The following is a post by writer, editor, pastor and speaker, Bob Hostetler, author of Quit Going to Church, now available from Leafwood Publishers. To learn more about Bob and his new book, you can check him out on Twitter, Facebook and his website: www.bobhostetler.com 

We’ve got to get intentional about spending time and living life with people who haven’t experienced new life in Christ. Most people who have been in and around the church for any length of time live in a Christian ghetto of our own making. We schedule ourselves day after day with church activities until all of our friends are Christians. We spend time only with Christians. We barely know anyone who isn’t a Christian. And believe it or not, that’s not a good thing.

If you take a close look at the first chapters of the book of Acts, you’ll see that in its earliest days, the first church—the church in Jerusalem—was settling in. They were having church; they were meeting in small groups; they were praying together, eating together, and helping each other out. And some preachers and scholars look at that picture (particularly in the latter verses of Acts 2) and see a picture of an ideal church.But I don’t see it that way. Because if it was ideal, God wouldn’t have had to change a thing. But he did.