Meeting Needs

In the days when Jesus walked the earth families either had or had not.
Life was very basic and people possessed few things except what they needed and some people did not even have that.
Jesus talks many times in the Bible about giving to the poor and helping those in need.
He said if someone is asking you for something to not only give them what they asked for but more.
He didn't often talk about helping people with money but said that we should be willing to give the coats off our backs and not expect to get them back.
Give freely.
When St.Paul came along he taught on the importance of Christians holding all things in common and dividing things up as each one had need.
He talked of raising money and goods for the poor,widowed and orphaned.
We have now become a more socialist society instead of the churches meeting these needs now the government does,allowing churches to wash their hands of such things.
But we as churches are not suppose to be allowing the government to take over what we are called to do.
Granted our churches are no longer filled to capacity with people and in most cases only a few fill the pews on Sunday.
But why would this be?
Maybe because during the good years when churches were filled to capacity we as Christians forgot the relevance of helping the poor and needy and chose to close our selves off so now we are reaping what we sowed,which is little or nothing.
We have allowed the government,someone with lots of money,to step in and become our new churches.
Today people have no need to turn to God because the government is meeting the needs with food,clothing,housing,medical,social services and even judgement and fairness.
Why should someone turn to the church.
Church seems irrelevant because we has parishioners have allowed it to become so.
Many people complain that being a small church does not allow them to do great things,this may be true but Jesus never talked about doing big things he focused on helping in the small areas.
We as "church" have to start becoming more relevant because even if the government can meet all needs they can not meet the spiritual coming to God one.
When you allow the government to put themselves in to an all giving,all knowing,meeting all your needs position then how do you fault people,who have no religion or faith,to not see government as a kind of god.
We as church need to be relevant to our communities or we will continue to falter and grow smaller and smaller until there are few of us left.
Then we'll be sitting around asking how this could have happened to us.