Intro: "A pastor came home one day to find his daughter arguing with her friends in the bedroom. From the front hallway he could hear them yelling and calling each other names, so he quickly made his way up the stairs.   "`What's going on in here?' he asked as he entered the room.  "His five-year-old looked up at him and smiled. `It's okay, Daddy. We're just playing church!'"
We laugh at a scene such as that, but the reality is much darker and far more serious that we often realize. A sad but true fact is that the church is often thought of as being out of touch and insensitive to what is going on in the world. Often, the church is seen as being so wrapped up within itself that it has no compassion or time for a world that is perishing. In fact, there are many outside the church that would rather turn anywhere for help but to the church.
There was a young mother at a homeless shelter in Chicago. She was a cocaine addict: "She was so desperate that she would rent out her two-year-old daughter to men so they could have sex with her. The woman would get $100 per man which would be just enough for another fix. She was homeless, she had bad health, she had no one to care for her. She poured out her story to a Christian minister, and he was overwhelmed and amazed. At the end he said to her, 'As you went through all this, did you ever think about going to a church for help?' He said that he would never forget the look of absolute naive shock that crossed her face as she said, 'Church! Why would I ever go there? I was already feeling bad enough, they would just make me feel worse!'")
Why do people have this perception of the church? Where did we go wrong?