Let’s Not Go To Church – Just For A Change. God and Religion Don't Mix by Adam Harbinson

Isn't it true that most of us have an inbuilt resistance to change? And the reason is that we tend to be comfortable with the predictable, we fear the unknown, better the devil you know than the one you don't.

However, the absolute need for change in our lives was impressed on me recently. The speaker's text was 2Cor. 3:18, ' And the Lord.makes us more and more like (Jesus) as we are changed into his glorious image.' Think about that one for a minute as we look at ourselves and ask, how much do I have to change to be like Jesus?

Growth means change, change means pain - and that's another thing we don't like about change, it involves pain. Pain, because we have to leave behind the things with which we are familiar and move into uncharted waters. Pain because we don't know what lies around the next corner. Pain because we tend to believe, wrongly in my view, that God is more inclined to ask us to do something we don't want to do than something we'd find thrilling. And so we assume the position; why can't we just keep on doing what we've always done?

One of my favourite people was Rev Howard Lewis. We had lunch together for the last time just a couple of months before he died. Howard was a founder of the men's annual event in Belfast ; Mandate, a hugely successful Christian conference with delegates coming from Holland , South Africa and even Australia . What Howard said to me was shocking in a way. He said that if Mandate, however enjoyable and uplifting, produced a generation of men who keep coming back for their annual spiritual 'fix', he'd consider it a failure and would wind it up on the spot.

Church should be a place that people go from; it's not primarily a place they go to. But does it? The Bible never talks about the man in the pulpit as the minister. His job is to equip those in his congregation to be ministers, to provoke them to change so they can go out and better serve the un-churched and the de-churched, (Eph. 4:11-13).

You could say that if the minister does his job properly his church would be empty, or at least there'd be a new batch of people every few months! Everybody would be 'out there' putting into practice what he has taught them, but instead they keep coming back, and the system fails because nobody wants to change.

' I wonder what would happen in the life of the average congregation if for just one month they entirely reorganised their programmes and activities with a view to winning people to Christ and reaching those who were outside the faith? So much of our Christian enterprise, 'even in evangelism, is geared to getting people on to the premises. But what would happen if we went to where they are and engaged with them? It would certainly mean a major reorientation of all we do at present. But it would also mean taking risks for the Gospel's sake.'

What an example, which if we were to follow, we'd see church buildings closing down faster than they could be turned into pubs or carpet warehouses, but for a whole different reason.