Spiritual Embezzlement Made Easy

By M.E. Brines

Spiritual Embezzlement Made Easy (or How NOT to Run a Church) - The Christian church in America today is ineffective at transforming society. Most of our youth drop out after graduation and the average age of churchgoers keeps rising every year. Meanwhile its influence on society has declined almost to the point of vanishing. After 400 years America is no longer a “Christian” nation. In a nation founded by Christians and originally settled for the very purpose of religious liberty our religious liberties are constantly under attack by the now secular majority. Spiritual Embezzlement Made Easy examines the causes of the decline of the Church in modern America today and proposes solutions. The author has served the church in every capacity a layman is allowed: teacher, Sunday School superintendent, janitor, youth group leader, as a deacon and on the church governing board. He’s taught Sunday School, vacation Bible schools (including one on the Navajo Indian reservation), AWANA, been a summer camp counselor, done home visitation, door-to-door cold calling to present the Gospel, participated in Christmas pageants and small groups, and organized, cooked for and cleaned up after banquets and dinners and breakfasts of all sorts in Christian and Missionary Alliance churches as well as Evangelical Free, Community, Methodist, Presbyterian and several varieties of Baptist churches. I don’t think anybody could be more knowledgeable about what goes on inside of churches in America from a layman’s point of view. Is the Church today doomed to cultural irrelevance? Can it be saved? Find out in Spiritual Embezzlement Made Easy. Written in a humorous and irreverent manner, it displays our church traditions and administrative practices in a manner where readers can see the Emperor has no clothes and what needs to be done to get him dressed again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: M.E. Brines
• Release date: Jul 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465743428

M.E. Brines

M.E. Brines spent the Cold War assembling atomic artillery shells and preparing to unleash the Apocalypse (and has a medal to prove it.) But when peace broke out, he turned his fevered, paranoid imagination to other pursuits. He spends his spare time scribbling another steampunk romance occult adventure novel, which despite certain rumors absolutely DOES NOT involve time-traveling Nazi vampires! A former member of the British Society for Psychical Research, he is the author of three dozen books, e-books, chapbooks and pamphlets on esoteric subjects such as alien abduction, alien hybrids, astrology, the Bible, biblical prophecy, Christian discipleship, conspiracies, esoteric Nazism, the Falun Gong, Knights Templar, magick, and UFOs, his work has also appeared in Challenge magazine, Weird Tales, The Outer Darkness, Tales of the Talisman, and Empirical magazine.

Book preview

Spiritual Embezzlement Made Easy

or

How NOT to Run a Church

By M.E. Brines

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 by M.E. Brines

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Introduction

We often hear conservatives and liberals arguing about whether or not America was originally a Christian nation but one thing that everyone seems to agree upon is that America is certainly not a Christian nation today. Compared to fifty years ago crime, divorce and immorality are now at all time highs. Abortion and pornography that were illegal then are not only legal today, but also quite commonplace. Where once the worst weapon you might encounter on a schoolyard might be a slingshot, now many schools have installed metal detectors and armed guards to try and reduce the number of stabbings and shootings.

Conversely we see statistics [from http://www.barna.com/] stating that in any given week more Americans attend church than attend a sporting event. According to a Gallup poll 74% of American adults claim to have made a personal commitment to Christ. How do we reconcile those statistics with the rampant rates of crime and immorality that exist side by side in the same communities with those same churches? Something is wrong with this picture. Despite all our efforts the Church has been ineffective at transforming the lives of those who attend and making the disciples that Christ called upon his followers to make of all the nations in Matthew chapter 28.

Meanwhile, attendance is declining and the majority of young people who do attend church drop out at or soon following graduation and few of them return. Statistics show that the average age of church attenders is increasing as gray hair proliferates in our sanctuaries on Sunday mornings.

Whether America was once a Christian nation is debatable, but that it is not one now is incontestable. The Christian church in America is dying, that much is obvious. But while most secular Americans seem to think that it’s from natural causes, just nature taking its course, many Christians believe that foul play was involved and are already pointing fingers at various suspects: Liberals, the Media, and Hollywood elites. But the brutal fact is that the decline of the church and of Christian influence in America is not murder; it’s suicide.

We’re doing it to ourselves.

In Acts chapter 26 the Apostle Paul gave his personal history as a way of demonstrating to his accusers his credentials to speak on the subject of Judaism. I’ve been attending for more than 45 years, actually since before I was born. During the time when my mother regularly attended and was pregnant with me, my father was the Sunday School Superintendent. I grew up in the church. I’ve got a first cousin who’s an ordained minister and a great-grandfather who was a Pentecostal preacher. My father organized a church from its beginnings as a house church with two families, through a storefront with a part-time pastor (who officiated at my own wedding in a real church rented for the occasion) all the way until it was able to build its own building.

I was saved and baptized as a teen and since then I’ve served in the church in every capacity that a layman is allowed to: teacher, Sunday School superintendent, janitor, youth group leader, as a deacon and on the church governing board. I’ve taught Sunday School, vacation Bible schools (including one on the Navajo Indian reservation), AWANA, been a summer camp counselor, done home visitation, door-to-door cold calling to present the Gospel, participated in Christmas pageants and small groups, and organized, cooked for and cleaned up after banquets and dinners and breakfasts of all sorts.

My family used to move a lot when I was a kid and I’ve attended Christian and Missionary Alliance churches as well as Evangelical Free, Community, Methodist, Presbyterian and several varieties of Baptist churches. I don’t think anybody could be more knowledgeable about what goes on inside of churches in America from a layman’s point of view than I am, so when I say that as busy as I’ve been for all that time that I’ve been mostly wasting my time and not obeying Jesus, that that conclusion didn’t come easily to me. It took a personal bankruptcy to do it.

Despite growing up in a Christian home I never gave much thought to what Christ wanted me to do with my life. It was MY life, after all. I studied what I wanted to in college, married who I wanted to and took jobs that were interesting or convenient to me. But I was always chasing after some get-rich-quick scheme and we always seemed short of cash as a result. (Most get-rich-quick schemes should be more accurately called get-poor-slowly schemes.) The last was a family bakery that failed miserably and left us bankrupt.

The good news was that disaster finally drove through my thick skull what the problem was. It hadn’t been the jobs or schemes that I’d tried (not that any of them had ever been all that good anyway). No, it had been following my own selfish desires seeking to find my own way through life instead of following my savior. It wasn’t supposed to have been MY life. I’d given it to Jesus (supposedly) back as a teenager. I’d signed over the title but continued to drive it as if it still belonged to me. So, after thirty years, I decided to get serious about my commitment.

And that’s when my problems really began.

I decided to get serious about being the disciple I should have been all along and put God first in my life. Among the many changes, I decided to tithe, not just my money but also my time. (Not that the Bible teaches this but I was overcorrecting for my previous slackness.) The Good Lord blesses us with 168 hours a week and we spend at least 56 of that sleeping. Ten percent of what was left was eleven hours. I decided to spend eleven hours a week serving God. So I volunteered for just about every program available at the church. I mean, if Sunday School and the worship service only last maybe three hours, that left eight hours a week to fill. So I worked myself to a frazzle visiting and serving and participating in all sorts of things: the annual Christmas pageant, an evangelistic