Should We Change the Church to be Relevant? Part 5: What's the real problem?

            Before changing the church, it is worth asking the question “Have we really identified the problem?”  I fear that too often a young minister who is very sincere and truly has a far greater love of souls than I can possibly lay claim to, will enter a church and make a very horrible mistake.  The good young man will come upon a church which has grown very careless about sin, very indifferent about the glories of God, unconcerned with adorning the gospel with good deeds, consumed with bitterness over past fights, always looking for faults now in those who have wronged them before, gossiping behind each others back, jealousy from those who do not hold positions towards those who do, indulging an obsession with the things of the world, and continually attempting to run off those with whom they are displeased.  The young man looks upon this church and sees that very few people desire to come to the church whether they be members or visitors.  Then the young man with a Sunday or two of thought comes to his conclusion.  The church clearly needs a contemporary worship service.  But best to be wise and wait a few Sundays before letting them know.  This young man is about to give this church exactly what they want, something else to take sides and fight about.

We will allow this blog to make its point very briefly.  Do not mistakenly think you can heal a church which is sickened with unrepentant sin by changing methods, strategies, or style.  If we can not see the real problems, our changes will be superficial at best and harmful at worst.  Sin is far more often the problem than style.

Should We Change Church to be Relevant? Part 4: What of Unity?

            What of unity?  Does it matter?  Is it a concern to us when we ask the question “How should the church change to reach the lost?”  Have we stopped to consider it?  Few things cause division in the church like an attempt to change it.  Now there is no question that some things are more important than unity.  We could name several doctrinal statements that are essential, things which to deny would forfeit the right to call a group by the name “church.”  We definitely should not sacrifice these crucial doctrines for the sake of unity.  There are standards of holiness which we are commanded to enforce as well.  We are explicitly commanded in scripture to remove people from our churches who persist in unrepentant sin despite the warnings of the church.  Obeying this command very well could cause a drop in unity as some of the church dislike the decision.  So we have no trouble affirming that there are some things more important than unity.  But is our hymn book one of them?  What of having a guitar in the service?  Is that more important than unity?  Is your pastor wearing a tie worth more?  Is your pastor not wearing a tie worth more?  What about the color of the carpet?  We affirm that some things are more important than unity, but is everything?  Scripture places a high importance on unity.

Php 2:1,2  Therefore if there is any encouragement in Christ, if there is any consolation of love, if there is any fellowship of the Spirit, if any affection and compassion, make my joy complete by being of the same mind, maintaining the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose.

Eph 4:3  being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

Scripture tells us to be diligent to preserve unity.  It is something we are to value, and strive for.  We are to make sacrifices to our own personal preferences for it.  Before we set about changing the church, we ought to think long and hard about how that change is going to impact the unity within our church.  Perhaps there is a better manner of making the change.  Perhaps there is a slower path to making the change which would preserve unity.  Very often double harm is caused to a church when a change is made because the leadership very blatantly showed that they weren’t concerned how people would feel about the change.  They transparently didn’t care about unity.  The suggestion that we care so deeply about souls that we must change, rings very hollow in the ears of those very souls which you are showing a plain disregard for in the midst of your congregation.  We absolutely must have a high and sincere value upon unity within the church.  And we must, because God does.

            But many would object that it is the immature Christians who don’t see the need for change who are causing the problems in the church and leading to the unity being disrupted.  In one sense it is sometimes even fair to say so.  But in another sense it is quite blatantly the fault of the “mature” ones.  I have a nineteen year old nephew and a four year old daughter.  Suppose I found the two of them screaming at one another and calling each other names.  Whose fault is it?  On one level I can almost assure you that the problem began with my daughter.  I would have no doubt that she is the one who first began to be unreasonable.  But on another level it just doesn’t matter.  Why?  Because it’s the 19 year old whom I expect to act right even when wronged.  He’s the one who should have never let it devolve to the point of yelling and name calling.  If the harmony between the two of them is ultimately going to depend on my four year old daughter being reasonable, then we are in very big trouble.  It is the same way in the church.  Talking about these very things, the scripture says,

Rom 15:1  Now we who are strong ought to bear the weaknesses of those without strength and not just please ourselves.

