Shallow, Impersonal, Uncaring
My church cares too much about how many people show up on Sunday. The pastors ask us to give money for their special projects, but don’t care to get to know us. Look at the volunteers, they’re automatons with fake smiles rushing around so that the church can churn out another rockin’ worship song, another shallow sermon, and another waste-of-time youth event. We do more and more and more, but we’re all still dead inside.
I hear these kinds of complaints a lot. I read one on Facebook in a post by a depressed college buddy. I hear another grumbled from a family member over the holidays. I hear the same whispered, through tears, by a friend at a small-group meeting. Sometimes, when I am feeling cynical about failures in ministry, these are my own words–though they are rarely said aloud.
Some churches are blasphemous, personality-driven machines–top-heavy organizations that grind through people in the name of building even larger organizations that grind through even larger amounts of people. Such churches leave battered and broken people in their wake. They deserve the scorn they generate. With other churches, things are not quite so clear-cut.
