Why The Church Isn’t Failing Enough by Colin Piper

Categories: Youth ministry articles

When Jesus died, He appeared an abject failure. Experts could pin point the moments He lost it. There was the time He sent away the rich young ruler. And what about the time He had the crowd of 5000 eating out of His hands. One moment they wanted to make Him King, the next He had alienated them. Yes, at the full time of His life, the expert panel called in to analyse what went wrong would be pretty united. Jesus blew it.

Of course the cross wasn’t full time. It wasn’t even half time! In many ways all Jesus had lost was the pre-match kick around. Out of the apparent defeat a church was born: a powerful, dynamic, living body radically changing and shaping society and bringing salvation to the world.

Well OK, that’s the church on a good day. And it is tough being church on a typical day to day basis. We can’t do what Jesus did. We can’t send people away. Our world doesn’t allow for apparent failure. We need instant success. The here and now is what counts not the here after. Our European mindset has little concept of eternity. Consumerism and Marxism agrees on this one thing: the church’s message of pain now gain later is out dated irrelevant manipulation.

So we make our message contemporary. The gospel is all about the here and now. It’s about Jesus meeting your needs now. OK, it might trivialise the cross a bit: reducing it to the key to a parking space at the supermarket or the funds for blinds in the new sun room. But at least its relevant and attractive. And that makes it successful. Instantly. To change a mind set. To get people thinking differently. That takes time, and time is what we don’t have. It is also hard and is likely to fail. And ultimately failure questions the efficacy of all we believe. Honestly we’re not sure we believe it enough to cope with that!

Yet unless we challenge and change the mind set we will never change society . More importantly, (because this preoccupation of changing society can also be a superficial gospel of the instant here and now), we will never see people radically saved. Have we the guts, faith and vision to build for eternity, even if it kills us before we see the fruit of our labour.

Tags: evangelism