Stages of a Dying Church

Matthew Boyd has a blog worth reading called From The Outside Looking In. He wrote a post recently asking what seems to be a simple question about church involvement in missions entitled Does The Progress of Your Mission Efforts Depend on Money Within An Organization? 

I started out with a simple comment:

 A church that is active in building and sending its own missionaries, in the local community, region, and around the world, is a healthy and Biblical church. Without this aspect of a church's ministry the church would turn its God-given resources in on itself and implode. The mechanism for doing this is the idea that the goal of evangelism is to get people to join, or even just to come to, the church. The mentality is that the church is there to meet their felt needs with the hopes that they will pay their dues. The struggle at this point is between those who think the church should change everything to draw more people and those who think the church should do things the way it has done for hundreds of years. The changers what new people to come to church to be ministered to. The non-changers want the people already paying their fair share of the dues to be catered to with services as they have always been. The point that is missed is that the struggle needs to be to make the current members understand that having accepted the gospel and being God's children means that we need to take the gospel out where people have never heard and disciple them with it whether they end up joining your church or not.

I ended up with something longer than I could post as a single comment. So I'm posting the rest of it here. I talk about the stages of a dying church...

Churches in the cycle of self-consumption go through progressively painful steps toward their own destruction as we are observing today:

1. The Social Club stage. People come and pay their dues and enjoy the company of other people as they are ministered to by charismatic people who have to be in control. These people often feed off the clubby nature of the church because their desire to control is aided by the desire of members to not have to do too much. These ore most often not the pastors of the church, but the deacons or church council members. Pastors who don't see this stage won't teach against it and may cater to the controllers because they fear their influence in the church, or because they tithe from a healthy portfolio. If a pastor can't turn things around in this stage, the church will go through major upheavals in later stages. But a certain amount of tact and wisdom is required to pull it off lest he inadvertently throw the church into stage 2:

2. Non-powerful members of the church realize their duty to serve God instead of just paying for others in the church to serve them. When they ask for help from the church, financially or otherwise, they are met with obstacles*. These obstacles are placed in their way by the ones in control who like the clubby nature of the church as I have described. The ones in control become upset because the Christians who desire to serve God biblically require vested leadership. This threatens the power base of the ones in control and they fear losing the status quo of their clubby church. The longer this goes on, the stronger the obstacles become and they often become codified. This is where the church enters into phase 3.

3. The people who want to minister begin to find the obstacles insurmountable and they begin to leave the church in favor of other congregations open to their ministering. I have often found in many of these churches where the ones in power will actually counsel those who want to minister that they should leave the church. Churches in this stage will dwindle in size and struggle painfully sometimes for a long time with being able to pay the bills, much less a pastor. I'm not talking about very small churches who have this struggle naturally, but by churches once built to accommodate a much larger congregation who are no longer able to maintain the physical plant. Most often, I've seen the church dissolve. The property goes up for sale to a new or growing church or is renovated for some other purpose.

Can a church come back after having slipped from stage 1? Possibly, but I've never observed it. Once a church denies the gospel to the rest of the world, it denies it to its own members. If any church life grows back, it's not a biblical church (e.g. the prosperity gospel).

I've seen this happen too often in the states and I'm familiar with this pattern. I don't have anyone to credit by my own observations. Someone may be able to refine them. But the material in Matthew's article is inextricably linked to the health of a church, I believe as according to what I have observed, and I think God allows this pattern to lessen the impact of sinful churches and increase the effectiveness of healthy churches.

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*These obstacles can be unnecessary procedural difficulties (red tape), de-funding from the budget, the decay of orthodox doctrines, etc.

Open Letter to Strong-Willed Christians

I don’t need to tell you all the good things about yourselves because you have already made the case, at least in your own minds. But let me iterate the qualities about yourselves that make you valuable people so that you know that I respect you for that as well as for letting other people who read this know.

You possess the drive to accomplish great things. You have integrity to your own ideals. You are capable of garnering the support and cooperation of other people. All of these things can be used to do great and mighty things in the Kingdom of God. I believe Peter was strong-willed. I believe Paul was strong-willed. So you have great examples in the Apostles for the work that God has for you.

