The Problem with the Church

How do I start this blog post? I try to be entertaining or elegant in using writing strategies to get the reader hooked, but this time I feel that bluntness is the best option. I believe the problem with the Church at large is that we have traded a living, vibrant relationship with God for a cookie cutter love affair with Christian celebrities and worship of them. What do I mean?


Simply this, the churches I have been in rarely interact with the Word of God. Our Sunday school lessons are based on books written about topics found in the Bible from popular, well-known, christian authors/pastors/singers. I heard a radio advertisement for a women's conference with Tim Tebow's mom. Really?? Her only reason for being there is that she is the mother of an infamous football player known as much for his religious posture than his football acumen. We worship Christian music artists in the same way the world worships their singers. We see a church that has a large number in attendance and we try to copy what they do. Why? Because we measure and value success in the same way the world does. This is fundamentally flawed and just plain wrong.
 
Christians are lazy in their love relationship with God, and when we see a church or person have 'success,' we want to copy what they did thinking that is the way to 'success.' Success only comes in having a living relationship with God. Spending time in His Word and with Him in prayer. Whether you get up at 5:30 every morning to pray or spend your whole day talking with Him and looking for opportunities to serve, either way you spend time with Him. Responding to His invitation to work with Him is also a way of getting to know Him. God is always working around us and when we see His work, that is his invitation to join Him. When we respond in faith, we get to know Him better as well as getting to know ourselves and His will for our lives.
 

In essence it isn't that much different at it's core than any other relationship we have. We spend time with those we love and we respond to their invitations to be with them. The one thing we can't get back in life is necessary to learn about Him and to get to know Him, and that one thing is time. Marriage is a great example and is used in the Bible as an illustration of our relationship with God. What do we pledge at a wedding? Many things are pledged but mainly time. It is a promise to live faithfully with another person for the rest of your life. You pledge to them the time remaining in your life. That is what is necessary to get to know God. He demands the first place in our lives. All other relationships come in a far distant second place when compared to our relationship with Him. Our relationship with Jesus Christ should be the priority in our lives.

This is where the difficulty comes into the Church. The fact that we have replaced the study of His Word with the words of another is a symptom that He no longer carries priority in the life of many churches. Success carries the priority and it shows in how the Church treats those outside of it's walls. There are billions of hurting, hungry, lost people in this world and we spend little time, effort, or resources on them. We send people hundreds or thousands of miles away to serve people far away, but seem to refuse to walk across the street and greet our neighbors.

This blog could take a very long time, and may continue, but for now let me say this: To be clear, I want to say I have no problem with Christian books. I have a problem with the study of the Bible being substituted with study of Christian author's books. I have to restrain from laughing in church at times because I sit there and think, "If we would just read the Bible we could see all that this author is telling us for ourselves." We trust the pastor of a mega-church hundreds of miles away but not our friends who see us each and every week at church. This needs to change.