The burden of unity is upon the mature, not the immature.  We may consider this unfair, but it is reality and it is scripture.  This means we may very well have to slow down and make changes much more slowly, or even give up some ideas for the sake of unity in God’s church.

            Second, have you considered the cost of sacrificing unity for the sake of changing the church?  Have you considered that you are most likely sacrificing love?

Col 3:14  Beyond all these things put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity.

Now I do not mean to suggest that love is impossible without a unity on all subjects.  However, they are very intimately related.  And it would take a remarkably mature church to have their unity destroyed and yet their love for each other remain intact.  The truth is, usually when you throw out unity you also throw out love between the parties and replace it with bitterness and mistrust.  You may not want to throw out love.  You may have not intended to throw it under the buss along with unity, but all the same there it goes.  And with the loss of a vibrant and dramatic love among the church members you have thrown out the single most powerful witness which we have control over in this world.  Jesus said,

Joh 13:35  "By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another."

What will we do when those we have sacrificed so much to bring into our church finds a place full of hurt feelings, bitterness, maliciousness,  and gossip rather than an atmosphere of palpable love?  What will we do to make up for this lack?  Is there anything that can make up for it?  We have not yet found a substitute.

            Are there things worth fighting for in the church?  Yes.  Are there things we can change to better reach the lost?  Yes.  But the man who wishes to change the church must have a very sincere and high value placed on the church’s unity.  It is only the man who truly hates war and passionately loves peace that I would be confident to follow to battle.  Because only then do I know the battle is necessary.  In the same way only the man who passionately loves and values the unity of the church will be the man who knows when it is truly necessary to disturb it and when it is more fitting to bear with the faults of the weak.  See to it that you are such a man before you start changing things.

Speaking with Dead People

            In light of my last blog I think that I should clarify my thoughts on one particular topic, the role of writings outside of scripture and what if any authority they ought to have over the church.  The short answer is that they should have absolutely no authority.  However, in the past I have been accused of trying to give them authority simply because I place value on old writings and the opinions they express.  I would love to clarify my attitude towards them and, since it is my blog, I will!

            The root belief underneath the high value I place on books outside of scripture is my conviction that there is value in Christian dialogue over the right meaning of scripture.  That is my base conviction in this.  As Peter said,

2Pe 1:20,21  But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.

In other words, you don’t get to just decide what a scripture means.  God meant something when he said it.  If you suggest it means something contrary to what God meant, you are wrong.  So when we read scripture, we try to understand, “What did God mean by this?”  Sometimes it’s very simple to figure out.  Sometimes things are very difficult to understand.  In the same letter Peter wrote,

just as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him, wrote to you,

as also in all his letters, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction (2 Peter 3:15-16).

So here we see three very important statements.  First, some things in scripture are hard to understand.  Second, when people distort them it leads to destruction.  Third, it is a result of untaught and unstable Christians misunderstanding the scripture.

            All of this is to say one thing.  Dialogue between Christians over what scripture rightly means is a good thing.  What a person suggests may be wrong.  The interpretation may be bad, but dialoging between Christians about the meaning of scripture is good.  When you and I discuss rightly interpreting a passage, my thinking is stretched, my personal biases in the way I read the passage is exposed, verses I might not have thought of get introduced, and my personal blind spots get revealed.  All this is bad if you are mostly concerned with your pride, but it is all very good if you are concerned with rightly understanding the word of God.

            This effect is compounded when we discuss scripture with those from a different culture.  Not only are my personal blind spots revealed, but cultural assumptions that have affected my thinking get exposed and tested.  Assumptions which I hold to that would have never been exposed by others who hold those same assumptions get corrected when discussing with Christians from different cultures.  Perhaps they are sound, perhaps they are faulty, but at least now they are in the light for us to evaluate by God’s word rather in my blind spots.  Does that other culture I’m interacting with have blind spots too?  Absolutely.  But probably not all the same blind spots as mine.

            All of this is compounded greatly when we begin to interact with Christians of past generations.  Nobody said it better than C.S. Lewis,

Every age has its own outlook.  It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes.  We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.  All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny.  They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions.  We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?"—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth.  None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already.  Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill.  The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.  Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past.  People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes.  They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us.  Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.

