Are We There Yet?

Wow.  Couldn’t pass up relating this James Montgomery Boice quote given on the Ligonier Blog.  We pray and speak of being a healthy church at HLPC and this cuts to the heart of it:

Many things are talked about as necessary for the health and growth of the church today. People talk about certain programs as essential. It is true that they are important. We have such a diversified culture that people have their own individual problems. The family is fragmented, and the kind of reinforcement along Christian lines that ought to take place in homes does not always take place. The church is trying to minister specifically at these points through programs. Still, if you think back to the time of the Great Awakening in this country, you will realize that churches at that time had hardly any programs at all, at least nothing that we would recognize as programs. There were no youth groups, no graded Sunday schools, no bowling leagues, no baseball teams. But those churches were healthy. Why? Because they had the faithful preaching of the Word.

Quoted in Feed My Sheep: A Passionate Plea for Preaching. 2nd edition, 2008 by Reformation Trust Publishing, an imprint of Ligonier Ministries. Available here.

(HT:  Ligonier)

This entry (Permalink) was posted on Monday, January 5th, 2009 at 9:25 am and is filed under Church. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site.