Before You Pack Up and Leave…
The fact is that in a consumeristic culture like this one—a culture in which the customer is always right—too many people leave too many churches too easily. It’s unlikely that any of us is above the temptation to depart for poor reasons and to leave behind us a trail of hurt and confusion. So before you make that decision, pray for the people of the church and diligently serve them. Ask God for wisdom and ask others for guidance. And then, only then, leave with confidence that your departure is God’s will.
Every one of us has become familiar with the pattern. Every one of us has seen church members becoming dissatisfied and then disgruntled, missing church occasionally and then consistently. Every one of us has seen the pattern and begun to dread the nearly-inevitable conclusion. This is especially discouraging when the reason for the departure is not an area of essential theological disagreement but something much more common and much less important—hurt feelings, petty squabbles, matters of preference.
This pattern is so common that we should all assume we ourselves may at some time fall into it. This being the case, what should you do when you begin feeling discontent at your church? What should you do when you feel that yearning to pick up and move on? What should you do when you find yourself eager to slip out of one church and into another? I’d like to offer just a few suggestions that I hope you’ll consider and put into practice.
Pray through the directory. Find yourself a copy of the church directory and commit to praying through the entire thing at least once. Pray for each person or each family by name. Pray what the Bible models and pray what the Spirit prompts. Prayer is one of our core responsibilities toward one another and has a way of stirring up our affections. As you pray for those people may it remind you that you’re not just walking away from a club or institution, but from a community—a family, even.
Commit to serving. The temptation when disgruntled is always to stop serving—to remove yourself from whatever ministries you’ve been involved with. Before you leave, recommit to serving others for a period of time—several months at least. Love tends to grow cold when we stop loving others and it tends to be rekindled when we start loving again. Plus, it’s as we serve that the Lord reminds us that he has gifted us specifically so we can use his gifts to bless our fellow Christians.
Related Posts:
You Might also like
-
Look at the PCA Book (of Church Order)
I challenge you to consider the BCO in light of what the Bible says about the church. Read it carefully and deliberately. If you disagree with a statement made in its pages, ask why, and investigate further. Ask your pastor and elders about it. Order pleases the Lord, and he desires for his people to be built up and edified, by all the teachings of the Bible about the church. The BCO helps the local church accomplish this vital task.
Like many in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) who come from baptistic backgrounds, I found my church’s inquirers’ class to be a welcome & intriguing experience. Most Baptist churches in the United States can fall anywhere along a wide spectrum of educational practices and confessional commitments, so it was a refreshing drink of mature biblical doctrine to walk week-by-week through the Westminster Confession. My wife and I came to our church already presbycurious, but emerged from the inquirers’ class as full-fledged Westminsterians. We couldn’t get enough of the glorious teaching contained within our Standards. We craved more.
As I spoke with my pastor and elders throughout this class, I came to learn there was more.
You see, Presbyterians love books. They love order even more. They even have a whole book devoted to the establishing & keeping of order in the church. Reading the PCA’s Book of Church Order (BCO) has helped me to learn about my denomination and to love it even more. Laity in our church would find much benefit from the troves of wisdom in its pages. Many a pastor labors in its pages, and perhaps even many elders & deacons, but I believe it can be of great use to the everyday believer in forming their thoughts about the church in its operation.
Giving Shape to the Church
Oftentimes as we read popular works of theology, we gain many insights into what Scripture teaches about God, the Christian, salvation, repentance, and living out life as Christ’s redeemed. The doctrine of the Church, however, can sometimes be unfortunately neglected or even wholly ignored. The BCO provides the reader with the standards by which a Presbyterian church is constituted and maintained. It outlines the scriptural doctrine of church government and defines both the visible church and the powers of that church. It details a governing structure for the local church, its initial organization, its officers, and the rights and duties of its members. The courts of the session, the presbytery, and the general assembly are all defined, as well as the relation of elders to the courts.
For laypersons, the Form of Government (Part 1) of the BCO teaches us about the church, properly governed. We are taught that the visible church’s government reaches its perfection in the presbytery, but that the absence of presbytery doesn’t deny the existence of the church. This comforts many of us who have loved ones and relations outside of Presbyterian churches. This also teaches us what to expect of and for our pastor, how to relate to him in his ministry, and how a church can call a pastor if it does not have one. For any who have spent time in the Wild West of nondenominational churches, such guidance is like water from a spring. No church and no church order is perfect in its execution, but the procedures that the BCO lay out for a church to live by provide a firm foundation of unity & practice for a covenant body of believers.
