Churches are dying all around us today. But I’m not sure Satan is always the one who’s shutting them down. Sometimes, I believe God himself is shutting off the lights and throwing away the key. Why? Because those “houses of worship” are only interested in worshiping themselves.
One Friday afternoon, years ago, I was in the tech booth alone in the back of a church’s empty sanctuary typing my sermon notes into the video computer for Sunday. I didn’t want to be interrupted so, just in case, I made sure the sanctuary doors were locked. This was one of those times I needed to get my work done quickly and be able to get home.
Did I mention no one else was around?
The sanctuary ceiling lights were controlled by a panel at the other end of the room from me. From where I sat in the booth, the panel was directly in my line of vision. As I concentrated on the computer screen in front of me, I suddenly heard four distinct clicking noises, and the ceiling lights directly in front of me popped on and off—twice.
Immediately, at the first click, I had looked up. No one was at the light panel, and there was no other panel in the room to control that lighting system.
“Was someone playing a joke on me?”
When I finally got to the panel, there was no one there. I checked the nearby doors that exited the sanctuary. They were all still locked.
As I stood there trying to wrap my brain around what had just happened, my mind went to the only logical place I could find.
For several years I had been trying to move that church forward, but it was like pushing through molasses. Worship felt like it had an oppressive spirit keeping us from breaking through. I had wondered what was wrong, but that day I felt I had finally been confronted by the problem.
Something or someone wanted to let me know they were working there, too, that Friday afternoon. Actually, they had been working there a long time before I came, and would still be at work long after I’d gone.
Churches are dying all around us today. But I’m not sure Satan is always the one who’s shutting them down. Sometimes, I believe God himself is shutting off the lights and throwing away the key. Why? Because those “houses of worship” are only interested in worshiping themselves.
Satan is pretty happy about how many of our churches have been operating. For years, some churches have existed for no one else but us. We’ve created it to fit our comforts and schedules. Maybe we’ve raised money to build nicer, prettier places to worship. We have built banquet halls to eat in and even built their recreation centers so we wouldn’t have to work out with those “heathens.” And we managed to do all this in the name of “outreach to the community” when the community never reaped any of the benefits.
In other words, we made the church “all about me and us” and what we want.
Instead of preaching the Gospel and drawing people out of sin to Christ, we’ve “massaged” the message to be sure to take out anything offensive.
So, the question I want you to ask is, “If our church died today, would anyone in our community even notice we were gone?”
The answer for many is a resounding “no.”
God warned us a long time ago that when church became less about doing his will and more about having our own way, he’d eventually put a stop to it (Amos 5:21-24).
So what do we do?
Instead of returning to glorify him, serve our neighbors, and draw people to Christ, we try to fix things with human strategies. We change the music style, update some programs, and do a little more advertising on social media. There is nothing wrong with these things. However, they won’t make a bit of difference when the problem is not natural but supernatural.
We exchange dead traditional worship for dead contemporary worship, dead programs from the 1990s for dead programs that are the latest thing. We exchange outdated technology for state-of-the-art equipment. But none of these things will make a spiritually dead church alive.
It’s like that movie Weekend at Bernie’s. The plot is pretty ridiculous, but suffice it to say our two heroes must keep people thinking a dead mob boss is still alive, or somebody will kill them. So they end up dragging his body out in public with them, with sunglasses covering his eyes. They manipulate his arms to wave at people. They even put him on water skis and let him bounce around on the waves. It’s less macabre and more ridiculous than it sounds.
And how ridiculous to think that a flurry of activity in a church means it’s still alive. We wave the arms of the corpse around, thinking we’ll fool people into thinking there’s still life in the old girl. What we don’t realize is we’re not fighting off a death by natural causes. What we are fighting is actually evil that has infiltrated the church’s ranks and compromised our true mission.
Trying to accomplish anything in those churches feels like carrying Bernie’s dead body on our back and into the pulpit every Sunday.
If we want our church to survive and grow in the coming years, it will take more than trendy ideas. I believe God is no longer tolerating our games. If we want our church to thrive, stop making it about what you or I want.
Make our church the lighthouse in the community it was meant to be. Do so much good that we can’t help but draw people to the irresistible Christ they see in us. Be so dynamic that our city would mourn the day our church’s doors closed.
But if we won’t be that lighthouse, don’t be surprised when God turns off the lights and walks away himself. And don’t make the mistake of thinking he won’t do it just to make his point clear.
Like our dads used to say: He brought you into this world. He can take you out and make another one that looks just like you.
Photo by Sheldon Kennedy on Unsplash
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- The Long Run - June 19, 2024
