CHURCH ON THE MAINSTREET [Part 5]: Mind Games

For the creation is eagerly waiting for God to reveal his children, (Rom 8:19 ISV)

In my meditation, I came to one conclusion: the problem lies in HOW we think about church and not what we think church is. Many of us know somewhere in our consciousness that church refers to a people, the only problem is that we relate to it not as a people. We know church is the saints of Christ but we think they are effectively only church when and where they gather. This mindset has consequently produced other problems as we shall see.

I have always wondered why local church leaders multiply meetings for their members and if you do not attend these meetings regularly you are seen as an unserious Christian; some would even say you have backslidden! The average local church member might have to attend some form of meeting four to five times in the week excluding Sunday. The people who attend most of these meeting are deemed to be the bonafide members of the church, it doesn’t matter whether you are born-again or not! When we spend so much time inside the four walls of our meeting place how much time do we have to reach out to the world out there not to talk of discipling them? Pastors must equip their members and release them to actually do the work of the ministry instead of inventing so many programmes to keep people within the church walls. After all, it is not like we stop following Christ the moment we leave church gatherings.

Ask almost any Christian if he or she is working for God and you might hear an answer in the affirmative. Ask them what they are doing for Christ and nine out of ten would probably list some of the activities they are involved in their local churches. How did we come to equate serving in our local church bodies to working for God? I am not insinuating that working in our local assemblies is unimportant, to the contrary they are but merely doing that does not mean you are working for Christ. You might and you might not. It is from this mindset that we have, inconsistent with scriptural teaching, separated our lives into two; the church life and the secular life. We think what we do inside our local assemblies is the work of the ministry and every other thing is secular work. With this mindset it is no wonder that Christians hardly shine as light outside the walls of our churches. But of what use is a lighted candle under a bucket or an unused salt inside the salt shaker. Church leaders need to start teaching their members to think differently.

In almost every local church assembly, members are encouraged to invite people to church especially those who are not born-again. While many people have come to our meetings and then accepted Jesus Christ, we are still far from achieving our aim of discipling all nation. If we are sincere with ourselves we know that unbelievers rarely accept our invitation to come to church. A minimum of five billion people are still effectively outside the fold of the Church. Many times our response to the realization that we still have so many people on the outside who do not yet know Christ is that we organize more church programs and crusades, buy more television and radio air time for preaching, send more money to the missionaries on the field, and distribute more tracts and etcetera. In other words, we just do more of the things we have been doing and expect more result. The more we do these things the less we see tangible results, maybe except for diverting Christians from one local assembly to another.

The problem with this method of reaching out is that what we are doing consciously or otherwise is inviting people to our various churches and denominations instead of inviting them to Christ. We think that when they get to church then our messages would change them. This method has not proved effective so far because the mandate, and therefore the power backing the mandate, is for us to bring them to Christ and not to our local church assembly. While we are waiting for them to heed our call and come to church they are waiting for us to show them the Light right where they are. When they see the light then they will see the importance of joining an assembly of other Christians for fellowship. We have put the Cart before the Horse so now let’s put the Horse before the Cart.

The other interesting thing is that more often than not our programmes and activities are designed to appeal to those who are already Christians though we hold the belief that we are reaching out to those who do not know Christ. How many non-Christians attend most of our church programmes and how many eagerly await the next edition of our television programmes that we spend millions of dollars on every year? Whether we admit it or not, most of our projects and programmes as currently structured aren’t reaching out as we would love them to. We need to go back to the drawing board and come up with the right strategies on reaching the truly lost.

As much as it may contradict our theology, the truth is that the ‘church gathered’ is not designed to be the absolute in the workings of the Kingdom of God. It is a very important convergence zone but it is not the most important; every other convergence zone is as important because this is where we have the opportunity of extending the Kingdom of God and discipling nations.