Irrelevant

 Numbers can be difficult to wrap our minds around. Take the number 4 million; it’s so large that we find it difficult to put it in perspective, how high would a stack of 4 million cheeseburgers be? Now try imagining a stack of 20 million cheeseburgers. See my point? What if instead of cheeseburgers we were talking about 4 million people plunged into poverty in the last year? Or 20 million unemployed or under-employed, or just plain discouraged into despair?

 When we’ve got 24 million people added to the ranks of people in poverty and unemployed, the numbers are simply too large to get a handle on. But each one of those 24 million people is in a life storm and they all have a story to tell. How long would it take to listen?

Not since the Great Depression have we seen numbers this stark, we all have friends or family members affected, we know their stories, but there is no way as individuals to grasp the enormity of human suffering out there, there are simply too many stories.~Excerpt From "Lessons From The Wheelbarrow"

There's a reason the church is deemed irrelevant by tens of millions of Americans. We're in an economic crisis of near historic proportions, more Americans live below the poverty line today than in anytime since the Great Depression. Millions of homes are in or near foreclosure, the percentage of Americans requiring food assistance stuns the imagination, at the current pace of job creation we'll not see a return to 5/6% unemployment for a decade if ever. And what are our so called religious leaders up in arms about? Gay marriage, evolution, and school prayer.

Could there be issues less important or relevant to the millions of Americans wondering how to feed, clothe, and shelter their families than gay marriage or creationism? Is it possible for the church to get farther from relevance to the immediate needs of their flocks or the people we're trying to reach for Christ than we are today? If a father asks "How do I feed my children?", "Vote against gay marriage, and for school prayer." is an answer unlikely to move him to Christ.

So it's no wonder that for millions of people in crisis, the church isn't relevant, in fact it's never even considered as being part of the solution because we're blindly focused on problems that have no bearing on hunger, unemployment, homelessness, and the gut wrenching despair that accompany those troubles. There is a season for every cause, and to the extent that the church focuses on problems that do not have relevance to the season we're in, we fail Jesus.