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"If God is at work week by week raising men
from the dead, there will always be people coming to see how it is done. You cannot find an
empty church that has conversion for its leading feature. Do you want to know how
to fill empty chapels? Here is the answer: Get your Lazarus." |
Week 12 (March)
Both our children, Matthew and Rachele, were asking
about food. I looked at my watch. It was about noon. Just ahead on the right I saw the familiar
red-and-white roof of a Kentucky Fried Chicken Restaurant. So we stopped there.
As we sat eating at a table inside, I found myself reading the
end of the cardboard box our chicken had come in. "Colonel Sanders has 5,000
restaurants," it said. Five thousand? Why, we Nazarenes have that many churches in the U.S.
Yet, I wondered: Is the Church of the Nazarene as well known as the Colonel's
chicken?
There are, of course, all kinds of valid reasons for Colonel
Sanders' company being able to fill up his restaurants. Those reasons include a distinctive
product, an aggressive marketing strategy, an ability to meet a felt need and well-placed, highly
visible facilities.
There's no reason why the Church of the Nazarene shouldn't
be as well known as the Colonel. In fact, in the parable of the great feast in Luke 14, Jesus seems to be saying to us that we, as His servants, ought to be
possessed with an urgency and act with a persuasiveness that far exceeds anything this world has
ever seen.
The passionate wish of the Master is to have an absolutely
full house. In Jesus' parable, the nobleman told his servants to keep searching and persuading
until his banquet hall was completely filled. If those who were invited first did not respond, they
were to keep looking until they found enough people who would respond.
From this parable, we can conclude that it grieves Jesus
even more than us to see empty pews in church sanctuaries. Sometimes I'm not sure it really
grieves us at all. For example, not long ago the Sunday school leader in a small American church
said to me: "Well, the people in this town know the church is here. They can come if they
want to. They know the doors are open."
Sadly, it appeared that the hearing of a thousand excuses and
being discouraged over and over again by people refusing to admit their spiritual needs had
caused that little church to retreat from its commitment to fulfilling this command of Christ.
How tragic! Jesus said we must be prepared to
compel. And in fact, some pressure may be needed to overcome the incredulity of people
as to our invitation being meant seriously. The poor and the disadvantaged and the minorities
may be especially wary of our attempts to win them. But Jesus said: "Compel them!"
After we'd been in Florence, Italy a couple of years, we put
up a new sign in front of the church building. In addition to giving a schedule of services, we
added the phrase, "Ingresso Libero" (literally free entry, but really meaning Everyone
Welcome).
A few weeks later I was doing some door-to-door
canvassing in the neighborhood. At one door a young woman said, "I walked past your church
the other day and noticed your new sign. I didn't realize outsiders were welcome in your
meetings. I'd like to come visit someday."
That evening I wondered to myself how many others in the
neighborhood thought that the "banquets" inside our little building were closed to outsiders. I
asked the Holy Spirit to help me get on with the "compelling" in the Peretola/Piazza Puccini
neighborhoods of Florence, Italy. [ Missionary stories from
Italy ]
Why has the Colonel been able to make such an impact on
the United States with 5,000 restaurants? Does he have something going for him that we don't
have? I don't think so. Maybe it's just that we have not been doing enough compelling.
These devotional thoughts by Howard Culbertson appeared in the March 23, 1980 edition of Standard
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Howard Culbertson, 5901 NW 81st, Oklahoma
City, OK 73132 | Phone: 405-740-4149 - Fax:
405-491-6658
Updated: February 12, 2019
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