In the last sharing, we talked about a phenomena that very few young people are serving full time in the Diocese.
One of the reasons for this is that the church has not played its proper role. The role of the church is to systematically, continuously and comprehensively train and nurture children at an early age so that they will grow up to have the heart to serve God full-time.
How many churches in the Diocese of West Malaysia have such a strategic vision? How many churches have a systematic approach to train and nurture young people so that they will grow spiritually and have a strong commitment to serve God when they are young?
Unfortunately, many churches youth activities are just about playing games, eating and drinking, and making friends? What kind of Christians can be produced by such youth activities? The result of this situation is that many young people, though brought up in church, are uncommitted, unchanged, self-centred and hedonistic. Will such young people want to serve full time?
On the other hand, there are some young people who certainly have the heart to serve full-time, but because they have not been properly equipped and trained, their hearts are not strong and they are easily shaken, and as a result, they are wavering. Under such circumstances, many of them just continue their life journey and slowly incurring a lot of debts: study loans, car loans, housing loans, various personal loans, insurance premiums and so on. All these are like shackles and made them more difficult to make decision. When they get married and have children, it is almost impossible for them to serve full-time.
My conclusion is that the church’s failure to train young people properly from childhood to adolescence is a critical factor that caused their inability to serve full time when they grow up.
Sadly, there are some pastors who are not at all worry about what has happened. Some are now become event planners, busying with organising concerts, tours and so on. Why do churches keep these pastors who don’t even know what they are supposed to do? Instead of teaching the Bible diligently, they organize useless activities.