Church Fatigue, Part 4

Since many are feeling bored, restless and fatigue in their churches, is there not a much deeper spiritual problem with such people?

You see, all those negative statistics that has to do with the decline of the institutional church are hiding something important:  Many of those who are walking away are not doing so as back-sliders or because of a crisis of faith – quite the opposite – they are walking away because they are looking for something more meaningful.  More authentic.  They are looking for more of Jesus; not less.  They are not finding him in stale, routine services, they’ve simply gone looking for him outside of the four walls of the institutional church.

Ed Stetzer, director of the Center For Missional Research at the North American Mission Board has discovered that a growing number of people are finding Christian discipleship and community in places other than their local church buildings. His study found that an astonishing 24.5% of such Americans now say their primary form of spiritual nourishment is meeting with a small group of 20 or less people every week. Stetzer says, "About 6 million people meet weekly with a small group and never or rarely go to church services. There is a significant movement happening."

What this survey is suggesting that is people are leaving their local churches in order to find Jesus! They are meeting informally in small groups and have no desire to go back to the old routine.

Not only is the template not working for us, it's not working for the world either. People look at church now with extreme cynicism and suspicion. Relevant Magazine polled a range of non-Christians between the ages of 16-29 and discovered that between 70-91% of them thought the church could primarily be defined as judgmental, hypocritical, old-fashioned, too political, out of touch with reality and insensitive to others. These were the traits they most associated with Christianity.

What we must do, therefore, is ask some serious question:  “What went wrong?”  “How did a church with the most serious compelling message for the world to hear get so far off course?”

I think we got to spend some time “stripping the church” of her routines, baggages, and so-called sacred traditions and then clothe her with biblical Holy Ghost formation.

The church looks and behaves too much like the world and too much like the dying and dead churches we read about in Revelation 2-3. I don’t think many people even know what they are missing because they do not know what the church is to look and function like.

In our next series, let’s spend some time “un-dressing” the church.

End of Series