What If Church Was Hard?

I had a friend who once told me that he had two churches - his regular church and his summer church. When he saw the puzzled look on my face, he explained that his regular church did not have air conditioning, so when it started getting hot in the summer, he attended a church that did.

Comfort and convenience is very important to us. And it seems like we work hard at making our churches comfortable and convenient. Long gone are the days of wooden pews. Now we have deep padded pews or, even better, chairs in climate controlled buildings with central heat and air conditioning. We provide treats and have espresso bars with all your favorite flavors. We limit the length of our services so they don’t go to long and make sure they begin and end at convenient times. We upgrade the microphones, the amps, the speakers, the mixing board, the instruments, and the acoustics so the music will be at its best. We even project the words on a screen so you don’t have to fumble around with a clumsy book. Even with that we are always looking for more - a upgraded kitchen, an expanded fellowship hall, an improved parking lot, newer carpet, more entertaining multi-media, and a service that ends before the Seahawks begin. And that is just what we do for Sundays.

But is it working?

Church attendance in America is on the decline. And the most common response is to try to figure out new ways to draw people in by appealing to their interests and their comforts and to make things even more convenient. We try to draw in men by starting small groups around cars, and hunting, and sports, and “manly” things. Women start knitting groups, and coffee clubs, and have shopping sprees. And these are often the “hooks” to draw “unbelievers” in to show them transformed lives through Christ...

What if we stopped worrying about the interests of the world? What if we stopped worrying about comfort and convenience? What if we stooped trying to cater to the wants and desires of attenders and potential attenders?

What if church was hard?

What if we had no chairs or pews? What if we didn’t care about acoustics? What if provided paper cups for water and forgot about treats and coffee? What if we let the pastor preach as long as he felt he needed to? What if we opened doors and windows in the summer and started services early in the morning to avoid the heat of the day? What if we minimized our heat and wore coats and brought blankets? What if we didn’t have a big enough parking lot and people had to walk a block or two or a mile or two to get to church? What if we didn’t have a kitchen? Or a fellowship hall? Or carpet? Or a computer and projector? I wonder if we could still manage to worship? I wonder if people would come?

There is a strange phenomenon that where the church is most severely persecuted, it tends to grow. Sometimes growth is explosive when persecution is at its worst. And the most stagnant of churches are often those who have it best. We have seen it repeated time and time again, and yet... We strive for comfort. We strive for convenience. We strive for the same things the rest of the world strives for and then we wonder why God does not seem alive to our attenders.

What if we had no conveniences to offer, but all we offered was the gospel - the real gospel. The gospel that says not to love the things of the world. The gospel that says to love your enemy. The gospel that says you will be persecuted for your faith. The gospel that says to give away your money. The gospel that says to care for the poor, the orphaned and the widowed. The gospel that says to lay down your life for your brother. The gospel that says that there is nothing on this earth worth anything apart from Jesus Christ. The gospel that says Jesus Christ gave his life for ours and asks us to give our life to him in return.

What if that was all we had to offer? Would people still come? Would you still come?