But qualities like this can also be your spiritual downfall and many great Christian leaders have succumbed to their ability to overcoming obstacles to fulfill their sinful desires.

You see, you possess qualities that make you a great leader. But these qualities do not guarantee that your leadership will be good. Let me share a couple of principles to consider as you seek to implement your leadership in the Kingdom of God.

First, the strong must cater to the needs of the weak. This is a biblical principle from 1 Corinthians 8-10. These three chapters involve Paul spelling out how those who have strong faith must surrender their rights for the sake of not being a stumbling block to their brothers and sisters in the faith who are weaker in their faith. The Corinthians were threatened with disunity because people who thought they were strong were opposing people who they thought were weak. Now, I’m sure it seems logical that they strong should dominate the weak so that the weak are brought up to speed. However, weak people don’t grow the same as strong people.

This follows after Paul’s instruction earlier in his letter to the Corinthians that they shouldn’t think too highly of themselves. He says it that way to the Romans who had a similar problem, but goes into much detail to the Corinthians. It also follows after Jesus’ teaching in Mark 10:42-45. Jesus himself demonstrated this by washing their feet at the last supper. Sadly, we don’t often think this way when we think of leadership in the church. We think of people who dominate other people and lead with strength.

I work in manufacturing. We have machine operators who need to program their machines based on drawings of the parts that come from our engineering department. Most of the time the drawings as simple enough and the operators can add or subtract the dimensions quickly given in order to come up with coordinates that fit in the Cartesian coordinate system that the machines use. But sometimes drawings are too complex for the machine operators to deal with quickly. Dimensions are specified on the drawings that include relative positions based on angles. In order for the operators to calculate the coordinates they need to key into the machines, they need to use trigonometry. Most of them don’t know trigonometry and those who do would spend too long trying to set up the formula and key it into a calculator. Even then, the probability they will make a mistake is too high. So they usually have to leave their workstation and come to see me. I can open the drawing electronically and measure the coordinates they need easily and quickly and without error.

The idea in my example is that it is incumbent on the engineers to generate drawings that the floor can use efficiently. The people on the floor don’t have the education or the tools to be able to use the drawings effectively. They are in a position of weakness where the engineers are in a position of strength. The people in the position of strength must cater to those in the position of weakness in order to accomplish what they need accomplished.

How does this relate to strong-willed people? Especially with raising strong-willed children, I can find dozens of resources counseling the parents how to cater to their strong-willed children’s needs. I can also find resources on how to lead strong-willed people or deal with them in general. But I also have found many resources instructing people that if they are not strong-willed then they are weak. You see, you require others to cater to you, but demand that you be seen as the strong ones. As I have already pointed out, this is contrary to biblical teaching. In order to be most effective in Kingdom work, you must learn to cater to those you see as weak. Paul did as he pointed out in 1 Cor 9. He is your example in this.

One way that you often fail to do this is through your natural competitiveness. You are driven to win. But you end up competing against people who are geared to cooperate in Christian mission, not contend. So you force them to contend, not for the faith, but against you. That’s wrong. You might claim something like you are pushing them to do their best, but you have to understand that they aren’t motivated the same way you are. If you think that they are the weak ones, then don’t expect them to change to cater to your leadership. You must change to fit their followership so as to motivate them according to their temperament.

This leads me to my second principle: The qualities that God gives us to serve him are the same qualities we use to sin against him. This realization should provide two things:

The first one I have pointed out is how the great qualities you have as a strong-willed person can also be your downfall. If you heed this principle, you should be humbled enough to submit to the authority of God in your life. Many strong-willed people I know go off strong, yet poorly informed. You push hard with only some of the facts you need. The key is understanding that you will never have all of the facts. That means that you need to lead with the care that you might be wrong about something. If that doesn’t lead you to submit to God’s authority in all humility then you need to step down from Christian leadership.

