Truly Changed…or Merely Churched?

Conduct yourselves with wisdom toward outsiders, making the most of the opportunity. Let your speech always be with grace, as though seasoned with salt, so that you will know how you should respond to each person.
Colossians 4:5-6

Our pastor’s sermon yesterday morning was entitled “Reaching the Radically Unchurched,” and it seemed especially relevant in view of the many bloggers who are posting about the “emerging church” and how to reach people in a post-modern culture. Once again, I was behind a TV camera and didn’t catch much of the message the first time around, so I gave another listen to it this morning.

The “outsiders” Paul refers to in the Colossians passage quoted above are those who are lost. They are the “radically unchurched,” and the key to reaching them is to make our walk and our talk consistent with the Gospel. Our very words are to be such as to make others thirsty (thus the allusion to salt)…thirsty for Living Water.

The pastor outlined several important issues, but I want to focus on a factor he called “authenticity.” As he put it, people don’t come to our churches because they’re afraid they’ll turn out like us. Our conduct must be consistent with our confession.

In practical terms, here’s how to distinguish those who are truly changed by the Gospel from those who are merely churched:

• To the Merely Churched, church is a place to go on Sundays; to the Truly Changed, Church is who we are every day.
• To the Merely Churched, church is a hotel for saints; to the Truly Changed, church is a hospital for sinners.
• To the Merely Churched, worship is getting a blessing; to the Truly Changed, worship is offering ourselves to God.
• To the Merely Churched, evangelism is for the preachers and the gifted; to the Truly Changed, it’s a commission to be fulfilled by every believer.
• The Merely Churched are defined by behavior: what you do and don’t do; the Truly Changed are defined by belief, which leads to right action.
• To the Merely Churched, Christianity means that Christ is part of your life; to the Truly Changed, Christ is your life.
• To the Merely Churched, the Bible is important to help one’s life; to the Truly Changed, the Bible is sufficient to guide all of life.

In his book Prophetic Untimeliness, Os Guinness warns the modern church not to seek marketing triumphs over mission, nor to let talk of reinventing the church replace prayer for revival. All too often nowadays, the Church is making the mistake of watering down the message in order to somehow become “relevant,” as if the original Gospel message can’t be understood and accepted by a post-modern culture*. The irony is that this present generation, like all others before it, is really seeking something that’s beyond relevance…it wants a return to “thus sayeth the Lord.”

There’s much more meat in this message — all of this is predicated on our ability as Christians to form meaningful relationships, to listen before we preach, and to remember that the leaves don’t move the wind…the Holy Spirit is the engine behind it all. But at the very least, it’s instructive to consider the extent to which we as individuals fall on one side of the other of the line between the “Merely Churched” and the “Truly Changed.”