Spare the Rod and Spoil the Church
Church discipline is a dirty word in many circles of the evangelical world, and not without good reason. Some Christians may have felt the overzealous hand of a church or officers who thought that excessive discipline was the best way to separate the chaff from the wheat. Others may have been exposed to church environments where practical discipline was entirely absent and unrepentant flagrant sin abounded in the body of believers. Neither of these are healthy, nor are they faithful biblical expressions of Christ’s command to care for His sheep. For these tender matters, the BCO is singularly useful as well. In its second part, The Rules of Discipline, standards are laid down for the church to know what church discipline is and how it is to be exercised. BCO 27-3 guides us to the Bible’s described ends for church discipline: the glory of God, the purity of His church, and the keeping and reclaiming of disobedient sinners. Discipline has godliness for its principal end in the life of a Christian; not the stoking of egos, but the salvation of sinners.
Read More
Where to find the BCO?1. The PCA website2. The Apple App Store3. Consult with your elders about one of those legendary blue binders.
Related Posts: -
Putting the Mess in Christmess
Gerry Bowler observed in his book Christmas in the Crosshairs, that while the birth of Jesus has always been important to the gospel, the first generations of Christians “lived in profound expectation of [Jesus’] imminent return.” He suggested that, among other things, when those eschatological hopes weren’t immediately fulfilled, the birth of Jesus began to get more attention. When Constantine issued the Edict of Milan making Christianity a legal religion, the annual celebration of festivals and holy days soon followed.
The history surrounding Christmas has been anything but peace on earth and goodwill toward men. While contemporary religious and cultural traditions may evoke a certain nostalgia for its celebration, its history is actually a mess! One big mess—with feverish disagreements, hostility, and even rioting. In Christmas in America, Penne Restad wrote: “Christians [have] wrestled for centuries with questions of if, when, and how to celebrate Jesus’ birth.”
Stop the sleigh! Christians have wrestled with if Christmas should be celebrated? To some that might be a bigger surprise than the presents under the tree. After all, according to Gallup polling, ninety-three percent of people across all demographics celebrate Christmas in the United States, and of those who are fairly religious that number rises to ninety-six percent. In a society that’s deeply divided on any and every issue, Christmas is a near-universal observance. But it wasn’t always so. Paul VM Flesher said: “The notion that Christians of any stripe should not want to celebrate Christmas is so foreign to our present concept of the holiday that we need to review some history to understand it.”
The incarnation—the act of the eternal and only begotten Son becoming man—is foundational to the Christian faith. As John Chyrsostom preached: “Truly wondrous is the whole chronicle of the Nativity.” For some, the yearly commemoration of that event is one of the most important days of the year. Yet Jesus never indicated that this redemptive act was to be annually celebrated, and its yearly observance didn’t enter into the way the Apostles ordered the worship and life of the church. Early Christian scholar Origen (d. 253) asserted that celebrating birthdays was foreign to Christianity, saying: “It has not come from the thought of any of the saints; not one from all the saints is found to have celebrated a festive day or a great feast on the day of his birth” (Homilies on Leviticus 8).
Gerry Bowler observed in his book Christmas in the Crosshairs, that while the birth of Jesus has always been important to the gospel, the first generations of Christians “lived in profound expectation of [Jesus’] imminent return.” He suggested that, among other things, when those eschatological hopes weren’t immediately fulfilled, the birth of Jesus began to get more attention. When Constantine issued the Edict of Milan making Christianity a legal religion, the annual celebration of festivals and holy days soon followed.
Emperor Constantine commissioned that the Church of the Nativity be built in Bethlehem over the cave where it was believed Mary had given birth to Jesus. Historians debate the role of Constantine in the precise development of Christmas, but it has been suggested that he had a personal interest in the festival of the nativity. Nevertheless, it was in the 4th-century when the Roman Church began celebrating December 25th as the birthdate of Jesus. In the spirit of celebration Maximus of Turin (d. 465) said: “Brothers and sisters, our hearts still echo with the joy of the Lord’s birth, and our continuing gladness creates in us a sense of heavenly festivity. For, though the joyous day itself has passed, the sanctification that joy brought is still with us” (Sermo 6).
As that spirit grew around this man-created holy day, so too did traditions, superstitions, and syncretism. Leading to centuries of trouble was the struggle to keep the celebration set apart from worldly activities. For example, warning of the dangers of celebrating the feast in a worldly way, Augustine (d. 430) preached: “For our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who became Man for our sake, paid a price for us. He gave Himself as a price and He did so for the purpose, namely, to redeem and separate you from the pagans. But if you wish to intermingle with the pagans, you do not wish to follow Him who redeemed you” (Sermon 198 on New Years Day). He went on to say: “Therefore, in order to follow your Redeemer, who bought you back with His own blood, do not mix with the pagans by aping their customs and deeds.”
