why church can be like your gym

ok so this is not my new body shot, i still have a sizable gut, but i have started working out at our local gym. The cool thing is that not many people look like this guy.... in fact who does?? talk about a condom stuffed with walnuts!

Anyway......

I have noticed some parallels between the modern gym and the modern church and here they are in no particular order.


1.The motivation to go to church/gym : I got off my ass to the gym because well i know that i need to lose some weight and i wont be able to do it "alone" some sort of vain self improvement i guess... So why do most people join a gym? usually they want something for themselves a better body, more fitness or perhaps it is motivated by fear, one guy i met in the change rooms said "my girlfriend said i better get down here because im 50 and i wont be around much longer if i don’t do something"
To often the modern church offers the "self help" gospel the "you can live a better life" message where we go to church because we want to get "better" have less sin, perhaps become a buff and ripped "super christian"

2.the professionals V the rest: Ok i have only been at the gym for a little bit but i don’t think its the guy on the bike next to you that designs your fitness program in fact usually its only the staff that give you any advice or encouragement, they teach you how to use the machines and get you started... but of cause because the staff to user ratio is so high you don’t even see them that much.
So to in the modern church if we are all driven by the "self help" reason for being at church we tend not to have anything more than a surface relationship with other people, sure the people in positions, the senior pastor, the small group leaders all try there best but once again the staff to user ratio is up there (unless your at a small pentecostal church where everybody tends to be a pastor?? i just don’t get it)

3.when you give up: now im sure that if i stoped coming to the gym i might be lucky if i got a call wanting to know where i was. in fact because my direct debit comes out each month im sure it doesn’t matter if i am there or not.
So to in the modern church when we get large or just to focused on the unimportant things we lose track of who "isnt" there we are constantly trying to bring in new "members" but the backdoor stays wide open and we sit back and wonder why we haven’t grown.

now i dont know if churches need to stop being like gyms or if gyms need to be more like churches, either way we need to capture a greater sense of community arround what we call church. It is not a business and i am not a consumer....