Monday, August 6, 2012

My heart breaks at the thought of the Church...

The Church today...

Yes I did say that in a slightly angsty, exasperated way.

I feel so heartbroken and irritated at the Church in America today. And it stems much from the church I have grown up in. We are failing as a Church. We have lost sight of what it means to be a part of a church and THE Church.

I feel like the Church today is all about sending help overseas, sending out missionaries, preaching to the outside world that they are living their lives wrong, and we are falling apart at the seams from the inside.

Church is about what I get from it... the pastor needs to make me feel excited about my faith, he is supposed to motivate me, invigorate me, make me really think... he has to be a good speaker... I need to be fed...

I agree, we need to be fed, and yes we need to be motivated in our faith, but what I have learned is that we take from a sermon what we want to take. If we are focusing on the Spirit and letting Him fill us during a sermon, even if only part of a verse or a single word in the sermon sparks a thought and you get side-tracked completely, lost in your own scripture, then that's ok. God uses many different ways to reveal his Word to us, it isn't always directly form a preacher.

But I digress...

I think we have lost what it means to be the Church and to build the Kingdom.

We were asked to make disciples. But how can we make disciples if we are not working on becoming ones ourselves? We must remember that the Church's purpose is to support you in times of need; to love you unconditionally like the Father; to convict you in love when you are straying from the path of righteousness; and build leaders of ALL its members to go out and build MORE disciples.

This is our mission, to be disciples, not to be led by men, but to lead men to Christ. To be responsible enough for our own faith to know that we must be willing to change and grow in order for our heart to change and grow and become more like Christ.

I am tired of mentors within the Church not being mentors, and wondering why the youth of today has little respect for them.

I am ready for change, I do not always like it, it hurts, it's scary, it can be really rough. But I am ready for it for I know that is the only way to live a life pleasing to God. And I am not willing to listen to man's decisions for me based on petty expectations and constraints of the world.

GOD IS BIGGER THAN ANYTHING WE COULD DREAM UP.

Why should I let others tell me what I should do because they have fallen to the world, rather than listening to the AMAZING expectations the Lord has for every single one of His children.

To the Church:
Stop living with selfish ambitions, wanting to make as many "Christians" as possible. The title "Christian" has no meaning in the modern world anymore. We need to live as THE CHURCH, readying the earth for the KINGDOM of GOD, and building more disciples.

I think C.S. Lewis said it well, "“I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.”

The religion of Christianity, when practiced as God originally planned it, when following his leading, we find that often we are not happy. But happiness means nothing without joy, and joy can come in the most darkest moments of our lives. Because joy stems on the fact that we are sinners and cannot be saved, and yet, there is a Father, a God, who can save us, even when all seems lost. In that moment we can find pure joy, for our soul realizes that we are a child, and our Father is holding us, no matter what.

The job of the Church is not to make people happy, but point them towards God so that he can fill them with joy, and build them into the people He meant for them to be.