September 30, 2009
Best Used By
Many believers today are floating in and out of churches rather than putting down roots. Because of this transient nature I’ve started inviting people to come and just visit our church, whether or not they have a regular church home. It’s been interesting to note that some ‘older’ folks that I’ve invited have heard by through the grapevine that our church has more older folks than younger folks...in other words, they don’t want to attend a church full of old people. Good grief…from that perspective you’d think Christians come with an expiration date. I don’t think that Jesus would find this criteria acceptable for worshipping together.
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Gail;
-----I don’t claim to know everything about the truth fully and clearly, but I do know the valley in which it is found. The Word of God calls us to a relationship with Him, and through the love built up in that relationship we have relationships with one another. This church, that church, and the other churches are only organizations created and maintained by groups of His followers. We have become much too confused about needing to have a relationship with one of these organizations more than with our brothers and sisters. Maybe the reasons why some people float in and out of churches are not the best they could be, but I like to think at least some of them are about what His church could be if it were not compartmentalized by human organization into all these little spheres of independent fellowship.
-----If we were to break free of thinking that attending a church builds our relationship with the Lord and perceive that we are built up through gathering together with the saints, then maybe there would be less angst concerning the general age of those who attend a church. Like it was yesterday I recall the controversy brewed up in the XYZ Church over the old folks. “I looked around the congregation one Sunday, Steve,” an elder of that church told me, “and do you know what I saw? I saw a whole lot of white heads. That is when I realized they were all going to die soon, and this church was going to die with them.” Why! Of Course, Brother! It certainly is! A piece of the church dies with every believer’s departure from this life. The church is in a continual state of birth and death, and it just is that the believers who are gathering at this location happen to be more older than not. So what? They are still believers and they are still gathering and they are still doing what the Lord wants them to do - loving one another, fellowshipping, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord whom they all together are worshipping. Did you think they were there to support an organization, or to support one another? Well, from where I sat in the congregation I saw those white heads beginning to support one another. And I saw an organization beginning to support itself.
-----If the believers in the community sprinkled their fellowship more freely amongst the churches, this elder and his cohort of spies making observations about who was gathering (contriving to make them what they thought their organization should be) would have been more powerless to seize the fellowship’s control that truthfully belonged to the Lord. If many had been floating in and out as traditionally as we have all come to sink roots into just one church, the ideas and beliefs about how you treat your brother, serving him and pleasing him, may have been the more maintained ideology than the ideas about how you serve the organization of the church and change its paradigm for the sake of its survival and be darned with those who disagree! You see folks, it isn’t about church. It’s about you, because you are the church come together about the Lord. Whether you are old or young, here or there, the nature and interests and personality of the church you go to is your nature and interests and personalities. Your roots are in who you are with, because your roots and theirs are in the Lord.
-----But when we make an organization and think that roots have to be sunk into it, we have created an artificial vessel to carry our fellowship to one another. Don’t mistake me for thinking organizing has no benefits. It provides the same social advantages from the economy of scale that it does for any other group. But it also carries the same risk of becoming the objective rather than the means. Your service to your brothers and sisters and the Lord must remain the objective.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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