Changing the Way We Do Church 7

This last installment in my series Changing the Way We Do Church 7 has been a long time coming. That's not because I didn't know what to write. It's just that I have been up to a lot of other things and one of them is more involvement with my local church, Shepherd’s Fold Community Church, on the Central part of Oklahoma City OK. As I wrote this series, I realized that I needed to be more closely aligned with a local body so that I was not just theorizing, griping or fantasizing, in any way to do harm too but actually contributing to the solution in an active way.

The seventh and last step in the Changing process would be to address and meet the needs of women, ethnic minorities, and children around the world.

A number of years ago, I watched a Sixty Minutes segment on the Taliban and they had done to women in Afghanistan and I cried. A friend of mine asked the Lord that he would go there if He wanted him to. Lo and behold, he was invited there after the Taliban were ousted and he saw for himself the suffering that war imposes on women and children. Over the years, I have heard the same dynamic in Africa and in some parts of Asia. What's more, I still behold the problem here at home.

Jesus was the friend of women, which was a revolutionary concept in Judaism. He and the disciples had a team of women traveling with them (see Luke 8:1-3). Jesus allowed women to appropriately touch Him and they were healed; He did not rebuke them for doing so. Children also had easy access to Jesus, even though the disciples, His ushers, tried to keep the children away.

If Jesus was a magnet for women and children, and Jesus is present in His body, the church, then doesn't it stand to reason that women and children, the neediest groups due to male mismanagement and irresponsibility, should also flock to the Church? What's more, should not the Church proactively address the needs of these two important groups?

I also mention ethnic groups because the church should always be a place where people who don't look like one another gather. That's why I don't care for churches that have all or only one group, whether they are all Chinese, Korean, Messianic believers, Spanish or Mexican Americans, Africans or African-Americans. Church should look like heaven is going to look and that is best described in Revelation 7:9: - After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands.

I am addressing that wrong thinking and I believe churches have that problem, too. We will pay the electric company whatever they say we owe them, but won't sometimes spend $100 on the poor or widows. That has to change.

There you have my seven steps to changing the way we do church. Feel free to write me your comments, even if you disagree. Let me hear from you as to what changes you think need to take place for the Body to be a place of mission and purpose and not just a place of assembly once or twice a week

A note to thank all those who have similar feelings on the church and how we need to change from the different Blogs and studies I have used in this effort.

Pastor Frank