Amos 6-9: Is your wealth and convenience getting in the way of your worship? Have you lost your focus? Have we as the church lost focus of our mission? Our friend L. Lavon Gray wrote this today and it is so where the nation of Israel was in Amos’ day, and it is where the church in America is today. We have lost our focus on our mission. Here are Lavon’s words.
It’s no secret the institutional church is in big-time trouble. According to January 2018 LifeWay Research, between 6,000 and 10,000 churches in the U.S. will die this year. That means around 100-200 churches will close this week.
Why? Because we’ve made it into something it was never intended to be. We entertain instead of worship….socialize instead of evangelize….and are more focused on protecting the status quo than reaching the communities in which we sit. We focus on music styles, cosmetic issues and keeping cash in the bank while people flee in droves, all looking for a church somewhere, anywhere, that is making a difference in people’s lives.
The result: Beautiful and majestic church houses half filled with weak and ineffective social clubs. God help us.
Years ago I heard Chuck Swindoll tell the following old parable about the Life-Saving Station. Unfortunately, it sums it up pretty well:
On a dangerous seacoast where shipwrecks often occur there was a once a crude little life-saving station. The building was just a hut, and there was only one boat, but the few devoted members kept a constant watch over the sea, and with no thought for themselves, they went out day or night tirelessly searching for the lost.
Many lives were saved by this wonderful little station, so that it became famous. Some of those who were saved, and various others in the surrounding areas, wanted to become associated with the station and give of their time and money and effort for the support of its work. New boats were bought and new crews were trained. The little life-saving station grew.
Some of the new members of the life-saving station were unhappy that the building was so crude and so poorly equipped. They felt that a more comfortable place should be provided as the first refuge of those saved from the sea.
So they replaced the emergency cots with beds and put better furniture in an enlarged building. Now the life-saving station became a popular gathering place for its members, and they re-decorated it beautifully and furnished it as a sort of club.
Less of the members were now interested in going to sea on life-saving missions, so they hired life boat crews to do this work.
The mission of life-saving was still given lip-service but most were too busy or lacked the necessary commitment to take part in the life-saving activities personally.
About this time a large ship was wrecked off the coast, and the hired crews brought in boat loads of cold, wet, and half-drowned people.
They were dirty and sick, and some of them had black skin, and some spoke a strange language, and the beautiful new club was considerably messed up. So the property committee immediately had a shower house built outside the club where victims of shipwreck could be cleaned up before coming inside.
At the next meeting, there was a split in the club membership. Most of the members wanted to stop the club’s life-saving activities as being unpleasant and a hindrance to the normal life pattern of the club.
But some members insisted that life-saving was their primary purpose and pointed out that they were still called a life-saving station. But they were finally voted down and told that if they wanted to save the life of all the various kinds of people who were shipwrecked in those waters, they could begin their own life-saving station down the coast. They did.
As the years went by, the new station experienced the same changes that had occurred in the old. They evolved into a club and yet another life-saving station was founded.
If you visit the seacoast today you will find a number of exclusive clubs along that shore. Shipwrecks are still frequent in those waters, only now most of the people drown.