THE CHURCH OF CHRIST

UNLIKE ANY OTHER RELIGION ON EARTH

By Carl O. Cooper

            We live in an age when men have decided that it is not good for the church of Christ to be different and unlike all the other “Christian” religions of the world. They have reasoned that it is hard for the church to attract visitors from the surrounding communities if they perceive us as being different from the preconceived and politically correct picture of religion that they have fixed in their minds. Some men in the church have decided that if we display ourselves in the same way we have always done in the past that we will not blend in to the modern and various cultures that have developed around us. The church of Christ, as it has always existed in the past, is very hard to “sell” to the general public and if we have any hope of reaching the people of today then we will have to change the image of the church to fit what the modern cultures want in their religion. And some people would even go so far as to say that the church was designed by God to be an ever changing, bubbling, churning, evolving , and stretching wineskin that is designed to change and evolve with the customs of the times and be whatever modern people want it to be. But none of this is true.

            The church was designed by God. It was created by God, it belongs to God, and it cannot be changed, except by God. There is a pattern and a design that originated and was created within the mind of God. It takes authority to change any of this, and that authority rests with God and not with man.

            Nevertheless, there is a mindset and world view among a certain segment of the population that views authority as “relative”. This person tends to see the design of the church as relative to something that they see as far more important than pattern and design. And that “something” is the number of members in the congregation where they attend. When this person compares within their own mind the value and importance of the number of people in attendance with the importance of design and pattern, then design and pattern are unimportant. In this person’s thinking, design and pattern actually become a hindrance to church growth. They see design and pattern as being restrictive to what they consider to be “evangelism”. Evangelism in many cases is defined as “having visitors visit the worship services”. The fallacy of this line of thinking is that once you become committed to creating a “visitor friendly” atmosphere in the worship service, then design, pattern, and doctrine become “off limits” in the teaching and preaching done in the presence of visitors for the fear of offending them. In place of this type of teaching, a new message has evolved. It is a message of hope and comfort and cheer that is designed to seek out and address those areas within people’s lives where they struggle and feel they need help and to give them soft words and emotional uplifts to help them in their daily walks of life. A preacher who can do this with emotional stories and humor and personal antidotes can create an atmosphere that draws a crowd. If he is within a church that is committed to creating a “visitor friendly” environment at the expense of “pattern, design, and doctrine”, then this “new form” of evangelism takes place. The result of this “new evangelism” is a church that grows in numbers and at the same time becomes more and more weakened in knowledge of design, pattern, and doctrine. Eventually there will be enough members with a “relative” mindset that the church no longer resembles the church as it started out. It evolves with the culture and changes to something else. It is no longer true to the design and without any desire to continue with the pattern of the original church.

            The devil has seized an opportunity to do the church great harm by taking advantage of a group of people’s desire to do good. Almost everyone feels the need and desire to “evangelize” the world. This is right and good. The Bible instructs us to evangelize the world. The problem comes about in how we attempt to carry out this command. We know that the Bible tells us that the power of God is in “the Gospel”, the word of God. We must never lose sight of this fact. The word of God, the Gospel, is our sword and our power to evangelize the world.

            There is a new line of thinking among the generation alive today. To some, this old method of evangelism has failed. To them, when they look at the numbers in a church and consider them low, they are ashamed. They are ashamed of what they consider as a failure on the part of the church to “evangelize”. They have come to judge the value of their congregation in terms of the number of people present. This mindset is where the devil seizes the opportunity to do the church great harm. When a person becomes ashamed of the numbers in the church and sees the church as a failure, there is a strong desire to build the numbers to a higher level. Building the numbers to a higher level is a desire to do good. But this is a great problem when it comes with the feeling that the church is a failure because the numbers are low. This feeling produces that strong desire to increase the numbers “at any cost”. The first step to this is to design a way to “sell the church” that really works. Herein lays a major problem with this method of evangelizing. If you know anything about selling, you know that people only buy what they want. How then can we repackage the church to make more people “want to buy”? Well, first we need to poll them and find out what they want. Once we discover what they want, then let’s repackage the church and give them what they want. And I can tell you this, they do not want to be told that they are lost and in sin. They do not want to be told that their lifestyle is sinful. They do not want to be told that their past religions are not approved by God. And they do not want to hear restrictive and uncompromising doctrines. What they do want is a message of hope and comfort and cheer that is designed to seek out and address those areas within people’s lives where they struggle and feel they need help and to give them soft words and emotional uplifts to help them in their daily walks of life. A person who is ashamed of the number of people in the church and sees the church as a failure because of a failure to grow has no problem creating a “visitor friendly” atmosphere and giving these people what they want in an effort to grow.

            Now when this mindset captures and controls a local congregation, and the people of this view of the church are the people in charge, what makes it different from the denominational religions of the world around us? In reality, there is very little difference.

Carl O. Cooper