Pure And Genuine Religion

When I was a girl growing up, I knew a middle-aged man who, every Sunday morning, got up early to drive the church's yellow-orange Sunday school bus. Even though he was burdened with grief and worry for his beloved wife as she battled terminal cancer, he took the time on his day off to bring the children in the surrounding community to Sunday school.

Two of the children he regularly picked up and brought back home were me and my twin brother. I remember fondly how this volunteer bus driver would, before taking all the children back to their homes, stopped off at an ice-cream shop and, out of his own pocket, buy every child on that bus a soft ice-cream cone. We all eagerly looked forward to it!

It bereaves me to think how I don't remember the last time I saw a yellow-orange bus filled with children on their way to Sunday school. It must be several decades at least. Sunday school buses are becoming as obsolete as vinyl records, cassette tapes, VHS's, and CRT televisions.

But why is that? I remember when the Sunday school bus ministry was one of the most vital and productive ministries in a church. I don't know where I would be today if it wasn't for the Sunday School bus ministry. My mother never drove and Sunday school was where I learned about God and the truths in His Word. It was a place of learning, growing, and healing.

Have the children's ministries in churches lost interest in reaching children from non-Christian or non-Church-going homes? Do churches think that such children are not worth the effort or the expense of a school bus? If so, they are gravely mistaken!

I wonder where the money from church tithes is going to today. How much of it is going toward outreach in the surrounding communities versus keeping the tithe-payers happy? After paying for the expensive mortgage on a fancy church building, the wages of the multitude of paid-workers (many of which volunteered their services in the past), the sound equipment, the computers, the plasma televisions, and all the other "necessities", I am sure there is not much left to help the poor, the needy, the homeless, the widows, the single parents, and the unsaved children in the surrounding neighbourhoods.

The churches' priorities have changed over the years. Everyone wants to get paid. The churches compete with one another in materialism. Their goal has become no different than the common phrase that was once used to describe the goal of many middle-age families: "Keeping up with the Jones."

The Bible says that pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for the needy and not allowing the world to corrupt the purpose for which God intended the Church.

"Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father

means caring for orphans and widows in their distress

and refusing to let the world corrupt you."

James 1:27

I believe that worldly-thinking has gotten into many of our churches, filling them with insatiable desire for more material things and bigger and better buildings. Many churches have become corrupt and are far more business-oriented than ministry-oriented.

The amount of time and money that churches today spend on reaching the lost in their community and caring for the distressed is becoming less and less compared to how much time and money they spend on dealing with disputes, expanding buildings, buying sound equipment, buying new computers, hiring and firing pastors (oops, I mean accepting resignations), making up schedules, and organizing programs to make sure everyone is both happy and pleasantly entertained. The modern church has become sick over the years. It needs to get well before it will see a harvest.

We need as individuals and as a church to get back to God's idea of pure and genuine religion.