That is a question that has been ringing through my mind for the last few months or so. We, as a church, are at a major crossroad in our history.
To understand where we may be headed, we need to take a look at our past. I'm into history, so let's do it!
If we go all the way back to the beginning, in Acts, the church itself is a group of people. A relatively small group in relation to what the church is today, the majority of these people had seen Jesus with their own eyes and touched him with their hands! They sat under the teachings of the men who had walked with Jesus and heard words spoken from his very mouth.
I'd like to insert a flashback here. Go back with me to the time, way before Jesus. Go back and think about how many times the people of God didn't get it right. Think about the grace God lavished upon them. Think about how God disciplined them in various ways. Here we are looking at the Jewish people as a whole. God led them out of the bondage of Egypt, they turned on Him in the desert, when they'd lost faith.
They experienced a disconnect. Not God being disconnected from them, but them disconnecting themselves from God.
The Bible gives us a number of examples where people traded God for other things. All these things should sound familiar: money, power, sex, pride, position, cultural standing, politics, status, comfort, agenda, and many more. All that should sound familiar, because it's what the church is trading in for God today.
When I say the church, I don't mean your individual church or mine, I mean as a whole, we who label ourselves as Christians have in one way or another traded in our God for something. As the Bible tells us, we have "served the creature rather than the Creator..."(Romans 1:25)
You see it all over. What has caused this disconnect? Our time. To quote most of us, "we don't have enough." We fill our lives with so many things. Football, dinners, careers, movies, and on and on. We rarely have time to "wedge" time with God. We are in such a "convenience store" world, but we still can't slow down for the one who deserves all our praise.
We think that two hours on a Sunday is going to get us the refueling we need to get through the next week. Right then and there is where we have our first issue. God did not intend for the church to be our "pit stop" on the road of life. Church is part of our connection to Him. A vehicle we use to grow and develop.
But we neglect it. We neglect time with other believers. We've become accustomed to podcasts, because "I can listen just long enough, then when I'm convicted, I can cut it off." We read our Bible App, because it is simple and easy, but we can't recall half of what we read. We get upset if our pastor goes five minutes over on his sermon, because that puts us behind in getting a seat at the Golden Corral.
The cure to this issue in our country today is going to be to get away from our "convenience store" Christianity and get back to Biblical, foundational Christ-following. The Christ-followers in the Bible chased after God, loved on each other, served each other, and sacrificed whatever they had to for the Cause of Christ, even their lives.
We've got to get back to that. I've heard a number of times, take America back to what it was before. I don't think that's where need to be either! I'd venture to say that even as far back as 1776, the Christian identity of America has not been that of the people of Christ. That is another post for another day, but it has a lot to do with a certain type of institution that was in America for a good 200 years.
My point in this post is, in order to get where we need to be, we don't need to go back to where we were. We've got to go somewhere we may be uncomfortable, some places that may be hard!
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