Does God Need a New Marketing Manager?

Wild Card
By Laurie Haas

“Of the 250,000 Protestant churches in America, 200,000 are either stagnant (with no growth) or declining.” (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/christiancrier/2013/10/26/why-we-are-losing-so-many-churches-in-the-united-states/) We have 1/3 fewer churches today than in 1950 and 4,000 churches close their doors every single year. After reading about the Christian life in Chapters 6-10 of Book III of Calvin’s Institutes this week, one can perhaps understand why this is happening.

The first stumbling block for Americans is self-denial. The American dream is built on achieving success and prosperity by one’s own efforts of hard work, initiative and achievement. People flooded to America to improve on their individual life. It’s no surprise that today’s culture of entitlement and “self-made” people dominate the headlines. Juxtapose this against the church’s call to self-denial. “‘A world of vices is hidden in the soul of man.’ And you can find no other remedy than in denying yourself and giving up concern for yourself, and in turning your mind wholly to seek after those things which the Lord requires of you, and to seek them only because they are pleasing to him.” (Institutes, p. 692)

Not only are we to deny ourselves, but also in humility consider others better than we are. From this place of humility, we are to give God credit for all of our gifts and then give our gifts away to those in need. This is to be done from a place of love. Calvin writes in 3.7.5 “we are taught that all the gifts we posses have been bestowed by God and entrusted to us on condition that they be distributed for our neighbors’ benefit [cf. I Peter 4:10].” (p. 695) The blow is softened if we can indeed see the face of God in the neighbor we are trying to generously love.