The nature of the crowd

I had one of those major thought threads today. You know what they are like. You read one thing, hear one thing and begin to muse on it and you follow the thread in your mind as it unwinds, not quite sure where it is going. Then all of a sudden a major truth hits you between the eyes.

I had one today. Follow this with me.

I was thinking about the crowd in Mark. It’s a major player in the book. The crowd is everywhere. That led me to start thinking about the crowd, how it had one time raced around a lake to beat Jesus to the shore so they could hear more, experience more. Then I was thinking about how this crowd could so easily betray him later. How?

Then I was thinking about the nature of a crowd, any crowd. People in a crowd are different. They act differently then when they are alone.

 Together in a crowd you can hide, acting alone you can be seen.
 In a crowd you can embrace evil, alone you know accountability. Everyone is doing it; you can get away with it. Why not throw the stone?
 In a crowd you can excuse apathy, after all someone else can always respond. But when we are alone we feel compelled to respond.
 Together it is easy to blame others, alone we face responsibility.

In essence, I was being reminded that in a crowd it’s easy to hide from my individual responsibility.

Then I got to thinking about our passion for church growth. We want to see healthy thriving churches, but as the church grows does it just turn into a Christian crowd? One where it’s easy to be apathetic, easy to blame others, easy to shirk responsibility.

Then it hit me hard. We “live this call together”, but we are held individually responsible. The reckoning is not faced in the crowd. The judgment seat of Christ is not a corporate lawsuit. It’s the ultimate day of individual accounting. No hiding in the crowd that day. Standing unclothed from the trappings of the church, the crowd we so often hide in, we will individually be held accountable.

Have I (not we) lived the call? Have I known Him AND made Him known?

Beware the crowd!