Worse than Nothing, Part 3
by Teri Ong [This is the third of three posts about abandoning attendance in a local church congregation. If you are reading this and getting a little uncomfortable about your own practices in regard to building up the Body of Christ, I only have one suggestion: go to Scripture and the Lord for yourself and see what He would have you do on a regular basis. We, as American Christians, are so spoiled by our ease and affluence; perhaps we need to take some time out for honest self-evaluation. This post picks up our imaginary round table discussion where we […]
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Worse Than Nothing, Part 2
by Teri Ong We have already looked with sadness on the problem of churches cancelling services for reasons that are less than legitimate. Their reasons often are pragmatic and/or humanistic, but they don’t stand up to Biblical scrutiny. As sad as it is when churches cancel services, it is even sadder that there is a large population of people who profess to be members of the body of Christ – the church universal– that cancel service in church for themselves on an almost weekly basis. They find many reasons for forsaking the assembly. I have met many people who were […]
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Worse than Nothing Part 1
by Teri Ong [Introductory remarks – I wrote this a long time ago, but I needed to carefully consider whether it could be helpful to anyone or might be merely inflammatory. Many years ago I heard a song by a country Gospel group that was much more concise than what I have written, but along the same lines. The song was called “Excuses.” It was all about the excuses people give for not going to church, and believe me, in 40 years of church ministry, I have heard every one of them given. There are sometimes legitimate reasons not to […]
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The Mother of All Birthday Parties
by Teri Ong This weekend is the end of the annual “birthday” cycle for our immediate family. Even all of our children’s spouses fall within the January 5 to October 15 range. So far we only have one grandchild outside the range, but even he gets his in by the end of October. This gives us a couple months for focusing on Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations. As our children were growing up, they understood that it would happen fairly frequently that we would not be celebrating “their day” on their day. This was particularly true if “their day” happened to be on […]
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