“…life starts when the church ends.” – Jay Z “New York” Empire State of Mind.

If you wonder how young people view the church today just look down at your stomach and touch 3 to 4 inches to the right of your belly button.  That’s your appendix.

It’s the part of the body that you completely ignore until something goes wrong with it.

For us who love the church and see the gospel message as the hope of the world this is a harsh reality.  But the “church as appendix” view should be understood and not condemned.  No doubt many reasons exist why this has happened, but to help people trust the church again Christians must repent of this view.

Instead Christians have to understand that the church, centered around the gospel, is the heart of a society.  The heart pumps life into the rest of the body.  When the heart is weak life is miserable, when the heart stops, life dies.  That is why Christians can’t “appendicize” God.  He has to be the life-giver of everything we do.  He has to saturate our work, relationships, ambitions, goals, finances, even our rest and recreation.  If not, our individual parts will grow weak, and, in turn, even a society will decay.

And that is what revival is all about. It’s God revealing to the believers that He is not an appendix, but the source of life.  And when believers grasp that reality en masse, then the culture begins to feel the lifeblood return to the individual parts of society.