*This is something that has been on my heart for awhile, I just had to speak out on it! Let me know what you think!?
I am a PK. A Preachers kid. My father has left this life, to be with God. He was a Great Man,Father, and Pastor, He was a teaching pastor. I grew up in the faith, the ‘church’ with a good experience thru my childhood. It was a life that I knew that was the thing that I just went along with no reservations.
My remembrance of anything that was detrimental or catastrophic in my journey as a PK is nil. Grant you all I was doing it seems was just soaking everything that my father and mother were preaching, my opinion was still being formed in my mind. It wasn’t until a little later, that I have formed my opinions and my theology.
This is going to really sound like a scathing report on christianity or the ‘church’, and it is. But there are reasons for this.
Let me start by saying that some things have led to my ‘report’ on the ‘church’ as we know it. It has been some personal things over the last 15-20 years that I have been noticing with the failure of the church, in not of an individual church but of the church itself.
*When I talk about the ‘church’, I am talking about the institution of the ‘church’*
I have said that I have ‘lived’ the ‘church’ for over 50 years in the way that people do now. It was when I started to question of ‘Doing the things that they say that they do’. In the New Covenant there is only two ‘laws’ Love your God,Love your neighbor. The first relates to the second and second relates to the first. It is ‘all in all’. There is a disconnect between the actions of the believer and the rest of the believers in their actions.
What I am trying to say is, If we are a child of God it is a natural instinct of God’s people to sense or ‘to know’ when or what is wrong with our fellow believers. Our needs,hurts, desires, loves or loneliness. It is the Spirit that dwells within us that speaks to us when we can’t speak for us or for others. It is ‘not’ the so called institutional group of the ‘pastor’,leader, or committee to find out a need that we have to get a group together to ‘fix’ the issue. This is not the instructions that we have received from God, It is God in us that gives that ‘natural’ being of doing the job of need.
The ‘church’ has long established the need for people to take care of each other when in need,for anything! For people of the church, and for a special circumstance people of interest or locally. When we fail at doing this at the personal level, of knowing people from the ‘church’, and still not taking care of the ones we ‘socialize’ with or our so called fellowship that we talk about, doesn’t work itself into the actual result of actions. When we fail to do this in the early stages of a church and continue to fail to do this, this results in a plethora of failures with God’s servants that are left alone or hurt.
I have personal experiences in this tragedy that goes on a regular basis in churches. It is the always reiterated to me that it isn’t this way, that the ‘church’ always takes care of ‘needs’ when they are told of such things. But it is the more intimate ones that are falling thru the cracks that are not taken care, because it is not ‘seen’ or ‘felt’ or ‘heard’ from the more intimate relationship that one has when they are in more close knit community of people that bound by a daily and closeness life.
The failure of not ‘seeing’ the need in the older people with pain in their lives,let alone the needs of the people all around us in our neighborhoods and communities. I have been ‘preaching'(voicing my concern for this), which has meant that it isn’t that the ‘church’ just doesn’t care or doesn’t have the ‘program’, or they have the ‘programs’ but it is to far removed from the problem that it just doesn’t work. I have personally seen this in my years of being the ‘PK’ and also being in the pews or from being on a boards of churches. It just doesn’t work!
This is why I have searched and re-read the scriptures and Listened to the Lord to see what God’s Eternal Purpose Is!
God came to his people, forgave them, gave them ‘A New Life’ of Holiness in and thru the Messiah for All His Creation! It is in the paradigm, that the ‘church’ is to be different, different in the world, not to of the world but in the world to be that ‘differentness’ that the world will smile and say that is for me! It will be the difference maker that will bring the nations to God to bow down on their knees to proclaim that God is King, and King of All.
The Eternal Purpose 