CHURCH:
OBJECTIVES; CHURCH: FOCUS

There are few things as frustrating as to work without knowing what we are trying to accomplish; that is, to be lost in the means and ignorant of the end.

Examples of this are found in “parts” factories where men spend years making small articles that have no significance in themselves and can have satisfying meaning only when related to hundreds of other and dissimilar articles and to the completed object of which each one is a small part.

Since the human mind is designed to deal with ends and wholes, this enforced preoccupation with parts and means is particularly disconcerting. The urge to plan and to create according to plan is strong in us, and we feel fenced in and defeated when we are compelled to spend our days in toil that attains no visible objective. It is this rather than the work itself that makes so many jobs dull and boresome.

I have wondered whether the flat tedium found in most churches cannot be explained at least in part as the psychological consequence of numbers of persons meeting together at stated times without quite knowing why they have met.…

Some persons, for instance, find church intolerable because there is no objective toward which pastor and people are moving, aside possibly from the limited one of trying to enlist eight more women and 10 more men to chaperon the annual youth cookout or reaching the building fund quota for the month.…

It was the knowledge that they were part of an eternal plan that imparted unquenchable enthusiasm to the early Christians. They burned with holy zeal for Christ and felt that they were part of an army which the Lord was leading to ultimate conquest over all the powers of darkness. That was enough to fill them with perpetual enthusiasm.

Matthew 28:18–20; 1 Corinthians 9:16; 2 Corinthians 5:12–15; Ephesians 3:10–11; Ephesians 4:11–16

The Set of the Sail, 90, 91.