Will The Real Church Please Stand Up

The current sermon series we are working through has surfaced a number of questions for me. One of the big ones being, what goes through God’s mind when we blow off something that He says is important?

Have you ever stopped to think about how much disobedience God sees in our individual lives in a days’ time, a weeks’ time, or a lifetime? I wonder if there is any connection between this tragedy and the waning influence of the corporate church in our world today.

You know you have lived a while when you begin seeing current trends developing in the world around you and you immediately begin comparing them to those of former days. During my lifetime I have seen the world’s attitude toward the church shift from one of total trust and deep respect to one of nearly total disrespect and complete distrust. I am wondering if the churches lack of respect toward God, modeled by the personal disobedience of believers, and the world’s decision to view the church as nearly irrelevant don’t overlap.

Do you suppose the repeated public reports of moral lapse in the lives of professing believers have damaged the credibility of the church? If George Barna’s data can be trusted we may be digging our own hole. His surveys have found that there is little if any discernable difference between the moral decisions and behaviors of those professing faith in Christ and those that make no profession of faith at all. This seems to be true for both clergy and laity.

Protestant pastors and Roman Catholic priests alike have both been in the public eye far too often because of moral indiscretions of one form or another. It makes sense that if religious leaders cannot be trusted to relate responsibly to the wives and children of those already attending the church that it will be nearly impossible to convince those not yet attending that the quality of their lives would be improved by doing so. I wonder how different our world would be if the reports of pastors and priests centered on how they and the people were engaged in acts of loving service to the community? I wonder if our communities wouldn’t take us a lot more seriously if we showed them a lot more of Jesus and a lot less of ourselves.

Any time the church fails to connect strongly with Christ it appears that is only a matter of time before it also fails to connect with the culture as well. I believe this disconnect develops because it is impossible to avoid misrepresenting Christ when we are content to try to do life in our own power and not His.

How are you revealing Jesus in the living of your day to day life? What is your picture of an ideal church? What kind of impact would that church have on the surrounding community? What can you do to raise the odds of that ideal church becoming a reality? Are there any areas of your life where you are not taking God seriously but need to? Take a second to leave a comment with your thoughts. Thanks.