Darryl brought this point up last night and it struck me interesting and worthy enough to be posted. Since Darryl doesn’t have his own blog I’ll just get the ideas across. If you think Darryl should get his own blog (because he’s way more insightful and creative than me) e-mail him, [email protected].
After I had finished explaining what I had in the previous post to everyone Darryl pointed out that church had become an idol. It makes complete sense. If your entire walk was summed up in a once a week (night and morning service if extra spiritual) service then you start to give a service a standing in your life it never should have. You depend on that service for your growth.
Imagine for a moment, your senior pastor, in his announcements, says that church on Sundays is going to be cancelled. All services are being trashed. What would happen? Well I’ll tell you one of two things. In most churches, the church will either fall apart and slowly disintegrate or it will fire its senior pastor and have a new one hired within a few months. Or try this, go up to anyone at church and get into a serious conversation with them about getting rid of Sunday services. They would obviously disagree, how dare you take something away that belongs to them. Watch how defensive people get over this service. It’s quite interesting how much time and energy goes into planning the service. It’s even more interesting to compare that to the time and energy that goes into the community.
So church becomes this substitute for our Christian walk. Of course we are encouraged to read our Bible and pray everyday to keep things up, but the unwritten rule is that you come to church because that’s the climax of your Christianity. Really nothing can substitute our Christian walk; Christ needs to be that foundation and the glue that holds it all together. So you replace Christ with anything, including church and you have yourself an idol. Don’t let this shock you; I still replace my life with idols everyday, I’m just pointing out one more that we seem to do corporately.
If a service got taken away from a church, the church should be able to run just as effectively without it. Everyone should still know what to do with their time, because let me tell you if the service disappeared there would be a lot of people with nothing to do. When church is made more important than God, we become the Pharisees, and that my friend is not a bandwagon that I am comfortable being on.