AN IRRELEVANT CHURCH

In Australia, the church is irrelevant to most people. At most it attracts 10% of the population despite large numbers saying they are Christians, whatever that means to them. One has only to read social comment and lifestyle magazines and columns in the newspapers to understand that the primary focus of most people is their physical well being. They are obsessed with body image, physical looks, their fitness or lack of it, and diet.

Their spiritual wellbeing takes a distant second, and is usually fuelled by their need to discover themselves and their personal psychological wellbeing expressed as self esteem. This has created a new industry of ‘life coach’ and psychologists are raking in the dollars and made the New Age movement which embraces facets of Hinduism and Buddhism mainstream.

Despite all this, it is very obvious that it is failing miserably to achieve its objectives as stress and depression are major causes of Workcover claims.

The world has passed the church by but it has failed to notice the fact. In most cases we prefer to go our own merry way, believing that we are fulfilling all that is required of us as long as we turn up for our weekly religious ritual and put our 10% in the money bag.

The church has in most cases disengaged from society and where it has not, it is nothing more than a social organisation to care for the physical needs of those who make use of its services.

Vibrant, life changing, supernatural, Christ exalting churches are few and far between. Oh yes, there are churches that are full of activity and have lots of noise through so called “contemporary” praise, and are attracting young people by the thousands, but the question remains, if all this secular expressions were removed, would they still attract them.

Would the self denial, cross carrying Christ life be as attractive? One where sacrifice, poverty, sharing, dying to self and living for others be as attractive to young people if you took away the self satisfying sensual expressions of music and happy meetings.

When these evangelical christian churches are the subject of discussion the main comment is what a wonderful job “the pastor” is doing. Jesus? Who is he?

Would the churches that are dying on their feet because they fiercely defend the ‘status quo’ the one that they have been doing for 200 years grow if they forgot the status quo and took on board what Christ wanted them to do. “But we are doing what Christ wants us to do.” In that case, why is the church dying?

The bottom line is that we have left a vacuum in society because of our insistence that we know better than the Holy Spirit how to set the world on fire for Jesus. For hundred of years we have gone about building the church with man made ideas and schemes, choosing to sideline the Holy Spirit and all his gifts and making 'the church' a building.

We are so entrenched in the fact, that our heresy has superseded the truth of scripture. Consequently, the world has said “bye bye church we don’t need you”. And they don’t because we are just another social club for people who want religious devotion to appease their conscience.

Until the church acknowledges the truth of scripture that without Jesus we can do nothing and invite the Holy Spirit to take control of what we are and do, we will never ever fulfil our mandate of making disciples of all nations.