Church is like a religious lullaby, too often putting Christians to sleep. Attending church requires nothing but passivity. That doesn’t sound like a great plan for Christian spiritual growth.

Church services say to people; “We don’t need your input, just be a passive spectator and let the preacher do the rest.” Long or short, sermons often make people feel like they don’t really belong in church, because their insights and gifts are deemed to be totally unnecessary to the message and/or the meeting.

Three questions to shake up a church out of a rut: 1) In this age of lateral learning (learning from your peers), how long will church make people sit passively and silently listen? 2) If Christ has given spiritual gifts to all His people, why does church limit them to listening to a preacher every week? 3) Is it possible that the traditional one-man lecture church format has held Christians back from becoming all God wants us to be?

Just because a preacher has thousands of followers, it doesn’t mean that he is leading them in the right direction. Even if he only has a hand-full of followers, he may be holding them back from what God wants them to be.