THE CHURCH IS FAT

THE CHURCH IN AMERICA IS FAT

This morning as I met with my associate, I had a revelation; The Church in America IS Fat. Why? For the same reason that most Americans are fat; empty calories and no consistent exercise for the body.

Everything in America is bigger and most of us have the mind set that “BIGGER is BETTER”. Our cars are big, our houses are big, our meals are big, our clothes are big, our appetites are big and never satisfied the more we eat, the more we want and need to eat. America in general is getting bigger all the time and not in a healthy way. And we are never satisfied.

Rather than eat many small nutritious meals each day, as most doctors recommend; many of us eat less often, but consume enough calories during those settings to feed several people. Furthermore much of what we eat is processed unhealthy empty calories; foods our bodies either cannot use or struggle to process. Such diet coupled with little or no consistent physical exercise and the result is a fat population of unhealthy people.

The American church too has strayed from what is healthy and has also become mortally obese. We have forgotten the model of the New Testament Church and adopted the practices of heathen religions, dedicated more to building and keeping our “houses of worship” rather than being ourselves the temple of The Holy Spirit. We have become infected with the gangrene mentality that “bigger is better” and so we create a vicious feeding cycle of building and supporting buildings and programs and special events, which we call ministry in order to pay the parallel growing hired staff and to maintain the structures now needed to house the growth.

As a sister in Christ wrote me yesterday, “our churches are so wrapped up in what we do, how much we give, where we can volunteer next, do more, give more, be more and people get overwhelmed and burned out because they are never allowed to REST and RESTORE to find out what is real inside of them.”; in the name of “church” and “outreach” or “evangelism” we demand more and more and more , expect more and more and bigger and better, but to what end? Empty calories which do not satisfy, but indeed enlarge the body. Are we effectively impacting our world for Christ? No! In fact we are not effectively impacting the Church for Christ.

After nearly thirty years in ministry and preaching and hearing preached thousands of sermons, I was dismayed at the unhealthy fat babies within the body of Christ. Great preaching, great worship; lousy men and women of faith, whose “beliefs” bore little resemblance to the lack of victory in their actual lives. I had to consider what was missing; in rexaming the early church, I discovered little resemblance to what we mass produce today as ministry. We’ve dropped our routine form of doing church and have decided to BE the Church. We have become a personal interactive community of believers who share life, good, bad and real; if you’re saved you serve, where God directs you to serve. I no longer preach as much as I lead an open discussion of the relevance of the Word of God in our lives. We quit bringing the projector, sound system, instruments and we’ve shut down programs and started bringing and opening the Bible. If we sing it is spontaneous, if we pray; it is real. When we commune it is around a full meal, like the early church.

The point is substance, subtance, substance. The result has been open confession of sin one to another and true spiritual growth. No more performance or pretending; just authenticy of community. Have we arrived yet? No, but we’re getting trim and healthy and if we are 15 or 25 in members – no stress our only growth goal is to grow in Him. Amen!