In Reply to: Re: 87 % of the Family is completely backslidden posted by Jesse (rockon) on February 14, 2003 at 08:33:40:
Please pardon me for asking this if you can, Jesse, but why do you even want to bother to get a radio station up to reach people with the gospel? After you give a salvation prayer what are you going to tell them? "By the way, stay away from the churches. Don't attend Christian fellowships now. I have it on good authority that 87% of all churches are dead and cause harm through their lack of love."
If you don't send new Christians to SOME kind of fellowship or church, they're going to wither on the vine, die for lack of teaching and fellowship and living in a caring community. So why bother to get them saved in the first place if you have already figured out the odds, that 87% of the people you lead to the Lord will be churchy, cold, unloving, hypocritcal and damage-causing through their lack of love.
I think you need to understand that just because you don't see a certain church as loving, caring and meeting your own spiritual and social needs, doesn't mean that it can't meet the needs of many thousands of other people. The truth is, there ARE many caring churches and compassionate, sincere Christians around, and if you can't find them I suspect that you're either looking at them through a pair of glasses that are too judgmental.
I realize some churches fall into the category of self-righteous and cold and inactive, but wow! There are surely not all like that and you can find a good one if you're not expecting them to jump through the hoops of your own expectations. Again, I return to my question, why would you want to be in ministry to get people saved if you expect 87% of them to end up in cold, unloving, dead churches?
It's great to have a vision, Jesse, so long as yo don't expect other people to have to jump to meet your same standards. We are supposed to be hear to help gently lift and heal the weak and wounded, and put them into whatever imperfect fellowships exist. Let's not be judgmental shepherds. If we're not here for the sake of the lost, looking at their needs, not trying to impose our own standards on them from above, then why bother with ministry to reach them.
Remember Grandmother Berg's poem about longing ot be out in the fields reaping, but it said, "I was so busy with service, I had drifted from Him apart?"