Many Ways to Destroy a Church

Tim Challies cites this powerful passage from Don Carson's The Cross and Christian Ministry:

The ways of destroying the church are many and colorful.
Raw factionalism will do it.
Rank heresy will do it.
Taking your eyes off the cross and letting other, more peripheral matters dominate the agenda will do it-admittedly more slowly than frank heresy, but just as effectively over the long haul.
Building the church with superficial 'conversions' and wonderful programs that rarely bring people into a deepening knowledge of the living God will do it.
Entertaining people to death but never fostering the beauty of holiness or the centrality of self-crucifying love will build an assembling of religious people, but it will destroy the church of the living God.
Gossip,
prayerlessness,
bitterness,
sustained biblical illiteracy,
self-promotion,
materialism
-all of these things, and many more, can destroy a church.
And to do so is dangerous:
If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him; for God's temple is sacred, and you are that temple (1 Cor. 3:17).
It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

Centenary

My father, Stanley Lewis McKay was born 100 years ago today.
There is much to admire about him, but I am especially grateful that he took me to church to hear the Word of God. He was a good role model in many ways. He was a loving husband (even when his wife was dishing out criticism,) industrious, kind, thoughtful ... and he thought the world of me, as revealed by his diaries.

We are part of the church nearest to our house ...

I love this cartoon and love the important exceptions for why we cross town to go to church.