Becoming a Church with Velocity Part 3

I think churches fall into one of two camps: Surviving or Thriving. A thriving church has the life blood of Jesus Christ in it. A thriving church is passionate about the things that are on the heart of God. The heart of Jesus is to seek and to save the lost and when the church’s heart is not beating with the heartbeat of Christ then you might as well hook it up to life support. A surviving church is just trying to keep the doors of the church open.

I’ve grown up going to church and most of the churches I have been in you could label as “surviving churches”. There was not much passion, nobody ever got healed, not many were getting saved, nothing ever really happened there. Most of the time the folks were just playing church. You had to be perfect or pretend to be perfect to fit in with all of the other people who were just playing church.

Here are some qualities of a surviving church.

1. The surviving church: strives to keep the members happy. I’ve heard Perry Noble (pastor of NewSpring Church) say, “We lose steeple people all the time” People will tell him, “In my former church we did this or that” He’d say, “Well maybe you need to go back to your former church.” He also said that he hears people talking about closing the backdoor of the church. He said, “We don’t need to close the backdoor of the church. The church is the body of Christ you go closing the back door of the body… Some churches are spiritually constipated.”

You reach the unsaved and you’ll offend the Pharisees. You do church “not as usual” and the religious folks will get bent out of shape. Trying to please everyone will divert the true focus of the local church.

2. The surviving church: avoids controversial issues. If you want to sap the life out of the church avoid certain topics found in the Bible, don’t talk about sin, don’t challenge people, play the politics game…

3. The surviving church: remains cautious. In the surviving church you hear their rally cry, “We’ve never done it that way before.” “Let’s not stretch our faith. Let’s just survive. Let’s just make sure the doors stay open.”

God never intended His church just to survive. God calls us to be a thriving church. Jesus said I have overcome the world and He gave us His Spirit. Too often we act like we are just trying to survive this world and we forget that we are more than conquerors through Jesus Christ.