"One New Year's Eve I asked my pastor a very straight forward question: 'How many adults came to faith in Christ at our church this year?' The pastor, a very diplomatic man, said, 'I am not sure. I'll have to get back to you on that.' But he and I knew the answer. It was zero. I added it up. That year our church conducted 104 regularly scheduled worship services, 7 special services, some 250 adult classes, 600 committee meetings and 1,000 small-group meetings and ran through a $750,000 budget to produce exactly zero new adult followers of Jesus Christ. We gathered. We worshiped. We loved each other. But we produced no crop. Our church was a contraption worthy of Rube Goldberg: lots of sound, motion, fury to produce a tiny amount of fruit."Steve Hill quotes 'Why Men Hate Going to Church' by David Murrow, page 164, and adds his 2 cents: "What is interesting is the demand for results when a church gives several hundred dollars to a mission project in the second or third worlds. The unspoken reality is no results, no more money (and that is perhaps as it should be!). Yet that same group will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on themselves without any results and think nothing of it!"
Some good words and convicting. I suppose we have to ask, "do we love ourselves too much and not the outside world". We can spend a bundle on ourselves but others just don't see the love of Jesus, hence no result.
Maybe the spending should be outside of ourselves then we those around us may see Christ's love.
Posted by: Mike | January 06, 2007 at 20:55