[Michael]

I agree with you! I have seen this happen in the recent turn of events at my currrent church. I have been involved with the pastors in trying to bring about biblocallly based activities. Due conflict in the church, A few weeks ago we felt the Lord call us to prayer and the group spent a week in prayer. We met by either meeting nightly, going over to the church at noon or in the evening and pray over it, or pray from home if we could not make it. We had no people from the congregation participate except for those of us in the ministry team (which only included 4 people).

After it was over we held a visioning meeting with the congregation and found out that most of the the people in the church, mostly elders, do not want to PRAY - HOW CAN A CHRISTIAN NOT WANT TO PRAY, nor do they want to do any kind of otreach.

In any event, these recent events came to a climax when the church board petitioned the district to allow them to conduct a vote to remove our pastors. In reality the vote was not the result of wrongdoing of the pastors, it is due to the fact that the congregation does not want to grow the church, are uncomfortable with each other and would rather leave things as they are regarding church programs and outreach - which is zilch. They are of the opinion that people should see the church and come in, that should be enough because they have built this nice big congregation next to a subdivsion that has a lot of traffic

I was part of their Saturday evening ministry team, we often would go to the church and pray over it, we held prayer meetings at the church for some time before they turned against the pastor. Keep us in your prayers!