What does a good church look like?

You may not like this because I evaluate a church differently than some. Now I'm an old guy in my seventies, so bear with me. For starters I want part of the congregation to look a certain way. I like to see folks dressed up and proper, but I also want to see a fella in jeans, T-shirt and a teardrop tattoo under his eye. I love to see women dressed like they respect the Lord's house, but then I want to see some gals dressed with skirts too short, pants too tight and hair in ways that would make my Grandma shudder and colors she'd never imagine! I want to see folk smoking in the parking lot and wonder at times if I didn't just smell a hint of alcohol on someone's breath. Then I know people are being brought to church in hope of change! I want to see wing-tips and cowboy boots.
When the music's playing I want to see hands going up and tears falling down! I want to hear a sermon as urgent as the times in which we live! Pastor’s veins popping, sweat flowing, heart breaking and pulpit shaking with words that tell the gospel story in impassioned pleas. I want to see the cross proudly mounted and passionately proclaimed!
I don't care much about videos, padded pews or basketball hoops, but let me hear the story of Jesus and feel His love in the members. And when the benediction comes, I want to hear prayers for blessings on marriages, children, finances and sickness, but also for those in recovery, single parents, the abused and molested.
When the service is over I want to see a flood of smiling children flowing from the Sunday School classes where they were taught about the love of Jesus and felt it there: and are more impressed by Him than the treats, games or technology.
If I see these things, I'm pretty sure they love the lost, last and least, and the future of Christianity looks optimistic because souls are being saved and children are learning of Him. I think this is the church for the 21st century. 

Simple tips to make parenting fun

  Parenting is so demanding, especially when the kids are young. We all need time alone as well as time with our spouse, and a date night is like marriage insurance! 

  If you have more than one child here are some ideas to make the routine tasks more fun. Grocery shopping is a great time to get away with only one child when your spouse is there to watch the other. It is so much fun, for you and the child, to go shopping together when you show them what you look for in the foods you buy. It is fun to be thumping watermelons together, smelling the fruit, checking for bruises, assessing the size and weighing them in the scales. When walking the aisles have them read the labels to see which is the best buy per ounce, teach them to read the ingredient labels and why you choose certain brands. Keep them out of the cart when they are old enough to keep up, but choose times when you are not rushed. And of course let them pick out a treat to take home and share with the others. 

Working in the missions and jails, I see the new crop of saved, delivered souls absolutely come to new life! Many become zealots of the faith, but they are in no way qualified to be preachers, not yet at least. Now if they were to focus their evangelizing to others from the same circumstances they came from, it would be more effective, but often they engage the first person they run into and they do more harm than good. Many have been delivered from addiction and horrid bondages, but the sanctification progress has just begun. They were walking in darkness. In short, the most surly, uneducated, coarse, vulgar, violent, hurting and downtrodden group in our societies; and many of those habits are still prevalent, so they need to be discipled and mentored, but mentors are few.

Hope for the discouraged preacher

  "The ministry is indeed armed with great powers for great effects. The teachings which Christianity commits to its teachers are MIGHTY engines. The perfect character of God; the tender and solemn attributes which belong to Him as our Father and Judge, His purposes of infinite and everlasting mercy towards the human race; the character and history of Christ; His entire self-sacrificing devotion to the cause of mankind; His intimate union with His followers; His sufferings and cross, His resurrection, ascension, and intercession; the promised aids of the Holy Spirit; the immortality of man; the retributions which await the un-repenting, and the blessings and glory of heaven -- here are the truths able to move the whole soul and to war victoriously with its host of passions. The teachers to whom are committed the infinite realities of the spiritual world, the sanctions of eternity, "the powers of life to come," has instruments to work with which turn to feebleness all other means of influence. There is not heard on earth a voice so powerful, so penetrating, as that of an enlightened minister, who, under the absorbing influence of these mighty truths, devotes himself a living sacrifice, a whole burnt-offering, to the cause of enlightening and saving his fellow-creatures." William Ellery Channing.

"A super popular girl", well it's no mystery why she's so popular if this represents the kind of choices she makes. You know, some people are just larger than life, they inspire, encourage and add value to everyone around them. Lord, may I be more like that!

