According to a recent article I read, the number one reason people church hop or leave their church, whether or not they can articulate this, is that they no longer feel spiritually fed and fulfilled. The real reason is that they no longer feel the church they are attending is encountering God anymore. How tragic! My belief is that encountering God is not only a Sunday morning at church mindset and action, and should be what happens daily and be personal.
But, I would also argue that spiritually fed and fulfilled cuts both ways. Are ‘they’ (we) bringing God to church with them? Where is their responsibility? If you think the last questions are insensitive or not the point, I think they are. Since the body is the church then isn’t it up to the body to make certain that God is invited into being involved in the life of the church? Is the responsibility only that of the church ‘leadership’ and pastor(s)? What are YOU doing about your church? And it does need to be more than merely greeting people at the service.
I would also suggest that part of the problem is in the identifying and defining what ‘spiritually fed and fulfilled’ is. This tends to be a very personal definition, regardless of whether the definer even does this and probably isn’t a universally held definition/description. Too often this is couched in affective words such as ‘feeling’, which has multiple definitions. But it is a sense that ‘there’s something missing’. This last point that ‘something’s missing’ is a valid component in the assessing. Again – are you doing anything about being spiritually fed or are you sitting back expecting ‘it’ to happen?
If we accept that the church isn’t spiritually feeding and fulfilling people, what IS it doing? You can’t simply say what isn’t happening without identifying what is. If it is to provide the… atmosphere(?) so that the goal of a spiritually fed and fulfilled congregation occurs, this seems to miss the point. Everyone needs to feel and experience fed and fulfilled but we have to come with the attitude and conviction we are involved in the process – not the focus. Remember that God is the focus.
I would suggest we look at what our services should emphasize – praise and worshiping our God, learn who we are as Christians and how we can go about being His hand in our world, and consider how Paul defined services – when we come together (1Corinthians 14:26). Again we get into the issue of defining and determining responsibility – and discovering our individual roles that need to occur for all to be and feel fed and fulfilled.
