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Sterile churches

A quote from the book, Why Men hate Going To Church: “One New Year’s Eve I asked my pastor a very straight forward question: ‘How many adults came to faith in Christ at our church this year?’ The pastor, a very diplomatic man, said, ‘I am not sure. I’ll have to get back to you on that.’ But he…
By Seth Barnes

A quote from the book, Why Men hate Going To Church: “One New Year’s Eve I asked my pastor a very straight forward
question: ‘How many adults came to faith in Christ at our church this year?’
The pastor, a very diplomatic man, said, ‘I am not sure. I’ll have to get back
to you on that.’ But he and I knew the answer. It was zero.”

“I added it up. That year our
church conducted 104 regularly scheduled worship services, 7 special services,
some 250 adult classes, 600 committee meetings and 1,000 small-group meetings
and ran through a $750,000 budget to produce exactly zero new adult followers
of Jesus Christ. We gathered. We worshiped. We loved each other. But we
produced no crop. Our church was a contraption worthy of Rube Goldberg: lots of
sound, motion, fury to produce a tiny amount of fruit. . . How do we conceal
this scandalous lack of productivity? Some clever churches have simply changed
the definition of crop. Churches now judge success by the standards of a family
reunion. How many people came and did everyone get along?”

The challenge to all of us is, “Are we listening to Him, and when He
speaks are we obeying?”

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