You think it’s because “the culture” is so lost, so perverse, so beyond help that they are all walking away.
You believe that they've turned a deaf ear to the voice of God; chasing money, and sex, and material things.
You think that the gays and the Muslims and the Atheists and the pop stars have so screwed-up the morality of the world, that everyone is abandoning faith in droves.
But those aren't the reasons people are leaving you.
They aren't the problem, Church. You are the problem.
1) Your Sunday productions have worn thin. We can be entertained anywhere. Until you can give us something more than a Christian-themed performance piece; something that allows us space and breath and conversation and relationship, many of us are going to sleep-in and stay away.
2) You speak in a foreign tongue. Church, you talk and talk and talk, but you do so using a dead language. You’re holding on to dusty words that have no resonance in people’s ears, not realizing that just saying those words louder isn’t the answer. All the religious buzzwords that used to work 20 years ago, no longer do.
This spiritualized insider-language may give you some comfort in an outside world that is changing, but that stuff’s just lazy religious shorthand, and it keeps regular people at a distance.
3) Your vision can’t see past your building. Most of your time, money, and energy seems to be about luring people to where you are, instead of reaching people where they already are.
Rather than simply stepping out into the neighborhoods around you and partnering with the amazing things already happening, and the beautiful stuff God is already doing, you seem content to franchise out your particular brand of Jesus-stuff, and wait for the sinful world to beat down your door.
4) You choose lousy battles. Every day we see a world suffocated by poverty, and racism, and violence, and bigotry, and hunger; and in the face of that stuff, you get awfully, frighteningly quiet. We wish you were as courageous in those fights, rather than the culture war, which is only a paper tiger to people out here with bloody boots on the ground.
5) Your love doesn't look like love. Love seems to be a pretty big deal to you, but we’re not getting that when the rubber meets the road. In fact, more and more, your brand of love seems incredibly selective and decidedly narrow; filtering out all the spiritual riff-raff, which sadly includes far too many of us. From what we know about Jesus, we think he looks like love. The unfortunate thing is, you don’t look much like him.
That’s part of the reason people are leaving you, Church.
The full article is available here
4) You choose lousy battles. Every day we see a world suffocated by poverty, and racism, and violence, and bigotry, and hunger; and in the face of that stuff, you get awfully, frighteningly quiet. We wish you were as courageous in those fights, rather than the culture war, which is only a paper tiger to people out here with bloody boots on the ground.
5) Your love doesn't look like love. Love seems to be a pretty big deal to you, but we’re not getting that when the rubber meets the road. In fact, more and more, your brand of love seems incredibly selective and decidedly narrow; filtering out all the spiritual riff-raff, which sadly includes far too many of us. From what we know about Jesus, we think he looks like love. The unfortunate thing is, you don’t look much like him.
That’s part of the reason people are leaving you, Church.
The full article is available here
