Day 10

Is the church moving from being God centered to becoming need-centered and human-centered?

“...I know your deeds; you have a reputation for being alive, but you are dead. Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die...”   —REVELATION 3:1–2

Churches that have been around for a long time are often considered to be ‘mature’, and while that may be true chronologically, it may not be true spiritually. Such a church may have been exposed to subtle dangers which incrementally creep up without realizing it. Like the church in Sardis, it may have a reputation for being alive, yet not know that it is in the throes of death.

When you read through the letters of Paul to established churches, and the letters of Jesus to the seven churches of Asia in the book of Revelation, you find they have easily become riddled with dangers, seductions, inaccurate teachings and wrong behavior again and again. The sign to look for in this is whether or not the church is moving from an outward looking disposition to becoming inward looking. Is the church moving from being God centered to becoming need-centered and human-centered?

There is the danger of moving from being a ‘living organism’ to a well-managed organization. A church like this can display symptoms of being alive, especially if you associate life with activity and buzz, but it may actually be dead, because it has ceased to be a living organism with the life of Jesus Christ flowing through it.

We can move from being Spirit-dependent to being self-sufficient, and thereby create fail-safe structures and resources that enable us to keep up with our programs whether God is in business or not. We can move our thinking from ‘Biblical revelation’ to human reasoning with which we then interpret biblical revelation, giving our reason the right of veto over the inconvenient parts of Scripture that don’t fit into our style or culture.

All these temptations can drain us of spiritual life and replace it with outward form that may be impressive to some, but will, in due course, crumble under the hollowness of its internal spiritual life. But this is not new. To the churches in Corinth, Colossae, Galatia, Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Sardis, Laodicea and the rest, there was always hope, “Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die….” What is true of the church is only true when it is true of the individuals who make it up – you and me.