Worldly Targets Set By Churches: How My Friend Began Preaching Rubbish
Ever since I became born-again and began to walk closely with God, I have always thought the practice of setting attendance or financial targets by churches and their leaders for those under their leadership was erroneous.
I believed it was a worldly practice that had nothing to do with God, hence if the church embraced such it would only end up derailing the church from its original values and standard.
I once had a friend who was a dedicated member of Christ Embassy, one of the denominations guilty of this practice, so when this topic came up during our conversations, I expressed my disapproval of such a policy in the church. But despite being a very devoted and committed member of the Church, he honestly admitted that such targets made him to start preaching what he ought not when he held a leadership position under the church.
He bowed to the pressure of meeting such targets set for him by his leaders and began preaching something else which he thought would enable him meet those targets when preaching the right thing couldn’t.
I wasn’t much surprised though about that because I knew very well that such was inevitable, considering that such targets were worldly and not of God, so it was only going to lead to compromising and going contrary to the things of God, since the things of this world were opposed to the things of God.
This is the same kind of targets set by some financial institutions to their employees that would make them to start going to ridiculous lengths, including sleeping with some of their clients, to meet them.
This is what has being embraced by a significant part of the church which ought to be in this world but not to the world.
That’s why I don’t get impressed with the mammoth crowds attending some churches and the amount of money they generate as a result.
It’s much easier to achieve similar results by preaching the nonsense people want to hear rather than the Truth and Words of the Spirit.
If it were by preaching rubbish as it is the case in most of such churches, many of the disciples who left Jesus because of the Words of the Spirit He preached, would have never left Him.
They would have remained in the church at the expense of spiritual quality, which is more or less the result of the church we have today.
That’s why I don’t judge a church by the amount of members or riches they have, but how much they follow the example and teachings of Christ, because that’s the only true standard that determines how successful a church is in the sight of God.
God bless.