We always start off our Wednesday night services with a devotional before going to class. Why? Tradition, Tradition! We started off having devotionals back in the day, and they've continued. Besides, the devotional is a grace period for people who can’t get here right at 7:00 p.m. If we started off with class, many would miss the first 15 minutes! During our "devotional" Wednesday, I asked our folks (the ones who were there on time) what was “good” about our Wednesday Bible study. Why was it important enough that they would come? I had a PPT template ready and typed in their answers as they gave them. And they had some good answers:
- Recharge our batteries
- Fellowship: See our family
- Refocus: Middle of the week
- Encouragement and Support
- Couple hours of down time
- Learn more of God’s word
- Listen to God
All those are good reasons to drag yourself and your family out in the middle of the week for the mid-week church gathering. Simple fact of life—fewer and fewer are bothering to drag. Back in the day, we had about 50% of our Sunday morning attendance come back on Wednesday night. Now we can have as few as 50. Why? Life is much more hectic than it is; our kids lives are more programmed and busy. But don’t we still need our batteries charged, to refocus priories, to encourage and support one another, and to learn God’s word as we listen to His voice. Those reasons are still valid.
But maybe we need to rethink how we meet those needs. Like our devotional period at the beginning, are Wednesday night meetings simply a tradition that no longer meets its objective effectively? Can we do a better job of using that time and meeting those objectives?
Assignment: Do you think there is a better way to use Wednesday nights? And what is it? More small groups? More prayer focus? Ministry night? Stay home and watch Law and Order? What do you think?
2 comments:
Maybe an out-reach focus might get the uninterested going. Something that puts us all on the spot, particularly our teenagers and early 20s. Maybe we need a Youth Minister to get their juices flowing.
I read a devotional from the "Purposedrivenlife.com" that got me thinking that maybe our probably is that we have decided, much like the pharisees, that becoming holy and rightous like Jesus is an attainable goal. I substituted "Church of Christ Members" where appropriate. Church of Christ Members today when still think that their strict adherence to the requirements of the tradition and self exaltation by exclusion has earned them a place among the righteous. We have arrived, in other words. Of course we have not, and this is something Jesus through his own words continually tries to bring to our attention. The only thing we have arrived at is our own interpretation of the righteousness through our actions or inactions, which is sorely inadequate to produce the true inner character of righteousness that God is after. We are measuring ourselves by a scaled-down version of righteousness and looking at those who we deem worse than ourselves in order to make ourselves acceptable in our own eyes. If we look at Jesus, something very different would happen.
When we look at Jesus, at least three things happen. 1) We realize our own shortcomings and how far we have to go. 2) We realize God’s love and accept the forgiveness made possible through Christ’s death for us on the cross. 3) We reflect his glory, not our own. It’s the only way we can still stand in front of his perfect righteousness and not be consumed – we receive, as a free gift, a righteousness we cannot earn. Looking at Jesus makes us humble and holy all at the same time. Not holy like the Pharisees, but holy in that we are totally counting on Christ for our own righteousness because we realize how much we lack.
We should go through our day looking to Christ, realizing that our love for God and his love for us make up for the deficiencies in our character and the distance we still have to go to have Christ fully realized. Maybe it is because of forced recognition from consequences of my sins that I have experienced recently that makes it more acute. I consider that a good thing! It is when we stop striving to obtain the “unattainable” of being completely “Christ like” that we lose that bridge of grace that makes up the void between our characters and that of our Lord and Savior. And without even knowing it we start reflecting our own flawed characters instead of reflecting something of him in our lives. We need to humble ourselves and recognize that we need Wednesday nights, and Sunday nights, etc. to help us become more like “mirrors that brightly reflect the glory of the Lord.” (2 Corinthians 3:18).
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