The Fat Church – Part 1

In reading an article about the underground church in Iran that has garnered around 1 million converts to Christianity, mostly Muslim converts, I began to think about how bloated we are in our churches in America.

We have so much musical talent to lead in worship services.  We have gifted preachers who preach great messages.  We have enormous numbers of volunteers who make the church function as a well-oiled machine.  Yet I sense that we are lacking much in deep spiritual content within our lives.

I call it the “fat church.”  Why?  Because of the things I have mentioned.  We are eager for people to receive our message, to like our church, and to join with us in our journey.  That all sounds great.  But underlying all of this frivolity I fear we have lost our true spiritual depth.

Please forgive me if I offend you, but I want to speak about some serious issues that I believe confront the hypocrisy of the modern day church.

We are entertainment driven.  Oh yes, we have our top 40 groups just like the world, only we mention Jesus somewhere in the lyrics and feel good that we can jump and jive like the honky-tonks of yesterday.  We couldn’t interest people to come to our churches with the dull hymns and sincere worship, so we brought the world into our churches and people began to take notice of us, now that we are “cool.”

Are we really any different from the world in our music these days?  Oh, I know, much of the music is catchy and the more it mimics the world, the more we seem to think we are on the path to winning the lost to Christ.  It is a sham form of religion.  It lacks spiritual insight and depth of meaning.  We have traded real good for feel good, that is, we have opted to gin up emotional appeal instead of Holy Spirit conviction.  If we can sway and clap, we sense that we are finding our way to God that appeals to our fleshly senses.

We are mega-church driven.  If enough people will come out to hear us on Sunday, we feel we have made a great accomplishment, because size accounts for blessing.  Oh, I know we try to deny it, but come on, when the church is full, we feel we have honored God with our attendance.  Really, we are more prone to honoring ourselves and patting ourselves on the back with pride.  The bigger a church gets, especially to the size of a mega-church, we feel those preachers are the closest to God and sometimes it seems that they think so.

Do you really think that God cares about the size of your church?  Is that goal pleasing to Him?  All of our striving to become bigger has led us down a dark road of compromise and that compromise is with the world, or can I just put it right out there, it is a compromise with the devil’s way of doing things.

I am up in years now and I’ve seen a lot of change in the church over the last 70.  We have better communication, better facilities, more educated preachers, information galore, movies from Hollywood that try to please the Christian crowd so that they can take more of our money, top notch entertainment and a super-rich appeal to the world.  The carnal Christian feels right at home in the average church.  Conviction is seemingly at its lowest point.  People want to feel good when they come to church.  It all appeals to our base nature and I must admit, sometimes to mine as well.

Look, I love my fellow believers.  They are my dearest friends in this world.  But I believe the church, as a whole in America, is at its lowest point ever in real spiritual integrity.  Much like Israel of old, we have forsaken the true ways defined for us by God and clung to idolatry, which is our love of the world.  We worship at the throne of feeling good and appealing to the world so that somehow, they will think that we are cool and come to church and become like us.  Ugh.

So what is the answer?  Let me phrase it in a simple way:  We need to get down to the basics.  I know that does not sound profound, but remember I am just a simple preacher that can only put things in simple terms.

First, we must face the problem of idolatry in our church families.  You sound surprised at this idea.  I can hear you thinking about it as you read.  “What, I don’t have any handmade statues that I bow down to and worship!”  Of course, you don’t.  That would be too obvious.  Think about our adversary, the devil.  He cannot trick you or manipulate you if you can see his nefarious ways.  He comes as an angel and sheds light on your situation and then offers you a solution that seems reasonable to you, but it will lead you away from God’s way of responding to a problem.

We’ve adapted the world’s strategies or solutions in place of God’s.  In future articles I will share some of the ones I believe are dragging us away from God’s ways.