Where Have All The Georges Gone?

George is a twenty-something denominational churchgoer and George says he’s had enough. He’s quitting as of yesterday and says he’s speaking for his demographic because they’re quitting church too. George says he and the others were driven out, they didn’t want to go, but they just couldn’t take it any more.

What’s driven George east of his ecclesiastical Eden? One wonders. Was it Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and the resulting alliance of politics, the Republican Party, and his church? No, George says that had nothing to do with it, although he considers the amalgamation an “unholy union.”

Could it be all those scandals that have erupted from priestly, pastoral, and televangelistic quarters? No, George says that didn’t do it.

George says that it wasn’t the wars he’s seen in the name of God, as one might expect from a twenty-something, since that college-age group may have pacifistic, left-wing leanings.

What demons drove him from the divine? If George were taking a multiple choice test as to the reason, he’d circle “None of the above.”

George says it all started one sunny Sunday morning when he was sitting in the same pew his family had always occupied and it was on that sunlit Sunday that his church turned that day into “Kick-off Sunday.”

Although George didn’t know it at the time, that Sunday became the prototype of many others to come, Sundays dedicated to and consumed by money. George says it was all very sudden, but during the year, the church dedicated select Sundays to numbers, figures, charts, and graphs. Included in the burgeoning Sabbath stats were incessant reports of costs and benefits; losses and gains. The business of the church had become business.

Mammon mounted the pulpit, and in the process pushed aside prayer and piety, humility and the spiritual life. In commandeering the pulpit, Mammon changed George’s church into a company; Mammon made the congregation its shareholders. In the process, God didn’t seem to be holding many shares at all. As George looks over the ecclesiastical landscape, he says he sees the same thing everywhere.

President Calvin Coolidge is famous for saying, “The business of America is business.” I suppose George would say the same thing about many churches, “The business of churches is business.”

Yet, we have it in black and white, so that if the church George loved became a business complete with charts and graphs, it did so against the command of the Head of the church. In Matthew 28, Jesus (the same One who’d earlier driven the businessmen out of the Temple) said that the purpose of the church was to make people into Christ-followers.

And it’s also clear that when Christ-followers follow Him, they fish for men, not finances. He said so in Matthew 4, “Follow Me and I will make you fishers of men.” A Christ-follower and a Christ-following church will subject finances to Christ, using money to fish and for fishing expeditions.

If a person’s church doesn’t use its precious Sundays for evangelism and discipleship, the Christ-follower will find and join one which does. The Christ-following church will use mammon; it will not let mammon use the church. The Christ-following church fishes for men; George’s church fished for finances and lost George and its own soul in the process.

George says he’s quit church, but he still sneaks back into the building occasionally on weekdays. When he’s troubled, he finds the side door, enters, and prays. But Sundays aren’t for him; Sundays are for the businessmen with their graphs, charts, and projections. Sundays at George’s former church are for listening to the Pastor who’s become Mammon’s CEO. On Sundays Mammon is there demanding his pennies, preying on his people. The business of the business of the church must go on.

George wasn’t driven from the church by demons. He says, “All it took was a pledge drive.”

Dr. Mike Halsey, Pastor

For more information about our church or comments on this web site, please contact webmaster@countylinechurch.com.