Should We Stop Saying, “The Church Hurt Me”?

I hear the statement quite often. Usually it’s raised in discussions of church membership. People want to know how to help a wounded friend or family member re-engage the church. Or, they’re the ones who have been hurt and they’re wrestling with whether church is worth it. Some want to be convinced to join a church and others want to be told it’s okay to leave. Answering well depends, in part, on knowing which way the person leans.

But recently I’ve been thinking that part of the answer must include questioning the way the problem is phrased. What does the person mean when they say, “The church hurt me”? Let’s walk the possibilities backward from the most sweeping accusation to the most narrow.

The Universal Church

The person could mean the big-C Church has hurt them–all Christians everywhere. That sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? But think about it. When a person says “The church has hurt me” and they’re refusing to visit or join any local congregation of believers they have practically projected their hurt onto the entire universal body of Christ! They have assigned their offense to every possible Christian and Christian congregation imaginable. Practically, their distrust has reached universal proportions. In every case this is false. We might provide some of our best care by helping our friends recognize the practical universalism in some of their reactions. Hopefully we can get them to dial it down to the next possible  level.   Continue at Thabiti Anyabwile

The Local Church is THE place for Biblical Counseling

Can local churches become a natural home for counseling ministry? Often the limitations or failures of the church get cited first, making it seem that church is at best an adjunct to “the real work of counseling.” But, in principle, the local church is the natural home for face-to-face ministry. Counseling can and should thrive in local churches. Here are five of the numerous advantages to counseling being localized in the church.

First, a wise pastor (or friend, elder, small group leader, mentor, etc.) has many advantages over the secular paradigm of the office-bound counselor. In your own church you know people. You have seen them in action. Perhaps you know their parents and friends. You see how they treat their kids. You know how they handle themselves in a group. You have “back-story,” and aren’t limited to hearing only one side of the story. You know what kind of Christian nurture they are receiving week to week—and counseling can build on that. In addition to a wider knowledge base, you relate at multiple levels. You can invite people to your home, and invite yourself into their home. You can initiate the relationship, and express your concern. In contrast, office-bound counseling is structurally passive, always only on the receiving end of inquiry or referral. There is an active, outreaching quality to counseling ministry when we conceptualize it in the church.   Continue at David Powlison

Vertical Church

Harvest Bible Fellowship is a network of churches on the move. It seems as if every week brings a report of a new church plant somewhere in the world. From what I have observed locally, these are solid churches whose pastors love God’s Word and where people are being transformed by the gospel. James MacDonald is the founder of this movement and he refers to them as “vertical” churches. What MacDonald wants is for every local church to be a place where people have “a weekly experience with the manifest glory of God.” The local church is to be the one place where people experience what they can experience nowhere else.

Vertical Church is part manifesto and part instructional guide and is one of those unusual and unfortunate books that combines genuine strengths with disappointing weaknesses. The first half of the book is strong and provides a biblical basis for a vertical model of the local church; the second half is far weaker in explaining how to create one.

The Strengths of Vertical Church

 

Vertical Church has many notable strengths. The discussion of verticality is very helpful and provoked the pastor in me to think carefully about the worship services at my church and the role of church leaders in providing an experience of God’s glory and majesty. Our role is not simply to check off a list of boxes—singing, Bible-reading, preaching, prayer—but to lead people in an encounter with the living God. MacDonald’s desire to glorify God in every facet of the church’s life is laudable and challenging. He shares a great deal of wisdom earned through many years of ministry while critiquing both the church growth movement and those traditional churches that don’t care to grow at all.  Continue at Tim Challies

40 Reasons to be Part of a Local Church

Is it possible to live a faithful Christian life without being a faithful part of a local church? I’ve heard many people make the argument that it is indeed possible—especially if there are no good churches around. I disagree.

At the bare minimum, there are forty different commands in the New Testament to live life in some sense with other believers. While certainly it is possible to do some of these with Christians in general, the weight of this list should convince you of the necessity of having on going relationships with other believers.

