What Do Oil Companies and Church Have in Common?

I heard something that really bothered me today on talk radio. Yeah, I am a Christian and no I don't always listen to Christian radio. Before you leap to judgment, Jesus didn't always listen to Christian radio either. Well, I mean if there were such a thing as radio I think He would spend a fair amount of time listening to the conversations of pagans. I would like to think that my motives would always be the same as His, but truth is I get tired of the same songs played in rotation. Remember, you can't spell routine without "r-u-t". Anyway, back to the subject at hand. The guy on the radion was fielding phone calls from listeners. Out of the blue, this guy starts talking about how churches should stick to doing what they "ought to do". He never mentioned what that was, but if the church was large he was sure they weren't doing what they were supposed to do. He said that's why he left church years ago. It seems that he recently was looking to buy a car and someone suggested he look into a one year old BMW in a neighboring town. All was well until he found out it belonged to a preacher. Somehow, in his convoluted way of thinking, this meant that this preacher was a bad guy. (It never occurred to him it that he may be just as wrong for wanting to buy such a material item.) Of course, the talk show host admitted that he could count the number of times he had attended church in the last year on one finger, but he was sympathetic with the guy on the other end of the line. Certainly churches that were big and successful were evil. Funny how that logic doesn't apply to high schools, universities, civic clubs, or anything else other than oil companies and churches.
Man, was I ever tempted to give these guys a piece of mind. I was already clutching my cell phone in my white knuckled fist. Don't these yahoos know that the bigger the church is the more they are able to impact society. Don't they realize that there is hardly a day goes by that we don't feed a family, buy medicine for an underpriviledged person, keep children for a fraction of the cost of private daycare or offer counseling to families on the verge of disaster. Don't these whiners care that there will be more than a dozen mission trips originate from Dallas Bay this year or that we offer a state-of-the-art youth building to give teens an alternative to otherwise risky behavior. And then it hit me; they don't care. They are blinded by the god of this world. If they were to ever see the good things that can be done by a "successful" church they might look at the church differently and even at our Lord who birthed it by His blood. My fist relaxed and I didn't make that call to the radio station, but I did talk to Someone about my anger.
Now, where was I going? Oh yeah, I heard about this great deal on a used BMW. See ya around the throne.
Pasor Ken