Tag: Pastor

We Believe (#12): Christ’s Church and Her Ordinances

~ fundyreformed ~ 8 Comments

Part 12 in a series of Sunday posts celebrating the glorious Truth we believe as Christians. The readings are quoted from the Elder Affirmation of Faith, of my church, Bethlehem Baptist (Pastor John Piper). I’m doing this because every few weeks our congregational reading is an excerpt from this document, and every time we all read aloud the truths we confess, my soul rejoices. I pray these posts will aid you in worshiping our Lord on His day.

Christ’s Church and Her Ordinances

We believe in the one universal Church, composed of all those, in every time and place, who are chosen in Christ and united to Him through faith by the Spirit in one Body, with Christ Himself as the all-supplying, all-sustaining, all-supreme, and all-authoritative Head. We believe that the ultimate purpose of the Church is to glorify God in the everlasting and ever-increasing gladness of worship.

We believe it is God’s will that the universal Church find expression in local churches in which believers agree together to hear the Word of God proclaimed, to engage in corporate worship, to practice the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, to build each other’s faith through the manifold ministries of love, to hold each other accountable in the obedience of faith through Biblical discipline, and to engage in local and world evangelization. The Church is a body in which each member should find a suitable ministry for His gifts; it is the household of God in which the Spirit dwells; it is the pillar and bulwark of God’s truth in a truth-denying world; and it is a city set on a hill so that men may see the light of its good deeds — especially to the poor — and give glory to the Father in heaven.

We believe that baptism is an ordinance of the Lord by which those who have repented and come to faith express their union with Christ in His death and resurrection, by being immersed in water in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. It is a sign of belonging to the new people of God, the true Israel, and an emblem of burial and cleansing, signifying death to the old life of unbelief, and purification from the pollution of sin.

We believe that the Lord’s Supper is an ordinance of the Lord in which gathered believers eat bread, signifying Christ’s body given for His people, and drink the cup of the Lord, signifying the New Covenant in Christ’s blood. We do this in remembrance of the Lord, and thus proclaim His death until He comes. Those who eat and drink in a worthy manner partake of Christ’s body and blood, not physically, but spiritually, in that, by faith, they are nourished with the benefits He obtained through His death, and thus grow in grace.

We believe that each local church should recognize and affirm the divine calling of spiritually qualified men to give leadership to the church through the role of pastor-elder in the ministry of the Word and prayer. Women are not to fill the role of pastor-elder in the local church, but are encouraged to use their gifts in appropriate roles that edify the body of Christ and spread the gospel.

*Taken from the Bethlehem Baptist Church Elder Affirmation of Faith, paragraphs 12.1 – 12.5. You are free to download the entire affirmation [pdf] complete with Scriptural proofs for the above statements.

Quote to Note 1: Theology and Preaching

~ Bob Hayton ~ 5 Comments

From time to time, I’ll be bringing Quotes to Note. Most often they will be quotes good enough to stand on their own two feet. And hopefully they will indeed be quotes worth noting.

Today’s concerns theology and preaching.

“Theology without proclamation is empty, proclamation without theology is blind.“

— Gerhard Ebeling

After providing this quote in his article “Preaching and Biblical Theology” for The New Dictionary of Biblical Theology (IVP, 2000), P. J. H. Adam elaborates:

So theologians should never be satisfied when their theology serves only the needs of the academy. Any theology, including biblical theology, must serve the Christian ministry of the word. Likewise preachers should not be satisfied when they have communicated only their own insight, the ideas of contemporary sociologists, or even current theories of Christian or church life. Nor should they be content with ritual repetition of a text of Scripture, reference to a token Bible verse, or preaching on a text to which they have not first applied Paul’s instruction to Timothy: “Reflect on what I am saying” (2 Tim. 2:7).

The dangers of the Western academic tradition are its assumptions that knowledge can be discovered only by those who share secular, naturalistic, or contemporary world views, and that knowledge is a satisfactory end in itself. These are damaging assumptions for any Christian academic to adopt, but particularly damaging for the theologian. Many preachers today, even many who know the Bible, do not use it in their preaching, or use it in a trivial way. We should not meet the challenge of postmodernism by abandoning the Bible, but by using it carefully, theologically and effectively. If we abandon theological reflection on the meaning of the text of the Bible, we will indeed be blind guides. ¹

 ¹ Pgs. 105-106, The New Dictionary of Biblical Theology, edited by T. Desmond Alexander, Brian S. Rosner, D. A. Carson, Graeme Goldsworthy & Steve Carter (Inter-Varsity Press: Downers Grove, Illinois, 2003).

 ² P. J. H. Adam is the Vicar of St. Jude’s Carlton, Melbourne, Australia. The quote by Gerhard Ebeling is from his book Theology and Proclamation (London, 1966), pg. 20.

