Getting ready to look at the
Seven Church of Revelation
If Jesus Google rated
churches
What
if Jesus rated churches today? Forgive me if I am playing anachronistic with
the church, but I was wondering if Jesus wrote a Google review of the seven
churches how would they do on a scale of one to five? My guess is
that a couple would do fairly well, but most of the churches wouldn’t. That
caused me to wonder how would our churches do? Which caused me to
chase down another rabbit trail.
I
looked up on Google “Churches in (city name withheld)” and looked at their
reviews. I reviewed the first 20 churches to populate the list and to
my surprise they all rated pretty high, the lowest score being a
4.4. The churches in this city rated on average 4.76 which struck me
as a bit odd, I seemed to be missing something. This community has a
crime problem, a drug and alcohol addiction problem, there are rumors of
corruption in the local government, wide spread educational problems, not to
mention a not very well-hidden problem with hatred in the guise of
racism. How is it that in a community that is suffused with the
symptoms of sin every church is extremely good? One would think that
with every church being great that the powers of darkness would be receding if
not vanquished. How can this be? I have a few ideas of
what may be happening. I do not mean to ridicule or degrade the
church, but I am bothered by what I see in the church.
When
Jesus looked at the churches listed in Revelation only the churches at Smyrna
and Philadelphia did not receive stinging rebukes and those churches don’t look
much like our churches. In fact, these two churches that were given
positive divine reviews didn’t have the things that typically get a church good
reviews on Google. In contrast the
churches that appear to have the things we would value most, wealth, tolerance,
reputation, lots of activity, were the ones most soundly criticized.
Why
is it that the Lord’s opinion of these seven churches is for the most part
negative while our opinion of our churches is so positive? There are several possibilities for
this. But not all of them are equally
valid.
The
first possibility is that Jesus is just too demanding. He may have been an un-please able fuss-budget
that no matter how good the church was He was going to find some little thing
to complain about. But when we look at
His indictments of the church we see those He rebuked had hideous
problems. We also see that His agenda
was not criticism but to rescue the churches.
We must reject this explanation.
A
second possibility is that the churches of today have grown and evolved into
genuinely great churches. It may be that
our churches really are as good as we seem to think they are. But if that is the case why are most churches
in America in decline or flat-lined? Why
is the current church so fractured and divided both within and without? Why is there regression in all the
disciplines by which we can measure the life and walk of the individual
Christian? No one who seriously
considered the question would ever imagine that the condition of the American
church is anything other than grave.
This second possibility we must also reject.
There
is a third possibility. The reason that
we rate our churches so highly is because we like them for entirely selfish
reasons. We have turned religion into a
consumer commodity. As individuals we
have made a priority of our likes, dislikes, appetites and requirements the
means by which we evaluate a church. We
have made our wants the idol to which we expect a church to sacrifice
itself. If we attend a church and we do
not like something, indeed anything about the church, we will leave and go find
a church that suits us. Having done this
a few times we have migrated into churches we like and thus we rate them
highly. This is the only possible
explanation of how every church can be so highly rated and yet the church is so
utterly carnal, divided, ineffective and self-satisfied.
We
must not, however, place all the blame on the membership of the church. The church is a mess in America and church
leadership is part of the problem. In
order to grow churches numerically, to keep members from drifting to other
congregations, to keep offerings coming in and to keep the people happy church
leaders have, with good-intentioned motives, pandered to the whims of the
religious consumers in their churches and community. Telling them what they want to hear and
programming to their demands.
It
is a small wonder that the churches are so highly rated by their members and
consumers. But that still begs the
question, “What if Jesus rated churches today?”
Questions
to Ponder
On
a scale of 1 to 5 how would you rate your church? Using the same scale how would Jesus rate
your church? Why the difference?
What
criteria do you believe the Lord uses to give a church a positive review?
