"How do you suppose God is going to grow your life? He's going to take imperfect people and imperfect churches and he's giong to stick you in them so that you will grow and stick them with you so that they can grow, and together, you're the church. But we don't like that, because it's painful, because it hurts."If I look at where the growth has come in my life, it rarely comes in a vacum. It typically comes as I bump into different types of people in my church, or through friends in my life telling me hard things about who I am and how I handle stuff.
Noel also hits hard the topic of people jumping ship on their churches for the wrong reasons:
"There are good reasons to leave a church but they're few and far between, and most people I've talked to have not left for the right reasons."If you don't know Pastor Noel, he's a co-pastor of a church called Riverview in East Lansing. IMHO, they're a great example of what the church is supposed to look like, and the chuch we'd go to if we lived in the area. One of the coolest things about Riverview is that as they've experienced huge growth in the past few years there's a lot of things they haven't done. They haven't had a $50M building campaign to build the largest building in the world and they haven't tried to plan a bunch of churches in areas that already have churches that need resources. Part of Riverview's vision, is to help resource other churches that need them. Riverview has helped Crossroads out a bunch of times, sharing their music team, their teaching team, teaching at our summer camp and mentoring our youth pastor.
Tags:
3 comments:
So what are the right reasons to leave a church? (other than the obvious criminal type things) How do you know if it's a challenge that God has given you to work through there, or to maybe move on?
anonymous... that is a good question. What does the bible say? leaving because the music isn't your taste, because someone pissed you off, because you are looking for a service at a different time, because something in the church irritated you isn't the right reason. Church should be a real community and if you care for people in that community things like this don't make you walk away. Would you walk out on your family for these reasons?
Maybe a bigger problem is our lack of commitment and attempt to grow and make the community work?
One of the things I recently learned is that to a westerner we may look at practice of faith as a personal thing but to the Hebrews it's a communal thing.
Noel's message does a nice job talking about valid/invalid reasons to leave.
One of my biggest pet peeves is when people use the whole "I'm not being fed" excuse to leave a church. It cracks me up when people think they should just be able to sit there and let the church spoon feed them, like a mother-bird putting pre-chewed food into a baby-bird's mouth.
Post a Comment