Temple Baptist Life

Too many people come to Church three times primarily. They’re Baptized, they get married, and they have their funeral service at the Church. The first time they throw water on you, the second time rice the third time dirt!

IS THE CHURCH ON THE ENDANGERED LIST? Many Americans are on a spiritual quest. This should be good news for the church. But, according to researchers, many of them are choosing noninstitutional forms of religion.

A recent poll by Gallup shows that weekly church attendance is holding steady at about 40 percent of the population - the same rate as in the 1950s.

But other researchers - like Dave T. Olson, director of TheAmericanChurch.org - claim only 17.7 percent of the population attends a church service any given weekend. Olson, who bases his numbers on annual church attendance reported by individual U.S. congregations, says, “People who only go to church now and again exaggerate how often they go.”

Albert Winseman, religion and social trends editor for the Gallup Organization, says people are shopping for alternatives to church and that is one-reason 3,000 local churches close their doors annually. “Most denominations are either declining or stagnant,” says Winseman.

The Assemblies of God is one of the few Christian groups to show steady growth in recent years. The Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches reports the Assemblies of God and Southern Baptists are the only Protestant faith groups of the largest 25 to report an increase in membership for 2004. An April Gallup poll indicated 65 percent of Pentecostals attend church weekly, second only to Church of Christ (at 68 percent) among Protestant groups.

VANISHING PROTESTANT MAJORITY Half a century ago, two-thirds of the population considered themselves Protestants. Officially, for the first time last year, self-identified Protestants dipped below half of all Americans, according to Gallup research. Evangelical and Pentecostal church attendance looks stable, but membership isn’t keeping pace with population growth.

Olson says although the same number of people are attending church as 15 years ago, there are an additional 48 million people living in the country. But people are not necessarily flocking to other faiths. J. Gordon Melton, author of the Encyclopedia of American Religions, says tabulating all the Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews and New Agers accounts for only 7 percent of Americans. Self-professing atheists comprise another 10 percent of the population. “In the culture today we don’t have the churchgoing momentum we did in the 1950s, when ’respectable people’ attended church every week,” says Earl Creps, director of the Doctor of Ministry Program at Assemblies of God Theological Seminary in Springfield, Missouri. “There’s no guarantee anymore that people are going to come to church.”

Although only 17 to 40 percent of Americans attend church regularly, about 80 percent of the population professes Christianity. Pollster George Barna, who last year wrote the book “Revolution: Finding Vibrant Faith Beyond the Walls of the Sanctuary,” believes a transformational shift is occurring in how Christians view church. He claims more than 20 million committed yet disaffected “revolutionaries” have struck out on their own to form house churches, family faith communities and cyber churches.

WHAT CHURCH OFFERS Creps, author of “Off-Road Disciples,” believes these “revolutionaries” are forfeiting a great deal by not being involved in a local church. “A great church offers relational connections, people modeling how to live faith, accountability, the enormous power of a group worship experience and the operation of the gifts of the Spirit,” he says. Theologian J.I. Packer says the reality of corporate church life pervaded first-century Christianity and should today as well. “Individuality is not correct, according to biblical standards,” says Packer, author of “Knowing God.” “The church is central in God’s plan. God uses the church to set up His kingdom - the corporate relational reality where people respond to Christ as King. We can’t dismiss the structure God has established.”

Many observers believe house churches and cyber church movements are short-lived trends that will never amount to more than 5 percent of Christians. Melton says such methods don’t represent a new phenomenon. “For decades people have been saying they can be a good Christian and never go to church,” he says. Gallup sees a strong link between individual spiritual commitment and church attendance by measuring factors such as prayer, Bible study and small group involvement. “People can say they are a spiritually committed person without attending church, but it happens only 5 percent of the time,”

Creps says merely getting people into the sanctuary isn’t the goal. “The issue really is the need for every person to come to God through His Son Jesus Christ. That involves a connection with a community of Christians - which we call church.” “The church is God’s primary vehicle for the proclamation of the gospel,” Winseman says. “The abundant life is found most abundantly in the community of the local church.” –John W. Kennedy,

Much of this article has come from Today’s Pentecostal Evangel. This article reveals the current condition of the church and some new trends in Christianity but for the church to be the Acts New Testament church we need to continue to explore and discover from acts what the church looks like and what the church does.

We must remember that the church is the people and not a building. What is the church? The best way to kill a church is to squeeze it into a building. For without contact with people in need and publicly witnessing faith and trust in Jesus, a church will quietly die. In the Bible, the Church is the only organization that is ordained to reach the world. I believe that every Christian organization that is reaching out to the world, must come under the authority and blessing of the church. God blesses the church and the church is commissioned to reach the world.

Is church important? YES IT IS. Without church there would be no ministry, no music, or no moving of the hand of God. Sometimes the church gets so far from what the New Testament teaches it should be. The church should just step back and let God work. The church is people and life and ministry. That is what Jesus was about and that is what we should be about. I thank God for the church!

I was asked what is the best scripture that describes the church? I think it is Romans 12:1-8:

1 I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. 2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. 3 For I say, through the grace given to me, to everyone who is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly, as God has dealt to each one a measure of faith. 4 For as we have many members in one body, but all the members do not have the same function, 5 so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another. 6 Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, let us prophesy in proportion to our faith; 7 or ministry, let us use it in our ministering; he who teaches, in teaching; 8 he who exhorts, in exhortation; he who gives, with liberality; he who leads, with diligence; he who shows mercy, with cheerfulness.

To me that is church. I am proud to be a part of the local church that meets at Temple Baptist in Salida, Colorado. The old man says don’t attend church, the new man says let’s go! Don’t return to the old ways.

If you took all the people who attended church each Sunday and laid them end to end . . . . . .they’d be much more comfortable:-)