Fed Up With Church? Part 3

[Gary Petty] This is part three in our series, "Fed Up with Church." As I mentioned before, I'm going through a study of why people sort of get fed up with church, and it's not just young people. We usually think of younger people, millennials, and others, who are sort of disillusioned with church. I read something recently where the people older than them in their 30s and their 40s and even early 50s are getting fed up with their churches for an interesting reason. It seems their churches change their style, adding certain kinds of music and certain kinds of teaching to interest them when they were in their teens and their 20s. They're older now, and they find that, well, sort of shallow. They want something else. 

Everybody's looking for something else, and that has led a lot of people to believe that, "Well, my relationship with God is personal, and I don't need to go to church because I'm spiritual, not religious." Well, you know, all relationships with God is to be personal and all of us are to be spiritual. Now, what many people mean by religious is people who act religious, but they're really hypocrites. And that's wrong, but I don't have to go to church because I'm spiritual. There's a fundamental problem with that. When you look at the Scripture and you read through the New Testament, every place they went and preached the Gospel, they started congregations, people who assembled together and lived together as Christians interacting with each other. And it was messy. It was difficult. They had problems. They had to learn to get along with each other, and they all had sins and weird personalities sometimes. 

All the things we face today, you will find in the New Testament church, but they came together, and they didn't have the choices we have today. There wasn't a Christian church on every street corner. They were a small minority in the Roman Empire, many times persecuted. Just because you have problems in a church where you go, and maybe you need to change churches, but it doesn't mean that you should not attend with other Christians. We are expected to attend with each other. In fact, let's face it. God is creating a family. We are all his children and if the disciples of Jesus Christ, as his brothers and sisters, can't get along and we can't work it out, as hard as it is, that is very sad. What kind of example is that to the world?

That's BT Daily. Join us next time.