Thinking about my previous blog post The Church Needs to Become The Church on the way to a restaurant for lunch, I heard this song from ten years ago:

Everything To Everyone
Everclear

You put yourself in stupid places
Yes I think you know its true
Situations where its easy to look down on you
I think you like to be the victim
I think you like to be in pain
I think you make yourself a victim
Almost every single day

You do what you do
You say what you say
You try to be everything to everyone
You know all the right people
You play all the right games
You always try to be
Everything to everyone

Yeah you do it again
You always do it again

You say they taught you how to read and write
Yeah, they taught you how to count
I say they taught you how to buy and sell
Your own body by the pound
I think you like to be their simple toy
I think you love to play the clown
I think you are blind to the fact
That the hand you hold is the hand that holds you down

You do what you do
Yeah, You say what you say
You always try to be everything to everyone
You know all the right people
You play all the right games
You always try to be everything to everyone

Spin around and fall down, do it again
You stumble and you fall
Yeah why dont you ever learn
Spin around and fall down, do it again
Yeah, you stumble and you fall
I wonder if you will ever learn

Why wont you ever learn?

Come on now, do that stupid dance for me

You do what they tell you to do
You say what they say
You try to be everything to everyone
Yeah, You jump through the big hoop
You play all the right games
You try to be everything to everyone

Spin around and fall down, do it again
You stumble and you fall
Yeah you do it again
Spin around and fall down, do it again
You stumble and you fall

In the ‘Christian cutthroat competition’ for the numbers and the money, the seeker-sensitive church has done exactly what this song has talked about:

Become Everything to Everyone

We have tried to be political to appease the religious right, tried to be ‘hip’ to appease the ‘Joshua-X-homey boy’ generation, tried to be ‘cartoonish’ to appease the children at children’s church, tried to ‘extreme makeover’ the sanctuary to appease the seekers, tried to speak the ‘new Christianese’ (sinner called ‘pre-Christian’, sanctuary called ‘worship center’) to not offend the offenders, tried to find our ‘purpose’ to hinder fulfilling our mandated calling, and tried to become ‘Worship Bandstand’ to attempt to be ‘culturally relevant’.

We have put ourselves in stupid places when ministers who preach the house down calling for holiness go out the next day and sleep with a prostitute in a sleazy hotel room and claim ‘the devil made me do it’. We have played ‘victim’ when the government does something that the big dogs in Christian media do not like and the catechism turns into crusade. We do what the Christian media and the pastors turned politicians tell us to do. We politic and play games with souls. We say the right cliche catch phrazes. We want the ‘right people’ in our doors to where we can get a favor from the city council when we need an ordinance passed or a piece of property zoned in order to build a new mega-monument.

However, all we did was to be like temple prostitutes and sell our souls to the highest bidder and perform a ‘trick’ and wait for the next ‘john’ with the big payday to come and offer up some money.

We stumble and we fall down
Yet, we do it again (and again)
Why won’t we ever learn…..

Different name, same bill of goods, promising the same results…. and never delivering

We stumble and we fall down
Yet, we do it again (and again)
Why won’t we ever learn????????

Because we chose to discard the Word of God (the Bible) and instead read the words of church growth ‘experts’. Like when the church traded pastors for politicians, we traded evangelists for ‘experts’ and traded power written on parchments many centuries ago for ‘programs’ written yesterday. We replaced faith with formula and replaced worship with wantonness. We decided to grow the church with our ‘know how’ instead of praying for souls down on our knees.

We were taught to count as census ourselves as we walked by might and ‘power’ believing that the CONsensus was the truth. We were taught to read the Christian best sellers and write letters to the editor to sway public opinion……

And the hand we held became the hand that held the church down as we clowned around with our Jesus Junk toys.

However the church of Acts, like taught us how to do so much with physically so little realizing that their ‘all’ was in the justification by faith. You never saw these guys hold abortion protest signs. You never heard an election campaign speech for Caesar’s opposition candidate. You never saw these people boycott a consumer good. You never saw these people look for marketing to grow the church. The Word clearly states that many were baptized and the church grew and the widows and orphans among them were taken care of instead of being an emotional target for a donation promising a hundredfold blessing. You never saw the church play victim when Paul and Silas were imprisoned or when the Greeks or Romans had control of the land (but elect a democrat in office and watch the pity party begin). The church became victors and conquerors when the government persecuted and beheaded their fellow brothers and sisters and these people prayed without ceasing not in the name of IHOP for a harp and a bowl but in the power of the Holy Spirit for a move of God. Lydia sold purple dyes and not purple dyes with a cross silkscreened on the glass bottle calling it Christian dye and selling it for three times the price.

Instead, we read books by experts and became political action committees trying to loophole around the law, agenda armies slaving to fulfill the masterplan instead of obeying the Master’s Words, corporations where the senior pastor calls himself an ‘empowered executive’, ‘pentecostal play-lands minus the super slick slides and blow up castles that we jump up and down in. When all along, God wanted us to become his church to fulfill a Great Commission

In becoming ‘everything to everyone’ we became ‘nothing to nobodies’.

Come on now, do that stupid dance for me…..

Yeah, you know… the one you want us to dance to in order to say ‘God moved…’

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