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Cold Rock is this ice cream place where they take the ice cream flavour of your choice and then mix it together with your choice of lollies and cookies. It's basically like the ice cream bar at an all-you-can-eat Sizzler, except they do the mixing for you and charge you an extra $3. That means the people doing the mixing are working at $36 an hour, which isn't too bad for a takeaway franchise job.
Anyway. Some people approach church like Cold Rock. They mix a bit of Bible Study from this church, with a bit of safe-feeling morning service from that church, with a bit of exciting-music evening service from that church. Where is their home church? Nowhere really. They've kind of invented their own mutant church.
This temptation is especially real for students who have moved to a new city to study. And it is one that I think should be avoided. There's plenty of reasons why, but here's six:
- Coldrocking fails to submit to a local church community and its leaders. It may not feel disrespectful to a local church, but it is: "I'm deciding what the local church is, thank you very much!"
- Coldrocking fills up our time with attending church events and takes away energy from the less glamorous parts of church involvement: small groups, Sunday school teaching and volunteering on rosters.
- Coldrocking distracts churches from caring for their true members and non-Christian visitors.
- Coldrocking lets our preferences dominate in churchgoing, rather than an attitude of service to others.
- Coldrocking retards the leadership recruitment process. Choice can lead to consumerism, rather than settling down in one place and taking on significant responsibility.
- Coldrocking stops churches getting better. They don't see how few new people are coming cause they're full of visitors and they don't get to work on their weaknesses, because people just go elsewhere for that.
In our first Leadership Development session we did a tour of Deuteronomy and Hebrews to see just how central the Word of God is to Christianity.
We then discussed some important applications of this to our fellowship:
- The Word of God must be central to ministry, not good deeds, community, music or other things.
- We should be willing to go in depth with our study of God's word. Our sermons and conferences and Fellowship Groups should sometimes be long, hard work.
- There is great value in simply working through books of the Bible in our sermons and Bible studies, so that God sets the agenda of what we think about, rather than always focusing on answering our questions.
- There is an important place for leaders and preachers, so that we hear God's Word as authoritative, rather than only ever doing discussions and forums.
- Our unity with others should be based around the Word of God, rather than simply social or institutional things.
- The Word of God should remain front and centre in our evangelism. No one will be saved by good deeds, loving community or clever arguments alone.
If you really recognise that, how will it change what we do? Or maybe we are thinking and acting as if people don't become Christians.
All over the world, people are becoming Christians. Right here in Hobart, people are becoming Christians. We should think, act, plan and pray for people to become Christians.
Good way to start Semester 2, don't you think?
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