Platt on what draws us to go to church

Will we still go church if it did not have any bells and whistles/smoke and mirrors; how often do we think/pray about the persecuted church who risk their lives to gather?

From Page 26-28 of 

Radical

Is his word enough for us?

This is the question that often haunts me when I stand before a crowd of thousands of people in the church I pastor. What if we take away the cool music and the cushioned chairs? What if the screens are gone and the stage is no longer decorated? What if the air conditioning is off and the comforts are removed? Would his Word still be enough for his people to come together?

At Brook Hills we decided to try to answer this question. We actually stripped away the entertainment value and invited people to come together simply to study God’s Word for hours at a time. We called it Secret Church.

We set a date-one Friday night-when we would gather from six o’clock in the evening until midnight, and for six hours we would do nothing but study the Word and pray. We would interrupt the six-hour Bible study periodically to pray for our brothers and sisters around the world who are forced to gather secretly. We would also pray for ourselves, that we would learn to love the Word as they do.

We weren’t sure how many would show up that first evening, but by night’s end about a thousand people had gathered. Our topic of study was the Old Testament. After our first try we decided to do it again, and again, and now we have to take reservations because we cannot contain all the people who want to come.

One of my favourite sights is to look across a room packed with people with their Bible in their laps, studying who God is and what God had said–after midnight (we have never ended on time). Granted, we still have the cushioned chairs-though we did discuss the possibility of removing them! And we still have the comforts of a nice building with indoor bathrooms. But we are taking steps, I hope, toward discovering what is means to be a people who are hungry for the revelation of God.

What is it about God’s Word that creates a hunger to hear more? And not just hear the Word but to long for it, study it, memorize it, and follow it? What causes followers of Christ around the world literally to risk their lives in order to know it?

These questions cause us to step back and look at the foundations of the gospel. Fundamentally, the gospel is the revelation of who God is, who we are, and how we can be reconciled to him. Yet in the American dream, where self reigns as king (or queen), we have a dangerous tendency to misunderstand, minimize, and even manipulate the gospel in order to accommodate our assumptions and our desires. As a result, we desperately need to explore how much of our understanding of the gospel is American and how much is biblical. And in the process we need to examine whether we have misconstrued a proper response to the gospel and maybe even missed the primary reward of the gospel, which is God himself.