Following is part 2 of my interview with Jim Samra, author of the new book, The Gift of Church: How God Designed the Local Church to Meet Our Needs as Christians. Read part 1 here. – AR
EC: Are pastors and church leadership teams not pushing church membership, attendance and gathering as a community to meet with God and celebrate – as much as they have in the past? Why not?
JS: There seems to be two factors at work here. 1) Some in church leadership are just as confused as lay people in recognizing the value of the church. I know because for years I was unsure about the value of church. I did church because it seemed like the right thing to do, but I didn’t have any way to articulate “why church”? When I didn’t feel confident about the answer to this question, I certainly didn’t want to try to answer it for other people. Nothing in my evangelical heritage or training had prepared me to answer that question. It took writing a dissertation on the subject before I began to understand the value of church. 2) The second factor is that no one wants to seem self-serving. For a pastor to stand up and preach church attendance sounds like he is only out for what is in his best interests.
These are two of the reasons I wrote this book. First, to try to explain why God intends church participation as a gift. Second, to allow pastors to have someone else articulate to their people why participating in church is so important.
