I must repeat, and insist that God has given us the precept of “Church,” and we are not at liberty to set what God has given us aside to do some other thing we want to do. If we examine the New Testament, we see what a church is, and we see it functioning quite well. (“Well” in the sense that the NT church does what God wants it to do. We have no right to insert our desires and purposes into what is God’s work.) A typical church in the New Testament has various service elements which we would do well to understand and imitate. As this series goes on, we will come back to these service elements and re-examine them and meditate on them. For now, we start by defining the Service Elements briefly.
Click on tag: Church-Definition to see the entire series.
Contents
Sunday Meeting
The New Testament believers (under God’s direction) moved the day of worshiping God from Saturday to Sunday, the first day of the week. This was a distinction that separated them from Old Testament Jews. People who claim to be Christians and return to Saturday worship strike Christ’s resurrection in the face. They are saying it is not important to them. Some Jehovah’s Witness groups and all Seventh Day Adventist groups do this. We meet on the day the Lord rose from the grave, in celebration of his resurrection. There is no other more important element in Christianity that the resurrection. It is what appeases the wrath of God against us.
A Leader: (Pastor or Elder)
Brethren churches deny that the church should have any specific leader. Presbyterian churches likewise teach that a biblical church has a board of elders, that are all equal, and they lead the church by making decisions on an equality basis. The problem with both of these concepts is that they undermine the clear leadership roles of God’s servants in both the Old Testament and New Testament. The complaint that “God’s people should never be lead by any one human, only Christ” rings so nicely when they use this to beat other groups that have leaders. But in practicality, their thinking just doesn’t work.
If in the Brethren concept of things, every male in the church is equal, and some have 50 years in the faith, and many of those years teaching and preaching the Word of God, then how can a man supposedly that gets saved come in and give an equal voice in the affairs of the church? In reality, they do not let “outsiders” take over or have an equal voice. They theory is one thing, but their practice is another. That is because they realize how foolish it is to give the power to make decisions and speak to the group to people who are new Christians, and maybe not even really saved.
On the Presbyterian side of things, all elders are not equal in reality. One usually is paid by the church to do “pastoral duties” (essentially he is the pastor). The rest are not paid in general (maybe only an assistant pastor or two).
But somebody is in charge of the church and its affairs before the throne of glory. The key point here is that there is a charge, and that charge is from God to “the church”. Some one person is responsible before God and man that the divine charge is being carried out the way God wants it to be done.
Here I see two or more important service elements. The first important service element is that this person “in charge” directs the church. There is a fine line many times between being a dictator and being a forceful supervisor (literally “bishop” in biblical terms) that governs the Church of God (1Tim3). While being a dictator to impose one’s own will is not what God wants, allowing other things, elements, or people to frustrate God’s work being done in the church is not it either. We can sometimes be so “democratic” that nothing gets done. We can seek to not offend people so much that we never tell them the truth of their sinfulness and God’s mercy in fear of offending them. The bottom line here is that somebody has to make sure that God’s will is done, that biblical doctrine and practice is carried out.
As far as leadership being singular or plural,
Church leadership is always plural by preference, but singular usually in practice.
By that, I mean that no true man of God wants to be alone in governing a church. If he is godly, he will seek godly advice from other wise people around him. He will listen before deciding. He will take into account their explanations of Scripture as to what is happening and what the church should do. That is a preference, and it is a goal that all biblical groups seek to work towards fulfilling. Unfortunately, when a new church plant starts, that is hardly ever the case, and in the end analysis even in large churches with hundreds of godly men, many times, the pastor has to make a call all on his own, and pay the consequences for whatever he did right or wrong in that decision.
Servants: (Deacons)
The local community of the church is the place where God has designed his people to practice their Christianity and to do the work of God. This realization has consequences. God has gifted many people (all of his people) with talents and abilities that they can use to further the kingdom of God, and the church community is where they “do their gifts”. Teachers, preachers, etc. do their “thing” in the church (thus divinely talented servants are a service element). The church service should be built around talented people exercising their talents for the Lord in the presence of the brethren. This is “church”.
