Dr. Terry’s report on church attendance and family/church teaching prompts me to respond: My experience in Southern Baptist churches is that we have a split personality regarding emphasis on church attendance. I have taken time, effort and battled depression and an urge to stay home to attend a particular service, only to have the pastor or guest speaker choose to make barbed remarks about individuals who “play church,” and about those who attend church and then go about their lives as if they had not been to church. Baptists have an irresistible pull to measure success on church attendance, while discouraging the hearers who’ve taken the first steps.
Particularly overused, I feel, in Baptist sermons is the generalization of one “attending church every time the doors are open but still dying lost without Christ.” If we value our own Spirit-led, doctrinally sound exhortations, which I do, the poor dull unenlightened soul exposed to it, assuming he had ears to hear and receptive heart, would by conclusion have to be astonishingly rare.
Do we want people “in” church? How do they fit in? To assume people go to church for social reasons and to salve their consciences does not wash anymore in our permissive society where there is not the pressure to do such.
Betty Zimmerle Smith
Killen, Ala.
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