For a number of years, I have known that something was wrong with my beloved United Methodist Church. Recently, I was reading Rev. Adam Hamilton's book Leading Beyond the Walls, and the answer struck me. On page 137, down towards the bottom he referenced another author, J.S. Phillips who wrote a little book called, Your God Is Too Small. Rev. Hamilton goes on to say that one of the problems behind our declining numbers is the limited vision that permeates the leadership in our churches, and that this stems from a "safe" faith in an impotent God who no longer works in our world.
Eureka! That was it. This lead me to my first ever blog! Our people are worshipping a God that is too small.
For those of us that are old enough to remember automobiles with metal dashboards, the small plastic Jesus figure on the dashboard may conjure up certain memories. Unfortunately, I have come to understand in recent years, that this is what many people in our churches worship. They worship that small, plastic figure that once decorated many dashboards. It was plastic, and fairly lightweight except for the small magnet that held it firmly in place. It generally looked only backwards, so it had absolutely no vision of what was coming.
To make matters worse, the magnet eventually weakened and the Jesus figure on the dashboard no longer held. If you were in a wreck, it was often destroyed, even if the magnet held, and sometimes it would become a flying object inside the vehicle, doing damage where ever it hit.
There was also the problem that if you got one of the cheaper ones, a good hot day in the Southern United States would turn your plastic Jesus into a mass of molten goo that had to be removed from your metal dashboard with a putty knife, leaving scars and scratches where that symbol of cheap faith had once been.
But, the dashboard Jesus is gone now, done in by changing standards in vehicle construction which lead to the end of the metal dashboard. So it is with many of our churches. A changing world that they are unable to adapt to is bringing and end to many plastic, static churches that had no vision except what once was, and often never was. In the smashes and crashes of life, they had no ability to stick, to stand firm in faith or adapt to the ever changing world around them. They offered nothing but a cheapened version of a once great movement, and like the dashboard Jesus, they too will one day be nothing but a blob of unrecognizable goo, pried from the landscape, leaving nothing behind but scares and scratches, and within a few years all memory and trace of them will be forgotten.
You see, future generations have no memory of the dashboard Jesus they never knew, and future generations will have no memory of the stiff, unmoving plastic churches that they never knew.
And no one will morn the loss of either the plastic dashboard ornament or the plastic churches that are still stuck in the days of metal dashboards and plastic Jesus.
