How Can I Put This Nicely?

If you are easily offended, please stop reading NOW! Seriously, I don’t want to have to field a bunch of complaints about my language being unacceptable. So stop now or keep your complaints to yourself.

I have been struggling with this week’s sermon. It is about the importance of participation in a Life Group. I am trying to find a nice way of saying something that I believe is very important. I am trying to communicate and finding our so called sensitivities getting in the way. Here is my dilemma. I don’t want to say something so offensive in my sermon that people get stuck on the word or words I have used and miss the point I am making. So I have been searching to find another way to phrase something that I believe is a great insight. In rephrasing the idea, I am afraid that the strength of what I am saying is going to be greatly weakened. Anyway…

Life Groups, I am talking about Life Groups. It is one of the core values of the church I am a part of that everyone should be in a Life Group. Like many things, we believe that but don’t necessarily do that. We call it a Life Group on purpose. It is not a Bible Study Group. It is not a fellowship group. It is not a prayer group. It is not an evangelism team. It is not a mission team. It is all of those things. It is a miniature church. We say and we believe, “If you are not in a Life Group you are not really a part of the church.”

It has been my experience that most churches are rather ineffective at producing disciples – fully functioning followers of Christ. It is not from lack of effort. In many ways it seems the thing that most retards the process is the idea that we can get this “Christian Thing” all done and accomplished in a couple of hours on Sunday morning. That is impossible.

Even if you are not a fan of Rick Warren (Pastor of Saddleback Community Church and author of The Purpose Driven Life) most people will admit that he is on to something when he says that a healthy church does five things well – Discipleship, Evangelism, Fellowship, Worship and Serving. Unfortunately there are lots of churches that don’t even consider doing all five of these things, much less working at doing them all well. Trying to get these important things done in 2 ½ hours on a Sunday morning is an impossibility. To think we do is the height of rationalization.

We listen to a short sermon and call it Discipleship. Later we complain that we are not being fed through the sermons. That is laughable. Of course you’re not. Over a cup of coffee we greet each other and call that Fellowship. We sing a few songs (but only if we like them and they use the correct instruments) and call it Worship. Occasionally we invite someone from another church to attend ours and call that Evangelism. If we really want to go overboard we volunteer to hand out bulletins and call that Serving. And then we wonder why others aren’t attracted to the faith and why our own faith has so little impact on our own lives.

How we measure the success of our Sunday morning experience is if it made us feel good. Normally that good feeling is rather short lived. No one is really helped. No real connection is made with another human being. We continue the fantasy that we have a deep relationship with God because we had some kind of emotional experience on Sunday morning. Twenty minutes after it is over it slips away and ultimately fails to have a lasting impact on our lives. I believe the most honest definition of what has happened is Spiritual Masturbation. With fantasies in our heads we have participated in an activity that has served no one but ourselves and only served to make us feel better. Sounds like masturbation to me.

Somehow we have allowed a relatively meaningless, self-serving Sunday morning activity to take the place of a growing relationship with the Living God and a meaningful relationship with fellow members of the family of God. And we call this being a Christian. It is not only sad; it is misleading, confusing, and obscene.

We must re-think this whole deal we call Christianity. It is not an activity. It is not a club membership. It is a lifestyle; it is a way of life. Our faith, our relationship with God, needs to invade every area of our lives. Being a Christian speaks to how I spend my time, how I spend my money, what I do for a living, how I rear my children, how I treat my spouse, who I vote for and why I vote the way I do. Our attempts to live compartmentalized our lives in which our faith is separate from and has no effect on the rest of our lives is a farce.

Thus, I don’t think being a part of a Life Group is optional for a committed, growing Christian. If we can learn anything from the 1st Century Church; it is that the Christian life is not lived in a vacuum and it is not lived in solitude. We need each other. We need all the help and support we can get. And we need that help and support on a daily basis. We call that support a Life Group.

May I strongly suggest that instead of continuing to pleasure ourselves, we join a Life Group and get real about living a life with and for God?

Copyright © 2008, William T. McConnell, All Rights Reserved.