Life Goes On

Even writing this post is convicting to me. My passion for seeing people born into the kingdom of God is at best intermittent. As I look around in my city and county, I can't find a church that demonstrates a real passion for seeing the lost come to Christ. Most of the churches are content to hold on to what they've got, or grow by "swapping sheep" with other churches and hope they can get some two-for-one deals along the way. This week I led a conference session on "Sharing Your Faith" for a group of Sr. Adults. Amazingly, fifty people showed up and packed a room designed for about half that many. (even in our planning we don't expect people to be interested in learning how to share their faith) As we discussed how to tell our salvation stories, how to share the gospel using only one verse of scripture (John 3:16), and how to use the "Bridge to Life" illustration, there was a genuine sense of excitement in the room. Of course the "...

Over the Easter weekend and in the week following I have observed an interesting phenomenon among churches. Many of the newer church plants (w/in last 10 years) were extremely intentional about getting un-churched people into their Easter services while the older, more established churches seemed to rely on a "they know where we are" approach. The end result was that most of the "intentional" churches recorded large numbers of guests and, more importantly, recorded many professions of faith. I love my church. I love the pastor, the staff and the people. However, on Easter we only had a slight attendance "bump" and no decisions for Christ. We really didn't plan for any increase in attendance, we did very little in the way of promotion, there was little different about the service except for a couple of extra musical numbers. The pastor preached a solid evangelistic message to a group of people who largely thought of themselves as already being bel...