Freedom of thought

 

 

 "To train the student to power of thought and utterance, let him be left, and still more, encouraged to free investigation. Without this a theological institution becomes a prison to the intellect and a nuisance to the church. The mind grows by free action. Confine it to beaten paths, prescribe to it the results in which all study must end, and you rob it of elasticity and life. It will never spread to its full dimensions. 

  Teach the young person that the instructions of others are designed to quicken, not supersede his own activity; that he has a divine intellect for which he has to answer to God, and that to surrender it to another is to cast the crown from his head, and yield up his noblest birthright.

  Encourage them in all great questions to hear both sides, and to meet fairly the point of every hostile argument. Guard him against tampering with his own mind, against silencing its whispers and objections, that he may enjoy a favorite opinion undisturbed. Do not give him the shadow for the substance of freedom, by telling him to inquire, but prescribing to him the convictions at which he must stop. Better show him honestly his chains than mock the slave with the show of liberty. 

   I know the objection to this course. It puts to hazard, we are told, the religious principles of the young. The objection is not without foundation. The danger is not unreal. But I know of no method of forming a manly intellect or a manly character without danger. Peril is the element in which power is developed. Remove the youth from every hazard, keep him in leading-strings lest he should stray into forbidden paths, surround him with soft down lest he should be injured by a fall, shield him from wind and storms, and you doom him to perpetual infancy. All liberty is perilous. Freedom of will is almost a tremendous gift; but still a free agent, with all his capacity of crime, is infinitely more interesting and noble than the most harmonious and beautiful machine. Freedom is the nurse of intellectual and moral vigor. Better expose the mind to error than rob it of hardihood and individuality. Keep not the destined teacher of mankind from the perilous field where the battle between Truth and Falsehood is fought. Let him grapple with difficulty, sophistry, and error. Truth is a conquest, and no one holds her so fast as he who has won her by conflict." William Ellery Channing. 

 

"His word was with Power." Lu. 4:32

What does that mean? What did that power look like? What did it consist of? Is it something beyond what humans can have? Here is the best explanation I've ever heard that describes the power of Jesus. 

  "Power, energy, efficiency, this is the endowment Jesus had and used to communicate truth. I mean that strong action of the understanding, conscience, and heart on moral and religious truth by which the preacher is quickened and qualified to awaken the same strong action in others. I mean energy of thought and feeling creating an appropriate expression, and propagating itself to the hearer. The power to arrest the attention, to arouse emotion, and give a new spring to the soul. 

Jesus had a power to cause strong action of the intellect, vividness of ideas and conceptions, depth of conviction, and force of feeling.

 Jesus had more than knowledge, he had force of thought, feeling and purpose. The word of God is indeed "quick and powerful, and sharper than any two edged sword." 

  In Christ's power we see the earnestness of real warfare; bent on the accomplishment of great good that fit men and women to act on humanity, to make themselves felt in society. I mean power to act on intelligent and free beings, by means proportioned to their nature. I mean power to call into healthy exertion the intellect, conscience, affections and moral will of the hearer. He spoke of the soul, the ray of the Divinity, the partaker of God's own immortality; He spoke of God, the King and Father Eternal, whose praise no tongue of men or angels can worthily set forth. 

  Jesus spoke with an energy needed to break through the barriers of pride and self-love, and to place the individual before a tribunal in his own breast, as solemn and searching as that which awaits him at the last day. 

  The power of Jesus roused men to self-conflict, to warfare with the evil in their own hearts. This is in truth the supreme evil. The sorest calamities of life are caused by that one word, sin, revolt from God, in disloyalty to conscience, in the tyranny of the passions, in the slavery of the souls's noblest powers. To redeem men from sin was Christ's great end. To pierce them with a new consciousness of sin, so that they shall groan under it and strive against it, and through prayer and watching master it."

 This described power is given to us by the Holy Spirit to reach every generation, regardless of how evil or corrupt, and far from God they are. 

Abridged - William Ellery Channing.   

"It is absolutely essential that you are wounded in ministry and that you know the fellowship of His sufferings. It is such an essential part of the call, that we get wounded in the house of our friends, we get wounded by the people that we really thought we could trust, that we feel that kiss of betrayal that Jesus felt in the garden.

