Spiritual Anorexia on Church – Top 10 Causes

Anorexia, or loss of appetite, is a medical condition a person needs to be alarmed about when diagnosed. Even though causes may vary from light to serious ones (kindly refer to http://www.medicinenet.com/loss_of_appetite/symptoms.htm), it still gives discomfort to the affected person. Such abnormality may happen to everyone.

On the same hand, “Spiritual Anorexia” exists. It is when a person losses appetite in listening to God’s Word, reading the Bible, and worship. Churches (this includes the unbelievers) nowadays experience “Spiritual Anorexia.” This is a sad truth that every believer needs to be alarmed about; hence, must take precautionary actions before it happens to the local church where he belongs.

Below are the top 10 reasons why this happens:

1. Mismanagement in the Church. When system and order are not present in a church, a church-goer tend to find another place of worship, and when gets tired may end up never going to any church anymore, returning back to his old ways.

2. Character of the Believers. It is a duty of every believer to live a life that encourages other believers (as well as the non-believers), not becoming a stumbling block to others, to the ‘Baby Christians’ and most of all to those who do not know Christ yet. This takes a lot of character to perform such duty. The fruits of the Spirit mentioned in Galatians 5:22-23 must be clearly evident in every self-professing Christians.

3. Broken Trust. When a ‘Baby Christian’ experiences a situation wherein his trust is not handled propely by a more matured Christian, there is a great possibility that he could no longer be seen in the Church and worst, might generalize this bad thought to all Christians.

4. Hypocrisy. ‘They look and sound so holy when in Church but do the other way when they’re outside the Church.’ Sounds familiar, right?

5. Monetary Concerns. I have known many Christians skip church just to have enough money to pay the bills and/or debts. This might also happen when a believer tries to evade the person to whom he is indebted to.

6. Poverty. “An hour spent in church might give me and my family a meal when otherwise.”

7. Concerns of this World. “…but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful.” – Mark 4:19

8. Boredom. A believer who finds everything in the Church a routine, lacking anointing and power from God will most likely get bored and would loss the passion to come early in every fellowship, and worst would never attend to any of it anymore.

9. Complacency. Both believers and non-believers who think their level of knowing God is good and desires no more to grow more nor to dig deeper in Him would soon find himself no longer interested in the things that would please God. His laziness consumes his passion for God.

10. Worldliness. Both believers and non-believers who find joy in satisfying themselves over God would surely loss their spiritual appetite for godly things.