My Church is the Golf Course

Read Luke 5:12-16

Mount Cheam, near my home. 

Ever hear that?  Ever say that?  Time alone in the wilderness comes naturally to me.  Church, not so much. 

Jesus made time for both. 

Jesus heals a man, then tells him to go to church.  “Go and show yourself to the priest, and make an offering for your cleansing, as Moses commanded, for a proof to them.” 

That’s more than a lot of people would say. 

One out of four adults (23%) in the US are what the Barna Research Group calls Unattached – people who in the last year neither attended a conventional church nor an "organic faith community (e.g., house church, simple church, intentional community)."

Some of these people are what you might call Facebook Christians.  They use religious media, but they have no personal interaction with a regularly-convened faith community.  About one-third of these folks have never attended a church, ever. 

Six out of ten adults in that Unattached category (59%) consider themselves to be Christian. Even more surprising was Barna’s finding that 17% of the Unattached group meet Barna’s definition of “born again Christian:”  people who have made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that they consider to be very important in their life, and who believe that they will experience Heaven after they die because they have confessed their sins and accepted Christ as their savior.

Jesus endorsed participation in local organized religion.  But it was not a “do as I say, not as I do” thing.  He backed it up.  He went to synagogue regularly.  “As was his custom, [Jesus] went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day" (Luke 4:16). 

He met God in the wilderness too.  “But he would withdraw to desolate places and pray” (chapter 5, verse 16).  Maybe that’s how he maintained his sanity. 

So if you want to say that your church is in the backcountry, or the golf course, or your favourite fishing spot, Jesus understands that.  But he was intentional about organized religion too.