Church Voices

Want to revitalize a church? Have some advice:

This principle was confirmed in a huge way in our study of Comeback Churches. According to Comeback leaders, the key to making a comeback was this - “renewed belief in Jesus Christ and the mission of the church.” That was the highest-rated single item in the study. How simple and basic is that!?

This has been said before, probably by many people, but I believe it is worth repeating.

If you want to be a witness for Christ, you need to earn that opportunity.

Part of the role and work of the Holy Spirit in the church was/is to give credibility to the message of the Kingdom of God and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ through miracles.  People listened because they saw evidence of the love of God in their lives.

Dave Stone at Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, KY recently related how they did that as a church by encouraging their people to participate in the local Aids Walk.  Their leadership was the third largest donor in the walk.  You can tell a sinner they are going to hell, but the question is, Are they listening?  When you tell a sinner you care about them, and then you show them you care about them (or vice versa),  then they will listen when you tell them God cares about them and how he showed it.  This is why “friendship evangelism” is so popular and beneficial.

Hating on sinners is never convicting to the sinner. 

Having been raised in the church during the 1980s, I received much knowledge concerning morality, but some tidbits I picked up were less than stellar. One such inculcated gem, was a rabid disdain for dungeons and dragons; that sinister game that could infiltrate the minds of adolescents and convert them into suicidal devil worshiprs. Well, like a good Christian young man, I wasn’t hesitant about expressing my view to my friends who has partaken in that heathen ritual… needless to say, I felt a touch foolish the first time I watched them actually play a game… wondering why on earth we were so bent against it. Years later after having been in the ministry for a while, one of my students afforded me the opportunity to play a game, and I decided I’d try it out. I loved it, and have been playing it nearly weekly ever since. I can tell you truthfully that neither I, nor any of my students who participate in this game have committed suicide, nor have we begun worshipping Satan. In fact, I see that over the past year Dungeons and Dragons has become a peculiar draw to our ministry, as our regular gaming nights tend to draw a specific crowd that the church has largely ignored in the bulk of its outreach endeavors. In fact, two individuals we baptized last month came to us as a direct result of our playing of dungeons and dragons… clearly this is not the adversary’s domain… well, unless we decide to cede it to him, which most of us apparently have. This all begs the question as to why the church occasionally picks innocuous social phenomenon and decides to wage war against it, as though our eternities hung in the balance.

To be honest, I see the hand of a very intelligent adversary in this. During WW2 the British intelligence campaign known as “Bodyguard” engaged in an elaborate ruse intended to misdirect German resistance prior to the invasion of Normandy. One of these techniques was the use of inflatable tanks and contrived tread-marks throughout various fields in England, as well as false landing craft jamming the bays of England. This is how intelligent warfare is conducted… the wise adversary sets up phantom threats to conceal the real dangers in his arsenal. So it is with our adversary. Since the 1980s we’ve seen the occasional revelatory uprising of Christian watchdogs, who proclaim a book or a game to be an open door to Satan worship. It is spiritual death to our children, and our moral duty to openly oppose these things at every opportunity. All the while, religious syncretism, relativism, the death of sexual modesty, and other very real and very dangerous issues went virtually unopposed throughout the world’s congregations. And so, true to form, the American church does the easy thing and targets an adversary that can be boycotted or burned. Brilliant; ignore the call to wage war against spiritual powers and authorities, don’t bother with the corrupting influence of people who read books or play games, just berate a publisher and close your wallets, oh and don’t forget to level some partially conceived diatribe about satanic influence at people who already need Christ. Well, this all mindlessly ends in a bulk of the church jumping on board and rallying their teachings and parental oversight against a perceived threat. I don’t think I’d be exaggerating here if I were to suggest that perhaps 90% or more of said Christian populace has no first-hand experience with said threat, nor do they understand exactly why they should view it as a treat (save for the quick tidbits of zealous accusations they’ve gleaned from other Christians offering opinions on the issue). Are the Christians who jump on these issues bad people? …No, they’re just Christians who trust the church and are under the impression that this zeal of other believers has a solid foundation. Are these believers damaging possible evangelism opportunities, and ostracizing people needlessly? Absolutely. There is no doubt that people outside of Christianity view this type of paranoia as absurd (especially given that the vast majority of it is highly ill-informed and, well… absurd).

So what’s a believer to do? How about exercising a bit of shrewdness concerning the adversary’s intentions, and his ability to carry them out in and through the church? I’ve got to laud the wife of our senior minister who decided to actually read Harry Potter before passing judgment (she of course concluded that it is harmless fantasy fiction). I really appreciate Christians who don’t cede territory to the adversary that doesn’t really belong to him. In way of exhortation, please believers, exercise a bit of healthy skepticism regarding the zealous ranting of other Christians. Don’t take up a position on seemingly harmless issues unless you have a solid reason for doing so. Satan doesn’t have to make us worship him, it’s far easier to keep us looking like hysteric nuts, that no sane person would want to have anything to do with.

