On an average Sunday at most churches, my guess is that about 20-30% of the congregation has a physical Bible with them. The rest either have no Bible or use a Bible app on their phone.
This is a very revealing statistic to me. Which by the way is a completely made up statistic. I just averaged what I’ve seen in the 5-10 churches I’ve visited in the last couple of years and it may be totally off. But the ratio is somewhere around what I mentioned.
It’s revealing to me for several reasons. The most glaring and obvious is that if you don’t have your Bible with you at church — a time to learn and understand scripture, you clearly aren’t spending time learning and understanding scripture on your own time.
It seems to me that “church” has become some sort of “recharge.” Where you can go and get your spiritual fix for the week and then be good to go for the rest of it. A time where you come to either feel good or get convicted so that you can go do your “good work” during the week.
But the problem with this is like training in any other area of life. If you only have one 30 minute training a week, you are going to either learn extremely slowly or maybe never learn at all.
To become proficient at something, you must be putting consistent time into it. Ideally every day, but certainly more than once a week.
To jump back, the whole “I have the Bible on my phone” excuse in church is just that, an excuse. I don’t care if you actually are looking at your Bible app the entire service, the fact that you’re using a Bible app tells me the same I was just talking about. In general, I would guess 80% of people who use the Bible app on their phone use it only on Sunday’s or very occasionally. Very few people use it to actually study the word.
This argument has several layers I’ve realized. For instance, I go into writing this with the assumption that you and I agree that reading the Bible every day is a good thing to do. You may not think it’s important. I would challenge you on that view with many, many scriptures that talk about the importance of meditating on His word day and night, but that’s not the full argument of what I’m trying to say in this post.
I simply believe that the church has become a catch-all for people who want to seem spiritual. So many people use the church as an excuse to say they’re a good person. Let me tell you something, no man or woman has ever gone to Heaven because he went to church.
The church has been plagued by people who come in and claim the faith of Christianity but have “faith” only when it is convenient to them. I believe that you should study and be in the word daily. However, I’m not saying you’re “less of a Christian” if you don’t. There aren’t layers of Christian. You are saved or you aren’t.
I am just tired of being among people who say they believe the same thing as me when it becomes clear that they don’t believe anything at all. They believe what they were taught by parents or heard somewhere one time.
Take ownership of your faith if you’re a Christian. Ask yourself why you don’t take your Bible to church. Is it for a reason? Is it for a good reason? Do you care about the Bible? Be honest. It doesn’t help to lie to yourself any more than it helps to lie to other people.
Christians should be seeking to grow closer to God every day and pursue Him. Church should be an extension of that where you also fellowship with other believers.
Grow on your own, then come and grow together.