Column: If church is a business, business is good

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We Americans live in a day and age where there is an abundance of Christian resources available … more variations of Christian music, more Christian books, more versions of the Bible and more tools to examine Scripture than any other time in history. Not just the ideal time, but the ideal geographic location. In North America, we have more resources available and the disposable income to get them.

If information about Christianity is our goal, we live in the best time and place to get it.

The business of church is good! We are selling more books than before, pumping out more music than ever before and now with Christian higher education online, we are educating more and more of those who wouldn’t have been able to get a Christian degree before.

The problem is Church isn’t a business, it’s a social and spiritual transformation movement.

The church is about people, not products. Let me be very clear: People are not products!  We can simultaneously sell lots of Christian stuff and yet lose social influence in a community. Somehow we forget that the purpose of that which we produce is supposed to be for the people, not the other way around. People want to be given love and hope, not sold a product. The church has lost social influence by almost all statistics. I believe the church will continue to lose influence unless it does three things.

1. We must get back to our roots. When the church in Acts was formed, it wasn’t about making money; it was about being the hands and feet of Jesus. It must be our mission to take care of the poor, orphans, widows and demonstrate love to our communities, all while unapologetically proclaiming Jesus as the reason for this.

 2. We must stop looking at our own numbers and instead focus on cultural statistics. I get it. I am leading a growing church! It’s easy to get excited about the numerical growth in our churches all while the number of Christians in our communities is going down. We need to count the right stats. We shouldn’t just focus on what is happening inside our doors, we need to pay attention to what’s happening around us, too.

3. Last and most important, our deepest hope and greatest satisfaction must be in Jesus.


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