DEAR MINISTER Pt.10

RUN FROM THE "ABC" TRAP( A)

The "ABC" trap in ministry is a coinage for the obsessive desire for large Attendance, Building and Cash.

A for attendance. We are in the age of mega church. It is noteworthy that God has blessed the work of some ministers to the point where attendance in a single service is in tens and hundreds of thousands.

We cannot deny the move of God and his mighty power in drawing multitudes to himself. I am sure some ministers did not start out with the desire to be mega. They remained faithful to their assignment and God blessed their ministry.

I have nothing against mega churches that God raised and properly pastored the bible way. However, as a minister of the Gospel, your obsession shouldn't be about running a "mega" church or ministry. Not everyone will have a mega church.

I did not see it as a genuine ministry desire. From the standpoint of scriptures and apostolic doctrine, we never saw Jesus, Paul, Peter and other servants of God focus their teaching or preaching on how to be "mega" in ministry. Check the content of their teaching, they taught doctrines.

The obsessive desire to be mega may lead to compromise and lowering of standards. In a bid to increase attendance, some have gone diabolical or employed gimmicks so that crowds can come in.

Some mega churches did not go diabolical but they lowered standards for crowd to come in. I am wary of mega church model that do not have sunday school discipleship structure for discipling their members.

The desire is always to quickly finish service for the next to start. Quality is sacrificed for quantity and brevity. That's not how the church of Christ in centuries past was built strong and solid.

Let me quickly make a case for the restoration of sunday structure which has died in most mega and modern churches today. One of the reasons given by most churches who neglect sunday school is that they have other training structures for their members.

While that may be true, the question to ask is about the effectiveness of such training structures. Do people come/ attend those training classes? Are the training structures continuous like the old weekly sunday school?

In reality, every pastor knows that whatever training structure fixed during the week is limited in reach because those who attend church during the week are not up to 50% of the total membership. This may be due to work and traffic issues for those living in mega cities.

The sunday school remains the most effective opportunity to train and raise disciples because sunday is the day where most people have time for corporate worship. You can reach more persons on sunday than during the week.

A number of solid and properly trained believers today were raised through the sunday school system. Check.

The New Testament Church is a discipleship centre. The desire to populate should not overide the desire to disciple believers to become more like Jesus Christ.

Evangelism and discipleship should be your forte. Kill the obsessive desire for attendance before it kills your ministry.