Being on the other side of the Exodus sucks, don’t it?
I see the panic on your face, Church.
I know the internal terror as you see the statistics and hear the stories and scan the exit polls.
I see you desperately scrambling to do damage control for the fence-sitters, and manufacture passion from the shrinking faithful, and I want to help you.
You may think you know why people are leaving you, but I’m not sure you do. You think it’s because “the culture” is so lost, so perverse, so beyond help that they are all walking away. You believe that they’ve turned a deaf ear to the voice of God; chasing money, and sex, and material things. You think that the gays and the Muslims and the Atheists and the pop stars have so screwed up the morality of the world that everyone is abandoning faith in droves.
But those aren’t the reasons people are leaving you.
They aren’t the problem, Church.
You are the problem.
I see the panic on your face, Church.
I know the internal terror as you see the statistics and hear the stories and scan the exit polls.
I see you desperately scrambling to do damage control for the fence-sitters, and manufacture passion from the shrinking faithful, and I want to help you.
You may think you know why people are leaving you, but I’m not sure you do. You think it’s because “the culture” is so lost, so perverse, so beyond help that they are all walking away. You believe that they’ve turned a deaf ear to the voice of God; chasing money, and sex, and material things. You think that the gays and the Muslims and the Atheists and the pop stars have so screwed up the morality of the world that everyone is abandoning faith in droves.
But those aren’t the reasons people are leaving you.
They aren’t the problem, Church.
You are the problem.
#2 is increasingly a problem for my wife, who wasn't raised in church yet follows Christ as best she can because she loves people.
My parents balked the first time they wanted to play Bible Trivia because my wife didn't know who Samson or Jehu or Aquila or Ananias were or where Paul was bitten by a viper.
Yet as she pointed out (later, because even after five years of marriage she's still uncomfortable voicing a contrary opinion about religion around my parents), how would that knowledge make her better at loving people and living selflessly, as Christ commanded and lived by example?
Yet church people treat it as VITAL to living a Christ-like life, and have built up such a store of platitudes and insider cliches over the past hundred years, in addition to the various over-quoted Bible verses, that it seems to require concentration to speak in everyday language.
I've learned from experience that because so many Atheists and Agnostics in this country are former church kids, throwing Bible verses at them in an attempt to witness is exactly the kind of buzzword-based (hehe) platitude spewing that sent them running from church in the first place, yet so many church people refuse to say anything in their own words (God forbid their personal testimony carry more weight than a four thousand year-old collection of writings), and when outsiders don't respond positively to platitudes blame it on the outsider "not really listening" or "living in sin."
Even if the problem is me, it’s me who you’re supposed to be reaching, Church.
So, for the love of God; reach already.
So, for the love of God; reach already.
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