Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Back to WHAT?? Are You Kidding Me?

I have missed blogging for a while and honestly needed to back away for sabbatical from this.  I have truly been inspired today.

The latest Church Campaign being promoted is called “Back to Church” on September 16, 2012.  The idea behind it is to get disgruntled church folk back into church as well as non-church folk on that particular Sunday.

Of course, you realize and I hope you are thinking that I have some problems with this.  One, for decades, the rural church in America are still having “Homecomings” once a year to do this very thing.  We also have “Friend Day” where we urge folks to invite their neighbors to church as we recently did at Telephone BC.

Two, the website urges churches in CITIES to get together as a city wide campaign.  So, this doesn’t appeal to the churches in the rural areas.  I would tell you that in my disagreement with this, churches in rural areas tend to work together more than city churches do.  IMHO, I find that city churches are too “CASTLE-Y” to let the drawbridge down to work together.  Too much is at stake for them to risk working together for the kingdom of God.

Third, I find it interesting that the company that made and market this product made it on the video and the material that it has to be on September 16, 2012.  There is no flexibility to have this event on another Sunday if you even have it at all.

This is what we have done to EVANGELISM.  Baptists have always hailed Vacation Bible School as the largest outreach of the church, and second is revival meetings.  I guess third would be the worship gatherings on Sunday.  What happened to meeting your neighbor with the intention of loving them as Jesus taught in Matt. 22 and sharing the gospel message with them by showing them Jesus and telling them about Him.  What happened to that?  Do we really have to have a campaign for going “back to church"?