Let's face it, we are...
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Let's face it, we are generally more interested in what God can do for us rather than what we can do for God. Perhaps our greatest fear in surrendering to God is that we might be called to an African wilderness as missionaries. Few of us would leave tomorrow with only a toothbrush and a comb. The thought of being missionaries just doesn't dovetail with our pursuit of the American Dream. The United States is a fertile mission field. Yet, in summer 1997 at a Denver clergy leadership conference, participants were informed that church attendance nationally was at a forty-year low. Why is it that 80 to 85 percent of American churches have plateaued or are in decline? Maybe it's because we've substituted that little word "GO" in Luke 10:3 with the dysfunctional term "GET." Mission churches focus on where they can GO. Maintenance churches focus on who they can GET. Just listen to a typical maintenance church's ambiguous committee decisions, "Why aren't people coming to Sunday school? What can we do to GET some young families in here?" The logical result is that our mission degenerates into strained, artificial attempts to advance God's Kingdom. Take, for example, this 1995 account of a frustrated Florida waitress who wrote into the local paper at wit's end about pious tippers. "Being a waitress, I notice the worst tippers are people who come in after church on Sundays. And I'm getting sick of them leaving those little religious tracts." Christ never commanded the world to go to church, but everywhere in the New Testament he mandates the church to GO into the world. When disciples did that, they "returned with joy." -- Webster
