HippoChurch

…is that a good thing? Read recently where one of the most common perceptions of those who visit a church is that they perceive God’s character to be like the people and service they experienced. I don’t know about you, but that worries me. That means everything at the church is important - the look and feel, the music, the demeanor of those serving, the sermon, etc. If it’s boring, they think God’s boring. If it’s irrelevant and useless for their daily life, so is God. If it’s creepy and judgmental, guess what? Yep, they think God is too.

Why that worries me so much is because I think the vast majority of churches are just going through the motions. Everything that happens on Sunday and all the programming is simply a repeat of inherited tradition. It’s like there’s this big pattern book on “How to do Church” and we’re just mindlessly implementing it. It may have been decades since someone’s asked, “Is this effective anymore?”, “How do we know?”, “Is there a steady stream of people flowing into our church and meeting Jesus?” Complacency is probably the #1 crippler of every church. That’s not unique to churches. It’s just our human nature. But, we have to know what’s at stake and that every service, every program and environment has the possibility to be someone’s first experience and form their first impressions about God. I don’t know about you, but the God I know is dynamic, challenging, full of grace, loving discipline, and is more encouraging and uplifting the closer I get to Him. Is that the impression people get at your church and the closer they get to your people?

If the Church is His representative to the world, what are we presenting? If people think God is like your church, is that a good thing?