Diary of a (Maybe) Retired Pastor

Jesus Didn’t Make It To Church!

1 Corinthians 14:23 NRSV

After stepping down from the position of Senior Pastor in a Manchester church, my wife and I visited the churches in our local area. For the first few months, we visited, in rotation, almost every church within walking distance of our home and some within a short driving distance. It was a very interesting time. We placed few, if any, restrictions on the churches to visit so we experienced a wide range of churches representing a broad spectrum of the UK church both in demographic, theology and worship.

One thing that struck me quite strongly was, no matter what kind of church we visited – and a few were well-established evangelical churches, strong by many usual criteria, the kind of church that would feel that it was strong on “the christian identity” – almost all of them could get through Sunday service with scarcely a mention of the name “Jesus Christ”. I started timing when Jesus’ name would first be mentioned and came-up with 20 mins as the earliest and 30-40 mins on average. One set of leaders (the entire front of house team – minister, worship leader, service leader etc.) managed to get through an entire service without once mentioning the name of Jesus! (It was otherwise a good service).

What would someone from another faith make of it all? It seemed to me perfectly possible for a devout Muslim or Hindu to sit through almost any of these services and feel perfectly comfortable. God was constantly mentioned, glorified and worshipped, but not named specifically as Jesus. It reminded me very much of the Apostle Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 14 (referenced above), the difference being that Paul was writing about incomprehension brought about by he use of unknown languages in services, whereas, in these churches, it was not an unknown language that was the problem but an unknown, unspecified God. Our Muslim or Hindu friend might well leave these services feeling that they had a great time worshipping Allah or whichever expression of divinity they personally followed.

I personally believe that Sunday services are public events to which the world is invited to hear the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ and His worship. This is what makes it Christian worship. A person of any other faith should feel uncomfortable in a Sunday service but, yet, also attracted, and leave challenged rather than comfortable. Jesus and His work should be front, centre and end of Sunday services and not simply implied or understood.

Two churches stood out from the crowd during this time. They both managed to mention Jesus within the first 5 minutes and went on bringing up His name at every opportunity. We had a ball! A big shout out for Christchurch4U, Chorlton, and Liverpool Chinese Gospel Church 🙂