And those relationships are only strengthened by the fellowship of the local church. In fact, I submit that some of this list is simply impossible to obey if you do not have the kind of ongoing  and ever increasing fellowship with other believers that only comes through ministry in a local church:   Continue at  Jesse Johnson

Jesus' Church Is Here to Stay

The famously influential Nicene Creed contains a line that modern Christians sometimes misunderstand:  "I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church." The word "catholic" can be a source of confusion for those who think it is referring to the Roman Catholic Church, but the word simply means "universal." This leads us, then, to consider the important theological concept of the "universal church."

The term commonly used for the church in the New Testament is the Greek word ekklesia. Jesus is the first to use the word ekklesia in the New Testament (Matt. 16:18), but it is used in various ways with various meanings. As theologian Louis Berkhof explains, ekklesia can have the following meanings:

• A specific local group of Christians or a local church (Acts 11:26; 1 Cor. 11:18; Gal. 1:2).
• A house church (Rom. 16:23; 1 Cor. 16:19; Col 4:15).
• A group of churches in a region (Acts 9:31).
• All those throughout the world who profess to be Christians and organize for worship (1 Cor. 10:32; 11:22; 12:28).
• All those throughout history who have been or will be united to Christ as their savior (Eph. 1:22; 3:10, 21; 5:23-25, 27, 32; Col. 1:18, 24).

The last two definitions are explained by John Calvin in his treatment of the visible and invisible church. The "visible church" describes Christianity that can be measured and counted externally:

The whole body . . . scattered throughout the world, who profess to worship one God and Christ, who by baptism are initiated into the faith; by partaking of the Lord's Supper profess unity in true doctrine and charity, agree in holding the word of the Lord, and observe the ministry which Christ has appointed for the preaching of it.   Continue at Justin Holcomb

Entitlement and the Local Church

In an previous post, I wrote about the problems with leaders who have a sense of entitlement. Those leaders become self-serving, selfish, and ineffective. But entitlement is not a problem with the leader alone. To the contrary, the dreaded disease is infecting all levels of society in many areas of our nation and the world.

In a very general sense, entitlement typically means that someone is due certain economic or similar benefits. The term is also used to refer to massive federal and state programs that guarantee citizens income or benefits.

Entitlement and the Federal Government

The federal government, as the most obvious example, has 235 entitlement programs that cost the taxpayers over one trillion dollars every year. Those programs present the most serious challenges to the economic future of the United States. The three biggest entitlement programs are Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. In the most recent annual reports of Social Security and Medicare, the respective trustees of the trust funds said the funds are on an unsustainable path. Their very solvency is in jeopardy.

When Entitlement Becomes Epidemic

Entitlement, however, is not confined to certain leaders or government aid recipients. It is epidemic and widespread at multiple levels of family and society.

Have you ever supported someone in need? Perhaps you have been on the receiving end of a generous gift. Many people will be ever grateful, having expected nothing then or in the future. But some people will be grateful for a moment. The gratitude turns to resentment when more gifts are not forthcoming. They have a sense of entitlement.

Have you ever known an employee with a decent salary and benefits to complain because he’s not receiving more? He feels entitled.

Entitlement creeps into our marriages. We expect our spouses to serve us in a particular way because they’ve done so in the past, or because our parents treated us that way.

When the French government reduced the standard workweek from 39 hours to 35 hours in 2000, many leaders and workers lauded the move. They saw the change as a twofold victory. First, they conjectured, the reduction in a workweek would cause businesses to hire more workers to maintain production. Thus, unemployment would be reduced. Second, the move would improve the quality of life of the workers. The French unemployment rate in late 2000 was 8.8 percent. Today the rate is 10.0 percent.  Continue at Thom Rainer

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Five Reasons to be a Member of a Local Church

As a pastor and a lifelong church man, I’m concerned about the increasing tendency among young evangelicals to dismiss church attendance as irrelevant to spiritual growth. Today, my friend, Dave Jenkins shares five biblical reasons for being a member of a local bible-believing church. Dave is as pastoral intern and blogger and the director of  Servants of Grace Ministries.

The belief that professing Christians should gather together as members of a local Church in is waning many sectors of Christianity today. Some feel that faith shouldn’t be “institutionalized” and should be a private matter between individuals, not something to be experienced in community.

Here are five reasons why I feel Christians should be members of a local church. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but these reasons give Christians a biblical framework to think through why they should be members of a local Church.

