Ya Know What Really Grinds My Gears?!

So I saw a post on Facebook this morning that I thought was really good from my buddy Mark Corcoran. This was it: "Ive seen a world where churchs are more like sports teams, each one only taking care of its own members, competing against the other churches, unwilling to help each other, unwilling to love each other, and everyone loses. That is not the church of the bible. The church is Christs body, it is the entire body of believers, it is meant for good works and love, and only Jesus is the head."

Now if you think about it, this is so true. So often we as churches turn the work of Christ into a competition. We spend time looking at what other churches are doing not to get ideas for how we can more affectively spread the Kingdom of God, but so we can compete with them to get people from other churches into our churches. It seems really silly to me that we're all supposed to be brothers and sisters, but we're fighting with our brothers and sisters over where they choose to worship. Shouldn't we just be rejoicing in the fact that they ARE our brothers and sisters? Maybe it's this inner-quarreling that James was talking about when he said in his book, chapter 4 "What causes quarrels and fights among you? Do they not come from inside?"

It's this kind of inner-fighting within the Body of Christ that makes it so hard for people outside the Body of Christ to believe that we really are a faith based on love. How can we say our whole belief-system hinges on love, but then show so much hate towards our own family?

Maybe we should spend less time in our churches figuring out how to steal members from other churches, and focus more on just reaching as many people as we can with love and service toward them. Might not be a great business plan for churches, but it's the only Plan for followers of Christ.

okay I'll get off my soapbox now and figure out how to get more kids in my youth group...