Where Do Sheep Get Fed?

I am going to post here something I posted to Chuck Colson's "Speak Out with Chuck" page, because it's been on my mind for a while and I think it's applicable to a wider audience:

Mr. Colson,

I believe that your ministry is vital, just as many parachurch organizations are vital today (in the interests of disclosure, I do work for a parachurch organization myself). However, in the ultimate sense, I wish that you (and I) didn't have to be here. It would be great if the church was doing her job, thus making us irrelevant.

Sadly, most modern churches have become seeker-centered places for Christians to starve to death. Under the guise of evangelism, the church has watered down everything to the point that it is almost impossible to be spiritually fed. The Biblical mandate of the church is to feed the sheep. If the church becomes a mission field, where is the believer to go to get fed? And if he is not fed, then he is tossed by every wind, having no root.

If you want to become depressed, go to the average church in the average town and ask the average Christian, "Suppose I have three minutes left to live. What must I do to be saved?" Then watch the deer-in-the-headlights glaze come over their eyes, or the sputtering of anti-Biblical heresy.

We don't teach the flock how to be sheep, and then are surprised that they act like goats.

Yet God always has His remnant. He is faithful, and He brings up people such as yourself. So stay strong and be encouraged. The church in the West may be imploding, but A) it's not impossible to change course and B) the church in other parts of the world is strengthening even now. When we can get the Western church to recover the Gospel and to take her job at training the sheep seriously enough that Prison Fellowship and other parachurch organizations are put out of business, then we will be a healthy church once more. If God brought about the Great Awakening, He can do it again.

Here on Triablogue, I would like to emphasize that the Biblical role of the church is not to evangelize the lost. It is to train up disciples of Christ who can then go out and evangelize the lost. Any church that expects unbelievers to show up to hear the Gospel is already a deluded church. Sure, a handful do show up from time to time--but they're usually the handful who thinks they are saved when they are not. It is precisely for that reason that they need to hear what true Christianity is.

A church that never preached a sermon with an altar call, but who instead equipped believers with the true power of Christ, would have a greater impact and "save more souls" than a thousand of our "model" churches today.

Additionally, I'd also like to take a moment to thank Dusman for what he does with his church. While I haven't had the opportunity to visit his church (it's a bit of a commute), I can tell from many of the videos that I've watched of him, as well as the posts he's done here, that those in his church are getting well-fed spiritually.