CHURCH DECAY - I'm so mad I could spit!

For years I've been warning my congregation that we (the church) are failing the lost, that we've become like those Amos said are "at rest in Zion," and that we get our greatest strength from God at our weakest moments; and I preach these admonitions expositionally from the word, praying that lives might change.

So you'll understand if I get a little upset when people suggest I've not been doing my job.

The latest issue of Baptist Press just arrived via e-mail, here's the great news my denomination's leaders think I need to hear ...

• Christians ‘have failed’ those ‘outside the church,’ Welch says
• Church lamented as ‘asleep’ in an era likened to the Dark Ages, Smith says
• Ministers must find God’s strength in their weakness, Begg says
• Recovery of preaching will show 'power of God,' Mohler says
• Sermons should aim for changed lives, York says

All five of these articles are well-written and well-meaning; and they're all in one issue. What are we supposed to think, it's all our fault?

With around 40,000 Southern Baptist churches and 16,000,000 supposed members, you'd think they'd pick on someone other than the foremen in the Lord's vineyard.

Dang guys, thousands of your pastors have been busting their buns doing these very things ... just who is it you're talking to?

While you've been off giving interviews, doing conferences, taking cruises, managing your mega-barns, writing books and curriculum (designed for mega-barns), giving speeches, promoting your new Twelve Steps to Church Growth program, talking to state papers and the Baptist Press, giving lectures at one or another of our seminaries, and sucking the talent poor, worker poor, dinero poor, and just plain poor churches dry, your small church and bivocational pastors have been killing themselves serving the Lord the best they can.

I'm so sick of Christian shakers and movers finding fault with everyone but themselves and the people in the pews I could puke.

And you can't really blame the grey-haired folks in the pews in most of our small churches; after years of giving and giving ... and being ignored ... they've grown weary and cynical about denominational leaders, state and national.

They've been non-verbally told for years that they don't matter in the race to big-ness that they've just sat down and never gotten up again.

If these "leaders" would get off their high horses long enough to step back and take a look at what is going on they'd see their focus is on quantity of and not quality of church growth ... that drives the mega-barn movement which results in pandering to the size of and not the Spirit in our congregations.