Letter to the Church

How many hobbies did you have growing up? Were you one of those kids that found one thing that they loved and did that into adulthood? Or were you the one that had a new hobby each week. Every new week brought with it a new passionate exploration into a new endeavor. For the first few days, you burned brightly. Excited by the new task. Researching. Buying all the supplies you might need and jumping into it feet first. However, by the end of the week, your fast flame for the new hobby died to a flicker. And so the end of the week closed the chapter on a promising new hobby only to make way for the next impassioned project. For many of us, that sums up about childhood, adolescence, and even some of us in adulthood. Constantly on the move to find the next passion project because we lost the passion for what we started. It goes much farther than hobbies. In this day and age we’ve treated our careers, social circles, and even the church this way. Our need for constant entertainment and peaked interest is at an all time high while devotion to one thing seems to be at an all time low.

While we can’t force people to be devoted, it may be that we have made it too easy for them not to be. By trying to keep everyone interested and excited, we’ve created a cheap substitute for devotion. Rather than busying themselves with countless endeavors, the early followers devoted themselves to a few. And it changed the world. It seems like the Church of America is constantly looking for the next new thing (Francis Chan, Letters to the Church). Perhaps it's time to return the passion of the early church fathers. They changed the world by being filled and fueled to spread the message of Jesus Christ. The prophet Jeremiah had a similar feeling and experience as the early church did. He wrote of God that his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot (Jeremiah 20:9 NIV). The word of God consumed Jeremiah so much that he couldn’t hold it in. It had to be spoken to the people of Israel. The early church experienced much of the same. So what are we missing today? Where is the passion that we started out with for the gospel? The apostle Paul once said do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize (1 Corinthians 9:24 NIV)

The goal of the Christian life isn’t to find a comfortable place to worship, good music sets, or even to listen to a charismatic preacher. The Christian life is rooted in our belief in who Jesus Christ is, what He has done for us, and then being His witness to the world! We can have the best understanding of theology and Scripture, but without practical application, we’ve missed the mark and are simply living out a flickering faith rather than a blazing fire that is shut up in our bones. The theology that matters is not the theology we profess but the theology we practice (Francis Chan, Letters to the Church).

What would the letter to the Church be today? What is the theology that we practice? If you were to ask yourself honestly, what would need to change to return to the passion for the gospel?