The Reality of the Modern American Church

   A young couple who had moved into a small community, went to the local church. They met the greeters at the front door who had beautiful smiles and were very polite. The couple asked them, “Is this a Biblical church?”  The greeters looked at each other with surprise and then back to the couple and replied, “Of course we are!  We have a great service and afterwards, we go downstairs, have a nice luncheon and we fellowship.”

   The couple then responded to the greeters, “When we arrived this morning, we observed your congregation enter the church, and as they did, they walked by over a hundred people who are homeless and starving, many of them with small children who are also starving, and they asked everyone of your congregation for a few coins so they could buy something, many of them not for themselves, but for their own children.

   “We listened to your church members reply to those asking for help with such replies as, ‘I’ll pray for you,’ ‘If the Holy Spirit guides me, I’ll do something,’ ‘This is not my ministry’ and ‘My ministry is my children,’ though most just walked by them and refused to look at them or acknowledge their presence.” 

   The greeters’ politeness now turned to a defensiveness as they replied, “But we help in a third world country and do ma ...