It's All About The Numbers

Click the link above and read the article. This is enough to make me go into spasms.

I’ve read about this twice, now (two different reports), and just heard about it again this morning on NBC’s morning news program. One pastor said something to this effect, “The Bible doesn’t command us to remember the birth of Christ. We’re commanded to remember the death and resurrection of Christ.”

Why did Christians begin worshipping on Sunday? Why has the Church continued to meet for worship on Sundays for 2000 years? Precisely because, on this day, we remember and celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It’s not about “remembering” the birth of Christ.

“We want families to be together to celebrate the birth of Christ.” Hmm… they won’t be together if they join together for an hour or so?

“We’re not into forcing anyone to remember Christmas.” No, you’re into forcing them to stay away from a gathering place when it suits you.

“Well, there are lots of people that come to worship on Christmas Eve – probably the highest attended worship service in the year.” That’s a rationale?

“There won’t be very many people who will want to come that morning, anyway.” I wonder how many you must have in order to worship together, in order for Christ to be present. I remember that he did have something to say about that… something about two or three… thousand? hundred?

There is no acceptable rationale for cancelling worship services on Sunday when Christmas happens to fall on that day of the week.

Wait, here’s an idea… let’s send CDs and DVDs for families and individuals to use for “worship” on Christmas. We’ll be able to “reach” far more that way.” And since that is such an obviously great idea, let’s expand on that and skip worshipping together completely and just send out CDs and DVDs to everybody we know. It’s probably more cost effective that way (but don’t count on it), people can “worship” whenever they feel like it (instead of being forced to a particular time slot in the week) and we can do mass mailings every week instead of actually having to personally interact with any of them! Besides, we can “reach” a lot more people that way than we can trying to call meetings all the time.

Gee, it’s too bad Jesus didn’t have all this technology available to him back then. He could have had WAY more apostles than just those 12…