WHY CHURCH COMPETITION IS LOSING THE GAME

We churches have great work to do.  A blanket of darkness hovers over a large percentage of our people.  A great misleading concept that began in the Bible days of the church continues its aggressive march through ours and foreign lands.  This movement is slick, powerful, and deadly.  I speak of church competition as to which is biggest, better, and most right.

It doesn't matter the brand that any of us claim.  There remains a hole empty of hope in the hearts of friends, neighbors, and even enemies while churches and their people dot earth's landscape.  The community populace is in big trouble and our voices just must make some adjustments ourselves in order to be heard.

Devastating pride and arrogance rules many Christian hearts.  It did mine for years and I have no idea how strongly it remains.  Nonetheless, such framework opposes the very gentle and generous nature of Jesus.  It is in our discrepancy we can also find His solution.  For the most part, we churchies have become more addicted to promoting our name brand than we are in advancing the name; Jesus.  We can talk church here and there; yet to discuss Jesus seems to find we have some sort of mute button.

My concern is spoken in a spirit of tenderness and care; but I can tell you that as a preacher I thought my calling for years was to promote the Church of Christ (my preferred brand) which was to carry a message of dos and don'ts, rights and wrongs, blacks and whites, without our people ever having confidence in the One whose righteousness trumps ours.  This is tragedy as well as neglect of Scriptures.

The good news is that Jesus is becoming the greater Light among us as we wade from our own hangups all the while striving to learn at his feet.  As it turns out we can only convert others when we have been converted ourselves to a style far beyond our own imaginations.  The entire birth-through-death experience of Jesus is based upon an exact threat to man's spiritual enterprise.  Knowing him is a challenge.

Jesus is different than any leader anywhere at any time including the church one.  He changed the rules of knowing God so dramatically that opponents tried to kill him; not just in the garden, but at his birth.  Opponents went nuts destroying newborn males in the hunt for the biggest Threat to man's religion....ever!

Therefore I wish to speak in tenderness from the seat of extreme personal guilt.  If we don't do more of Jesus and less of our church is right, we will continue to groom a people who go to church; but do not pray, do not search the scriptures in honesty, and fearfully hope that they are saved when at death's door....but aren't really confident.  This is religion in regulation; but it is not life.

Jesus came that we might have life and have it abundantly.  This we shall experience in greater measure when we quit trying to out-debate others church doctrines and humbly submit to the One who died on the Cross because we were so very lost ourselves.

People want to know God more than why we are right and others got the church stuff wrong.  This does not mean that there are not vastly important truths to be known as well as followed.  But it does say that standing for Truth while being silent about the one named Jesus is the poorest of doctrines.

May we win the world by presenting the Winner rather than what we perceive to be winning arguments.