The second is that all the wonderful qualities of the people you lead can also be their undoing as well as the undoing of the team. If you can’t submit to God’s authority in all humility, you can’t lead them to do the same. If you don’t understand the magnitude of responsibility you have been given and the glory that God deserves for it, you will forage ahead half-cocked and do more damage than good for the Kingdom. And any good that does happen is in spite of you, not because of you.

Do not take the strength of will you have been given for granted or assume glory for using it. Learn to serve others before you use your strong will to lead others lest you lead them to destruction. You have been given a trust by God in your strengths.

Definitive Statements in the Bible

One of the many important factors in understanding the Bible is identifying how authors use specific words. So it’s important to be able to identify definitive statements made by authors. A famous one is Hebrews 11:1. I’ve heard that preached as definitive of faith throughout the Bible. Now, that’s not a bad thing. However, there is a refinement that is often overlooked.

There are two qualities to definitive statements: connotation and denotation. Now we are familiar with those words because we learned them in school as such: denotation is the dictionary definition; and connotation is how we feel about the word. “Piety” and “devotion” have that same basic denotation, but for many people they have completely opposite connotations.

How does this apply to the definitive statements?  One would hope that the dictionary would have strict denotations, but when a connotation becomes common enough it is added to the dictionary as a definition. So there’s not always a clear delineation between connotation and denotation.

This applies to study of the Bible when we identify a definitive statement. Like Hebrews 11:1, many take the statement as purely denotative. But we have to take into consideration that the statement is partially connotative. Logically, it works this way: Everything fits into categories. A certain amount of categories specified or excluded are enough to define something to a degree, but particular definition requires its exclusion from everything else in all categories that apply to it. Denotation is enough to fit the meaning of a word into a reasonable number of categories. But inasmuch as that word applies to more categories than what are generally specified, a definitive statement is connotative. So a connotation doesn’t require explicit denotation although some denotation may be given.

Let me give a tangible example as an explanation. I own a car. Now we all know the general definition of a car. So you know that I’m probably referring to a transportation vehicle that has four wheels and some means of propulsion. You might ask what kind of car I have and I might respond with, “I own a 2000 Ford Focus LX4.” That narrows it down significantly. But what if the police were after me and a witness said that they saw a Red Ford Focus, older style headlights, with North Carolina license plate that starts with “HCL” but they didn’t catch the rest. That might be enough information for the police to track me down as the owner of the car. So they didn’t have all the information, but they had enough to narrow down the information to one single car as different from the rest. Now, I could give you the VIN number without telling you anything else and you could find the car. The VIN number is completely denotative although I didn’t even say it was a car. The information exists elsewhere and can be easily discovered.

By the way, there is a common argument for dismissing some words in the Bible as synonymous. It is said of these that they “seem to be used interchangeably”. I’d have to look at them and analyze how they are used to determine if that argument is warranted. Sticking with the car example, one can say that my car is red. That statement is somewhat definitive. It can also be said that blood is red. That seems to be definitive. But my car isn’t blood. They are both in the category “red”, but they do not share many more categories than that. So it may be that two things that share many of the same categories are spoken of connotatively, but without arriving at a full denotation that demonstrates synonymy between them.

When John writes “Greater love has no man than this: that he lay down his life for his friends,” we can arrive at some important conclusions about how John thinks about love, specifically the Greek “agape” as opposed to “phileo” that he uses a few verses later. There may be some more specific things that john has to add about love, and these are evidenced by the extended passages that serve as the context for these verses where he relays Jesus’ teaching about love.

So, when you are studying the Bible in depth and desire to think about what the words mean, I hope this helps to refine your thinking about how you do so.

The Nature of God's Will

Stand to Reason has recently combined their youth blog with their main blog. One of the features that the youth blog brought to the table was a weekly challenge that gives readers an opportunity to try their hand at answering a challenge to the Christian faith with a followup article later in the week that offers a recommended answer. This week's challenge was thus:

Here's a question we received from a reader:

If morality is in God's nature, then He is omnibenevolent, right? Does that mean that God cannot choose evil? So, if God cannot choose to do evil, does that mean He doesn't have free will?