Again, Bowler wrote: “Time after time, century after century, clergy would warn against unseemly folk rituals being practiced by Catholic believers; Christmastide was not the only battlefield but was a particularly contested one.” It seems, however, it was a losing battle. At first, Christians and the church adopted rituals they deemed harmless, but soon even practices once condemned (like gift giving and feasting) became high points of celebration. By the sixteenth century Christmas celebration was well established.
Then the Reformation happened. Often, when we think of the Reformation we think of reclaiming the biblical gospel especially as its related to the doctrine of justification by faith alone. But the Protestant Reformation was also about worship. In his The Necessity of Reforming the Church, John Calvin wrote: “The whole substance of Christianity [is] a knowledge, first, of the mode in which God is duly worshipped; and, secondly of the source from which salvation is to be obtained.” As Sinclair Ferguson concluded: “[The Reformers] well understood that the rediscovery of the gospel and the reformation of worship were two sides of the same coin.”
Following the Protestant Reformation certain branches within Protestantism retained the celebration of Christmas. For example, the Augsburg Confession of the Lutheran churches states: “Of Usages in the Church they teach that those ought to be observed which may be observed without sin, and which are profitable unto tranquility and good order in the Church, as particular holy days, festivals, and the like” (Article 15.1).
Even some of those Protestants who followed a Reformed doctrine of worship gave place to its observance as helpful to piety although not given by God. The Church Order of Dort (1619) prescribed: “The congregations shall observe, in addition to Sunday, also Christmas, Easter and Pentecost”—and they threw in the circumcision of Jesus for good measure (Article 67). Francis Turretin (d. 1687), a Reformed scholastic, said “anniversary days” for the nativity, passion, or ascension should, according to the orthodox, “be left to the liberty of the church.” He argued this even while recognizing the festivals “were kept neither from the institution of Christ nor of the apostles.”
Read More
Related Posts: -
When Repentance Hurts: The Grief of Losing What We Love
Grief is a loaded word. It is something we all feel but rarely acknowledge. Sometimes we try to dictate what we should be allowed to grieve, like when a terminal diagnosis is given or a loved one dies.
But what about the grief we experience when we give up the things we love in order to turn to Christ in obedience? In other words, we experience the deep pain of loss of the things we love when we turn away from our sin in repentance. We experience grief even though we pursue holiness and obedience. This type of grief isn’t named very much in our Christian circles.
Maybe you’re grieving a gut-wrenching heartbreak as you walk away from an unholy relationship, or the pain of singleness as you refuse to run to other lovers, or technology to fill the void of your aloneness. Or the dream job you walked away from because traveling constantly threatened to jeopardize your marriage. Or the reality that, despite your best efforts, social media continues to be an unsafe place that breeds discontentment and jealousy for you.
It hurts to turn away from comforts and pleasures that have replaced Christ. It is godly, and it is absolutely what we are called to do, but it hurts to let go of our desires. Our flesh dies a slow death, and, in the process, we suffer. I mean, is death ever comfortable?
2 Corinthians 7:10 says, “For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.” Godly grief is characterized by repentance that causes us to turn back from selfish pursuits and live for God. Worldly grief leads to remorse brought about by what we lose from a worldly point of view.
Grief in the repentance process leads us either toward Jesus or away from him.
Worldly grief that leads away from Jesus threatens to bring us right back to the destructive things we are trying to walk away from. The pain leads us away from Jesus as we give way to the temptation to focus on what we have been called to forsake, give up, and run away from (1 Corinthians 6:18–20 and 10:13–14, 2 Timothy 2:2).
His comfort and compassion for us are real as we work out our salvation (Philippians 2:12), putting to death what he died for on the cross. However, God never encourages us to focus on what we are giving up or letting go of; he knows this only exacerbates the spiritual pain associated with sin (Colossians 3:1–3).
In Matthew 19, we read about a rich young man who asks Jesus what he must do to have eternal life. After Jesus answers him, the man feels like he has kept all of the commands, yet wonders what he still lacks. Jesus tells him to go and sell all he owns and give it to the poor, and then he will have treasure in heaven. His response? “When the young man heard this he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions” (Matthew 19:22). It appears that the cost was too much for him, and this man went away from Jesus because he couldn’t let go of his stuff.
Grief also has the ability to lead us towards Jesus, the one who bore all our afflictions, sorrows, grief, and pain, including spiritual sickness and pain, on the cross. Isaiah 53, commonly known as the Suffering Servant chapter, talks of our Savior as one who suffered and was pierced, crushed, afflicted. As he bore the judgement of our sins, Jesus’ physical agony in the Crucifixion was gruesome and intense, but his obedience to the Father is what counted.