Hyper Fundamentalism and the Family

~ fundyreformed ~ 13 Comments

A few weeks ago I received the following comment on my blog:

I am not sure what your blog was talking about, but I gather that you understand about the strictness of fundamental Baptist churches.
My son is in one, and I am gathering information about this church. It is independent and the pastor controls everything the members do. I only see my son Thanksgiving and Christmas. Probably not at all now, since I will not attend his church. I was saved in that church and immediately left soon after, when I realized what it was about. I am attending another church. If you can help me, I would appreciate it. —A Reader

I wish the predicament that this dear lady finds herself in were uncommon. But, sadly, this is all too common in hyper fundamentalism. I have encountered several examples to a greater or lesser degree myself, personally. And I am sure my readers have their own sad stories to add here.

Long before I ever made a break from fundamentalism, I felt this was wrong. A certain relative of mine treated his wife’s parents very badly—with great disrespect, I believe. Although at the time they were driving a long distance to go to a fundamental Baptist  church they could agree with, he apparently viewed them as not good enough for him to spend any time with them. The decency of visiting and loving the family God gave him was downplayed and evidently separation and loyalty to his own church and movement emphasized. But hey, isn’t Deut. 5:16 still Bible?

My Dad always warned me to be on the lookout for any emphasis to distrust your family or to not go home over the holidays. And indeed among some students, the implication was that if you stayed over the summer, or if you stayed over the Christmas break that you were a more devoted Christian. Or at least that is the impression one could get (especially if they did not come from one of the churches which strongly supported the college).

I can’t say the church and college I went to explicitly taught us to distrust your family or to separate from them. In fact they emphasized that we go home and be a help to our churches. But in the teaching they gave concerning the family, they made it very clear that your family could be very wrongly influenced by your relatives and you needed to be extremely careful. Generally, I would agree, to an extent. But that advice was often taken to an extreme.

People whose children are still faithful Christians, albeit not fundamentalists (or not as much a fundamentalist as the parents would like), practice a firm separation from them. It is unnatural and ungodly. And yes, I have heard first hand of such goings on. And in this lady’s example above, she is facing such separation from her children.

Can’t strict fundamentalists appreciate that God is at work in their families’ lives—even if they aren’t fundamentalists? Can’t they agree on the big things like love for Christ, mutual faith, salvation, the fundamentals, etc., and then agree to disagree on the minor issues which define them as fundamentalists?

Does anyone else see this as a big problem for hyper fundamentalists (IFBx)? Is the problem wider than just this segment of fundamentalism? Does anyone else think that this trait of IFBx is one which seems very similar to a cultish characteristic?

I am interested in your responses. And lastly, does anyone have any hope to offer this reader? I encourage her to look to Christ and trust Him for support and love. She should also get involved in a good church where she can be ministered to. And then, she should try to love her son and family and try to show them she is a dedicated Christian, albeit not a fundamentalist. Any other thoughts?

1 Thessalonians and Churches’ Greatest Need

~ fundyreformed ~ 16 Comments

Clergy over the laity mindset, excessive pastoral authority, a cultural lack of community, an emphasis on individualism, market-driven church ministry philosophies, a modern consumer mindset to Christianity–all of these and more contribute to what I believe is the greatest need in churches today: the “one another” ministry.

What is the “one another” ministry? It is the mutual encouraging and exhorting, indeed even admonishing, which is to be woven throughout the life of a church. It is the pattern we see over and over in the NT (Acts 2:44-47; 4:32; 18:27; Jn. 13:34-35; Rom. 1:12; 12:10, 16; 13:8; 15:1-7, 14; 1 Cor. 12:25; 14:26, 31; 2 Cor. 13:11; Gal. 5:13; 6:1-2, 6; Eph. 4:2-3, 32; 5:19; Phil. 1:27; 2:2; Col. 3:13, 16; 2 Thess. 1:3; Heb. 3:12-14; 10:24-25; James 5:16; 1 Pet. 1:22; 4:8-11; 1 Jn. 1:7; 3:11). The above list is not exhaustive, either!

I believe this is a great need in most churches. Our church has small groups in part to fulfill the instruction to daily exhort one another in Heb. 3:12-14. Yet even in small groups, intentional encouraging and exhortation can be neglected. It is one thing to believe and another to practice that belief. Our small group is in the process of trying to become more intentional in this regard. (By the way, this still must happen in church-wide contexts too. But small groups definitely can help us fulfill this important feature of church life.) In preparing for a small group meeting, I looked at 1 Thessalonians a little further concerning this “one another” ministry, and want to share my findings with you, briefly.

1) This “one another” ministry is a way God’s Word is intended to Work in us.

2:13 And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers.