Not to go into Driscoll overload, but here’s another one. He makes some excellent points, but here’s an interesting point I want to zero in on.

According to the guys with calculators at the denomination’s [Presby Church USA] headquarters, membership loss for the denomination in 2005 was estimated at sixty-five thousand, followed by an eighty-five thousand projected loss in 2006. According to The Layman Online, “Both the projected losses in members in 2005 and 2006 would be higher than any prior year’s downturn since the reunion of the northern and southern streams of the mainline denomination in 1983. The projected 2006 loss would represent a single-year decline of 3.7 percent, the highest percentage loss in the denomination’s 216-year history.”

Curiously, no explanation was given for the continued decline of the denomination. Perhaps that is because such an explanation would require repentance for getting off track of the mission of the gospel to fight over such things as homosexuality and feminism. These cancers are eating away at many liberal denominations and are now spreading to younger emerging-type Christian networks caught driving around the same moral and theological cul-de-sacs that a previous generation wasted their life on while failing to do evangelism and plant churches.

This is not exactly a new observation. What is new is the application of this observation to “emerging-type” Christians. Everytime a church focuses on the latest pet project of Bono they are working against the interest of creating a thriving church.

In Love Your God With All Your Mind, author J. P. Moreland, so far responsible for having planted three churches, four Campus Crusade ministries from scratch, pastured in two other congregations, and spoken in hundreds of churches during the last quarter century, has included his philosophy of ministry. (Moreland 188-200) In his first point, he maintains that a church should not have a senior pastor. He writes:

In my view, any philosophy of local church ministry ought to be clear about three very crucial ideas. First, the local church in the New Testament contained a plurality of elders (see Acts 14:23, 20:28; Philippians 1:1; Hebrews 13:17). The New Testament knows nothing about a senior pastor. In my opinion, the emergence of the senior pastor in the local church is one of the factors that has most significantly undermined the development of healthy churches. (Moreland 190)

He goes on to give several reasons as to why he thinks it harmful:

More and more people go into the pastorate to get their own significance needs met, and congregations are increasingly filled with empty selves [he expounded on this point earlier in his book]. Given these facts, the senior pastor model actually produces a codependence that often feeds the egos of the senior pastors while allowing parishioners to remain passive. None of this is intentional, but the effects are still real. The senior pastor model tends to create a situation in which we identify the church as “Pastor Smith’s church” and parishioners come to support his ministry. If a visitor asks where the minister is, instead of pointing to the congregation (as the New Testament would indicate, since we are all ministers of the new covenant), we actually point to pastor Smith. On the other hand, poor pastor Smith increasingly gets isolated from people and peer accountability, and eventually, he dries up spiritually if he is not careful. (Moreland 190)

He continues:

The local church should be lead and taught by a plurality of voices called elders, and these voices should be equal. If so-called lay elders do not have the seminary training possessed by those paid to be in “full-time” local church ministry, then the church needs to develop a long-term plan to give them that training in the church itself or elsewhere. No one person has enough gifts, perspective, and maturity to be given the opportunity disproportionately to shape the personality and texture of a local church. If Christ is actually the head of the church our church structures ought to reflect that, and a group of undershephards, not a senior pastor, should collectively seek his guidance in leading the congregation. (Moreland 190, 191)

More, he follows this reasoning in his practical suggestions to good sermons:

. . . “[T]wo reasons I do not think a single individual ought to preach more than half (twenty-six) the Sundays during the year. First, no one person ought to have a disproportionate influence through the pulpit because, inevitably, the church will take on that person’s strengths, weaknesses, and emphases. Now, who among us is adequate for this? No one. By rotating speakers, the body gets exposure to God’s truth being poured through a number of different personalities, and that is more healthy . . . As a result, the local church will have a growing number of competent leaders able to preach and consequently not be so dependent on one person.

Here is an important question: Would it inordinately impact your church’s attendance and effectiveness if the main preacher went to another church? If the answer is yes, your church is going about its business in the wrong way. Leaders are not being developed in the body, and the pulpit is not being adequately shared.

Second, no one who preaches week after week can do adequate study for a message or deeply process and internalize the sermon topic spiritually. What inevitably happens is that a pastor will rely on his speaking ability and skills at putting together a message. (Moreland 194)

He then provides a couple of persuasive examples in his own life where these considerations have proven true and beneficial. And lastly, he gives a more precise summary of what he is claiming:

The local church ought to be lead by a plurality of elders whose main job is to develop the ministries of others. They are to see to it that members of the body discover their spiritual gifts and natural talents and receive the training and equipping necessary to be good at their ministries individually and corporately. These elders are free to do whatever is necessary to the forms in the church in order to succeed in equipping the saints to accomplish biblical functions for the church. If this is correct, then the church must see herself as an educational institution, and the development of the Christian mind will be at the forefront of the church’s ministry strategy of equipping the saints. (Moreland 192)

Unfortunately, Moreland does not define what he means by senior pastor; though I think by the text it is clear what he is referring to. Now I’ve done my best to treat Moreland’s position accurately after admittedly not having read the entirety of his book. Note that he is not claiming definitive truth about said matters, only a personal philosophy attested to by the past thirty or so years of experience in Christian discipleship. Honestly, I’m not sure what to think about the like. Traditionally, we have always seen a church in which a senior pastor is appointed, which I think has been for the most part a success. But does Moreland have a point here?

