No Business Like Church Business

OK... now I'm probably going to irritate some folks.

Here's my take on an old song, "There's no business like church business..."

Let's get real for a second. Search your heart and answer thefollowing question, "What is the main concern for most churches?" OK... Here is the answer (IMHO): survival.

We seem to assume that the items high on God's eternal "to-do" list go a little something like this:

#1... Rescue the First Church of Bluffington... (they're my favorites... what would I do without them?)
#2... Love my Creation (even the humans),
#3... Offer salvation to each and every person on earth.

And, to survive we need to keep our focus squarely on the business of church. We need revenue for the upkeep of our physical plant (church building),
for upper management salaries (pastoral staff/ CE Director/ etc.) and for marketing (the Sunday Service aka the Sunday Matinee, clever outreach, etc.). In the end, we will hopefully have sufficient numbers of "giving units" secured that we will be able to... let's see... love more people and offer the Savior to them? In your dreams... but not in the day light. No, our hope is to be able to have a bigger building, a larger staff and a more "attractive" show.

Sadly, it seems, God's actual concerns (#s 2 and 3 above) get over shadowed. Afterall, we don't want to do anything that might jeopardize our prime objective... which is survival. And loving people and serving them and respectfully and graciously offering them the salvation of the Savior is... well, it is messy... and risky... and may in fact jeopardize our very survival (just take a look at the book of Acts).

May the Father enable us to make the structures and processes that we use in our churches servants of God and of people... and not God and people servants of those same structures and processes.

Barnabas