The Malnourished Church

In a society where one have the freedom to worship as please and as often as desired we find many spiritually mal nourished.

1850, 20% of the working men in England were too malnourished to go to work!

Ralph D. Winter

Too many Christians find that they are malnourished in the Word but well fed on the world, and they live defeated lives as a result.

Jentezen Franklin

If there is no passion to learn and apply the Word, no desire to discover what the Word says about the situations we face, we will become malnourished and emaciated and unable to handle trials when they come.

Anthony Evans

As Ezekiel’s horrified neighbours stared at the apparition before them—this gaunt spectre of a starving man, shaved bald with his hair in piles at his feet, tears of pain stinging his eyes and blood trickling from gashes in his taut malnourished skin—they were looking into the mirror of their own future as a people.

Christopher J. H. Wright

Many churches are suffering from malnourished imaginations, captive to culturally conditioned pictures of the good life. They want to believe the Bible—they do believe it, they are prepared to defend doctrinal truth—but they nevertheless find themselves unable to see or feel our world in biblical terms. Consequently, they experience a disconnect between the world they actually inhabit and the world of the biblical text whose truth we confess.

Kevin Vanhoozer

Far too many of God’s children are spiritually malnourished—not because they don’t eat, but because they eat the wrong things. Donuts taste good, but they have no nutritional value. You can’t have a donut-level spiritual diet and then wonder why you don’t experience God’s blessings. To hunger for righteousness is to apply the righteous standard of God to your life. You need to be hungry for that which pleases God. If you train your appetite in this way you will be filled—you’ll be satisfied with divine contentment.

Tony Evans

So time poverty and burnout have become the signs that the minority church remains serious about God in a world that has rejected him. Because we pastors rarely practice Sabbath, we rarely preach the Sabbath. And because we do not preach the Sabbath, our congregations are not challenged to take it seriously themselves. The result of our Sabbath amnesia is that we have become perhaps the most emotionally exhausted, psychologically overworked, spiritually malnourished people in history.

A. J. Swoboda