment on my last entry, thanks for that Nick, it’s always good to have disagreements because then that causes the truth to become more clear if handled in the right manner.
I’ve pointed out that church has become a number of things such as entertainment, drive through spirituality and an empty routine. There are many more things that it has become that I haven’t pointed out specifically such as its become a comfort haven, a programmed liturgy, a guilt remover, a political arena, a man made sanctuary and religion and the list goes on. A key factor of modernity is its desire to compress and speed up everything. Everything in the modern world is about speed and how much you can get done in a little bit of time. It never has anything to do with quality and always sticks with quantity. This mindset has infiltrated the church. For some reason it seems that the church service consists of a little bit of everything we need in our Christian life.
What modernity has done to the church is broken each aspect of it into little pieces, kept what was important, sped it up and then crammed everything that was left into a two hour service. Your entire Christian walk can be summed up in a two hour service, and this causes people to be lazy and accept that that is their Christian walk. So what happens is people go to church and that’s it, well the good Christians will read their bible everyday. We give people a little bit of community; just enough so you see other Christians, but not enough that you actually build meaningful, long-lasting deep relationships. We give people a bit of singing (calling it worship); just enough so that your ‘worship’ was done for the week, but not enough to leave you beaming for the rest of the week. We give you an opportunity to give money to the church, and always directly to the church. We give you a good show so that you will not be bored. We give you a place where you can bring your unsaved friends, so you don’t have to learn to witness yourself; you just have to be a good church recruiter.
Church has become a substitute for the Christian life. Show up at church on Sunday and your whole Christian life is in check for the next week. Oh how far we have strayed from the truth. When will we understand that the church is the sum of all Christians lives.
You amaze me everytime i listen to you talk, everytime I see your face EVEN every time i think about you.
There are not many people in this world that amaze me Nate, but you sir, you do.
You say the things we all think but don’t say, and you make it so we can all understand and you help those of us probably in ways you don;t even realize.
thank you.