What do you think? How would you respond to a friend who asked you this? What kind of questions would you ask him? What would he need to clarify? Leave your response, then look for Brett's answer on Thursday. People from different theological traditions will probably respond to this differently, so this should be interesting.

My response was to clarify the difference between God's will and human will:

We must understand that God's will is not the same as man's will. God's will is creative. Man's will is reactive. Man doesn't choose the conditions or the determinants of his choices. Mutually exclusive paths (conditions) are set before him from outside of himself and he cannot choose by using information or stimuli (determinants) outside of God's created order. For God, however, the conditions and the determinants are the same for he creates them out of nothing more than his nature which his will reflects. Since goodness has its foundation in the nature of God, there is no higher ethical standard against which God's will can be compared. So whatever God does is good.

Now the problem we have in trying to ascertain God's goodness is the effect of sin on epistemology. Sin distorts our ability to perceive truth by creating ethical dilemmas inside of God's creation. God himself is not conflicted, but we perceive conflicts because of the distortion.

Perhaps a metaphor will help. God's will is like a river that flows gently but swiftly and strongly. We are like swimmers in the river who can choose either to swim against the flow of God's will or with it. If we swim against God's will we push against the water that is carrying us downstream. Our efforts are frustrated by the strength of God's will. Our swimming is laborious and difficult and we are buffeted by the current. Are we not swimming as God has instructed? yet because we swim against the flow we feel God may be doing some evil against us.

On the other hand, if we choose to swim with the current, our swimming is easy and we are carried along to our destination. Perhaps the speed at which we are carried along is frightening and other swimmers struggling against the flow impede our path dangerously. Perhaps rocks or some other natural peril threatens us. Nevertheless, we find that we are carried to our destination handily.

God has established not only the river, but its source, destination, obstacles, and us. We will be carried along willingly or unwillingly. The willing will be happy with the destination. The unwilling will not. God has done no evil to either.

Now, this answer I gave doesn't answer all questions regarding the problem of evil. That wasn't my intent. But since we know that God is always good, he is trustworthy despite what we may not understand. That is what someone questioning Christianity on this point will most need to hear.

The Basis for Marriage

Ephesians 5:15-21:

[15] Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, [16] making the best use of the time, because the days are evil. [17] Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. [18] And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, [19] addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, [20] giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, [21] submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. (ESV)

I’ve heard Christians who desired to twist what the Bible said in order to justify their own pursuit of happiness. Divorce, homosexuality and promiscuity are the big ones with regard to the subject of marriage. So I’ve heard the argument made that “God just wants me to be happy.”

The answer that I’ve conserved more often than not is, “God doesn’t want us to be happy. He wants us to be obedient.” The problem with this answer is that God does want us to be happy. The real issue I have come to understand concerns where we are placing the source of our happiness. In other words, if you are trying to find happiness in what someone else does for you, then you will be disappointed and go looking for happiness elsewhere.

Look at the Ephesians passage. This comes right before a primary source teaching on marriage from the Bible. This is its context. The reason we submit to each other is because our desire is for God. If we don’t submit to each other then our desire is not for God. Rather, our desire is to have our own needs satisfied. Remember what Jesus said: seek first the kingdom of God and all these things will be added to you. The first thing we should seek is the will of the one who provides us all things (v 17).

So we see how this works with marriage. If you want a happy marriage, seek God’s will. If you understand that God loves your spouse more than you do, you will seek to minister to the one that God loves according to their need. When both spouses do this, it’s pure bliss. When one spouse doesn’t, then the one who does will continue counting the suffering as joy. There is no seeking happiness elsewhere because you are aligned with Christ who died for us while we were still in sin.

Long gone are the self-serving warm fuzzies I once felt for my wife. Long now have I had an even greater passion for her as I follow Christ on her behalf.

So whether you are married, single, or have inappropriate feelings for another, whether the opposite or the same sex, seek God’s will first. All of us will suffer in one way or another for our earthly passions. Count it as all joy as we glorify God and submit to each other out of reverence for Him.

