What do the church and the NFL have in common? Or maybe the ought to be, ‘What SHOULD the church and the NFL have in common?’.
As I sat yesterday on my couch, cold bottle of Mountain Dew in hand participating in my Sunday afternoon fall ritual I couldn’t help but notice the amount of people in the stands at the weekly NFL game I was watching. I began to wonder what it is that drew so many people to the stadium to watch the game and what the parallel to the church could be.
Church meets once a week in auditoriums all over the country. NFL games take place once a week in stadiums all over the country. People show up on Sunday mornings expecting certain things to take place at both of these places. So what is it about the NFL that church has not figured out. I mean, even the Cleveland Browns, one of the worst teams in football draws an average of 60,000 fans per week.
Jim Rayburn said it perfectly, ‘Christ is the strongest, grandest most attractive personality to ever grace this earth. But a careless messenger with the wrong approach can reduce all this magnificence to the level of boredom.’
We serve the greatest God with greatest power and each week we have the opportunity to put that out there for the world to see. Why then are more people drawn to football then to church?
I believe there are two main reasons why and we will address them in the next two days.
1. Carnality of people.
2. Boredom of the Church
Maybe together we can see something happen in our world and our church where we draw more people to Christ than the NFL does to it’s stadiums. Who knows, anything is possible.
