Many people long for more “life” in their church. It’s not necessarily a new desire. I think God puts a desire within each of us for His most, even if we don’t realize what we’re wanting. It may be a longing to see more miracles. Fewer rules and more of following the Spirit. Less talk and more walk. More unchurched people embracing an authentic relationship with Christ. The list goes on. But I fear that our churches will fail to experience any more life twenty years from now than they are today.
It’s really depressing if all Christianity is, is going to church on Sunday and reading our Bibles. If our Sunday experiences have nothing to do with the rest of our lives and the purpose of our vocations, “church” becomes dead and turns anyone off. In that case it’s perfectly legitimate to want more life.
Yet, as I think of what it takes to have more life in our churches—as I look down the road and realize that whether we like it or not, one day my generation will lead the church—I’m forced to ask myself this question:
Am I doing anything now to enable the “more” I long to see in my church?
To be honest, there are three reasons why whatever church I’m apart of in twenty years won’t be any different from the church I may be “frustrated” with now. These reasons begin and end with me. Whether I change or not affects the church I attend. I believe it’s true for all of us.
Here are three reasons our churches won’t be any different twenty years from now, unless we change.
We don’t truly care about the church
Not many people truly care about the church. Most are either too apathetic to care or they’re focused only on personal agendas. Either they’re okay with the “way it’s always been,” or they’re more concerned about their ideas and making them happen then they are about understanding where others are coming from in order to be a community that loves well.
Peter Scazzero puts it this way in his book, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality
:
“One of the greatest gifts we can give our world is to be a community of emotionally healthy adults who love well.”
The “Church” is people. God’s people. Are we a healthy people? Do we care enough about fellow people to love them well?
A second reason that threatens to keep us from greater life in our churches is that we’re too busy reacting to others
We all have stories. We see life through unique “glasses.” Those glasses get tainted by the good and bad experiences in our stories. Because of that, we place people into “boxes” when looking only through our personal “glasses.” Anyone who is similar to *that* gets put in the same box, whether it’s true of them or not.
“Ah, you listen to contemporary music so you’re a part of the charismatic, modernistic movement.”
Or
“You only sing hymns, so you must be stuck in the mud conservative.”
Many major decisions within the church are based on mere reaction. Nothing else. And it’s happening among our generation, as well. If we live out of reaction, though we may feel different, we aren’t, actually. We’ve embraced the same heart attitude as those we’re reacting to. It takes radical love to pursue people and not react to them. Are we willing to embrace that kind of love, as difficult as it is?
Lastly, we don’t do any better at self-evaluating
Visit a Bible school and listen to the discussions. Many have critiques about the church: ways of doing missions, worship styles, how to handle people of other cultures—you name it! But who’s currently leading the church? For the most part, it’s our parent’s generation. While it might feel that we’re on the verge of revolutionizing churches all across America, all we’re doing is criticizing. That never revolutionized anything.
What if we sat around asking each other how we can be the people we long to see others be? And then what if we got up and actually lived it? We do well at critiquing. We do well at talking. But my generation has yet to prove we do any better at actually being life-giving.
We could be a generation with radical life in our churches. But it’s going to take living against the flow of the natural lifestyle handed down to us from past generations. It’s not as easy as seeing problems and pointing them out. We need to live differently. And we can only do that by walking personally with Jesus Christ and following His example.
If we do that, “life” is the only natural byproduct. If we pursue more of Christ and less of idealized signs of “life,” we really will be a generation of churches unstoppable against our enemy. Will we do it?
