You call yourself a church?

there’s a big church up in indiana that i receive a lot of encouragement from.  i’ve read some books by pastors on their staff and i usually keep up with them weekly on one of their staff member’s blogs.  i think if i ever worked in a big church again, i think i might be able to fit in a church like this one (might is the operative word…)

recently, they paid a big firm to conduct a survey among the thousands that attend their weekly gatherings.  the survey findings were interesting…the leadership response to those findings was even more interesting.

they found that 57% of those attending did not believe in the authority of the bible…56% do not believe that jesus is the only way to eternal life…47% do not believe in salvation by grace.  wow.  thousands attending a church that don’t believe in the most basic tenets of christian faith.  and they call themselves a church!  mmmm…

here’s an observation by one of their staff members:

But I can think of some worse statistics. I would much rather be in a church where 57% don’t believe in the Bible than in a church where 100% of those attending do believe in the Bible. That would be awful!

Imagine a church that was completely filled with those already convinced…where no one invited an unchurched friend…where the Christians had grown stagnant in their pursuit of knowledge and stopped putting the gospel into practice…where the church had made Jesus so unattractive that no one on a search for purpose or meaning would consider coming. If I found myself in such a church, I would be weeping.

We’ve believed and taught for years that a crowd is not a church. At Granger, we build a weekend experience to draw the biggest crowd possible, because we believe that if more people hear the gospel, more people will respond.

I will cringe if the day ever comes when only the church gathers on the weekend…or when the supposed mature Christians stop inviting their friends to hear the good news…or when we have a church filled with people who ace their theology exam but flunk their practice-ology test.

are we passing or failing?

are you “ace”-ing or flunking?

i hate it when the truth hurts…

A thought on marriage

i did a wedding tonight.  not my normal wednesday night fare, but pretty cool.  it was the second marriage for both of them.  i know that god hates divorce.  that’s what it says in the bible, for crying out loud.  i believe it.  i teach it.  i hold it up as the truth.  but things happen.  sometimes really bad things where people get hurt and promises are broken and trust is sacrificed.  sometimes things just happen.

when a marriage fails, there’s a lot of blame to go around.  no one is completely innocent.  no one is completely at fault.  both parties share the responsibility for the failure.  things happen.

does god bring good out of bad?  i hope so.  can god bless something that has it’s origin in something that he hates?  does god orchestrate happy endings to stories that were never supposed to have happened?  does god honor broken promises?  sometimes, when theology meets reality, it gets messy.

i’m glad my friends found each other.  i’m glad they both have enough faith and enough love left over to try again.  i wish their first marriages hadn’t ended.  i’m sure that’s what god wishes also.

what god brings together, let no one pull apart.  yeah…