THE CROSS AND THE CHURCH
A group of women were talking together. One said, "Our congregation is sometimes down to 30 or 40 at a worship service." Another said, "That's nothing. Sometimes our congregation is down to 6 or 7." A maiden lady in her 70s added her bit, "Why, it's so bad in our church that when the minister says `Dearly beloved,' it makes me blush."
Does it surprise you to learn that a survey taken among Americans shows that 86 percent said, 'I believe I can have a good relationship with God without being involved in a church?'
Could that be the reason why so many fine Christian people have chosen to attend worship services less and less?
Researchers have concluded that “fewer Americans are attending church… because many adults do not consider church attendance to be essential to their faith.”
Somehow that doesn’t match the example of Jesus, according to the words of Luke 4:16, “He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom.”
A Barna survey indicates that only 17 percent of adults believe that "a person's faith is meant to be developed mainly by involvement in a local church." Among those who claim to have a biblical worldview, only about one quarter believe that church attendance is important in a person's spiritual life.
Those Christians who do not attend church services regularly don’t believe they are abandoning the church. They just don’t see that it is all that important. Indications are, however, that occasional skipping of worship services tends to become frequent, and in time it ends in abandonment of the church.
John Stott gets my attention when he says, “Some people construct a Christianity which consists entirely of a personal relationship to Jesus Christ and has virtually nothing to do with the church. Others make a grudging concession to the need for church membership, but add that they have given up the ecclesiastical institution as hopeless. Now it is understandable, even inevitable, that we are critical of many of the church's inherited structures and traditions. Every church in every place at every time is in need of reform and renewal. But we need to beware lest we despise the church of God, and are blind to his work in history. We may safely say that God has not abandoned his church, however displeased with it he may be. He is still building and refining it. And if God has not abandoned it, how can we? (From "The Message of Ephesians" The Bible Speaks Today series: Leicester: IVP, 1979, p. 126.)
About half the people who hold membership of the Minnetonka Adventist Church do not attend at all. About one third attend infrequently.
How will our involvement with the church change if we take seriously the words of Acts 20:28, which say that Jesus purchased the church with His blood, and the words of Ephesians 5:25, which say that Jesus loves the church and gave His life for her? Both these passages link the church with the Cross of Jesus.
Could it be that our relationship with the church is closely linked to how much our lives are impacted by the Cross of Jesus?
--Pastor Ivan Blake |
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