From Marielle Thomas:

There is no such thing as a “perfect” church. Honestly, there will never be a perfect church because the people who occupy the church are imperfect. The only thing perfect in church is the message and purity of the Gospel. Though there is no perfect church, there are healthy and unhealthy churches. I have been in church literally my entire life, so I have seen the great, the good, the bad and the downright ugly. After witnessing and having endless discussions about the church culture, I have compiled a list of 5 signs that signal you are a part of an unhealthy church.

1. Leadership Does Not Have A Clear Vision
Proverbs 29:18 states, “Where there is  no vision, the people perish.” A church whose leadership has not explained or formed a vision that states: “this is who we are, this is where we’re going and this is how we’re going to get there” is unhealthy in the highest form. How can a church or any organization function or truly exist without vision? Jesus was the ultimate vision-caster. He stated his vision for not only what the church should look like but ultimately, what the role of the church is and its purpose. Unfortunately, I have seen churches that had no mission and absolutely no vision and scripture is 100% correct, the people did perish. If you don’t know what the mission and vision is of your church, chances are you are in an unhealthy church. Additionally, if your church has a mission and vision statement but you don’t see the mission and vision being executed within the church’s set up and organizational structure, programs and/or ministries that are offered, you are probably in an unhealthy church.

2. Leadership Can Never Be Challenged
If you are part of a church where leadership can never be questioned or challenged, run! I have witnessed this and I can tell you this will not end very well. Please remember, church leaders are there to cast vision and to steer the church in the direction to which God is leading. Church leaders are not and should not be dictators. What I mean is this; members should never fear asking a question against a proposed idea or direction from leadership in the church. With that being said, there should also be a level of respect given when challenging church leadership. The key is to be concerned not confrontational. Ultimately, you should be able to ask questions regarding where your church is headed, without feeling fearful of church leadership.

3. You Are Comfortable but Never Convicted
If you are attending a church and you have a) never been convicted or b) never offended in your sin when the Gospel is preached or taught, hightail it out of there! It is very dangerous when a church’s preaching and teaching team operates in what I call the “Ren and Stimpy” Theology. What I mean by this is every sermon and lesson that comes from the reaching/teaching team is always “happy happy joy joy,” but there are never heart-piercing, convicting messages that will challenge people.

Church shouldn’t be designed to just make you feel warm and fuzzy on the inside but church should be there to bring conviction through the Word of God to bring correction in a person’s life. Additionally, if your church is not balanced in its teaching, your walk with God becomes stunted; you will not grow.

If you have ever had to go to a hospital to get better, then you know most times in your healing process, there is pain involved. It’s the same thing with church, your healing process won’t be joyful all the time, there will be and should be times you are broken, convicted and offended in your sin.

4. Congregants Are Content With Being Pew Warmers
I can generally tell if a church’s culture is unhealthy if its congregants are content with being pew warmers. What is a pew warmer? A pew warmer is a person who does not get involved in their church; they only attend church on Sundays and they are content in doing so. When a church is healthy, people are excited about lending their gifts to the up-building of their local church and the Body of Christ as a whole.
However, if the only time a church sees a rise in volunteerism is when the pastor lays a huge guilt trip on his or her congregation, something is wrong. When a church’s environment is a healthy one, you should never have to inflict guilt upon people in order to get them involved. They will have a heart to serve, not out of guilt but out of desire.

5. Outreach is Never Planned or Preached                            A church that never plans or even preaches outreach is unhealthy. When a church feels no need or desire to not only preach helping those outside of the four walls, but never does anything in its surrounding community, it speaks volumes. Outreach was and is the heart of Jesus. Simply having worship on Sundays is not church; it’s simply a meeting. The work that is done in the community to show God’s love is church. It is one thing to talk church, but it’s another thing to actually BE the church. If the church that you attend never preaches or plans outreach in the community, country or world, you are definitely part of an unhealthy church. Real church takes place by rendering service; usually outside the four walls of a building.

Marielle, Thanks so much for allowing me to re-post!

The where and when:

• Sunday, April 1^st  from 10:30AM until 11:30AM
• Homewood Suites Hotel, 2223 Palomar Airport Road

Hour Church will be a Bible based, Christ centered, non-denomination teaching church founded by Pastor Steve Verret. Steve is also a successful Christian comedian as well as the founder of the very popular course; “The Bible For Dummies”. Through “The Bible For Dummies” course Steve has guided hundreds of people from complete lack of knowledge in the Bible to a clear understanding and confidence in God’s word. Hour Church will be unique in several ways.  First, we will invite families to attend church together.  Steve’s sermons are uplifting, heartfelt, funny and very easy to understand.  We also believe that families should attend worship together because there is no greater influence on a child than a parent demonstrating their love for God and others in front of that child.

The church web site will be www.hourchurch.org. I hope to have it up and running very soon. You will be able to stay connected with Steve and the church even on your smart phone.

