You call yourself a church?

there’s a big church up in indiana that i receive a lot of encouragement from.  i’ve read some books by pastors on their staff and i usually keep up with them weekly on one of their staff member’s blogs.  i think if i ever worked in a big church again, i think i might be able to fit in a church like this one (might is the operative word…)

recently, they paid a big firm to conduct a survey among the thousands that attend their weekly gatherings.  the survey findings were interesting…the leadership response to those findings was even more interesting.

they found that 57% of those attending did not believe in the authority of the bible…56% do not believe that jesus is the only way to eternal life…47% do not believe in salvation by grace.  wow.  thousands attending a church that don’t believe in the most basic tenets of christian faith.  and they call themselves a church!  mmmm…

here’s an observation by one of their staff members:

But I can think of some worse statistics. I would much rather be in a church where 57% don’t believe in the Bible than in a church where 100% of those attending do believe in the Bible. That would be awful!Imagine a church that was completely filled with those already convinced…where no one invited an unchurched friend…where the Christians had grown stagnant in their pursuit of knowledge and stopped putting the gospel into practice…where the church had made Jesus so unattractive that no one on a search for purpose or meaning would consider coming. If I found myself in such a church, I would be weeping.We’ve believed and taught for years that a crowd is not a church. At Granger, we build a weekend experience to draw the biggest crowd possible, because we believe that if more people hear the gospel, more people will respond.I will cringe if the day ever comes when only the church gathers on the weekend…or when the supposed mature Christians stop inviting their friends to hear the good news…or when we have a church filled with people who ace their theology exam but flunk their practice-ology test.

are we passing or failing?

are you “ace”-ing or flunking?

i hate it when the truth hurts…

#church #theology