Is your home congregation drifting? Maybe your entire denomination is adrift. Perhaps your concern has more to do with drift you see in individual people.
It might even possible that someone told you that you or your church are drifting…and you are wondering what that means and what you are supposed to do about it!
In the middle of the previous century, someone compiled these significant things about drifting:
- Drifting usually is not begun or even continued deliberately.
- Drift often is not noticed by the one who is drifting.
- Drifting is noticeable much more readily by those who are not drifting.
- Warning must be given by those who notice the drifting.
- Prayer sometimes is the only effective agent left in the rescuing task.
- The one saved from drifting will be truly grateful and happy.
- Drifting may become so pleasurable that the one drifting deliberately rejects all warnings.
- A person who is drifting has a personal responsibility in his own rescue.
- A person never drifts upstream.
- A person drifts because it is easy.
- A person drifts because he is not busy doing that which is best.
- A person drifts via the things he likes.
- You can’t stop the current from going downstream.
- You can’t blame the stream for carrying you with the current.
- Any worldly drift in the church cannot be blamed upon the church as God’s church.
The above list is not original with me, though I did shorten each item for use here. The full list comes from a booklet written by Clayton F. Yake and published in 1943 by Mennonite Publishing House. Read it in its entirety at my Anabaptists site: Drifting.
Amen!
Thanks for stopping by, Joe! I’m glad the message resonates with you. It certainly does with me. 🙂