Spiritual Malnourishment
by Rob ~ April 29th, 2008. Filed under: church revitalization.Just got back in from lunch with a pastor from a church across town in a neighborhood not too dissimilar from ours. He called yesterday and wanted to get together to compare notes. So we got together today for lunch.
He’s been at his church almost the same length of time I’ve been at Cradock. He’s been networking with the pastors in the other churches which are nearest to his neighborhood. Almost all of them are in decline. Some of them realize it and are beginning to think about what the future will hold. Others are being obscurantist about it all.
Over lunch the conversation turned to “how did we get to this point?” As I listened to him talk about the current reality where he is, and the current reality in my church, I said, “I can sum it up in two words!…. Spiritual Malnourishment!” Our people are spiritually malnourished. There has been a famine of God’s Word in our churches. He agreed, and said as he has talked with other pastors, this has been a constant theme which transcends time and place or age of congregation.
Most of the churches we identified all have one thing in common: the bulk of their organizational lives have been lived out in the modern era, and they have been led by pastors who were trained in classically liberal seminaries.
Does anybody else out there see this correlation?