“A church for people who don’t do church…”

How’s that work? Is there some sort of ministry Gestapo that evaluates people, identifying people who don’t do church and then kidnaps them and forces them to come to church or what?

Puzzling to say the least.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
- Matthew 5:43-48

And then…

I was on my home and was on the ramp getting off the highway. I saw a mini-van on the side of the road. There was a lady standing next to the van and in her arms she held her child. I can only assume her mini-van had broken down. I don’t know, perhaps with so many gad stations being out of gas, she had also run out. I slowed down and started to pull over to offer her a ride. At the very last second I noticed a “W” sticker on the back of her vehicle and I sped up and drove off.
- Democratic Underground

One advantage of the slow evaporation of the Judeo-Christian ethic from North America is that it gives the chance to once again draw a contrasting image between Christians and everyone else, if we’re willing to take it.

Going to Bible college is a good way to develop a nervous tic in which the knee is spontaneously and devastatingly applied to the face of anyone who complains about the church.

See, there exists among future ministers the attitude that the church at large sucks and really can’t do much of anything right. To listen to my classmates you’d think the church was filled with a combination of malevolence and incompetence, like some sort of wierd lovechild between Hitler and Barney Fife. Now, I don’t particularly have a problem when there is a specific complaint made about a specific church (or members of a church) so long as the complaint is made with the intention of correcting the problem and its done in a Christ-like way. But that was the rare exception to the rule. Most of the time when I heard complaining about the chuch it was done to elevate the complainer, sort of like when the school bully punches a fat nerd and leaves him flailing on the ground humiliated and hurt to get the attention of a little Ms. Bully. So with that in mind I wanted to just drop a few scriptures on people.

For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the savior.Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her
-Ephesians 5:23-25

His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms,
- Ephesians 3:10

And finally, let me leave you with this…

Don’t you have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you for this? Certainly not!
- 1 Cor 11:22

Whenever a church begins to grow there’s always problems that come along with it. In Acts 6 we see this same thing happening. This is the part where the Grecian Christians are a bit miffed because Grecian widows aren’t being properly cared for. But, notice the very first verse notes, “In those days when the number of disciples was increasing…”. We shouldn’t be surprised when this happens, or acts like its some kind of horrible failing of the church today, it has always happened. But, we have the example of those who went before us to help to guide us.

What stands out to me the most is that this seems to be a problem of infrastructure. As churches grow the methods and procedures that worked for few people fail to work for large numbers of people. Notice what the disciples conclude: the teaching of the word of God is more important than waiting tables, and so, rather than doubling their efforts using the same procedure as before they devise a new infrastructure that is capable of handling the larger population of the church.

Next I notice that the disciples don’t bother getting bogged down in the details. They devise a strategy and toss it back to those who brought the complaint. Instead of debating who should be doing what they simply tell the Greek Christians, pick out seven who will take care of business. Whenever a complaint is brought in a church the people doing the complaining should be involved as part of the solution. Generally those who are troubled enough by an issue to raise it are those most interested in seeing the issue resolved. By involving them as part of the solution you are choosing those who will most energetically pursue the solution. And as it becomes known what your policy is, people who complain for the sake of complaining will stop complaining out of fear of being put to work.

Finally, notice the qualifications of those who were to be chosen. They were to be full of the Spirit, full of wisdom and men of good repute. These qualifications are 75% of the way to the qualifications for eldership. When it comes to appointing leaders to do something even as seemingly mundane as waiting tables we should have some pretty high standards.

From here:

It’s not that the quality of their core ministry is compromised by their entry into the political realm; rather, the number of people who would ever dream of walking through the front door of a FamilyLife conference is diminished to only those on the same side of the political fence as FamilyLife.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the problem every church faces. When a church enters the political fray there will be a certain number of people that will instantly be closed off from ever entering the church building or engaging in a meaningful conversation with a member of the church. The problem comes in with the fact that churches are in the business of “making disciples of all the nations”, sort of a difficult task when some of the members of a nation won’t even talk to you.

At the same time the church is compelled to weigh in on some political issues. Primarily issues where the government has failed to uphold its divine charge of enacting justice (Romans 13:1ff). As with many, many issues the devil is in the details on this. On what issues and how should a church express itself? At the very least its walking a very thin a tightrope.