North and South

I have been watching a series, actually several series of documentaries on the American Revolution and the Civil War. They are more closely connected than I imagined as the issue of the Civil War was in effect something that the founders of our nation chose to ignore for the sake of an early union. Slavery was a volatile hot button even before the War for Independence but men who knew it was wrong chose not to stand. It could be said that their lack of action was the cause of the six hundred twenty five thousand men, women and children who died eighty seven years later.

Today I heard the words of a confederate soldier who wrote that he had heard a sermon and the preacher had lied. The preacher said that God had fought all their battles and had led them in victory. The soldier wrote, "If God is fighting these battles why hadn't they promoted Him to general?" Wow, there is some insight! We are so quick to use His name but so slow to let Him be General. 

That got me to thinking about the Baptist preachers both North and South. How could they have justified their differences? It occurred to me that they were trapped in their cultures. A Baptist preacher in the south would have fairly been committing suicide to have preached against slavery during the Civil War. But they had already divided from the Baptists in the North back in 1845 when the Northern Baptists refused to endorse missionaries who owned slaves. The fact was that all the way back to the Revolution a Baptist in the South had to support slavery if he wanted to be effective in the South. The culture of his region of ministry impacted his preaching and practice, even his practical interpretation of the Bible, if not his theology.

I doubt that it is possible for us to divorce our culture from our interpretation of the Bible but we had better be aware of the problem and resist it with all our being.

The Missions Church

I got started as an independent Baptist in a missions church. The first Sunday I attended church, shortly after I became a believer, was the second Sunday of the church's existence. Cornerstone Baptist Church, all approximately ten people in it, was a missions church sent out of Bible Baptist Church in Selah, WA. I quickly learned that independent Baptists practice this principle of "churches make churches." In other words, the authority to begin a new church is not in a man, but in the local church. To preserve the integrity of doctrine, a church authorizes a man to

• Plant a church
• Evangelize a community and
• Baptize those who are converted
   

I also learned that most young preachers want to free their fledgling missions church from her sending authority as quickly as possible. I used to think that was because we were aggressive servants of the Lord. I have come to believe it is more because our sin nature does not like authority over us. Any authority; even the authority of a sending church. We view it as a sort of necessary evil. We would condemn a man for planting a church without this sending church, exclaiming his "church" as no real church at all. But we will shed our own selves from the shackles of this mother church at the first possible moment.

I propose that this needs to be addressed and changed. Some ministries would be better off as missions ministries, possibly indefinitely. Depending upon circumstances, it could be that they should be missions ministries permanently.

Consider what would qualify a church as indigenous:
Some would say it is the ability to support their own pastor.
I have seen this qualification cited a number of times but often neglected by men who will organize as independent living off of mission support from dozens of churches.

Some would say it is having a pastor and deacons.
But pastors sometimes move. Sometimes they move after only a brief time. Deacons, the biblical mandate for deacons only happens when church is of sufficient size that the pastor can care for the daily ministry by himself. Deacons are never seen in the Bible as leaders but as servants. The very fact that someone suggests a church isn't well organized until they have deacons suggests they have an unbiblical view of the office.

I have personally suggested that a church is not ready to be organized until it has ten faithful and tithing families.

I took the idea from the Jewish practice for their synagogues. However I have also seen this practice manipulated by getting friends and family to move to the town in order to get the ten and get out from under the sending church. (Frequently they still want money from the sending church, just no subjection to it.)

I want to suggest a different tact, I want to suggest that,

A church is ready to be indigenous when it is capable of keeping the course over generations.

• When the church has members who are longstanding citizens of the area in which the church is planted and who are convinced and committed to the doctrine and practice the church planter was sent to propagate,
• When there is a plan in place and agreed upon by members of that church to keep the church on course at the untimely demise of the current pastor (whether by death, departure or depravity),
• When those who are spokesmen in the church when the pastor isn't looking are as committed to the doctrines and practice of the sending church as the church planter claims to be

then the sending church may well consider organizing the missions church as an indigenous work.

By the way I would also propose that organization should always be upon the suggestion of the sending church and not the church planter.

The sin nature of the church planter will always be to get free of authority and that should never be the motive of independence.

