church growth

Mike and I had the neatest experience on Monday.  We attended a live worship service online.  It was through Lifechurch, a church that has this awesome ministry on the internet.  In addition to watching the streaming service with people from at least 26 different countries, we were in a live chat room.  For someone like me who is very visually stimulated, the chat room was almost too much.  Having two things happening simultaneously on my screen was a little overwhelming.  Since I find myself compelled to read every post entered into the chat, I was getting pretty distracted from the worship and sermon.  There was also an option to open a tab of sermon notes in which you can see the sermon notes and add your own comments.  You can then email these to yourself to review later.  Next time, I think I will try to just have that tab open rather than the live chat.  Anyway, it was the most unique “church” experience I have had in a long time.  The sermon was great, and the extent of the spread of His Word was breathtaking.  I would encourage you to check it out at lifechurch.tv sometime.

While I was having a lot of trouble following all of the sermon, being in the chat room was an eye-opening experience for me.  God used it to expose some of my own prejudice.  While we were in the chat room, two people entered who were what is often called griefing.  They kept making comments like “There is no God” just to get a reaction.  Most people were ignoring them, but the room administrators were gently counseling them.  My first gut reaction to these two individuals was to wonder why the admins did not just ban them from the room.  After all, they were disturbing my ability to listen to the message.  After a few minutes, one of them left on his own, but the other stayed in the room.  He was quiet for a little while.  Near the end of the sermon, he began to make comments again.  The admins once again responded kindly, trying to point out to him the existence of God.  He began to ask questions like, “Where was God in 9/11?,  Where was God during Katrina?, etc.”  Then Mike chimed in, reminding us all that those things were a result of sin in the world, not a lack of God’s presence.  While the “griefer” (for lack of a better word at this point) was still very caustic in his statements, he was beginning to be more open to the answers being given him by the others in the room.  It was becoming clear to me that in his own way, he was seeking God, just unaware how to find Him.

Now for the part about my own prejudice.  At first, this guy was really bugging me.  I was getting irritated by his comments and the admin’s apparent lack of getting rid of him.  After all, he was disturbing my worship experience.  Then God gently reminded me that he came to seek and to save those who were lost.  As I thought about what had happened, I realized that, like many in our churches today, I am not always as accepting of the unsaved as I should be.  We want our churches to be filled with God-filled, righteous, Christians.  Yes, we need those in our churches.  But our job is not to sit around parsing the Scripture with others just like us.  We need this to keep growing in our own faith, but our job is to take the message of God’s love to those who have never heard.  Jesus’ ministry was not to the “church people”.  His ministry was to the sick, the dying, the untouchables.  He spent his time with thieves, prostitutes, the unwanted and untouched.  When those around him had accepted his message, he did not tell them to stay with him to learn more.  He sent them out to the surrounding countryside to preach the gospel.  I was very convicted of my own want to just be around those like me.  I don’t always want “those people” in my life.  They make me uncomfortable.  But isn’t it our job to go to them to share the love of God with them?  If the admins had kicked the griefer out of the room, his perception that Christians are haughty and rude would have been solidified.  Instead, he felt the love of God through the actions of those he was criticizing.

Perhaps this is the problem in many of our churches today.  We have a prejudice towards those who don’t know God.  We say that we want our churches to grow, but do we want to invite the untouchables in, those who so desperately need to hear about salvation?  Perhaps, we need to remember that the Great Physician came for the sick, not the healthy.  We need to remember where we once were, dying in our own sin.  I think this is harder for those like me who were raised in church.  Jesus came to seek out and to save those who are lost.  Maybe we (I) need to so some seeking out of the lost ourselves.