Playing Church

I find myself reading a lot in preparation for messages at my church. This week, after going to lunch with my wife on Monday, I stopped at the local Christian bookstore and saw a book that caught my eye. On Sunday I am on message 5 of a 7 message series on the Great Commission. This week is called, "Disciples are Glocal Trekkers." When I shared the word "glocal" with the worship design team, they all laughed! But at the bookstore, I found a book by Bob Roberts, Jr, called "Glocalization: How followers of Jesus engage a flat world." I highly recommend the book.

In it Bob writes...something I have been saying for a while..."Until our faith engages the whole of society, we will not see transformation. Until our understanding of the kingdom of God moves beyond the gospel of individual conversation, we will keep it all inside churches. Until our vision is expanded beyond what makes me feel good and successful to what brings the most glory to God, we'll just be piddling around playing church and being religious, all the while missing what God has called us to do."

The older I get the more impatient I am with the way we do church! The impact we are having on the world is minimal at best and often negative. That's because our focus is wrong. We see what we are doing as building a church. When we need to be building the kingdom of God by building lives... helping people find the transformation God offers and living it 24.7.365. That's one of the reasons that the idea of a modern well is so exciting to me. It is a shift. A new twist on an OLD way to bring the kingdom of heaven to earth!

I'm tired of playing church! Bored with playing church! I want to give the rest of my life to seeing God's kingdom become a reality in the world! And in some ways it is easier now than ever before... the world really is flat. Technology has made it so!