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| image from Masterbundles.com |
I have been reading the Bible
diligently since I was nine years old, thanks to my grandmother, Nell Leach, my
stepfather, George Eckenrode, and my pastor at the Alliance Baptist Church in
Detroit with whom I argued much after each of his sermons.
My grandmother, Baptist,
insisted I go to church.
My stepfather, Catholic,
introduced me to Bible Commentaries which were available at the Monteith Public
Library in Detroit.
My pastor, with whom I
argued, seemed to have an emotionally manipulative approach to preaching while
I was looking for a “reasoned out” approach in keeping with Apostle Paul’s
approach found in Acts 18: 4 “And he reasoned in the synagogue every
sabbath, and persuaded the Jews and the Greeks.”
Over these last sixty-one
years of paying attention to preachers, church attendance, faithfulness to the
teachings of Jesus, and “Christian culture” in general, I have not seen a decline
in authentic Christian belief.
Contrarily, I have noticed those who had attended church from
a sense of peer pressure, family expectation, or some other less than spiritual
conviction, to finally release themselves from the burden and discontinue
attendance.
I have noticed a decline in attendance of salespeople
seeking out prospects, politicians laundering their reputations, and lonely people
looking for romantic dates.
Church was never intended
by Jesus or the apostles to be a place of commerce, political campaigning, or romantic
conquest.
Unfortunately, without
all of those people of self-serving motivations, our congregations seem much
smaller than they did in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies.
But I assert that the
decline in attendance is much, much less a result of people losing faith and
more the result of church no longer serving wealth and power seekers.
The faithful are still
there; in the pews, serving the poor, feeding the hungry, and not even
expecting a trophy for doing so.
