Warnings against worldliness in the church

In some ways I like getting older. For instance, the older I get, the closer I am to going home to be with the Lord -- unless for some unfathomable reason He should decide I will be around for long after the normal allotted life span. I feel I've already done that in a way as I turned 65 my last birthday and the doctors told me when I was 23 I would be very lucky to live to be 25. If I'm to take that at face value, I'll probably live to see things come to pass I've only seen written in the pages of Scripture.

In other ways, I don't like getting older. I don't like watching Christianity take on the trappings of the world and call them sanctified. I don't like reading about how to "grow" the church and its people -- in most of the contemporary literature about growing the church there is a difference made between church and people and here I thought they were the same thing. Guess that's why I just can't go wrap my head around being told the best thing to do to grow, is to structure the services to "stop preaching and start communicating" and that "there IS a difference."

It's also probably why I don't like being told the Gospel is "boring" to people, and being told "today's audiences have very short attention spans so it's the first and last 30 seconds that have the most impact." I've heard of minute rice but minute sermons? I have to say our congregation shouldn't hold their breath waiting for that! It's also probably why I don't like being told "not to waste those precious first and last seconds with trivialities" (the Gospel is trivial? Prayer is trivial?) much less being told to do "anything" rather than being too predictable as that can be boring and that since the advent of the TV remote control, no one watches anything that stands still long enough to bore because today's audiences will forgive you for anything except being boring..." I've been called a lot of things -- most not nice -- but never boring.

Would you be interested in a list of things I've read we should do to grow? I'll give you as many as I can stomach. I say that because some of these make me pretty sick to my stomach to think about.

We are told we should "hire young, platform young, program young because we attract who we platform, and most churches are growing old." How TOTALLY opposite of Biblical teaching is that where we're taught to honor and listen to the elderly with the Bible speaking well of the "hoary head"? How totally different from an emphasis on "the whole family" the Bible teaches? Mmm-- I seem to remember a novel and movie years ago called "Logan's Run" with similar thoughts.

We are told we should "shift the outreach focus away from the already convinced toward those who are not." (So much for the hymn "I love to tell the Story.") While we should always do the work of an evangelist, our inner cities, homes and elsewhere show the effects of forgetting home to focus on other places.

The worst one of all -- which I will stop with -- because I find myself once again, in thinking of these things, truly feeling as Jeremiah writes in Jeremiah 20: 9, "Then I said, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name. But his word was in my heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary from holding it back, and I could not." (KJ 2000) As did Jeremiah I find myself going from "it's too much, I'm going to shut up!" to "How can I keep quiet? The truth is like a fire in me, I can either let it out or it will burn its way out.

So, the worst one of all the ones I've read that we need to consider in adjusting our services so the church and people will grow is this: "Remember, It's the weekend, stupid." God have mercy on our souls, churches and country.

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Editor's note: Charlie Newman is pastor of Avoca Christian Church. To contact him, e-mail [email protected], or write in care of The Times at [email protected] or P.O. Box 25, Pea Ridge, AR 72751.

Religion on 10/14/2015