I believe that God’s Word presently working in the believers, in part, was their living it out through love, encouragement, and exhortation as we will see.

2) This “one another” ministry is needed lest our faith die.

3:5 For this reason, when I could bear it no longer, I sent to learn about your faith, for fear that somehow the tempter had tempted you and our labor would be in vain.

with

Heb. 3:12-14 Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end.

Paul in 3:5 clearly indicates that he feels their faith could have died. This would have made his labor vain. What made him confident this was not the case was their faith and love and mutual love for Paul, which Timothy testified to. Heb. 3:12-14 also indicates that without mutual love, expressed through loving exhortation, our faith might die. This means that this “one another” ministry is vital in helping us persevere.

[Note: I am not claiming that we must produce works to save ourselves. Rather all truly saved people will work good works (Eph. 2:8-10, Titus 2:14), and it is by these works that their faith’s genuineness will be known (Matt. 7:16, James 2:20-26, Rom. 8:13, and especially 1 Jn. 2:19). Since we are admonished that our faith might be in vain (1 Cor. 15:2) and directed to examine ourselves whether we be in the faith (2 Cor. 13:5), and further instructed to make our calling and election sure (2 Pet. 1:10), we must not take our faith for granted. Rather we must with Paul recognize that some have made shipwreck of their faith (1 Tim. 1:19), realize that we ourselves could potentially make shipwreck of our faith (1 Cor. 9:27, Phil. 3:8-14), and so resolve to hold on to faith, and fight that good fight of faith, and thereby take hold of eternal life (1 Tim. 1:19; 3:8; 6:11-12).]

3) We must depend upon God to energize this “one another” ministry in our personal lives.

3:11-13 Now may our God and Father himself, and our Lord Jesus, direct our way to you, and may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, as we do for you, so that he may establish your hearts blameless in holiness before our God and Father, at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.

As I said before, we can believe in this, but when the rubber meets the road it is difficult to practice. Thus we must depend on God to “make” us increase in this “one another” ministry. (See also 1 Thess. 5:23-24, set at the end of a series of what I believe are coorporate exhortations .)

4) We need to always abound in this regard and grow, doing “one another” ministry “more and more”.

4:9-10 Now concerning brotherly love you have no need for anyone to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another, for that indeed is what you are doing to all the brothers throughout Macedonia. But we urge you, brothers, to do this more and more, [See also 3:12; 4:1; and Heb. 10:25b]

We have never “arrived” when it comes to this or any other ministry. We need to be growing and abounding more and more.

5) This “one another” ministry has many facets.

We are to…

a) love each other [3:12 and 4:9-10]
b) encourage one another [4:18 and 5:11]
c) “be at peace” with one another [5:13b]
d) “admonish the idle” [5:14a]
e) “encourage the fainthearted” [5:14b]
f) “help the weak” [5:14c]
g) “be patient with them all” [5:14d]
h) not seek vengeance (not repay wrong for wrong) [5:15a]
i) “seek to do good to one another and to everyone” [5:15b]
j) “rejoice always” (In context, this is a coorporate command) [5:16]
k) “pray without ceasing” (again, while this certainly applies personally, it is a coorporate command) [5:17]
l) “give thanks in all circumstances” [5:18]
m) let the Spirit move (do not quench the Spirit)[5:19]
n) do not despise the preaching and teaching of the word [5:20]
o) test everything (including sermons and teaching from the context), holding only to what is good [5:21]
p) abstain from all forms of evil (church discipline could be in view with the coorporate context, too) [5:22]

6) This “one another” ministry is clearly a duty of every believer, not merely the church leaders, elders, deacons, or pastors.

5:12-14 We ask you, brothers, to respect those who labor among you and are over you in the Lord and admonish you, and to esteem them very highly in love because of their work. Be at peace among yourselves. And we urge you, brothers, admonish the idle,[c] encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all….

From the above verses it is clear that each brother (and the word can refer to men or women) in the church is responsible to follow the commands of vs. 13b (be at peace) and following. Notice that 1 Thess. was addressed to the whole church. If the pastoral staff, elders, and deacons are the only ones needed to minister to us in this encouraging, exhorting, admonishing sense, why is it that most of the NT epistles are addressed to churches (ie the people) rather than just the elders? Phil. 1:1 mentions the saints in Philippi as the primary audience, with the elders and deacons also–not the other way around.

7) This “one another” ministry is indispensable.

4:18 Therefore encourage one another with these words. [See also 5:11]

Notice, Paul’s having written the words to each person in the church was not enough. They were to pick up the book/letter and use its teaching to encourage each other. Just reading the Bible and studying it alone does not cut it. We need the mutual ministry of the Word to be working in us through the mutual encouraging and exhorting, even admonishing, of our fellow believers (along with a weekly sermon from our preacher).