"Run to the Cross"

I've heard or read the phrase in the title of this post more times than I can remember. I've even heard it in songs. I have a question about it:

What does it mean?

The phrase "run to the cross" is not in the Bible. I looked. In order to answer the question, you have to give me an answer that indicates how this phrase means the same thing for everyone. You can't just tell me what YOU think it means. If it doesn't mean the same thing for everyone, then how can anyone admonish anyone else and expect that they will understand the admonition.

You see, I think we Christians too often use vague language like this and expect that everyone should know what we are talking about. But such is not the case. So can anyone tell me what this means?

Anyone?

Giving Sight

There’s a difference between making didactic arguments and influencing people’s attitudes.

Let’s say that many thoughtful blogs make didactic arguments. The articles I write do. They are intended to be instructive and provide interested individuals with the material to discuss things influentially later.

But influencing people’s attitudes requires making positive appeal to the sensibilities of the person or people you are talking to. An example of this happened yesterday. I had a discussion with a Christian steeped in that sort of theology that focuses on the miraculous as a benefit to the physical welfare of the believer.

Specifically, he brought up as a matter of discussion a devotion by Joseph Prince he had recently read. He said that a woman who was blind came to him for healing. He told her to close her eyes and tell him what she saw.

“Nothing,” she replied.

Then Joseph Prince told her to imagine herself with perfect vision and tell him what she saw. She then described a beautiful scene of green fields, etc. When she opened her eyes, she had perfect vision.

So my brother was amazed by the miraculous physical healing that we can have if we only have the right understanding of how to think about God.

Now, my didactic argument is based on the principle that our purpose is to glorify God. So thinking from the account we have here, let us assume that it is true that the woman was miraculously healed. God can certainly do it and he can use flawed and sinful people in the process. I don’t know if Joseph Prince is fabricating miraculous accounts for his own glory or not. Some, if not most or all, of faith healers are certainly fakes. But I’m not going to pontificate with skepticism for which I have no basis in knowledge.

Now, Christians who follow faith healers cognitively attribute such miracles to God. That’s not a bad thing. That’s what it means to give God the glory. God does good things that we want to use to tell others about God. The problem is that it’s a really low view of God. The gospel is so much greater and more glorious than mere physical miracles. The gospel is the sacrifice of His son to atone for our sins and when we are associated with Christ, then we get to suffer sacrificially in His service of the gospel to others as long as we are here on earth.

That’s the rub. It’s the suffering that most glorifies God because it is aligned with the gospel in the pattern of it. Physical miracles are temporary. How many people healed by faith healers are immune to death? None of them. Suffering betrays a spiritual truth that the sufferer knows that transcends death.

Worse, there is an implication in the Joseph Prince devotion, as is in the general school of “faith” that dwells on such things, that implies what I would consider a serious error. That error is that while it can be said that God did the miracle, he did it in response to some act of faith. So really, this teaching implicitly focuses on the ability of the miracle recipient to obtain the miracle by generating the right kind of faith. If someone gets a miracle because they have the right faith, then the miracle recipient is the one who is glorified. When things are good, we don’t need God. When things are not good, then the Bible is a self-help book and God is the manager of the great health-care/welfare system in the sky.

The thing is, I might write this here, but when I have a real person in front of me that I can talk to and work with, my conversation looks vastly different.

In this case, I told my Christian brother about a blind man I know. He was a successful businessman up until a few years ago when he was struck blind. He went into a period of despair when that happened until he realized that God could work through him despite his blindness. He now writes a weekly article where he encourages Christians around the world and has participated in street evangelism efforts.

I didn’t add to it any commentary. I didn’t need to. But I could tell by the look in his eyes that his understanding of how God works through our weaknesses was improved. Blindness in this case wasn’t something to be healed of. Blindness was something that yielded a greater spiritual vision. Ultimately, God was glorified by inflicting temporary weakness on his creation because a greater and enduring strength was to be seen by it.