Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Getting Conned
Some time ago, Scotwise quoted extensively from a Cerulean Sanctum post that I had glossed over. Dan is discussing the plethora of Christian conferences and the lack of Christ apparent in our society. Consider:
Travel does indeed seem like a luxury and therefore people tend not to do it, or to do so on tight budgets. We think we need "an excuse" to go somewhere, and expecially to go somewhere besides to visit relatives. So we cook up conferences in Laguana Nigel and mission trips to the Caribbean.
But in the end we fool ourselves, and worse we fool others. I would much rather gift my pastor with a vacation because he needs one than be told that "this trip to San Francisco will really help me help the church" when he'll be in only four hours of meetings a day and the church will get hit for a dinner tab of $50/person. I don't begrudge him the vacation or the conference, but I do hate the deception.
That's the bottom line here Let's quit the deception. Let's be honest with ourselves and with each other. Then I think productive things can happen. Then when we do go to conferences, it will be to actually go to the conference and they might be productive. Then when we go on vacation we will actually rest, rather than crowd it with business we are not really interested in.
And most of all we will be better men and women of God when we are truthful.
Related Tags: church, confernces, money, resources, deception, truth
Pastors, worship leaders, and Sunday School teachers will attend conferences for pastors, worship leaders, and Sunday School teachers. Men, women, couples, singles, seniors, and youth all have conferences geared to their unique needs. We have countless denominations conferencing to handle policy and chart the future of their group.Dan uses these facts to hammer the church
Yet we have no revival.
We sponsor conferences on theology, ecclesiology, purity, pastoral care, eschatology, hermeneutics, biblical archeology, and any topic within Christendom we can imagine. We even have conferences on evangelism.
Yet we have no revival.
We drop millions of dollars on airfare, trainfare, boatfare, and gasoline to get to conferences. We line the pockets of innumerable conference speakers, teachers, facilitators, and facility owners. We have the monetary equivalent of the GDP of a small African nation to spend on lodging, dining, and even sightseeing within conference host cities.
Yet we have no revival.
I simply ask this: Are our churches so weak that we can’t disciple anyone to any reasonable level of maturity, so we have to send everyone running off to a plethora of conferences to take up the slack? If so, we should instead be staying home and fixing our churches with prayer, fasting, and faces-in-the-dust repentance. But do we do this? No. We pack people off to conferences. And as we’ve seen, we have thousands of conferences and yet we have no revival.Dan goes on to discuss the misappropriation of resources present in this trend which is what I think begins to strike at the heart of the real problem. Conferences, like many of what pass for "mission trips" out of churches are little more than an excuse to travel on someone else's dime. The apparent success of these endeavors, I think, lies on that simple fact.
Travel does indeed seem like a luxury and therefore people tend not to do it, or to do so on tight budgets. We think we need "an excuse" to go somewhere, and expecially to go somewhere besides to visit relatives. So we cook up conferences in Laguana Nigel and mission trips to the Caribbean.
But in the end we fool ourselves, and worse we fool others. I would much rather gift my pastor with a vacation because he needs one than be told that "this trip to San Francisco will really help me help the church" when he'll be in only four hours of meetings a day and the church will get hit for a dinner tab of $50/person. I don't begrudge him the vacation or the conference, but I do hate the deception.
That's the bottom line here Let's quit the deception. Let's be honest with ourselves and with each other. Then I think productive things can happen. Then when we do go to conferences, it will be to actually go to the conference and they might be productive. Then when we go on vacation we will actually rest, rather than crowd it with business we are not really interested in.
And most of all we will be better men and women of God when we are truthful.
Related Tags: church, confernces, money, resources, deception, truth