We must prevent and dampen any thoughts of self-glory for the servant. He should be exercising his talents as a believer which is in doing that worshipping God with those talents. It greatly troubles my soul when I visit a church and after a song, a special, or a really good sermon, the people applaud. This is as carnal and ungodly as it gets. Servanthood is bathed in humility if it is of God.
Moreover, servants serve. The base quality of any good servant is self-humility. They sacrifice of themselves in order to be of benefit to some other person. The concept that the deacons run the church sort of as a board over the pastor is unbiblical. That is not in the biblical words and concepts at all. True deacons are not people who sit and enjoy the activities, but who are making those activities good and beneficial for the rest of the people in the church. Deacons are the ones who come early, set up, stay late, and put up, and close up. Deacons are the ones who see that everything is as good as it can be. They shoulder the burden of making things work in the church. Stephen is an example of a deacon, and what we see in him is that he went out witnessing and preaching. Most deacons don’t participate in the evangelism program, and actually, they should be the ones who are the backbone of it. They should be constantly there so that the rest of the people will be encouraged to come and participate.
Preaching/Teaching Time
Some “modern” churches have restructured their service elements, basically, eliminating all elements of preaching, exhortation, or being “preachy”. They don’t want people to be turned away from their church because something seems “preachy” to them. That is like remaking a hospital so that it is not a place to heal people. You destroy the very essence of what it is if you do that.
A true biblical NT church has a message, the gospel. Jesus Christ died on the cross to save you from your sins, and those sins will put you in hell if you do not repent and turn from them. A true biblical NT church has a mission, and that is to reach the world with the gospel message of salvation. This is the foundational essence of the church, and they are the only priorities that are acceptable for a church.
If you change either of these two elements, you destroy what a church is. Believe me, there are thousands of churches which have exactly changed these priorities. In fact, very few churches today have these two as their priorities. If you doubt me, just analyze this. What are your foundational essence and supreme priority, you dedicate the majority of your energies, time, personnel, and resources to that thing(s). How many churches do you know where evangelism locally by the people is a major part of church life, and that the majority of the church members go out on a weekly basis witnessing? Very, very few. If they have an evangelism program at all, very few people go out. Note that evangelism is not following up on visitors to the church. Evangelism is not a bus route or recruiting more kids for the bus route. Evangelism is explaining the gospel to new people. If the gospel is a true priority, then the church would be consumed in evangelizing locally, and around their own country and around the world. How much does a church do towards missions? Yes, many churches have dozens or hundreds of missionaries. But are these missionaries actively and primarily engaged in evangelism? Many times the majority of a church’s missions program is not even focused on the salvation of souls, but putting Christian music on the airwaves, like a Christian radio station. Is that really a fulfillment of the Great Commission. I don’t think so. I have listened to a lot of Christian radio stations, and some put the gospel out from time to time, but it is not anything like a primary focus.
Confusion over Evangelism or Edification
Some people want to beg the question by saying that we are to be engaged in evangelism AND edification, so the edification part qualifies Bible Institutes, Christian Radio Stations, Christian Summer Camps, etc. But who gave these people to split God’s commission into parts, and leave off some parts to concentrate on others? Is the Great Commission a buffet where you can take whatever parts you want and leave the rest for somebody else to do? No. The early church was engaged in a singular ministry of the work of God, and evangelism was done by everybody, as well as the edification was done by everybody.
The focus here is not on some fuzzy, feel-good “edification”. Edification, as the Bible presents it, is an equipping of the saints to do the work of the ministry. If the ministry “mission” is getting the gospel out, then edification has centrally to do with preparing people to engage others in doctrine, arguments, false concepts, and clearly present the gospel and refute their false ideas. That is edification.
