One struggle for people of faith is seeing their Church through today’s eyes.

We tend to lock into the time we came to know Jesus. We look back at music, the preacher, and even the décor as being the best at the time we became Christians. Our emotional attachment to the methods of that time is unseen but clearly present in our hearts. Without articulating it, people begin to see the Church today as “less than” when they were younger.

With time, we stop innovating, and we stop being creative in our worship of God. We lock into our favorite era and never leave. We begin to become crawdads, as one preacher put it. “We back blindly into the future and look longingly into the past.”

The Church must continually evaluate only two things: First, is it true to God’s word? Second, is it about reaching people with the gospel and helping them become fully devoted disciples of Jesus today?

Our commitment to Jesus and his mission must be bigger than our love of the past if we want our Church to be vital today and still effective tomorrow.