This post is going to be about church meetings. Now, I wonder how many people stopped reading there – because church meetings are genuinely notorious for being one of the most tedious and dreary experiences of anyone’s life. Oh, how I wish this stereotype didn’t exist. Perhaps this is the main reason why church meetings are typically extremely poorly attended.
Very often we hear the phrase that ‘a church isn’t the building, it’s the people inside.’ This is true, although I think there is something else to be understood about what a church is. In today’s society, the idea of Church is practically synonymous with a Sunday Morning. For many people, Christian and non-Christian alike, a church is a group of people who meet together on a Sunday morning.
Fair enough, that’s true. However the Sunday morning service is not the most important thing in church life. It forms a major part, but its importance is not paramount. It is on a par with the Sunday evening service (if any), small groups, children’s ministry and contact with the elderly during the rest of the week.
If the focus of a church becomes its Sunday morning service then the church will die. For Sunday morning services are not the purpose of God’s church. And any church that is not God’s will die.
When looking at all the events in the life of a church, the church meeting is by far the most important. For the church meeting is the forum in which decisions are made and conversations are held that affect every single other event. This is why it is so important that church meetings are focused on God and His will for the church – Sunday morning services can get away with focusing on God for most of it, but rarely do the services on Sundays focus entirely on God throughout. If they did, they’d be pretty heavy spiritually and as the service serves very often as an outreach opportunity, this isn’t wise. Yet the church meeting on the other hand is incredibly spiritually deep – every second is drenched with God and His presence (or it should be, I’m not getting in to that).
Back to the issue of the fairly poor attendance. I feel for many people that the church meeting is something quite optional – something that carries equal weight to watching a film, going to bed early etc. etc. I’m not suggesting that we force people to go to meetings…but the people that make up a church need to realise that the church should be their priority. The church is the bride of Christ – if we put the church first in our lives, we are well on the way to putting Christ first in our lives too. Of all the ‘things’ that people do – work, school, clubs, social stuff – for a Christian, the church is the most important of all. The way we spend our time reflects the desires of our hearts…those who truly seek after God will show this in how they spend their time.
Therefore, if the church meeting is the most important event in the life of a church, and church is the most important thing in the lives of its members, then everyone would be there, without a doubt (excluding those who can’t make it due to illness/looking after children etc.). The fact that hardly anyone – the same small group of people time and time again – turns up to church meetings shows clearly that the essence of church has been somewhat lost. And it’s a huge loss – we need to find it again!
The paramount importance of church has been iced over by so many other things. Often we hear the concept that a Christian doesn’t have to go to church to be a Christian. Rubbish. We need to get out of our consumer-based society and our culture of entitlement and get back to where God wants us to be – serving His church and therefore His world.
I said in a previous post that the church is the hope of the world. The church is God’s plan A, and He doesn’t have a plan B. Come on, church, sort it out! Otherwise we’re all going to end up looking like massive tools to the rest of the world…and that’s genuinely useless.
