GregQualls.com speaking outside the box….sometimes | Albuquerque, NM

It’s Messy

I just got done reading a blog by a guy named Gary Lamb. It was a very weird experience. It was weird because I know that three years ago, my emotions wouldn’t have been the same. As I read his words, my heart broke for the people that he was talking about. Even now I have this weird mixture of sorrow, compassion, passion, and shame.

It broke my heart to hear about about the person who joined his church for selfish reasons. How many people do I know that are like that. They just join a church because they want to be edgy. There is no desire for the lost. No desire to serve. It’s just about their own selfish desires. This breaks my heart because people are looking for the hope that we have, and we’re just filling our own personal pride. It’s depressing.

Then my heart starts to break for those that are involved in his church. As he told the stories about the people committing suicide and lives being destroyed by drugs, I couldn’t help but feel compassion. Over the past few years, my heart has been drawn to those who are outcasts of the church. My heart goes out to the guy who only lives for the next fix, the single mom who strips to make ends meet, the guy who tries to fill the void in his life by sleeping with every girl in sight, and the girl who sleeps with him because she has never really known the love of a true father. Gary’s stories hit me at my core.

More than ever this gives me a passion to plant a church. The church in America is dying. Over the last 100 years, “the number of churches increased just over 50 percent while the population of the country has almost quadrupled. This decline in church-to-population ratio helps to explain the decline of the North American church during the past century.”* Plus a lot of the new churches being planting aren’t reaching people who don’t know God. Like Gary said, they are reaching Christians who are just tired of their current church. We need churches who are showing the love and hope that is only available through Jesus. But they are few and far between.

This is why I felt shameful. I know that for some time my only hope was to plant a church that was “cool.” I wanted to be known as the edgy church. I wanted to plant a church that religious people wouldn’t come to, but that cool and edgy Christians came to. I didn’t want to get my hands dirty. I didn’t want reach out to the outcasts. But I know now that I need to repent of that mindset. I know where God has called me and it’s time to get my hands dirty. I don’t know if I have what it takes…but I do know I have the One who can take me through it all.

*Ed Stetzer – Planting Missional Churches pg. 9