The church of fifty years ago was one of the main centers of the community, especially in rural areas. People went to church to see their neighbors, perhaps catch up on some news, and for “spiritual” food, or something approaching that. It was all seen as important. This has been turned on its end.

People today generally see the church as irrelevant, boring, and disconnected to what the larger community is doing. This is what I believe has happened: this generation has sought its socialization--its fun, fellowship, and recreation--in other places. As far as getting the “news,” one is bombarded with it in our homes via various media.

This is a huge part of the problem: the church generally morphed into a social institution in the 20th Century and then the government took responsibility for the social needs and problems of the community. Charitable organizations were raised up to fill in the gaps. Finally, spiritual relevancy was negated as recreation and shopping on Sunday supplanted
all things spiritual. The result was that the church became irrelevant.

The fall-out from all this should be obvious to a person of average intelligence. Remove God from your community and individual life and you witness the leakage of real meaning for life. Seventy years of the Soviet Union proved this. Even more pertinent to us in the West is the media, the activist groups, the courts, and the politicians that have been the driving force to remove prayer, the Bible, and Christianity from the public arena. And the fall-out from the resultant pluralism and secularism has been huge. Remove spiritual meaning from life and you decimate a culture.

On the other hand, I strongly argue for the relevancy of the church. First, at its core, the church of Christ was God’s creation, and it is good. It is good to attend its ministries when Christ and the Word of God are central to the proclamations in the church. Done right, it gives hope, reason for living, and a sense of community that is rarely seen today. To learn that we are created in the image of God to worship and serve a living God is huge for a pervading inward peace. At Lake Echo Fellowship Baptist Church we have repeatedly seen lives changed and wish to take that hope and peace outside the walls of the building. We strive to be community-oriented while focused on godly matters. We refuse to compromise the call of God upon us in order that we may fall in line with a pluralistic, secularized culture of hopelessness.

Check us out!

For more information call me, Pastor Frank Kohler, at 829-3030 or email me at fkohler@ns.sympatico.ca.