Complacency, Jon Nelms warns, is a cancer: we don’t notice it growing until it has weakened us. He wrote this article for the July/August 2004 Progress Report after a visit to a Christian bookstore. It has been lightly edited. Reading time: about 7 minutes.
We are not building to the glory of God; we are building to the comfort of His spoiled children.
One of the greatest hazards to world conquest for Christ is the complacency of the typical Christian. We can quote batting averages, television schedules and the top ten movies, but we can scarcely quote a verse of Scripture. If God’s Word was taken from us, as it has been from numerous cultures throughout history, how many passages would we carry in our hearts? Complacency is, it seems, a cancer that eats at the very soul of our faith.
Looking for the missions section
Recently, I made a journey to a Christian bookstore in our area. I wandered through its many aisles of self-help books that overwhelmed me with how to be a better Christian father, a better Christian husband, a better Christian employee and, certainly, how to be a better Christian. I could have walked out, if my wallet was deep enough, with trinkets to fill a department store at Christmas time. Christian bumper stickers, Christian bookmarks, Christian mugs, Christian fine china, Christian plaques, Christian lapel pins, Christian T-shirts, Christian pencils, even a Christian doormat with the ever-present outline of the Christian fish (a symbol that we are told was used by the early church for one secret believer to recognize another, yet which was in reality, according to archaeological records, not “invented” until the fourth century). How incredible! Only in our materialistic culture could we think to make money by inducing believers to wipe the mud of the world off on a symbol of Christ before we enter our Christian houses. And don’t kid yourself; what in the world could have been the motivation for such a product? In a word, profit. I was overwhelmed by all I saw, but to be honest, I was also wondering just how much of it I could take home with me. They were beautiful and enticing and in most cases uplifted my spirit with their words of praise.
As I progressed on my exploration looking for certain CDs, I decided to take a look at the “Missions” section. After all, missions is the lifeblood of the Church. God never commanded us to go into all the world and build Christian bookstores in every nation. We were not told to build hospitals, Bible colleges, etc. All of these are good (and needed), but none are the fulfillment of the Great Commission; they are the result of it. They are peripheral; the evidence of our abundance of wealth and ingenuity. If there ever was a case of putting the cart before the horse, we have mastered it.
Cutting my way through the foliage of merchandise that was choking this jungle of Christianity I had entered into, I began to have difficulty in finding the “Missions” section. Ah, I thought, an employee can surely help me. So after waiting patiently for others to be assisted, I asked, “Where is your Missions section?” The first few seconds of silence seemed to be minutes. I felt awkward. It was obvious she had never been asked this question before. I became as stunned by her silence as she was by my inquiry. Then suddenly the puzzled look on her face shocked me back into reality. I hadn’t been in a Christian bookstore in years and now I was remembering; it was all coming back to me. That look! In almost every store I have ever been in, I have gotten the same puzzled look when I asked for books on missions. It is almost like they don’t exist. Maybe that’s the problem. And if they don’t exist, why don’t they? Is it that no one writes about missions, or is it that no one wants to read about missions?
As the puzzled employee uttered the customary “hmmms,” I thought to myself, surely there is a book here on William Carey, or Adoniram Judson, or Jonathan Goforth. As I was reasoning this all out in my mind, the light bulb flashed on over her head and she said, “We do have some things back here, follow me.” (On the way she stopped to ask a senior employee where the section was, just to be sure, I suppose.) We walked literally to the furthest corner of the store to one little, ten-foot-long aisle. Here it was at long last, the alleged “missions section.” There were no world maps showing where the unreached people live. There were no CDs of missions music. (Could this be because there has been virtually none produced?) There were no missionary biographies (not even a single book on Lottie Moon, and this was a Baptist store). There were not even any how-to books on holding a missions conference, or missions coloring books, or pens, or bookmarks, or missions doormats. It seems that missions has become the religious dodo bird of our generation.
In 1986, when we first started this ministry, I received in the mail a publication from a mail-order bookstore that boasted on the front cover that over 10,000 titles of books could be ordered from the pages within. I looked through the entire paper and there was not one single title of a missions book listed. Not one out of 10,000! Eighteen years later, nothing had changed.
Before you think I am too hard on bookstore owners, let me stop to say that I have a basic grasp of marketing: supply and demand. I understand that the owners are not going to spend money to stock their shelves with books that no one is going to buy. They are just being good stewards. The fault is not theirs; it is ours. If we cared about missions, the shelves would be overflowing with product. We just don’t care, and that, my friend, is why the world still does not know the name of Jesus.
