As I've blogged, we attended a thriving, traditional, Seeker Sensitive church this past Sunday. The church we attended is one that any denomination would love to count as one of its own. It's growing in the way we measure growth today. A large percentage of the Sunday morning crowd is of the millennial generation. It has an optimistic budget for a group its size and it's keeping up with that budget. We attended because a close friend was being baptized as part of the morning show.
We showed up early (because I'm OCD) and while we were sitting in our pew waiting for the show to start, Evie said, "I hope (our friend) knows how much I love her, showing up at this service."
I asked her why she said that.
She said, "I don't like church services." This is something I have known but, during all our years, we've never talked her feeling through.
So, we talked while we waited for the show to start and, later on, we talked more.
In one of his books, I think it's, A WORK OF HEART, Reggie McNeal uses the phrase, "heart language."
Bottom line and put simply, there is no way anyone can devise a Sunday worship service of any type that will touch Evie's heart language.
Evie loves God and she profoundly loves the people of God. The simple truth is that she will never be blessed by and thrive in a church where the worship service is central to the group's identity.
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Now, there is nothing about what a typical congregation today is or does that is essentially biblical.
Does anyone reading this blog believe that in order to walk in the world as a follower of Jesus that a person needs to go to church?
What's occurring to me is that today's church may very well be the very thing that is keeping people from Jesus.
I just learned that, as much as she loves the Lord, it may be that the greatest spiritual struggle in Evie's life has been to follow Jesus and make sense of how she FEELS about organized Christianity.
And, I'm wondering, how many people there are in my town like her.
The more the Christian community is dominated by people gifted to be shepherds, the more the emphasis is on the congregation and not the Lord and the more the life of the everyday believer is oriented to the worship service.
There is nothing in what Jesus did or taught that requires what's going on today.
How many souls will suffer in eternity because of what the church has become?
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