He told me to tell you that
We live close to a small community where my dad pastored a church a million years ago. After my family moved away the church building burned down and they relocated across town but eventually the church disbanded.
We drive through this community pretty often and I always drive by where the church building sat on that fairly prominent street corner not far from a busy downtown. There’s nothing left but the concrete slab. It’s sad. It makes me want to cry. It’s like seeing a ghost. It’s not holy ground but rather haunted ground. What happened?
I don’t know what it was like from my parent’s perspective – I remember a lot of fried chicken dinners after the morning worship services and the people were what we call good, salt of the earth type people.
My point is that it was not a bad church but it was obviously not a healthy church. Healthy things reproduce. The command of Christ is to go and tell others about Him (Matthew 28:19-20), in essence to multiply, to make disciples that will make disciples that will make disciples.
My friend Mark Clifton who works with the efforts of the Southern Baptist Convention concerning church revitalization on behalf of the North American Mission Board says, “Nothing about a dying church brings God glory.”
Jesus tells of a dying church in Revelation (Revelation 2:1-7) to remember, to repent, to return or He would remove their light. Most churches in America are past being plateaued and are in decline, if they do not reinvent themselves soon they will go the way of the buffalo (about 100 churches close their doors every week in America). It’s time to ride or die.
This church in Revelation, the Church at Ephesus was not always in such bad shape. In Acts 18, we see they were passionate about the mission and purpose of Christ but over time what was vibrant became Spiritless. Some say everything has a shelf-life. I don’t know about that, it seems like God wants His bride to not only survive but thrive.
We see an example of an on fire church in the Book of Acts (Acts 2:42-47). They were devoted to God, devoted to the Red Letters and devoted to each other. God blessed their efforts and they went from 120 members (Acts 1:15) to 3,120 in one day.
Everybody in Jerusalem was in some-awe of this church because they were awe-some. Today, not so much. They drive by our half-empty buildings and don’t even think about us but to be honest I don’t think we are thinking about them either.
G. K. Chesterton was an English writer who responded to an article that was written about what’s wrong with the world. His reply was, “I am.”
Well, what’s wrong with the church? Maybe I am? Maybe you are? He asked me to ask you that.
“The Lord hath done great things for us; whereof we are glad.” (Psalm 126:3)
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