While reading through John Piper’s book “Counted Righteous in Christ,” I came across a great paragraph where Piper discusses the problem with growing a Church with out a heart for doctrine.  He says;

“Everyone knows that with the right personality, the right music, the right location, and the right schedule you can grow a church without anybody really knowing what doctrinal commitments sustain it, if any.  Church-planting specialists generally downplay biblical doctrine in the core values of the what makes a church “successful.”  The long term effect of this ethos is a weakening of the church that is concealed as long as the crowds are large, the band is loud, the tragedies are few, and persecution is still at the level of preferences.

But more and more this doctrinally-diluted brew of music, drama, life-tips, and marketing seems out of touch with real life in this world- not to mention the next.  It tastes like watered down gruel, not a nourishing meal.  It simply isn’t serious enough.  It’s too playful and chatty and casual.  Its joy just doesn’t feel deep enough or heartbroken or well-rooted.  The injustice and persecution and suffering and hellish realities in the world today are so many and so large and so close that I can’t help but think that, deep inside, people are longing for something weighty and massive and rooted and stable and eternal.  So it seem to me that the trifling with silly little sketches and breezy welcome-to-the-den styles on Sunday morning are just out of touch with what matters.”

This is vintage Piper; direct, hard hitting and right on.  I thinks he is so right, people today are yearning for substance, something that they know is solid.  The problem is, they don’t know what it is and where to find it.  So they sit in the churches mentioned in the quote above, content with eating food that will only hold them until Sunday night and have no relevance or impact on them for the rest of the week. 

Let’s pray that God would continue to raise up churches that are committed to the Gospel and sound doctrine but let’s also pray that God would open the eyes of those yearning that they may  find the substance they are longing for in Christ.