Jesus and the Church

I have heard quite a few times that the people loved Jesus, but hate the church. If only we were like Jesus the people would flock to the church as they flocked to Jesus. But this is false.

First people did not embrace Jesus completely. Though he fed 5,000, at the very end of his ministry he appears to only 500. The people asked for him to be crucified! Far more rejected him than embraced him to the point that their rejection of him lead to a change in mission.

Second, of those who followed him at one time, many followed him for wrong reasons. He rebukes the crowd (John 6:26) saying they followed him for the wrong reason: they got their fill of bread. He does not encourage false belief, but confronts them with the truth. He tells them that he is the bread of life. He uses this analogy despite the fact that it offends them. It seems that throughout his ministry he drove far more people from him than to him for he would not have people follow him outside of the truth.

How too often do we think the church must bend over backwards to avoid offending and be seeker friendly? Yes we should try to be all things to all men like Paul did, but no compromise on the truth in the process. John 3 tells why people reject Christ, not because they are too smart and God doesn't make sense, not because the gospel was not presented in a perfect, but because their deeds were evil. (John 3:19)

I think it is false and dangerous for the church to blame itself for those that reject Christ. I know what you are talking about, that belief that if there is perfect presentation people will always accept Christ. The burden then is not to proclaim the gospel, but to proclaim it perfectly for every rejection is our fault and not the fault of the rejecter.

The scripture obviously rejects this claim. Christ was rejected to the point of death and he told us we should expect the same. Second, it can lead to burn out or despair. We ask ourselves: what are we doing that is causing them to reject God? Third, it leads to the temptation to change things that ought not be changed. We seek to be seeker friendly and go out of our way to not offend. But the gospel is offensive! We are sinners! We cannot save ourselves! We must start here in a humble recognition of our depravity before we can accept Christ's saving act of grace. But this offensive and too often we bypass it. But in losing this we lose an essential aspect of the Bible. Finally we change things that we need not. We chase after relevance and in doing so become irrelevant. If the church embraces the fashions of the world will it not be discarded as fashions change? The church must begin with timeless truths. That, and not contemporary music or casual dress, is the key to its relevance. It is not wrong to seek to make the church adapted to one's culture, but this should occur naturally and not be the focus. For when we put things of secondary importance above the things that should be first, we lose them both.

So oddly enough by worry is not so much the emptying pews, but the filled mega-churches. It is good that men hear the gospel, but are they hearing it? Christ, Paul, Peter: all of them died because they said things people didn't want to hear. I worry not when the world rejects the church, but when it embraces it. Christ said the world would reject us, for we are not of this world. When we are embraced I think we must soberly ask what we doing differently to provoke this change. We must not sacrifice the truth for numbers.