I was listening to Rick Warren recently and he said something I wish every pastor in the world could hear. Maybe you wont think its anything profound, but I believe it is the key to everything Jesus is about. He was talking about his first years in ministry and after his last sermon on the last Sunday in Saddleback’s first year of exsistance, he took a vacation. After being so worn out, and burnt out, he took sometime to be alone. As he began questioning himself, and letting the spirit talk the Lord told him to “worry about growing Gods people and God would worry about growing Gods church”.
I post this because I absolutely agree. Yet it does seem atleast to me that the popular church questions these days are How many people do you have at church? How do we get people to come to church? How do we reach the masses? How do we grow the church?
Maybe the answer is as simple as building relationships with people. Not passing out flyers, or cool advertising, or edgy messages. Just make some darn and friends and tell em about Jesus. It was always a heart thing with Jesus and if your heart just wants to get people to walk through church doors to hear about Jesus I think your heart is a little screwed up. I think you are destroying a much more beautiful, intimate, relational, aspect of what Jesus had in mind.
Jesus didn’t seem to care how many people followed him. He did care however that the people that did follow him went all out. That they cared about their neighbors, whether their neighbors cared about Jesus or not wasn’t the point. The point is caring about people makes it alot harder for people not to care about you, and care about the things you care about.
