42 "aWhoever causes one of these 1little ones who believe to stumble, it 2would be better for him if, with a heavy millstone hung around his neck, he 3had been cast into the sea. 43 "aIf your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life crippled, than, having your two hands, to go into 1bhell, into the cunquenchable fire, 44 [1where THEIR WORM DOES NOT DIE, AND THE FIRE IS NOT QUENCHED.] 45 "If your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame, than, having your two feet, to be cast into 1ahell, 46 [1where THEIR WORM DOES NOT DIE, AND THE FIRE IS NOT QUENCHED.] 47 "aIf your eye causes you to stumble, throw it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, than, having two eyes, to be cast into 1bhell, 48 awhere THEIR WORM DOES NOT DIE, AND bTHE FIRE IS NOT QUENCHED.
It is an academic thought that the Gospel of Mark was written during the First Jewish Revolt. Many passages appear to have been written with this backdrop. The Christian Jews in Galilee and Judea would have suffered along with the rest of the people. The Roman army was not kind to the ordinary person. They were like a shark in that they were a killing machine. Two pressures were on the people of the early Christian communities—the first from fellow Jews and the second from the Romans. The promise from the community leaders was that by coming to believe in Jesus as the Messiah, life would get better.
Nevertheless, it did not get better. How do you keep people in the community when just being a community member was a death sentence. This situation was the problem of the community then. It is a problem for the community today, similar but different. People in the United States are not killed for being a part of a church. However, there are still stumbling blocks in our churches today
What are the stumbling blocks today? First, the definition of a stumbling block is anything that convinces a believer to leave the faith. There are so many that it would take a few pages to list them all. The church has to wake up and recognize the reasons why attendance and membership are down. It has been declining since 1958 and now is on a roller coaster, moving faster and faster. How many stumbling blocks are self-inflicted? That is a great place to start. Examine your church community and ask that question.
Someone is saying, "preacher, you are so wrong; things are great in my church." Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and their views. Let me place the results before you then we can speculate what the causes are. The first is that church attendance and membership are down a lot and are getting worse. Yes, some churches are growing. In my area of the world, the three substantial independent churches are growing like gangbusters. The mainline churches are dying. O yes, some mainlines are hanging on or maybe growing slightly but not like the independent churches. As the mainline churches fight over the sexual orientation issue and other meaningless things, they split apart and lost membership. I am not going to tell you this is not an important issue. I am saying that so much energy and oxygen have gone into this situation. More importantly, the fighting inside the church is killing her. People outside the church see the fighting. The US media loves to tell the country of our denominations fighting over this and other issues. They paint the church as a heaven of hypocrites. My impression of church is that it is supposed to be a place of love and grace, but it is not. The church is a place for people judging others, unforgiving people, and flat-out hatred. Power-hungry people give a bad taste to outsiders. It is SO VISIBLE to the outsider and INVISIBLE to the insider. Would you want to become a member of a community where people openly dislike each other? Of course not.
Am I eluding that a significant stumbling block is our current membership? In many churches, yes. Wow, I bet that was hard to swallow. After pastoring churches for 24 years, that is a conclusion I have. If you are not a pastor, it is hard to understand the amount of energy people spend on not liking each other. When I say that, I am talking about the cliques that are in the church. Churches under 200 in attendance usually sit as family units. Non-family members are either adopted into a family or sit by themselves. Eventually, these people leave the church. I have been there and have seen it in action! After serving five churches, I can tell you the geography of the families in the sanctuary, even in the rural churches where the families have intermarried, thus all one big family, however, the stumbling block of who controls who is there. This is a sad commentary.
Jesus said in this Mark narrative that we must remove all stumbling blocks that prevent people from joining our Christian communities or forces them to leave. I tried to do this and faced many challenges. Unfortunately, I can say that I was never successful at removing the stumbling blocks. Why? The church leaders refused to let go of these stumbling blocks because removing them could have cost them their power. At one church, I asked the question of church members as to why visitors were treated poorly. I am referring to visitors who moved into the area and were seeking out a church. The answer was that the leaders were concerned that they would lose their power if outsiders came to the church and banded together.
According to Jesus' words in this narrative, these leaders must be cut off because they are stumbling blocks. Try it if you are so bold. I know a pastor whom the Bishop instructed to do exactly that. It was done, and the pastor was close to being crucified by the church. The Bishop turned on him when the noise from the church came forward. It is an unfortunate but true event.
Now let's turn to what we can do to remove the stumbling blocks from the church. We must do this because Jesus entrusted us with the task of making disciples for Him. The churches must self-examine and honestly look at their internal leadership structure and membership attitudes toward themselves and visitors. The church must be ready to let go of any leader who is a stumbling block! It is a painful thing to do, but it must be done. These leaders are not that difficult to identify. The church as a whole must have the courage to do what must be done.
The second item is to understand that the mission of the church is to make disciples for Christ. There is NO OTHER REASON to exist. If this is not your mission, then make it your mission. The people in the church need to be made disciples of Christ. John Wesley said the church is the hospital for the sinners. That is us who are inside the church. Jesus said that when we are baptized, we must be educated in the faith. That education must never stop! Unfortunately, in the church, it does. We must remind the church that study and education about God and Christ never ends. The more we come to understand Jesus, the closer we move to Him. Don't point to that written mission statement that you might have unless you intend to do it!!!
The rest of what should happen will fall in line when these two areas are corrected. Remember that the church's future may seem grim to you and the difficult road to prosperity, but it is not impossible! Let me repeat; it is not impossible! Church, if you want this to happen, if you want to remove the stumbling blocks, if you want to return to the mission of making disciples for Jesus Christ, it will happen! Let the Holy Spirit guide you and the church will again prosper. The love and grace of Jesus Christ is waiting for us to claim it and to share it with the world.
