"Unsaved People should not be invited to Church. Church is for believers".
You hear it all the time, invite your unsaved friends to Church. It might be OK for a special meeting, but we have taken this to a new level that has resulted in a lukewarm religion. Church is not the place for evangelism. Evangelism needs to be on the street or in the home over a cup of coffee. How do we get back to the true purpose of the Church? It lines up with something Martin Luther said.
A blog written by Alan Knox spoke of this.
I had read Alan's post long ago. I also read much of Luther's material on this. We have such public meetings, they are called crusades. The purpose is to help seekers hear a gospel message. The problem is we have degraded the believers service to a lukewarm don't offend anyone, particularly unbelievers meeting. It then neither serves to evangelize the unbeliever nor edify the believer. Luther backed away from this position under pressure...but based on what I am sensing, we need to revisit this.
I have not seen a recent video by a young man and the church, "loving Jesus but hating religion". I have intentionally stayed away from it. I did read an editorial on the Wall Street Journal website that touches this.
There is a reason this has touched a nerve and caused the voice of God to ring in my head as it did over this. We are wasting a precious gift in the church.
There are two categories of people to invite to church:
1. Backsliders who at one time were part of a church but who fell away. It will ring a bell for them. It will restore them to faith in God.
2. A person going to a cold dead church should be invited to church with more light. One should always be seeking more light.
But the unbeliever who has only been to church a few Christmas and Easters, an occasional wedding or funeral will find themselves baffled or mislead by the normative church service in America. At one end of the spectrum it will be boring and confirming to the unbeliever as a waste of time or it will be strange and perhaps a little frightening to him or her. So, we try to "tone it down" to not offend, make it seeker friendly. We fill the pews with people who have never encountered the creator of the universe while the pastor walks on an eggshell strewn tightrope to keep them. What a farce.
That's NOT what Paul taught in 1 Corinthians 14:22-25
Tongues, then, are a sign, not for believers but for unbelievers; prophecy, however, is not for unbelievers but for believers. 23 So if the whole church comes together and everyone speaks in tongues, and inquirers or unbelievers come in, will they not say that you are out of your mind? 24 But if an unbeliever or an inquirer comes in while everyone is prophesying, they are convicted of sin and are brought under judgment by all, 25 as the secrets of their hearts are laid bare. So they will fall down and worship God, exclaiming, “God is really among you!”
If you are a true prophet you will do more to convert the lost by telling them what God things about them, what HE knows about the, how HE loves them, what HE sees in them prophetically. "The secrets of their hearts laid bare". This is the way God uses me in evangelism and it SELDOM happens in Church. Pastors are fearful of the true prophetic and seldom will make room for it in their services. So what Paul says to do never happens in Church.
The true evangelists I know who really get results SELDOM do it in church. Evangelist Patrick-Arie Sabaitis, Keith Darrell and Reinhard Bonnke.
They go to the highways and byways and compel people not to come to Church but to come to JESUS...
God is encouraging us to rethink this whole thing...again. If you have ears to hear, hear what the Spirit of the Lord is saying to us today.
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