CHURCH, INVOLVEMENT IN

An athlete who desires to be effective on game day must first be properly trained. He must spend many hours keeping himself in shape and developing his skills to a high degree. If he does not, he will not be able to accomplish all that he wishes when it is time to play the game.

Any Christian who desires to be effective in the work of ministry must also realize that the public moment of any effective ministry is always preceded by many hours of careful preparation. Effective ministry will never be done by a weak and unhealthy church whose members neglect regular participation and sacrificial service.176

Many churches have a Beau Geste view of spiritual gifts. In that movie, the Arabs were attacking a Legionnaire fort where only four Legionnaires were left alive. The Arabs were not aware of this, but if they were to realize it, the fort would fall for sure. Therefore, the Legionnaires devised a plan to disguise their weak condition. They set up the bodies of their dead comrades along the wall of the fort and ran back and forth, firing off the guns of their dead friends. From the outside, it all looked very convincing—but on the inside, there were only four men.

Likewise, in many of our churches, we have two or three or four “professionals” who run around and shoot off the guns of the spiritually inactive congregation. Outwardly the church looks like it is alive and well—but inwardly there are only a very few people doing the work of the whole body.177

The frenzied activities of Christians have become a joke. Someone has revised the old nursery rhyme to read:

Mary had a little lamb,

’Twas given her to keep;

But then it joined the Baptist Church,

And died for lack of sleep!178

Proverb: He who is faithful in a little shall be swamped with much!179

Your local church is like a bank: the more you put into it, the greater the interest.180

The story is told of Oliver Cromwell who, when faced with a shortage of precious metal for coins, sent his troops out to find some. They reported that the only precious metal to be found was in the statues of saints standing in the corners of churches. Cromwell said, “Well, melt down the saints and put them in circulation.”181

Bud Wilkinson, a famous football coach, was once asked, “What contribution does professional sport make to the physical fitness of Americans?” To no one’s surprise, he answered, “Very little. A professional football game,” he said, “is a happening where fifty thousand spectators, desperately needing exercise, sit in the stands watching twenty-two men on the field, desperately needing rest.” That’s also a description of the typical mid-twentieth-century church organization.182