There is a spiritual side to edification when we hear prayer requests, and then see praising of God working. That builds our faith so that we can pray for things, specifically the work of God we are engaged in doing. But everything from singing to praises, to taking an offering should ultimately be focused and channeled back into doing the work of God. When you separate “feeling spiritual” from preparing to do the work of God, then edification gets lost in the shuffle, and nobody is benefitted. It is self-glory, entertainment, and not of God.
A biblical NT church keeps their head clear in actually doing the work of the ministry. It greatly saddens and frustrates me to see so many churches with no “Christian workers”. A Christian worker in my mind is somebody who is waiting at the front or sides of a church, and when a soul comes forward, the pastor can indicate to that Christian worker to take that person aside and present the plan of salvation to him, or counsel him in the spiritual needs and problems of his life. People are unprepared to do that today, and in many cases, pastors don’t give invitations because they themselves cannot present the gospel coherently nor counsel. In my youth, I remember a half dozen men and women “waiting in the wings” to help some person. Those days have disappeared it would seem.
Actual Reading of the Scripture
Those that preach and teach have a clear understanding that what we say and do is of no value. Nothing I can say can change anybody’s heart or eternal destiny. They understand that only the Word of God can save a soul, and only God’s words can counsel, fix, and make new people’s lives. If a church leadership and ministry team understand this, they will constantly appeal to Scripture for everything they pretend to give to the people. The actual words of Scripture will ring in the auditorium constantly, and they will have a great respect and honor for the authority of Scripture. They will yield Scripture as both a weapon and as a medicine to heal the ailing heart. That is if the church is a biblical church.
Bibles. What a mess! I don’t even want to get started on the Bible translation mess we are in today, but let me suffice to say this. Any good Bible is true to the originals. The looser, sloppier, and more commentary like (instead of sticking to a literal word-for-word, or concept-for-concept meaning). A good Bible is one that corresponds as exactly as possible to the original Greek and Hebrew meanings. Today we have lazy, sloppy Bible translations that are not accurate because the people using these Bible translations have a low view of the Bible’s authority. They want it “loose” so that they will have the liberty to reinterpret the very words into whatever spin they want to put on a passage. I have read some commentaries and sermons, and if you just read the Scripture, that is not what it says at all.
Explanation of Scripture in a principled fashion
Here even good pastors fall into a bad example. Pastors give a mountain of information to their congregation each year, but they don’t sort out the problems of life for them, and they don’t answer those problems and challenges with Scripture in a principled way. Instead of exposition to understand the principle, and then extract that principle and apply it to a situation today, they just throw out a few biblical passages and say some things about them, and they let the congregation do the analyzing and assembly into “what we should do”. There is no reason why pastors cannot apply the Bible. Read the story of Sodom and Gomorrah seven times in church, and then leave things there for your people to take away whatever they want from it. A homosexual will say those people were unkind to strangers, and God killed them for it. A biblical church will make deductions from Scripture that are valid and apply them to society today. In other words, homosexuality is an abominable sin in God’s eyes. Why is that so hard? It is because preachers have lost any desire to stand against the worldliness and carnality of our world.
Application of scriptural principles to the common Christian experience
I think the greatest error of modern preachers is to think that they can “preach a sermon” without making any kind of application of a scriptural principle in it. This returns to the desire “not to be preachy”. Preaching is supposed to be meddling in the lives of the people hearing you. It is supposed to be straightening out the crooked. Why is it wrong to exhort? Why is it wrong to apply Scripture?
Spiritual and emotional exhortation of scriptural principles
As a second part to the above, some preachers actually have a moral application to their sermon, but they don’t press it to the people with passion. What a waste! What a coward!
Prayer
Prayer is communicating with God, both in expressing the desires of our heart to God as well as trying to understand God’s word to us. Really, no prayer time with God is effective if it is not done with your Bible in hand. You have to have God speaking to you through His Word in order to have two way communication, and it be “communication”.
