Lostness

Friends:

I am just finishing up a few days of class as I work on my degree at Campbellsville University. This week I've been taking what's called "an intensive" which means I get eight weeks worth of class work done in four days. It is intensive, to say the least, and a bit overwhelming.

This course is about church planting and actually deals with the first year or two of a new church's life. One of the things that has really touched my heart this week is studying what happens to most new churches in the first couple of years of their existence. Most churches are started with the best of intentions and usually have as part of their original mission statement, either written or implied, to reach the "lost," or in other words, to reach those who are far from Christ with the message of His love.

Two things really hit home. The first is the degree to which our society is "lost." Most of us have no concept of just how many people really have no personal relationship with Christ. Some may attend church occasionally or have their names on a membership list somewhere, but the overwhelming majority of people in our nation, perhaps as high as 90% by some estimates, have NO REAL RELATIONSHIP with Christ! Now most of us find that hard to believe, and at least one reason why we do is because most of us have few if any meaningful relationships with those who are lost. All of our friends and family are Christians. Most of our business relationships that we can control are with Christians. As a matter of fact most of us, by choice, spend most of our time with others who believe what we do. Because of that we forget just how lost the world really is. Not long ago some ministers were asked to write down the names of 10 friends who were lost. Most of them could not. Why? Because most ministers only associate with Believers. That probably is not true of church members to quite the extent it is with ministers, but the principle still holds, we have become numb to just how lost our world is.

The second thing that really affected me was that most new churches lose their mission and their commitment to reaching the lost with the glorious gospel after just a short time. On average, a new church reverts to about the same rate of seeing new Christians as older churches within just a couple of years. Why is that? I believe it's because we sink back into the same ruts as in the past. We begin playing church, going through the motions...we come in, sit down, get up and go home, without ever having our hearts challenged to reach the lost world for Christ. Our hearts get hard, our tear ducts dry up, and our passion for seeing others birthed into God's kingdom grows cold.

We need to pray that God will rekindle our passion. We need to ask to see the world as Jesus sees it...lost. We need to pray for courage and love in sharing the gospel. Will you join me in that prayer? Will we agree together to not allow our Family of Faith to become too busy to reach our community with the gospel's message? I hope so.

Walking by Faith,

Pastor Rick