We Have Built a Church That Is Easy to Attend and Hard to Know God.
A first-generation Christian's letter to pastors and church leaders
A note before you read. This is a personal reflection. It is one man's reading of fifty years, and it does not claim to speak for anyone else, not for the ISCF movement, not for my own church, not for any leader or friend named or unnamed here. It grew out of my years in ISCF and out of many conversations since, with church leaders and with young people, which kept returning me to the same questions. I offer it as one voice among many. Weigh it against Scripture, and disagree with me where you must.
I came to Christ at twelve.
It happened at an ISCF camp, and I use the word happened deliberately, because nothing about it was arranged for me. My parents did not bring me. There was no family faith to inherit, no pew with my surname on it. I went to a camp, and God met me there, and I came home a different boy in a household that had no idea what to do with him.
What I was told next has shaped the following fifty years of my life: if you want to know God, read His Word. That was the whole discipleship programme. It was not a curriculum. It was not a cell group with icebreakers. It was a Bible, a quiet room, and the assumption, never questioned, that God had spoken and that it was my responsibility to go and listen.
I raised my children in church. They are second-generation Christians, which is a polite way of saying they inherited a faith I had to find. They attended because we insisted. We prayed, earnestly and for years, that Jesus would become their Lord and not merely their parents' God. And in those years of praying and watching, I began to notice that the church my children were growing up in was not the church I was converted into. Something had quietly moved.
Three things have shifted
Knowing God has been relocated. I was taught that to know God you open the Bible. My children were taught, by a thousand small signals rather than by any sermon, that to know God you come to church. The location of revelation moved from the text to the building. And once that move is made, attendance becomes the measure of spiritual health, because attendance is the only thing the new model can measure.
Encounter has been relocated too. Mine came in silence and solitude. Theirs is expected in musical worship, lights down, band up, the emotional arc of a set list engineered to land somewhere near the bridge of the third song. I am not against music. David was not against music. But when a generation learns that the felt intensity of a Sunday morning is the presence of God, we have taught them to look for God in the one place they cannot take with them on Monday.
Discipleship has been redefined downward. Our churches say two things at once: we are seeker-friendly, and we are disciple-making. In a corporate environment, "seeker-friendly" quietly becomes a membership strategy, a funnel, a growth curve, a number reported at the year-end meeting. And discipleship is then fitted into that strategy, which means discipleship must not cost anything, because cost repels seekers.
So we get the cell group. A friendly circle of people humouring one another. Snacks, a passage skimmed, prayer requests about examinations and job interviews. It is warm. It is easy. And it is not what Christ described.
Christ did not mince His words. "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me" (Luke 9:23). He said this to crowds He knew would thin out "After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him" (John 6:66). He let the rich young ruler walk away sorrowful rather than lower the terms (Mark 10:21–22). He told those who would follow Him to sit down first and count the cost (Luke 14:28–33). He was, by every metric our church boards use, in sales term, a poor closer of deals.
The cost of a friendly model
Here is my hardest thing to say to you, and I say it as someone who loves the church and has given his life to it: by building our own models, we have made it harder for our people to know God, not easier.
The calendar fills with activity. Serving rosters, camps, launches, initiatives, the endless machinery of a church that must keep its members engaged. And a member can be busy in that machinery for fifteen years and never once have been taught to sit down with an open Bible and meet God alone. We have not withheld God from them. We have simply never left them any time.
Consider what we now do with our young people. Experiential learning is the model. Feel it, do it, remember it. But experience without teachers who are skilled in the Word does something dangerous. The experience becomes the benchmark. And once the experience is the benchmark, Scripture gets pulled down to the level of what we have felt and what we have managed, when the Word of God is meant to stand above us as the mark we aim at.
Understand what has been lost there. A church that lowers the standard to what its people can currently reach has, with the kindest of motives, decided on their behalf that holiness is unrealistic. It is not. Holy living is possible because it is God's own call on our lives: "As he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, 'You shall be holy, for I am holy'" (1 Peter 1:15–16). And God does not command what He will not supply, "His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness" (2 Peter 1:3), and "it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure" (Philippians 2:13). He gives the strength. He gives the resources. He never asks a man to do what He has not equipped him to do. When we quietly stop preaching that, we are not being pastoral. We are being unbelieving on our people's behalf.
Where two or three gather.
"For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them" (Matthew 18:20).
Two or three. Not two or three hundred. Not two or three in a room approved by the church office, led by a trained cell leader, following the curriculum for the current term.
So why have we made gathering so difficult? Why must Christian meeting be contained within the membership of one local church? Our people spend their waking hours in offices, in schools, in neighbourhoods, precisely where God has placed them, precisely where the kingdom needs them, and we call them out of those places into our buildings, and call that the work of the church.
The ISCF I grew up in had none of this. We were Brethren and Baptist and Charismatic and Methodist and everything else, sitting together, and we learned something in that room that no single church model can teach: we learned to live as one body, "one body and one Spirit... one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all" (Ephesians 4:4–6). Our differences were real and we did not pretend otherwise. But the Christ we were following was more real, and He was not divided (1 Corinthians 1:13).
What I am asking you to do
Send them out. Tell your members plainly: gather in two or three where God has placed you. Start something in your office. Start something in your school. Meet with believers who do not attend your church and will never join your membership roll, and let it be a kingdom community rather than a congregational one. Build good company, because good company is how godly character is formed. "Do not be deceived: 'Bad company ruins good morals'" (1 Corinthians 15:33), and "Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another" (Proverbs 27:17). It always has been so.
And put the Bible back into the hands of our children, daily, as the ordinary practice of an ordinary Christian life. Like the Bereans "received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily" (Acts 17:11). Build the altar at home. Teach these words to your children, "when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise" (Deuteronomy 6:7). Let families pray together and let parents disciple their own children instead of subcontracting it to a youth programme.
I will end where I must, and you may take it as the sentence I most want you to carry into your next leaders' meeting:
You never truly encounter God simply by going to church. You encounter God by doing His will.
"Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven." (Matthew 7:21)
Fook Loy
Fook Loy is a practitioner of process improvement who believes the most important "process" we can re-engineer is the way we disciple the next generation.