What do we do when the church stops working?
David Wentz is a pastor and author of When Church Stops Working: Meeting With God in Your Living Room. He says if the church has stopped working for you, but your spirit knows something is missing, God may be calling you to try something new.
"You don't need a preacher. You don't need a special building. All you need is a few friends and a little faith," writes Wentz.
Wentz served as a pastor for 38 years. He says back when he started you could open the doors of a new church and expect people to show up.
"Nowadays, it's pretty much the opposite, and the attraction model of getting people to come to a building was failing even before the pandemic. But that made a real end to it," said David. "And then people started finding they could get some church experience over the internet or on television, but there is nothing that can substitute for in-person personal interaction with another group of Christians where you can hug each other if you need to, you can hold hands to pray if that's how you do it. It's just not the same over zoom or especially not on TV."
In his book, David looks at how the joyful, empowering gatherings of Jesus' followers in Bible times became today's institutional church. He also describes how any small group of friends in a living room can re-create the New Testament model of Christian gatherings and experience the love and power that turned the world upside down.
"My focus in writing this book was not on how to fix churches," said Wentz. "An awful lot of churches do a great job. They bless millions of people and praise the Lord for that. However, the things that have been going on recently, denominational splits, in particular, made me start thinking about this. What do they do?"
Today on Connections, David Wentz digs deeper into this topic.