First, The Bible clearly teaches that God made a distinction between His people and the world (Lev 13:46; Number 5:3; Deut. 7:3).  Christ says that entering the Kingdom of God means being bound to the Church “on earth” (Matthew 16:16-19; 18:17-19). The New Testament refers to some people being inside the church and some people being outside the church. (1 Cor. 5:12-13). The church in Corinth consisted of a definite number of believers, such that Paul could speak of a punishment inflicted by the majority (2 Cor. 2:6). Not only does the New Testament speak of the reality of church membership, but its dozens of “one another” passages are written to local churches. The “one another” passages in the New Testament fill out our understanding of what church members should look like practically. Biblical church membership is important, because the church presents God’s witness to Himself in the world, and displays His glory. In the church’s membership, then non-Christians should see in the lives of God’s changed people that God is holy and gracious and that His gospel is powerful for saving and transforming sinners.  Continue at Daniel Darling

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Satan's Great Desire

I have been engaged in a study of the second half of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, and, not surprisingly, the themes from that letter have been resonating in my mind over the past few weeks. I have been struck by Paul’s emphasis on the importance of love and unity in the local church. On the one hand it’s kind of obvious—we need to love the Christians around us—but on the other hand, the personal implications are profound. I’ve always known that God calls me to love the people I covenant with in my local church, but until now I haven’t been quite so aware of the danger of falling out of love.

Paul did not seem to have any particular concern with the unity of this church in Ephesus. As far as we can tell he wasn’t writing because the church was splintering apart or because he had heard rumors of their disunity. But perhaps this was even more reason for him to address the issue. Paul knew that Satan is the great enemy of God and his people, and one of his enduring tactics to disrupt the church and to hinder our witness to the world is to bring about disunity. How does he do this? He does it by first eroding the love between brothers and sisters in Christ.

Wherever there is disunity there will first be the absence of love and the presence of pride. Satan’s great desire for your church and for mine is to fracture the people in those churches into camps, into groups built along lines that have no business dividing us. We may know this in the abstract, but we need to make it personal. Here is what we need to see: God wants me and commands me to love the other people in my church; Satan wants me to hate them. God wants me to feel a great deal of unity with those people; Satan wants there to be an issue between us—something, anything, to drive us apart. Continue at Tim Challies

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A Biblical View of the Church

“It is very much in vogue for a consultant to ask church leaders, ‘What do you want your church to be? Figure out your needs and desires, tell me where you want to go, and I will help you craft a philosophy that will take you there.’ Such people are asking the wrong question! The right questions is, in Scripture, what does God say the church is? Based on that, we need to ask, where should it go and how should it behave? Then we must ask, what does scripture define as a need and how should it be met?” 

“I believe most evangelicals would have no argument with  looking first to scripture. But we cannot safely assume that this task is ever seriously undertaken. Most churches venture no further than their prepackaged and often predigested denominational doctrinal statement. The crafting of a philosophy of ministry based on scripture is very rare. Doing that kind of theology takes time, effort, and a serious commitment.” (pp. 60-61, “High commitment in a low commitment world, Bill Hull)

I. The term “Church”

The earliest New Testament reference to the Church is found in Matthew 16:18. In this verse, Jesus promised, “I will build my Church.” The New Testament records how Jesus did this through the leadership of the apostles and those appointed by them.  Continue at Thinkpoint


See Also: Overview of leadership in the local Church

A Vision for Worship in the Local Church

The Headship of Christ

Addressing the Damaging Effects of Professionalism in the Local Church

How to Build Relationally in the Local Church

HT: Competent Counseling

Quiz: Is Your Church Vertical?

"Pastoring Men" Offers Practical Help for Men’s Ministry in Local Church

There is a problem of spiritually AWOL or theologically shallow men in local churches and author Patrick Morley wants to see it remedied. In his new book Pastoring Men: What Works, What Doesn't, and Why It Matter Now More Than Ever (Moody), Morley seeks to arm pastors with a practical strategy for strengthening the spiritual lives of men under their care. Morley is a businessman who has written 15 books including The Man in the Mirror and No Man Left Behind. CBMW