Monday 30 April 2012

Recipe for a Fruitful Church

Many of us have been to places and tasted food and loved it so much that we have asked for the recipe so that we could try it at home. The method for attaining a desired result is not only limited to food but also school administration, work, church and raising up a family. Many have packaged these recipes and made some cash from it. I wonder how many of us have tried the nice recipe found in the the book of Acts 2: 42. These are 4 recipes for a fruitful church and they are; Doctrine or Teaching, Fellowship, Breaking of Bread or Communion and Prayer. Apart from few churches I know who don't have regular communion, the rest of the recipes i.e. teaching, fellowship, and prayer are common rituals with most churches. The key question is what should be the end result of all these teaching, fellowship, communion and prayer? It could be seen from the referenced text that all these activities yielded result hence peoples lives were saved as more people joined them, Acts 2:47. If this church was a company you could say that they had gains or profit as a result of the investment made. What you sow is what you get all things being equal.The church invested in those things and yielded results. There are some instances when we have followed the recipe instructions given to us but have not arrived at the desired results. In some cases we will phone friends to complain that our food didn't taste what we had wanted, or if its not about food we would go to some forum to complain bitterly that we didn't get the right result after following set of instructions. Some might end up getting a refund of their money if they had bought the recipe. What we often forget is that the mistake could be our own making. In the case of food recipe you might not get the desired result for some of the following reasons; poor quality of the ingredients, wrong proportion, wrong timing. So why is that some churches have followed these recipes diligently but have not had the desired result? Have those churches got too much and less of some ingredients? Have they for e.g. spent too much time on teachings and less on prayer and vice versa? Have we completely forgotten some ingredients? One important ingredient on the list which can easily be forgotten is fellowship. The only way to attain a fruitful church is to pay equal attention to these recipes- Doctrine/Teaching, Fellowship, Communion, Prayer. Have you critically checked your prayer life? What teachings are you giving to people? And just what do you call fellowship?