Be energized by the concept that your church could become the most loving church in the world. I find this compelling. There will be many things your church may not be. It may not be the most educated church or the most innovative church, or the most evangelistic church,  but it can be the most loving church. There is nothing to stop that from happening except your lack of determination and/or the will of the people. Love, after all, is the sign of maturity as a church. Now, if you are seeing this, you will find ways to encourage love.

Some time ago I drove to several small towns in rural Arkansas with my 89 year old father and my siblings, tracking the steps of the ministry of both my dad and his father. The experience was memorable. We visited small towns that even Arkansans might not recognize today: Cotter, Caledonia, Hagersville, Greenwood, LaVaca—twelve in all. These were the places where my father, and his father, labored for Christ eighty and ninety years ago.
Much has changed in the landscape of rural America in those eighty plus years. For one thing, most farms have been eaten up by large conglomerates, dramatically reducing population. The size of families has dropped and the area Walmart has made ghost towns of the typical downtown areas. Families long ago moved out of these rural places for the big cities in order to find work, and what young people you may find will almost certainly not stay where there is no action. With these demographic alterations, the country church has been reduced to only a shadow of what it once was.
But this does not mean the country church is not there. There are yellow brick buildings with mud stains around their base that still exist as the gathering place for those few faithful (and often reserved) older citizens and, in several cases, a family or two or even more containing younger people.
The “county seat” town churches are doing better, but even they feel the changes. Some have become regional churches for the surrounding areas. In fact, there are some notable exceptions to the general rule that rural churches are failing. In one Arkansas town that you have likely never heard of, there were 900 attending the largest church on Sunday mornings. The more remote rural churches have yielded their younger families over to these active centers which often carry on vibrant ministries. Regionalization is definitely a trend. We could call it the “Walmartization” of the rural church.
I’ve been there in my own ministry, pastoring in historic Washington, Arkansas as my first assignment. Thirty-five years ago, this town consisted of about 400 occupants, half black and half white. It has now lost much of that population and has turned into a state park (it was the old Civil War capitol of Arkansas). I never knew what quiet was until I pastored in that town. I used a “privy” behind the café and I waited out the lonely nights in a “Jim Walter” home provided by the church. It grew up to about 60 in attendance while I was there, but stayed mostly around 40. The grade school moved to Hope just after I was there, and things went down further. There is not as much going on now as far as church life is concerned, since the town has become a state park site. We said, even at that time, that the church was “just past Hope.” In more recent days, I’ve been back to that town and have reminisced about the good days of early ministry there, learning from kind people.
In addition to that, I’ve preached in so many rural churches that I could not even begin to recount them all. My ministry of 40 years of preaching has landed me in both city and rural churches, some huge, others in towns so sleepy that the grass grows unmolested on the two-lane highway—and deacons wear overalls. Though I’ve loved all of the experiences I’ve been privileged to have, I have to admit that it is often easier to visit than to stay in such a church. And I’ve scratched my head with the pastor wondering how the church could find vitality.
What happens when the young seminarian or college ministerial student takes his first churches in these areas?
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Choosing to sacrifice for others requires constant self-control. He compares it to the training an athlete maintains to remain at the top of his/her game. God’s Spirit here shows us that laying down our rights for the ministry of the Gospel requires a permanent and focused commitment to discipline.

