Our Diet is for babies, Pt. 4

Series:  What is wrong with church?

I read this the other day from a pastor.  He made a very enlightening observation:

"The difference in spiritual hunger between Chinese students at [church] and regular Brits, is startling. As I preached a simple Gospel on Sunday, the Chinese were perched on the edge of their seats, and full of questions at the end, engaging with a bible study on the sermon over lunch. While it's difficult to read body language when you're in fullflow, most others seemed to be stifling yawns. That is a picture of world Christianity at the moment. The East is ablaze, the west is asleep, with exactly the same Gospel. Still, who cares...so long as we have a merry christmas..."

As a pastor myself, I can sense the frustration.  It can be extremely frustrating to preach passionately week-in and week-out and find that it doesn't seem to be motivating the church or rousing any emotion. To preach your heart out but find that everyone is just as apathetic going out as coming in. This is where the pastor starts to doubt the effectiveness of preaching the Word and starts looking for more cute and conventional methods, such as giving more stories and jokes during his messages, or taking out about 20 minutes from the preaching of the Word in order to make his message shorter.

What is better is for the pastor to re-double his efforts and preach his messages twice as hard in the hope that it will re-evoke the passion that all Christians first feel when they meet Jesus. Perhaps, as this pastor seems to feel, it's a cultural thing or some judgement from God to harden the hearts of the people in a particular part of the world. I propose that the reason is far more obvious. It's simply that the basic Gospel message to mature converts is like a teacher trying to teach college students what 1+1 is. We know it. We get it. We understand it. We accept it. There's no need to kick at an open door. There's no need to try to convert the converted and make believers out of those who already believe. We're in. We've already signed up. But what comes next?

Now imagine a school teacher getting exasperated with an 18 year old university students saying, "why are you not grasping 1+1? Why are you not excited about it? Why are you not perched on the edge of your seats and taking notes like the five year old kids are?" The students may well reply, "we grasped it a long time ago and we were excited about it when we were their age...but what now? Where do we go from here? We've long been ready to be challenged with more...." And they are right.

These are the questions many Christians are asking themselves. We get the Gospel message. Really. But what comes next? Is this it? Are we just going to come to a church service every Sunday to hear variations of this same message for the rest of our lives? Is that what Christianity is? Sitting in services trying to coerce ourselves into feeling the same level of excitement we had about the Gospel message as when we first believed? Is merely feeling excited or emotional the end goal here? 

End of Part 4