Читать книгу UnLearning Church - Mike Slaughter - Страница 13

People today, both inside and outside the church, have an apathetic attitude toward organized religion. Most will tell you that it's not working. Perhaps their lack of interest is because we institutional church people have been more skilled at building walls of dogma and exclusivity than at rediscovering ancient paths of life-transformation.

Our society is marked by increased spiritual hunger and activity, yet overall attendance in churches has decreased. The number of people in attendance weekly in United Methodist churches has been declining for years—dramatically so. The same is true in most other mainline denominations. This decline seems to accompany a lack of spiritual power in churches today. As I look around many churches, the situation seems like the movie Night of the Living Dead. Many churches have died, and someone just needs to tell them they're dead. The churches that are still alive are asking, like the prophet Elijah, "Am I the only one left? Is there anyone out there who is being faithful to the purpose of God on planet Earth?" (See 1 Kings 19:1-10.)

Remember the guy who burst into a Baptist church in Texas? If angry people with guns are going to storm into church gatherings and shoot folks for their faith relationship with Jesus Christ, then I want to get shot for being a part of the right thing. I don't want the church I serve to sacrifice lives to something that is not world-changing.

For the earliest Christians, the gospel wasn't about information, but about a revolutionary encounter with God—"what we have heard . . . seen with our eyes . . . and touched with our hands . . . the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us" (1 John 1:1b-2). After his resurrection, Jesus warned his followers not to go out alone, but to "wait there for the promise of the Father" when they would be "baptized with the Holy Spirit" (Acts 1:4-5). Think about the implications of that order. Jesus' followers had been with him for three years. (That's a whole lot better than attending a weeklong church growth conference.) Didn't they learn enough about Jesus by watching and copying his work? Apparently not. Jesus was telling his followers, in effect, that information and imitation were not enough.