Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Drive-Thru


I love Taco Bell, especially in my college days. Any restaurant serving drive-thru tacos at 2am to hungry college students gets an A in my book. Recently Kelly and I went in a drive thru at Taco Bell.

Imagine a picture of three loaded tacos full of the works, with cilantro and lime to top it all off. Adding to the picture was a name which made my mouth water even more: “Cantina Tacos!”

I couldn’t resist. I ordered the Cantinas in hopes that they would be perfect goodness.
I opened up the foil around my tacos as fast as I could in hopes of biting into a delicious treat.

There laying inside the foil was the smallest, most unsatisfying tacos I have ever gotten from Taco Bell. These three tacos could hardly cover my taste not to mention my hungry, grumbling stomach.
Has our idea of church become like this?
We drive in, expect to be given something great and to be fed, only to drive away wondering why our appetites weren’t filled like we expected. We often wish church would feed us, when really it was never meant to function as a fast food restaurant. We expect programs to offer us something, and when the programs don’t meet our expectations, we wonder what’s wrong with the church.
Are we Christian consumers?
Does our mentality of church fit that of a drive-thru restaurant?
In the book of Acts, a scene is described in which the Spirit of God moved upon a group of people. These people were concerned with two main things, the love of God and love of each other. The two went hand in hand. They weren’t interested in what they could receive from the community, they were interested in what they could contribute to the community as God contributed His Spirit to them.
Many people who attend church possess this consumeristic mentality.
This bothers some of us. Some of us feel a pull to bring back church in its original context. Some of us are sick of being church critics; we're ready to be solutions.