Practical Atheists

Tony Woodlief lowered the boom in World magazine online:

When we forsake the spiritual disciplines and only gather corporately for 90 minutes a week, we roll into church on Sunday desperately hungry, expecting our pastor to feed us. ... It’s too much for any one man to bear. A pastor can’t “feed” us in that brief time slot on Sunday morning. He wasn’t ordained to do so. Yet how many people do we know who grumble about how the minister’s sermon wasn’t “uplifting” enough, or how they don’t feel “fed” in this or that church, or how they’re looking for a place where the preaching “speaks” to them?

Here’s a bold idea: If a person isn’t spending more than a few minutes a day in prayer and Bible reading, and can’t remember the last time he fasted, kept silence, or poured himself out for someone in need, then there is no sermonizing in the world that is going to fill him, because he is living—for all practical purposes—as an atheist.

So he blames his pastor. And then the church shopping begins, as he looks for that special speaker who can tickle his fancy, bring a tear to his eye, give him the illusion that he is really “connecting” to something.

I’m increasingly convinced that a good portion of the dissent and malaise we find in churches could be solved if more of us would shut our cakeholes and zealously pray for an hour each day.