Mike Ross

For many years I have found great difficulty in reconciling “church” with what I see in the New Testament. We get together once a week for an hour and a half on a Sunday morning and have church. We coax people to come to a meeting, we sing, and then a sermon is given by a guy in a suit. In most cases this is as involved on a relational level as the guy in the suit gets. At the end of service we ask people to raise their hands so they can get saved all the while no one else is looking. It is like we are all part of a secret society or “the brotherhood”.

Once we get someone to raise their hand we then try to extract them from the world. They must become entrenched in the brotherhood and start calling each other “brother” and “sister”. I find this odd because I do not address my biological sister or brother by prefacing their name with “brother” or “sister”. This just makes the church seem more like an exclusive community in which only certain people are welcomed. Once they learn how to call each other by the correct title then we tell them they can’t go into the world, and that they need to stop hanging out with all their friends and make new “Christian” friends. They need to start watching Christian television, going to Christian concerts, and listening to Christian radio. We try to immerse them in some weird sub culture that cannot relate to the world. We make these new believers think that their degree of separation from life as they used to know it determines their success as a Christian. This is real growth.

Once the extraction from the world has happened, we can proceed to put them in their place of “ministry”. We show them what they were created for. We tell them “before the foundation of the world God created you to ……”, and then we stick them in the place where they are needed the most to make the machine run. “Welcome to your spiritual destiny. You can park cars.” Maybe they can be a greeter and hand out bulletins, or work in the nursery. If they are really gifted and possibly attractive enough they can serve on the worship team.

 So here is the process:

1. Get them “Saved”.

2. Extract them from the world and induct them into our exclusive community.

3. Show them how to be real Christians and live in a bubble.

4. Put them in the place they were born to serve in. Show them their destiny!

5. Give them a T-shirt.

That is world transformation and something I am willing to give my life for! What about you?

Is it just me or are we missing something?

More to come.