Do you treat a hotel differently than you treat your house? When you stay in a hotel, did you do anything to improve it? You probably don’t say to your wife or husband, “Honey, what this room needs is a new coat of paint. Let’s go down to the paint store and pick up a couple of gallons of that color we used in our bedroom.” You don’t likely say, “This bedspread is faded. I think we should go to the store and buy another one.”
Before you checked out, did you tidy up the room? Did you run the vacuum cleaner or scrub the toilet or empty the trash cans? Did
you go to the manager and say, “Do you have any tools I could borrow? I feel like some things in the room need a little attention.”
Of course, you didn’t. That would be silly. You don’t treat a hotel like your home. You have an investment in your home.
However, I find that some people treat their church like a hotel rather than their home.
If church is a hotel, you drop in, ignore everything, leave your trash, drop in $5 or $10 or $20, and you’re gone. You expect certain things, because, after all, you’re the customer. If you’re a customer, you come to expect service. You expect to find the coffee ready and the childcare to be wonderfully staffed with the best childcare workers available. If you treat your church like a hotel, you expect good service. And if you don’t get it, you can always try another church.
However, if church is your home, you walk in, and you say, “I need to serve. I need to participate. What’s not getting done that I can do? What can I learn so that I can help out? What are the prayer needs?” And you become emotionally invested. You serve. You give. You participate because your heart’s there.
So ask yourself, “Do I treat my church like a hotel or my home?”