I know that Steve would appreciate your support. He wouldn’t want you to leave your home church, but please consider attending and encouraging Steve at least for for a short time

I will leave you with the Hour Church scripture verse: “In Him was life, and that life was the light of men” John 1: 4

I don’t seem to be ‘on fire’ as I once was. I’m not sure of what is happening, but I am sure of one thing, I’m scared.

Running?  Why would anyone run if they weren’t being chased?  What do you mean when you say “fun run”?  Isn’t that an oxymoron?  That’s what I used to think until about a year and a half ago when I started running for exercise and to get ready to run the Coronado Bay Bridge.  After the bridge run, I felt good and wanted to continue.  I kept at it with the encouragement of a few friends, and completed a half marathon last August.  It was exciting coming across the finish line, but man was I sore.  I thought I had trained enough so I wouldn’t feel so bad once I finished.  I guess it could have been worse.  I saw people at the 3 mile mark looking like they wouldn’t make it to 4.  I began to wonder why on earth they signed up for a 13.1 mile run and hadn’t, at least from my perspective, trained for it ahead of time.  Did they think they could just wake up, go to the start line, and finish a run like that without training for it? 

            Then I started wondering about our spiritual race.  The one Paul talked about in 1^st Corinthians chapter 9.  Should we think that we can just wake up one day, become a Christian, and everything will be just peachy?  That we will never stumble?  Why do we think we don’t need to go to church, or hang out with and encourage other Christians?  What makes us think we can run the race of life, the Christian life, without constant training?  I trained for almost a year, got serious and on an actual schedule about 16 weeks before the race, and I still felt like I had my butt kicked the day after the race.  Did I miss a day or two here and there during my training?  Of course.  Could I have trained better?  Sure.  Am I going to do it again?  You bet!  What a sense of accomplishment.  I praise God for giving me the ability to do it and thank him for being with me throughout everything. 

            Here are a few lessons for the race of life that I learned from my run.

-  It’s a lot easier to do when you have someone beside you, encouraging you, challenging you.  There are those days where you don’t even feel like getting out of bed, much less going for a training run, even when everyone else is busy and you have to go by yourself.  What do you do?  Do you say to yourself, “I’ll just take off this week and make up for it next week”?  Everyone else is going to watch the game today, so what could it hurt.  After all, it’s just one day! 

-  It takes determination and commitment.  Many a time during my training I had to ask myself what I was doing this for…especially after a hard run.  I felt sore and beat up, but always came back to my motivation.  We as Christians should have the perfect motivation and example in Jesus.  (Ephesians 5:1-20 sets out a great example on how we should live). 

-  A good pair of shoes helps!  Ok, that doesn’t really apply to our spiritual race, but boy a good pair of shoes helps your run.  Then again, maybe Eph 6:15 applies: “For shoes, put on the peace that comes from the Good News so that you can be fully prepared” (NLT).  Who doesn’t want to run the race “fully prepared”?  God’s peace can help you to keep running and running and running and… If we’re worried about what awaits us around the next turn we won’t be able to focus on the ultimate goal. So lace up your feet daily with the Good News and run in peace! 

-  Training, training, training.  Don’t ever stop training for something that’s important.  Is our spiritual race important?  I guess that depends on where you want to end up.  Our pastor has been going through a series on “The Journey” and things that are important.  One thing he says every week is that we will all end our journey one day, but will we finish in the location we want to be in or will we be where we want to be when it’s all over?  Are we headed in the right direction and are we running in that direction on purpose?  If we’re not focused on the “prize” as Paul put it, we can get distracted by all sorts of things that will waste our time and seek to keep us from reaching our goal.

-  Sole-mates.  Or if you wish, Soul-mates…those friends that encourage you day after day or week after week, to keep you going either by their example or their motivating words.  All of us tend to hang out with those we want to be like or those who want to be like us.  If your friends are not helping you reach your goal, in fact if they are hindering you from reaching your goal, it might be time to re-evaluate the friendship.  I’m not saying necessarily finding new friends but maybe it’s time to help them change or get them focused and back in the race especially if it’s a Christian brother or sister.

So what’s next?  Well, for me, another Half-Marathon in January.  I’m already in training again using what I have learned from the last one to make sure I don’t, or at least try not to make the same mistakes I made last time.  In the spiritual realm it’s time to read through the Bible in a year…again.  But that’s a different story and maybe the subject of another article.  Until then, keep running!!!

For the unsaved there can be, however quiet or small, a disturbance in a person’s way of life outside of Jesus Christ. Faith and fellowship with Jesus is in stark opposition in every way to the natural man. The inception of faith then would be a disturbance wherein the natural man starts to feel a deep sense of conviction over his sinful life. Consciously or unconsciously he just knows that what he is doing or the way he is living is somehow wrong, though he may not yet know why.

For a saved, growing Christian their faith prods and challenges them to more fully rely on Jesus and his will for us. It is altogether too easy to fall back into old habits, become complacent, or worse yet, to tell God “Thanks for the Salvation, but I’ll take it from here.” True Biblical faith leads the growing Christian to submission and to fully rest in the arms of Abba, Father, Daddy.

