"It will be a bad week for our revival. We have the fair, the concert, the circus, football this week. The Sons and Daughters of I Will Arise have a supper, the high school has a dance."
On and on it goes, while defeated church members build up their alibis. Any church that has to take a back seat and fearfully anticipate every side show that blows into town is already beaten.
We have developed an inferiority complex before the world, the flesh and the devil, and apologetically we take what is left in attendance after our worldly memmbers have gone where they really belong.
The Early Church did not quake every time the ungodly had a spree in Jerusalem. The saints in Rome did not have the blues because attendance would be cut by a gladitorial contest in the Colosseum. They had a robust, world-shaking power of their own that eventually put the Colosseum out of business. If we recovered that we would leave our little hot-chocolate huddles in church basements and give the world today a demonstration that would make its little affairs look like firecrackers beside atom bombs.
from Daily Devotional (Vance Havner) entitled When the Circus Did Not Hinder.