This plan could only work with a shift in the current practice of using a sending church as a formality rather than a functioning relationship. The sending church ought not to be a preacher's friend from Bible College days or some big and well known church in the fellowship, but a vital part of the church planter's spiritual life, the best case scenario would be the church where he was saved and baptized and brought up in the faith.

I know there are problems with this plan too; many of them the result of pastors of potential sending churches not being stable enough themselves to stay in one place and be mentors to younger men in the faith. However we would be stepping in the right direction if we began addressing these subjects with both the young would be church planter and the more mature potential sending church pastor.

Are We Asking for the Wrong Thing?

As long as I have been a Christian the churches I have attended have held revival meetings. The evangelists have all prayed for God to send heaven sent revival and the pastors have longed for that type of revival in their churches. I confess to having spent years

• Praying for that sort of revival
• Reading about many of the great revivals of the past and
• Preaching to the church I pastored about revival

I still hear many pastors looking for a revival like those of old days, I think often motivated by the desire to have a large church congregation. (I wonder if the men who pastor large churches feel as compelled for revival as those who pastor struggling churches?)

But as the years have moved on and I have studied the Bible and church history  more, I have noticed:
That those revivals of the past were drastically not Baptist.

The Baptists of that era even opposed them. For the longest time I assumed it was because there was something wrong with those Baptists. But that couldn't have been completely true because, although the Baptist's would not take part in the revival meetings themselves, their own churches grew as a result of those who were genuinely converted searching Scriptures and ending up in Baptist churches because they were the ones preaching the Bible. I am beginning to believe, there was more wrong with the revivalists than the Baptists and perhaps the reason modern Baptist pastors now so quickly side with the revivalists is because we are hungry for the large crowds we envision accompany revival.

That revival is not the norm of the Bible but the exception
God did grant "a little reviving" here and there through Israel's history. But with the exception of the book of Acts the New Testament is devoid of revival type language; and you have to make some assumptions to call Acts a revival era. It is more of a beginning than a reviving.

This all leads me to question whether we are asking God for the wrong thing. Maybe we dream of something that has never been the priority of God. Maybe that statement I have so often heard that “God is more interested in revival than we are” is not, in fact, true. I am coming to believe that the work that brings glory to the Lord is that

• Long term
• Consistent
• Stick by the stuff
• Day in and day out

growth in Christian graces as we look for the blessed hope kind of Christianity. Any other seems to tend toward compromise or the work of the flesh in order to get large groups.

Maybe we should stop asking for revival so that our church can grow bigger and start asking for a Christians to grow in faith and doctrine. Can any seriously deny that the average Christian in America is a hobby Christian at best? What we really need are some pastors who will roll up there sleeves and dig in to the hard work of building believers in the most holy faith instead of building their churches. 

Clearing Up Some Confusion

I've had two conversations this morning.

• Both had to do with sin of the most unspeakable sort
• Both involved a professing Christian as the offender
• Both parties asked how they should respond to such sin

In the one conversation my inquirer had been the one to lead the offender to a profession of faith. He said to me that he was confused; how could he be a saved person and still commit such atrocious sins?

• Is the offender a saved man?
• Had he really gotten saved?
• Did my inquirer make some sort of mistake in how he went about leading him to Christ?

My answer was this:

First, there are, in the Bible, such things as false professors of faith and such things as Christians who are sinners.

Second, we can never know the heart of a man, whether his is saved or not.

A false professor, we are told, will go back to his wallow. A Christian who lives in habitual sin will either:

• Come under conviction or turn from the sin
• Be chastened of the Lord until he repents of the sin or else
• Be removed from this life that he may not sin again

Because we do not know the heart of men, we can never know which a person is. Some who appear to have gone back to the wallow may come under conviction and return by and by. Some who we think are the hardest of hearts may be struggling with their sin more than we could imagine.

Third, we make a mistake when we focus too much on the results or the fruit of Christian living.

Ours is to remain faithful to the truth regardless of the absence or appearance of fruit. If we focus on people,

• Whether they are faithful to the Lord or not,
• Whether they are seeing glorious amounts to reward for their service
• Whether they have somehow become something different than what we thought

we will always be disappointed. Men are unknowable to us. We will always only guess about what is or isn’t true in their hearts. But if we focus on the Lord, the truth of His Word, the purpose He has given us, we can never be disappointed. He only is our Rock. He alone is constant and unmovable.