Recently I received and email from a friend which began: "Subject: Safety Statistics." It described The Safest Place on Earth. It warned that we should certainly avoid riding in automobiles because they are responsible for 20% of all fatal accidents. Moreover, we should not stay home because 17% of all accidents occur in the home. We must also avoid walking on streets or sidewalks because 14% of all accidents occur to pedestrians. And we should avoid traveling by air, rail, or water because 16% of all accidents involve some form of transportation.
I was pleased to learn that only .001% of all deaths occur in church, and these are usually related to previous physical disorders. Therefore, logic tells us that the safest place to be at any given point in time is at church! Bible study is safe too. The percentage of deaths during Bible study is even less. The conclusion: for safety's sake attend church! It could save our lives!
Maybe we should make this information widely available. It could be a good evangelism message, bring people to church, expand our membership and all that. After all, most of us have been taught from infancy to be safety conscious. What better way to put into practice what we have been taught?
On the other hand while reading over and article on Church history, I came across the following bit of historical information. At the very beginning of Christianity to openly profess to being a Christian was to invite persecution, suffering and even death. It was not until the Edict of Milan in 313 that persecution stopped and going to church became safe, at least for most people.
What I leaned was that of the 318 bishops who gathered at the first Council of the Church in Nicea in 325, a dozen years after religious freedom was granted, only about a dozen of those bishops had not lost an eye or a hand or did not limp because of a missing or atrophied foot or leg caused by torture. Those bishops must have uttered to themselves the thought: "I know His truth is marching on. But why do we have to stop so often to bandage up the soldiers?"
History has also taught us that if it is easy to live out our faith, if it does not cause us some form of pain or discomfort, when the going does get rough, it is easy to not live out our faith.
All of which leads to the question: do we really want to preach a faith that does not cost us anything, a faith that is easy to live? Is that the kind of faith we are now living? The truth is if living out our faith seems painless, it probably is. It may also mean that we are not truly living it as we should.
No one wants to live in pain, but it is sometimes required if we are to do what we know in faith we must. The truth is, when we are truly living out our faith, we will be bloodied in one way or another. So much for church being a safe place to be!
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