For the mature Christian there is a steady walk of faith that oftentimes leads to difficult, challenging places. Your faith will test your reliance on God and teach you to act in ways that are contrary to this world. To walk by faith knowingly and fearlessly into the fiery furnace would be the mark of a mature Christian persistently, doggedly, following Christ.

Genuine faith, I believe, leads us to this pleasant disquietude as the Holy Spirit works within the hearts and minds to move us from living in this world to preparing us for the next: to brings His sons and daughters into glory!

 A disturbance. A pleasant disquietude. A perturbing, disruptive faith. For these things I pray.

Honey! Where did you put my muse??

Where is that confounded muse anyways?

The East coast had a rumbling this week that usually only those of us on the West coast get to experience. It’s scary when we feel or even see the ground shifting beneath our feet…the very same ground that we thought was rock solid and immovable. All we can do is hang on and ride it out. There’s nothing we or anyone else can do to make it stop. It happens; and as long as our life belongs to Jesus we know we’re safe for eternity.

The question is what are we going to do once the storm passes?

Blogomine is looking for contributing Bloggers. Come, join the conversation.

A Christian Pilgrim’s Journey. That is our mission here at Blogomine.com. To speak of the magnificent obsession, this walk along the Way. Your struggles, your Eureka moments and your @#*!?^ moments as well.

Isn’t that what this journey is all about? As we walk with the Father we trip and stumble, stub our toes and skip lightly beside Him. We ask a million questions over and over while we scurry about trying to be more like Daddy.

So here is the challenge; I’m looking for one or two contributing writers. New Christians,  Mature Christians, seeking, struggling and searching Christians. Christian writers that have something they want to share with others. We’re not talkin’ FB 14o characters or less writing here. If you feel like that might be you please send me a note via the comment panel below.

Looking forward to hearing from you. And welcome to the Journey!

Here is my Top Ten Proven Effective Strategies to Maximize Search Engine Optimization list. I hope it helps!

1. Find keywords that are pertinent to your niche and use them throughout your posts. This will help Google and others find you. Use them liberally! Don’t sprinkle! inundate! More is better, right? While you’re at it, use words that just bring in searches, like porn, pornography, twitter, Facebook,  Copa Mundial, and zeitgeist. It doesn’t matter as long as you get your ratings higher.
2. When in doubt, see Rule #1. Repeat as necessary. Top Ten Proven Effective Strategies to Maximize Search Engine Optimization. Top Ten Proven Effective Strategies to Maximize Search Engine Optimization. You get the picture.
3. While we’re on the subject of zeitgeist, eschew pusillanimity, eschew obfuscation, espouse elucidation. Venerate sesquipedalianism. Utilize verbosity. Why use short words when you can use one that’s at least six syllables long. Utilize homonyms, antonyms, and synonyms as much as possible. It shows your readers how much smarterer you am.  Cogito epanalepsis ergo epanalepsis sum.
4. Obscure Unclear Acronyms (OUA) are your friend! Just like overly large words, they make people who don’t know what they mean feel stupid! Go ahead, bring out your SEOs, proudly display your HVACs, get your RFD freak on! Throw out your YMMV, your AFOA, XML, SCSI, HDMI, and your FIGMO. Forget those losers that are stuck on LOL and BFF. Go Obscure or Stay on the Porch. GOOSOTP! And never, ever, let the uninitiated know what they stand for. That spoils the fun!
5. Make up quotes to support your point. “In what would become the pivotal tome in his long illustrious career, H.K. Chetterson in his speech before Seton Hall University is quoted as saying: ‘A philosopher cannot speak upon anything without proving himself either a fool or a very wise man indeed’.” Sounds good, sounds impressive and important, who is ever going to check anyways?
6. Plagiarise whenever possible. Why work hard to write something when you can easily rip off somebody else who actually knows how to write. Two rules; make sure it is at least two or three years old and change enough words around so it sounds like it really is yours. A couple of minutes of work and Bam! you’re in business.
7. Ramble on endlessly about subjects that no one cares about. Don’t be shallow, dive in I say, dive in! Brevity may be the soul of wit, but not the soul of the blog. Make sure your blog posts are no less than two to three thousand words with long unending paragraphs that blur your reader’s vision. People want more, more, more. Give it to them in mass quantities. Give them herds and herds of words and words. Get that word count up!
8. Use words incorrectly as often as possible. Malapropisms are an exciting addition to your quiver of errors. To plummet your way to the top, you simply need to grasp the bondage between blogger and reader. Write things that are beyond your wildest apprehension, things that are unparalyzed in the blogging world. Another quick typ whlie were hear. Donut blather to eus SpillCheckers. It woount do no good anyhowe.
9. And finally, always leave your readers wanting more. They’ll come back again and again.

Well there it is. my Top Ten Proven Effective Strategies to Maximize Search Engine Optimization list. I hope it helped!