Being betrayed and wounded is just a part of your development. If you want all the fullness of God, you have to experience all the fullness of life! If you want the power of His resurrection you have to know the fellowship of His suffering. So when you know that it’s part of our development, it’s easier to forgive those people who have done things to you."

From WHY WOUNDED & BETRAYED BELIEVERS ARE SO USEFUL TO GOD by Graham Cooke.

Original Post 2017

                 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            "It is well known that the greatest obstruction to Christianity in heathen countries is the palpable and undeniable depravity of Christian nations. They abhor our religion because we are such unhappy specimens of it. They are unable to read our books, but they can read our lives; and what wonder if they reflect with scorn a system under which vices seem to have flourished so luxuriantly. The Indian of both hemispheres has reason to set down the Christian as little better than himself. (British occupation of India and the slaughter of native Americans, the crusades, slavery, bombing Hiroshima and all the other things true Christians are ashamed to have attached to the name Christian.) 

He associates with the  name, treachery, fraud, excessive greed, and slaughter. Can we wonder he is unwilling to receive a religion from the hand which has chained or robbed him? Thus, bad example is the great obstruction to Christianity abroad as well as at home; and perhaps little good is to be done abroad until we become better at home, until real Christians understand and practice their religion more thoroughly, and by their example and influence spread it among their neighbors and through their country, so that the aspect of Christian nations shall be less shocking and repulsive to the Jew, Mohammedan and Pagan. Would much be gained to heathen countries were we to make them precisely what nations called Christians now are? (Where we are purveyors of pornography and ever vile affection is promulgated in Hollywood and even in our schools and our leaders are corrupt.)  

They need to give up their severe inquisition into their neighbors opinions and to begin in earnest to seek for themselves, and to communicate to others, a nobler standard of temper and practice than they have yet derived from the Scriptures. In a word, they need to learn the real value and design of Christianity by the only thorough and effectual process; that is, by drinking deeply into its spirit of love to God and man." William Ellery Channing.  

  

  When I look at much of todays Christianity with its approach to the LGBT community, the endless threats of eternal conscious torments in hell, the proud declaration that the way of Christ is the only way and all others are excluded and doomed, while many within the faith cannot even agree on a Bible translation; the inter-denominational bickering and quarrels over every possible interpretation of texts that matter little; accusing different faiths as Babylon the great whore; turning on their own if they don't line up with their interpretation, and the little care for the poor, downcast, war Vets and oppressed, here and abroad, its clear to me, that far too many a church has "lost its savor."                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

 

Does God want our praise?

   "Do you think that God calls us to adore Him from a love of homage or service? Has God the passions of man for ruling? Does He have man's thirst for applause, or man's desire to have His name shouted by crowds? Could the acclamations of the universe, though concentrated into one burst of praise, give our Creator a new or brighter consciousness of His own majesty and goodness? Oh! no. He has manifested Himself to us because in the knowledge and adoration of His perfections our own intellectual and moral  perfection is found. 

What He desires is, not our subjection, but our excellence. He has no love of praise. He calls us as truly to honor goodness in others as in Himself, and only claims supreme honor because He transcends all others, and because He communicates to the mind which receives Him a light, strength and purity, which no other being can give. God has no love of being an Emperor. It gives Him no pleasure to have men bow before Him. It is to make us His children in the highest sense of the word, to make us more and more partakers of His own nature, it is not to multiply slaves, that He has sent His Son to make Himself known. God indeed is said to seek His own glory; but the glory of a creator consists in the glory of His works; and we may be assured that He cannot wish any recognition of Himself but that which will perfect the noblest highest work --- the immortal mind." Channing. 

   

 

  "The glory of Christianity is the pure and lofty action which it communicates to the human mind. It does not breathe a timid, abject spirit. If it did it would deserve no praise. It gives power, energy, courage, constancy to the will; love, disinterestedness, enlarged affection to the heart; soundness, clearness, and vigor to the  understanding. It rescues him who receives it from sin, from the sway of the passions; gives him the full and free use of his best powers; brings out and brightens the divine image in which he was created; and in this way not only bestows the promise but the beginning of heaven. This is the excellence of Christianity." 

William Ellery Channing.