What are we focusing on?

Times are tough for the church. That’s nothing new. It’s been tough for the church for many years now.

You know the stats — membership decline, less money and tighter budgets, Fewer people volunteering, more biblical illiteracy, fewer young people, fewer pastors, more closures, etc.

We spend a whole lot of time focused on decline, more of stuff we don’t like and less of stuff we do like.

There’s a saying — what you focus on, you get more of. This isn’t some hokey-pokey “The Secret” type of saying. There’s nothing secretive or magical about it actually. When your attention and focus is on seeing green cars, guess what your mind is tuned into — green cars. And you’ll notice there are a whole lot of green cars on the road. It’s not that there are more green cars on the road. It’s that your brain is focused on green cars and so it pays attention and is on the look out for green cars.

When we as a church focus on the stuff we don’t like, our brains pay attention to those things, being tuned in to them and noticing them all the more.

Let’s be real for a moment. I’m not arguing that these things aren’t happening. They are. But I’m not sure focusing on them is helping our cause. Yes, we should certainly acknowledge that these things are real, and they have real impact. But I think we spend far too much time on that.

How about we also pay attention to what our churches already have an abundance of. Each congregation has their own version of this…