1 Corinthians 8 showed us that love for Christ and His people determines how we use our “rights.” As applied to eating food offered to idols, we learned that even if we no longer fear demons or false gods ourselves, even if we have no conscience issues personally with eating offered food, we must abstain. Why? Eating food offered to idols emboldens weak believers to sin against their conscience, because that food is immediately associated with idol worship to which they recently were enslaved.
If, by exercising our “rights” we encourage our brethren to sin, we actually “sin against Christ” [1] (v.8:13). Our decisions affect others. Love for Christ and love for His people demand that we lay aside our rights for the sake of the Gospel.
In 1 Corinthians 9, Paul illustrates for us that he was not telling the Corinthian believers (and us!) to do something that he was not willing to do himself. He was a true apostle called by Christ (vv.1–2), not a self-proclaimed apostle motivated by selfish ambition such as some at Corinth who strove to discredit him. Paul was real. As proof, he often laid aside his rights, preferences, comfort, and sacrificed much to help unbelievers come to saving faith and for believers to be strengthened. The Corinthians knew this since they had experienced his life and ministry firsthand (v.2).
Paul delineates for us ways that he laid aside his rights for the Gospel. It is his “defense to those who would examine him” (v.3).
His Right to Financial Support
Paul was committed to a self-support model of ministry, particularly in a church plant. He doesn’t explain his reason here. It wasn’t because it was some kind of superior model of ministry or especially strategic. He declined support that people normally expected to give so that unbelievers and new disciples would not be confused about his motives or message. [2] He also did this to avoid being a burden upon the poor and to exemplify hard work where the example was desperately needed. [3] He chose this much more difficult path of self-support in most cases. He did this out of love to remove obstacles in making disciples. Enemies constantly challenged his motives as an apostle.
Paul knew and taught that God-sanctioned gospel workers were worthy of financial support. He knew and taught here that the norm was for gospel laborers to be supported by God’s people (vv.6–18). But he also knew that in his circumstances, it was important to be primarily self-supporting to protect his testimony and message. At great cost to himself, Paul “made no use of any of these rights” (v.15).
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Written by J. Warner Wallace |
Monday, March 4, 2024
The “chain of custody” will help me determine if the evidence was altered over time. In a similar way, there is a New Testament “chain of custody” related to the transmission of the Gospels and letters of Paul. The Gospel of John, for example, can be traced from John to his three personal students (Ignatius, Polycarp and Papias) to their personal student (Irenaeus) to his personal student (Hippolytus). These men in the chain of custody wrote their own letters and documents describing what they had been taught by their predecessors. These letters survive to this day and allow us to evaluate whether or not the New Testament narratives have been changed over the years. The evidence is clear, the foundational claims related to Jesus have not changed at all from the first record to the last.

When I first examined the New Testament Gospels as an atheist, I was completely uninterested in their claims related to the Deity of Jesus. As a philosophical naturalist, I rejected the supernatural claims of these narratives. I was merely interested in mining the wisdom of Jesus as an ancient sage, in much the same way someone might read the words of Aristotle, Buddha or Bahá’u’lláh. But as I read the accounts as a detective, I became intrigued with features reminiscent of eyewitness accounts I’d investigated. Could these ancient narratives be true eyewitness statements, and if so, could I evaluate them as I had evaluated hundreds of witness statements in the past? This became an obsession and it eventually led to my becoming a Christian and writing the book, Cold-Case Christianity.
There are four criteria by which I typically assess eyewitness reliability. The Gospels “pass the test” in these important areas. For this reason, I believe there are four good reasons to accept them as reliable accounts:
They Were Written Early
A significant case can be built to establish the early dating of the Gospels. It starts by establishing the authorship date for the Book of Acts. There are several missing historical events in Acts, including the destruction of the Temple (c. 70AD), the siege of Jerusalem (c. 68-70AD) and the deaths of Paul (64-67AD), Peter (64-67AD) and James (61AD). The absence of these events is reasonable if the Book of Acts was written no later than 60AD. Luke wrote two New Testament books; he wrote his Gospel prior to the Book of Acts. The only question is, how much earlier did he write the Gospel? I think there is good evidence support a dating in the early 50’s based on internal evidence in Paul’s letters. Paul appears to have quoted Luke’s Gospel twice; in 1 Timothy 5:18 (written in 63-64AD) he quoted Luke 10:6-7, and in 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 (written between 53-57AD) he quoted Luke 22:19-20. This means Paul would’ve had access to Luke’s Gospel as early as 53AD. Luke (in the first chapter of the Gospel), told Theophilus: “Therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you…” This term, “orderly” seems to be extraneous, unless Luke was responding to common first century knowledge about a “disorderly” Gospel. Papias, a first century bishop, famously claimed Mark’s Gospel (written based on the preaching of Peter in Rome) was accurate, if not orderly. Luke appears to have referenced this common knowledge in the opening lines of his Gospel, and Luke quoted Mark’s Gospel more than any other source. But this means the information in Mark’s Gospel is even earlier than Luke’s, placing Mark in the late 40’s or early 50’s. These early dates for both Luke and Mark make it highly unlikely they could have been written without vetting from those who were there and saw the truth about Jesus.
They Are Corroborated
My investigative and trial experience taught me one important truth: all corroborative evidence is “touch-point” evidence. It’s tempting to think the only kind of acceptable corroborative evidence would be video showing the entire event in minute detail. Few events (either historical or criminal) are documented this well, however. Instead, eyewitness claims are typically corroborated by limited pieces of evidence verifying only a portion of the larger account.
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