Rejecting Christ, or rejecting "Christianity"? (the church) ???

[Carl Emerson]

The locus of our Christianity should be the Home and our immediate neighbours.

Church should be coming together and rejoicing about what God has done during the week.

Sadly we have a serious disconnect between the two.

Church leadership has become a professional job.

Jesus is in the market place.

 

[Behold]

Church leadership has become a professional job.

The Job of a Pastor//Bishop is incredibly difficult.

Trying to take care of 50 people's needs.... demands, and thats a small church.

The marriages, the funerals, the baptisms, the hospital visits, the crazies, the heretics, the counseling sessions.. the endless late night phone calls needing "help".... and getting ready for Sunday and Wed, both services, or 3 services , if your church is LARGE.
Then you have people who are trying to split the church or take over the Pulpit.
And then, the Pastor has his own family to deal with......everyday.
Imagine if you have 20,000 sheep to shepherd in a big building.

And then, trying to delegate responsibility to a trustworth group of assistant pastors who all claim to "be led of the Holy Spirit"...and if you mistakenly pick just one devil, He can destroy your life's work......and will try to do it.

Pastors get burned out, because they signed up for the Preaching, and ended up being in charge of all the general maintenance.

 

[Carl Emerson]

The Job of a Pastor//Bishop is incredibly difficult.

Trying to take care of 50 people's needs.... demands, and thats a small church.

The marriages, the funerals, the baptisms, the hospital visits, the crazies, the heretics, the counseling sessions.. the endless late night phone calls needing "help".... and getting ready for Sunday and Wed, both services, or 3 services , if your church is LARGE.
Then you have people who are trying to split the church or take over the Pulpit.
And then, the Pastor has his own family to deal with......everyday.
Imagine if you have 20,000 sheep to shepherd in a big building.

And then, trying to delegate responsibility to a trustworth group of assistant pastors who all claim to "be led of the Holy Spirit"...and if you mistakenly pick just one devil, He can destroy your life's work......and will try to do it.

Pastors get burned out, because they signed up for the Preaching, and ended up being in charge of all the general maintenance.

Understand - maybe then the structure that puts a servant of God under this pressure needs to be reviewed ????

 

[Windmill Charge]

But in my experience it is rare to be approached by an unbeliever.

Yes very rare, but when I worked in an office we often had discussions about Christianity.

What if the visit to church turns them off?
- Asking them for money.
- Church members are unfriendly.
- Don't like the music.

We announce that the offering is for church members not visitors so please pass the bag by, there will be others doing the same.
Some people are friendly others arn't.
Music, many church members don't like all the music, we have a range of trad hymns, moder hymns played to a range of trad and new tunes.

Someone suggested earlier that we should get inquirers into small group settings before bringing them to church.
That seemed like good advice to me. What do you think?

Some people like small discussion groups, some don't.
We run the Alpha course at least once a year, we have church small groups for bible study and there are members willing to meet with interested people.

Church is only a collection of reasonable like minded people meeting together.
We range from unemployed to very successful buisnesmen, from never left this town to people from every contient, educated to those like me who cannot spell.

From what I've seen in the UK we're a fairly tipical small church.