            Will the authors of these old books be wrong about some things?  Absolutely.  But probably not the same things I am.  And these books are filled with men wrestling with the meaning of scripture and trying to teach and explain it.  And so in these old Christian books that have stood the test of time, I am allowed to dialogue with saints of the past over how to rightly understand the word of God.  I will have opportunity to see many of their faults, but they will also have opportunity to expose many of mine.  And through the process, we come to a better understanding of scripture.

            Sometimes, men who have never placed a value on such old books and the corrections and balance they can bring take great offense to suggesting they are important.  I suspect they take offence not because they hate the old books, they’ve not tried them, but rather their offense comes from the very human principle that when you suggest something is important for us, we will almost always interpret that statement as “you are unfit because you have neglected this.”  That, I think, is what they hear and what they are bristling over.  It is the notion that they are less because they have no knowledge of them which offends them. Let my closing be two fold.  First I will give a clarification of where I stand.  Do I think these old writings hold authority over the church?  Absolutely not.  Do I think reading them should be a requirement for church ministry?  Absolutely not.  Do I think they are healthy and benefit the reader and their church?  Yes I do.  I value them, because I value Christian dialogue over the meaning of scripture.  Second, I will close with a quote from Charles Spurgeon,

“It seems odd, that certain men who talk so much of what the Holy Spirit reveals to themselves, should think so little of what he has revealed to others.”

Should We Change Church to be Relevant? Part 3

            What should the primary pursuit of the church be?  Should we give highest priority to conforming ourselves to God’s commands or should we give highest priority to being relevant for the sake of outreach?  Two objections immediately spring to mind.

            First, we rightly object that the two things are not mutually exclusive.  We can pursue both.  We should pursue both.  But…which is most important?  I think the question is a good mental exercise for us as we work through the question “How should the church change to reach the lost?”  What should we be putting our effort into?  Our pastoral teams and young enthused Christians might spend quite a bit of time pondering how we might be better as a church in reaching the lost.  I would not fault them for this.  However, how much time do they spend, do we spend, on deeply thinking on how God has instructed a church to function?  It is a fair question.  Which should consume more of our time?  Should either of these be neglected?

            The second objection that comes to mind is: how is this any different than my last post?  I hope I’ve already given a good indication of the answer.  The second post in this series was simply about what wins when obedience and relevance conflict?  I hope we agreed that obedience must win.  What I am asking now is what should we be diligently striving to discover, relevance or revelation?

            Let me show you the heart of the problem.  Today many would say that there really isn’t much said in scripture about how we are to “do church.”  Of course there are some instructions, but just not much.  We are left with a breathtaking degree of freedom in how we are to organize things.  In contrast, the Christians of a century ago and further back believed that scripture contained very clear instructions on how we were to handle every aspect of our lives including church.  They were very confident that scripture gave a detailed map of “doing church.”  Now here is my point.  Somebody is wrong.  I do not mean to suggestion that we should take for granted that past Christians are right in this instance.  Perhaps modern Christians are right.  Perhaps the truth is somewhere in between.  But what I desire to ask of you is can you truly say that you have so searched God’s word, that you are so saturated with the entirety of it both old testament and new, that you can confidently say that it is they who are mistaken?

            Let this question sink in.  The truth is for most of us, probably all of us in this generation, there are swaths of scripture we have not diligently studied.  Television and modern entertainment have stolen far too much of our time such that we could never boast the familiarity with God’s word which generations past have accomplished in certain times of places.  Shouldn’t we cringe when our ministers in their 20’s boldly assure us something in direct contradiction to some of the most eminent saints of those past generations?  Have they even read the convictions of past generations on why church is done a particular way?  Do they know what scripture they based these convictions on?  Somebody is wrong.

            Now, here is my question.  What does the church most desperately need?  Is the most pressing concern of the church to seek relevance?  Or is the most pressing concern of the church to seek revelation?  Do we do well in this moment of history to spend the greater part of our effort to be diligently seeking how to attract the world?  Or should the greater part of our effort be seeking the scriptures daily to see what God says about doing church?  How we answer this question will drive how we proceed.  And it ought to be well thought over before a man begins restructuring our churches.  Is our great need relevance or revelation?