Featured Excuse not to attend?

Pass.

 

A Covid Apology to America, on Behalf of the Evangelical Church - The Aquila Report

 

Because some figure they don’t pose a risk, they take no preventive measures. Handshakes and hugs seem to abound.

Last week the pastor and family missed church. They have COVID.

Handshakes and hugs still abound.

 

I think John Macarthur put it well. He said if you closed, you admitted your church is non-essential. Why Should Christians come to a non-essential church.

Or as Rev. Laippley from FL says "Why should Christians ever return to a church shut down by the Covid Caving, Covid capitulating clowns that run the churches that closed. Yeah, I mean you, You Covid Caving, Covid capitulating pastors."

He has a great podcast. Y'all should check him out.

 

I agree entirely with the "big church" idea she is mentioning. Pastors/Elders are supposed to be Shepherds. You can't be a good shepherd if you can't identify your sheep from your neighbors.

Also, there's such a thing in farming as "carrying capacity" on your land. This is the amount of livestock, in this case sheep, that can sustain themselves solely on the vegetative growth of a given piece of pasture. An acre of pasture in well-watered Appalachia will have much more carrying capacity than an acre of scrub in Arizona.

When you put more sheep onto your pasture than the pasture can handle your sheep will get malnourished and eventually die and you will be guilty of being a poor shepherd.

When you've got more sheep than carrying capacity, you've gotta split your flock.

 

To make a mega church work you have to look at it as 100 small churches who come together once a week. A mega church can be personal, but the small groups are what makes it happen. Your best MEGAS have great small group networks and have a full time staff member for every 100 to 200 active members. Secretary and janitors don't count. I mean pastoral staff. An associate pastor will be over about 5 small groups with 20 people in each. Those small groups do things together. It's like being in your own 100 member church in the middle of a 10,000 member church.

 

It is very much a local church. They will have a small group that meets very close to where they live.

 

I agree that the above would be able to function. My wife went to Auburn and went to what I would consider a Mega Church (1000 people) and it was setup like that.

We go to one of the largest Churches in the county of about 200 people and we do those small groups on Wednesdays, which does help. We actively sought a Church that had those so it'd be close-knit. I do think though there gets to be an inefficient bureaucratic layer at some point once you get to a certain level of attendance. I don't know if that's 1,000 or 5,000 or 10,000.

I can't say for a surety, but a lot of the commands in the Bible, seem to be centered around dispersal. We are told to subdue the Earth and to spread out on it, and the Apostles are told to spread out almost like Osmosis. It's not a hill I'm going to die on, just my opinion, but I see a lot of "spread out" and not much "group up". Not something I feel that that strongly on though and I don't have any kind of specific verse to back it up.

 

On the other hand, what about a small church of 30 people that doesn't grow and where literally 10 people do 90% of the work? Well fed sheep?

It has come to my attention that Mrs Thomas15 and yours truly have been attending our present church for exactly a year now. In that year I think we have missed 3 or 4 Sundays. Pre-covid this assembly had I think about 250 members and regular attenders. First week we went there was the first week they opened for those wearing a mask. There were maybe 30 people there. Now it's at about 60 on Sunday. I think that those who are going to come back are back and now we have a more accurate picture of who has their heart into it and who does not.

Even with 50-60 people in regular attendance if the choir sings half of those in the pews leave to take their place in the loft. We barely have enough men to support a men's group but we are starting a men's handgun fellowship and there is a ladies Bible study group. VBS was a success but attendance was low. We had a work day where we removed and replaced a fairly large section of roof shingles, we had about 10 guys show up. Mrs Thomas15 is involved with the food pantry which is well attended.

I personally see nothing wrong with a big church. I was deep into a church that had about 600 members and there was no lack of fellowship. The big thing that worries me about a large assembly is that to support big numbers requires a big place which costs big money. So you have this big place then something happens, scandal, shift in demographics, economic downturn, exodus of members and now you have this place sitting empty and weeds growing in the parking lot.

Still the same thing can happen with a small assembly. A small assembly can suffer from financial pressures and just because it's small is no guarantee there is a tie that binds.

 

Bingo

 

hmmmm…. What is the mileage scripture sets as a local church?

 

I drive about 54 miles to worship with fellow Christians. For me, faithfulness to the Word of God, to proclaiming Christ as "The Lord our Righteousness"(Jeremiah 23:6), to proclaiming that salvation is "of the Lord"(Jonah 2:9), that man really died spiritually when Adam fell in the Garden of Eden, not just injured himself(Ephesians 2:1), that salvation is by free grace and not free will(John 1:13, Romans 9:16), far exceeds the convenience of settling for attending a local church where salvation is preached as being in man's hands, and not God's, and where it is taught that God can only be sovereign if man "lets" Him be sovereign. Just look at this monstrosity of a statement:

"What is hell? It is infinite negation. It is infinite chaos. And it is more than that. I tell you, and I say it with profound reverence, hell is a ghastly monument to the failure of God to save the multitudes that are there. I say it reverently, I say it with every nerve in my body tense; sinners go to hell because God Himself cannot save them. He did all He could. He failed." - Noel Smith

So I'll drive that 54 miles for as long as Almighty God blesses me with doing so.

 

We have a Bible study at 10:00 and a worship service on Sunday morning. For those who can't make it, it is available live on Facebook Live, on YouTube, and on Sermon Audio, and available on those places afterward:

Grace Baptist Of Ruston | Facebook

(16) GraceBaptistOfRuston - YouTube

Grace Baptist Church | SermonAudio

As I stated earlier, I am not going to settle, for convenience sakes, to attend a church where the gospel of God's salvation by His free grace in Christ, the Lord my Righteousness, is not proclaimed.

I am around very few people. About the only person I am around a lot is my cousin who is the song leader at the Methodist church she attends.

 

Sorry, didn't mean to imply that there are very few actual people around me. I mean that, since I am retired, I have personal contact with very few people. Which, as a homebody and introvert by nature, is fine with me.