What most Christians don’t understand is that things get done by prayer just as much as you doing some activity. The work of the Lord is a road that has to be paved with the petals of prayer. Our strength is measured by how much the Holy Spirit allows us and empowers us to do things. We can give the gospel witness to 1000 people and nothing happens. But when we pray for hours before witnessing, we can witness to one person and that person may get saved. The difference is not how well we do something or how much, but how much prayer went into what you are doing before and during while you do it.
God desires our prayers as individuals, but much more powerful are the prayers of the church in a corporate setting, i.e. in the public worship services. Let’s not overlook the fact that God listens to everyone’s prayers, but He listens more attentively to his own children’s prayers, and most of all, God intensely listens and answers the prayers of those Christians that are closest to Him, that are most spiritual. Asking these spiritual brethren and sisters to pray for something is the strongest way to get spiritual power in what you are doing.
Praise / Thanksgiving
Praise is different from worship. Worship concentrates itself on the being and attributes of God. Praise concentrates itself on what God has done and is doing. Much of the Psalms are just repeating the great works of God in nature, and most especially in the lives of his children. When we praise (modern praise services seems to confuse praise and worship), it is not a time of raising emotions for no reason. Through the manipulation of people’s emotions with music (sound) and certain emotional speeches, you can work up an emotion fervor in a service. That serves no real purpose for God.
When Isaiah saw the Lord in the Temple, he fell mute. The awesomeness of God and God’s things should make us solemn and reverential. To go into a frenzy is not necessarily spiritual.
When we praise God for what He has done, and we can insert here thanksgiving, giving God the acknowledgement that God has done what is good in our lives, then we are praising Him. It is important to thank God for what happens in your life. God wants to hear that from our lips constantly.
Singing of Hymns and Spiritual Songs
We must understand that the church is not an entertainment adventure. “It” (the services) are not for our pleasure. We may be pleased, but that is not the main objective in a church service. The main objective is not our pleasure, but that what we do pleases God. It is a Satanic maneuver to shift the focus from God to man, from pleasing God to pleasing man.
The “song service” as it used to be known is for offering up our singing of songs in worship to God. What it should be is a repeating of the doctrine we believe as well as praises to God. Both should be biblical, not just “feel good” stuff. We should avoid vain repetitions. We should make our songs spiritual in that they reaffirm our doctrinal beliefs.
The song service is in a sense a secondary preaching time. These hymns should be solemn, and reverential. They should not be what pleases us, but what pleases God. Glory to His name, His person, His way of doing things, i.e. His will.
Receiving Tithes and Offerings
The Bible records the early church taking up tithes and offerings from the people of God. The physical work of preaching, witnessing, and even arranging a church service takes people, time, and energy. It takes a place, and there is a need for physical things like hymn books and Bibles. All of this means somebody has to pay for it, and that is exactly what Scriptures focus our physical sacrifices are for.
Fellowship, and one-on-one Encouragement
Perhaps the one long lost element of a church service is simply the company of fellow believers. God has not saved us as the only one saved in whole world. Moreover, we are in an intense spiritual battle, from fighting with sin, confusion, frustration, and depression, to physical persecution from the children of the Devil. Unfortunately, some who identify as the children of God also cause us much distress.
But if we are redeemed, how do we “fit into” the group of the redeemed? How do we identify with them? Simply put, we are in the body of the redeemed in a local church, doing what the children of God should be doing, the work of God, growing, and encouraging one another. That means going to church. It does us no good whatsoever to go sit in the church building on Mondays. We need to be “with the church”. That means being with the people of God when they congregate in order to worship God, learn of God, and do the work of God.
You also do very little good if you come to church to sleep, or sit there not a part of what is going on, a knot on a log as they say. You congregate to participate. When there is a time of thanksgiving or prayer requests, you participate. When there is congregational singing, you participate. When they pass the offering plate, you participate. That is how you fulfill your identification with the redeemed.