Pilgrim Soldier

Over the last few weeks I’ve seen quite a few posts on various blogs about the amount of time we should be giving to the Church. Most of the time this really seems to be about how much time we should be spending at organised church activities, whether they be in the building where we worship together, or in our homes or communities. The thing is though that often the question seems to be more about how much time Christians should be giving to their denomination, rather than how much they should give to the work of the Kingdom.

I do feel that we have a sanitised type of church today. As long as we attend the Sunday meetings/services we feel that this is sufficient. We justify our lack of involvement on a day to day basis by saying that times have changed. It’s no longer possible to commit ourselves in the ways our parent’s did, or the early disciples. Life is faster and work commitments make it more difficult.

It reminds me of the stories my father tells of his childhood in The Salvation Army. Back then, we’re talking about the 1940’s and 1950’s. He talks about how he used to walk to the Army every Sunday with his father and how they would walk home between meetings. He talks of 3 indoor meetings on a Sunday, 2 Open-Airs, Sunday School and a march of witness. He’s not the only one I’ve heard either, as many of his generation seem to feel that the Army is weaker because of having moved away from this sort of schedule.

Now I’m not afraid of hard work, but to me it feels as if this sort of schedule is actually detrimental to the work, because the focus is more on organised activities than it is on building community. As I think about it I also have a suspicion this is one reason why our meetings are now restricted in the majority of places to just one hour. If it was longer than an hour we wouldn’t have been able to fit everything into a Sunday. As things have been dropped from the Sunday programme the meetings simply stayed the same length.

We need to find constructive ways of encouraging people into more activity for the Kingdom. If its based solely on our local congregation this is, in my opinion, against Biblical teaching. We might even find we can work together at a deeper level with other branches of the universal church in our city/town/village. You never know we might even become more like the disciples God calls us to be.