Complacency in how we spend God’s money
Since I began speaking on missions, I have often shared the pulpit with others. Many have been the times that a singing group was at the church the same time I was. Typically they are given 45 minutes to an hour to sing and entertain the congregation. I am given five minutes to talk about missions. This was specifically because the pastor did not want the “challenge” I was going to give to interfere with their time of singing and praise. At one church in the Atlanta area, I recall that at the end of the service two “love offerings” were taken. When I left that day, the pastor gave me a check for $25 and proudly announced that they had raised and given more than $6,000 to the singing group. Oh well, somebody has to pay for the bus they were traveling in, but who was going to pay to get the Gospel to the billions of people who still have not heard it?
We care too much about ourselves, our desires, our needs and our pleasures; we spend “God’s tithe” to build “bigger barns” for ourselves. And let’s not kid ourselves either; they are for us far more than they are for God. He does not need a family life center, a bowling alley, a weight room, an aerobics area; but then again, He doesn’t need padded pews, air conditioning or indoor baptisteries. None of these things are wrong, none are evil, but neither are they ultimately necessary. They are an “evangelistic luxury” unknown in Christian history. What is necessary is reaching the lost with the Gospel. I know that these “tools” can be instruments that open the door of opportunity to witnessing to others, but come on, personal soul winning can do the same thing. Who, I wonder, is going to pay to open the doors of opportunity to reach the rest of the world?
You see, what perplexed me as a pastor years ago is how God’s people will give to build a new auditorium or classrooms for their church, but they won’t give a dime to build one for another church of like faith in their own town, which just happens to be down the block or in the ghetto. Who are we kidding? We are not building to the glory of God; we are building to the comfort of His spoiled children. We say we are giving to God, but in reality, we are giving to ourselves: to our comfort, to our own children’s youth programs. If we were truly giving to God, we would be more concerned about where it is given and how it is used. We would give it where it was needed most, not where we would benefit the most.
We pay for padded pews so that our oversized bottoms will be comfortable while we sing “Send the Light,” then we give precious little to send it. We spend $10,000, $50,000, $200,000 on air-conditioning systems so that we remain comfortable for those three hours a week when we actually use the auditorium, but then proclaim that our church cannot afford to take on any more missionary projects. These men whom we are failing are dying from heat exhaustion while we complain that the thermostat is turned down too low.
Churches and ministries will borrow money to build structures but would never consider doing so to support missions. We will spend tens of millions to build a new church facility for ourselves but cannot give $1,000 to build one for a church in India. I was told by one of our representatives of a church that cancelled his meeting because they could not at the moment afford to have a missions speaker; yet the pastor went on to tell him how the men in his church had just spent some $14,000 on a fishing trip and subsequent fish fry at his church. God help us!
It is time for our shepherds to stand before the congregations and rebuke us for our complacency. We don’t need to be patted on the back and told that our complacency is acceptable to God; we need to be swatted on the seat of our pants and told to repent and do what God put us here to do for Him.
Love the things He loves
As I said, complacency is like a cancer. At first we don’t even know it is growing in us, but in time it weakens us, makes us ineffective and eventually destroys us. That is why God warned us, “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world.” We are His children; we should love the things that He loves. If we spend enough time with Him, we will become more like Him. We will love the things He loves and despise the things He despises. This is as much a law of nature as is gravity. I am very much like my father, and my grown children are very much like me. I don’t wonder why. It doesn’t surprise me. I expect this, and God expects us to be like Him too.
We preach this as if it is something we must do, or give up, to accomplish. That is not the case; this should involve no effort at all on our part. If our hearts are in love with Him, it is natural to want to be like Him, to gravitate to what He likes, to shun what He dislikes. At first this may be just an effort to please Him, but before long the effort has been replaced with a sincere desire. When our hearts are conformed to His image, our likes and dislikes are transformed too. You will never get a person to live right by preaching at them. Help them fall in love with Jesus and you can’t stop them from living right.
The bottom line is that many of these things I have mentioned are not wrong in themselves. I am not casting stones here; I am merely asking us to consider if what we are doing “for God” really is for Him or for ourselves. As I travel, church members speak to me about some of these same things. They too are concerned. The sons of Eli, the Bible says, because they abused the offerings people were bringing to the temple, actually caused people to “abhor” giving to God. When what we are asked to finance is so obviously for ourselves alone and does precious little to advance the cause of His Great Commission, then we need to step back and consider what our motivation really is.
This is not a moment of instruction to pastors; I am speaking to the church at large. So many pastors go without their paycheck because the offerings are so low at their church. They and their families suffer without mentioning it because they are not there for a paycheck; they are there to serve. Such men are worthy of more honor than we can give to them.
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