A warm heart, a cool head, and me feeling useless again..

On Sunday night at church Jim, the preacher, spoke about some very similar issues to those I did in my last post: the shrinking of the church. He talked about some of the ways the church has tried to halt this, but concluded, somewhat gloomily, that although these had slowed the decline they had not stopped it.

This certainly wasn't all he talked about, but it was what stood out to me, and let me breathe a sigh of relief. It's not just me that feels like that, as if almost everything we do seems to be pointless, so much effort for so little 'harvest'. It's something I often find myself feeling down about- indeed, earlier that day I'd been worrying about it. Because however much I go on in my writings about evangelism being an integral part of our daily lives, about the way we live, about our character and the way we behave towards others, the terrible truth always lurks in the shadows, bugging me. I can't ignore it.

I've never seen anyone come to faith. Not just in the sense of being there at the time, but of being involved in the process at all. No one I know that isn't already a Christian even seems to be interested. Some friends I've prayed for for three, four, even five years without seeing any kind of change take place. And it can get me down, thinking how much they're missing out on, and make me feel like a failure, as if it's my fault, that I'm doing something wrong or am not doing something I should be. Even when I was helping run the Alpha course, one of the more successful ways of introducing Christianity to people, no one in either of my groups came to faith. (I should point out that people in other groups on the course did.) Some who had already made commitments increased their knowledge and understanding, others who hadn't also learnt things which made them think. But comparing my personal record (and I know one shouldn't really) to other people I know, it seems rather pathetic. What right have I got to say or write all this stuff when, even trying to put it into practice, I seem to be a pretty ineffective witness?

Of course, we don't know what effect our words or actions may have at some point in the future, but I find it hard to believe I can have made that much impression on people. The most I can claim is to have perhaps demonstrated to my friends that Christians are humans too, even if we are a bit odd at times! So the prudent course would be for me to shut up, to stop writing or talking about the subject. But I can't. It's a subject I feel strongly about. If it wasn't so important I wouldn't feel so bad that the people I care about aren't interested.

Jim the preacher went on to talk about how Moses spent a long time in the desert of Midian before embarking on his mission to free the Israelites from Egyptian slavery. Although he had wanted to help the Israelites earlier, his passionate killing of the Egyptian slave driver only led to him having to flee the country (see Exodus 2 v11-25). Jim's point was that we have to balance our passion with knowledge and understanding- of God's will, God's word and of other people. We need, as he said, a warm heart and a cool head. And also we need to be patient and wait for what God might be teaching us when it seems like we're getting nowhere, doing nothing useful. As Moses had to go through a period of learning (and calming down!) so sometimes God can be teaching us something- even if we don't have a clue what!- when it feels like nothing's happening. Maybe that's what's happening to me at the moment.