Church Planting is about the Desire to Congregate

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Church Planting the desire to congregate is the desire of saved people to congregate to receive spiritual support from their brethren. This article explains where the drive for church planting comes from.

I will only mention and explain briefly the main issues in this, but each of these should be explored and studied further. But we need to understand before we jump into something.

Salvation has a Group Aspect to It

Some people think that Jesus died on the cross for them. That is true and good. But these people think that Jesus died just for them, and nobody else. That is incorrect. It is a beautiful picture, but doesn’t represent reality as much as understanding that Christ’s death was for all humanity, and those that decide to receive the Savior form a group.

On judgment day, God, as Judge, will accuse all mankind of being sinners, and condemn all mankind to hell. At that point, Jesus our Savior will step up, and recognize that some of that group are part of his body; they are the redeemed. Jesus will redeem us actually at that point, and he will separate us unto hell with God.

But in a very real sense, a person is saved because he or she is a part of the redeemed. The particulars are that they have to confess that they are sinners, repent of that state, and believe in Jesus as their own personal Savior. All of that is true. But we are guaranteed salvation and heaven because of those actions, and we are classified as saints and the redeemed. Groups that describe all saved persons.

Note that Calvinism has it wrong. We are not elect (chosen) first, therefore God’s grace is irresistible to us. The primary cause of us going to heaven is not because we are elect, chosen, or special. David chose 5 stones to use against Goliath, but what he chose had some kind of quality to it that made it “chosen.” God sees us from our beginning to our end. He sees us as a “known quantity.” We all come from the class of people who are sinners, and our election is an “after you are saved” descriptor. God deals with man in time, but God is not subject to the restrictions of time. He sees everything and everyone, from the beginning to the end, in one glance. God sees me, He sees my beginning, my life through the years and my death, and my eternity all in a single glance. We cannot do that. God’s judgment in choosing is based on what He sees and knows.

The fatalism in Calvinism is that nothing can be changed, God has decided it before starting everything. But we are living in time, and our striving to serve God is something that we decide to do, and God honors that.

Jesus and all the preachers and evangelists of the Bible never once presented their election or their perdition (God decided before they were born that they would live forever in hell after their death) in a presentation to them about eternity. While God knows everybody’s eternal state from before the beginning of the world, because God is at this capacity, we are not.

Part of being saved is to endurance and persevere through life until death, being faithful unto the Lord. God has not made things so that the minute you believe and are saved, you immediately die and go to heaven. The reproduction of saved people would have a very difficult time if this were so. Satan would have a heyday.

God gives us Help

When we talk of “help” or “helpers” we come upon the New Testament word “Comforter“. This word is key in our present discussion. The word comforter (παράκλητος) means to be brought alongside for help in a problem. The idea is to contract a lawyer to help you through a legal problem. The client confesses to his lawyer everything he has done and his motives. The lawyer defends him, whether he was wrong or not. That is the work of Jesus, our Savior.

But the lawyer, if he is any good or not, will immediately “advise” the client on two bases. What the client did was within the law, and he can continue to do that thing, and the lawyer will fight in court for him, or he broke the law, and the client needs to listen to him and stop doing that.

There is a constant teaching, advising about the law, and exhortation about what to do in order to not be condemned.

Jesus is our first Comforter, and then the Holy Spirit is our second Comforter. But wait. There are more comforters. Every saved person is also a comforter to other saved people about their salvation. Most of the idea of “comforter” in Christian literature, including how παράκλητος is translated into English, has this idea of sympathizing with someone in pain and suffering. The emphasis is on sympathizing and very little on exhortation. This is in itself sad.

See these tracts on the Church

Church is to get the Redeemed together locally for Benefit

The idea of “church” in the Bible is God’s will to get the redeemed together for mutual spiritual benefit. Satan has so attacked the body of Christ that church has almost become synonymous with conflict, fights, discord, etc. If God has given spiritual gifts to the body of Christ, and those spiritual gifts are seen in individuals ministering to the body of Christ, where and when is this supposed to happen if not each Sunday? It is illogical to accept that God doesn’t leave us as orphans, and then negate the entire purpose and activity of church. This becomes a major issue in the existence of churches.

Within this framework of “the church“, we are talking about both the church universal and the church local. The universal exists as individual local churches. We can talk about marriage, but marriage as a universal concept between a man and woman does not exist except in individual instances of that concept.

The point is, when two redeemed people get together “to fellowship” amongst themselves, this is spiritually beneficial, or at least it should be, and most often it is of benefit. But formally, this takes the shape of a local church. Individually meeting and edifying one another is also valid, but it can never replace “church.”

Many Christians think that church is unnecessary because they are spiritual giants. Or some will say yes, fellowship is good, but they do that in a restaurant on Sunday mornings. I would like to see them take an offering for the work of God in that setting, or somebody stands and preaches, or some number of people stand and sing hymns to the glory of God. They would be thrown out of most restaurants if they did that.

The church is a meeting place where these spiritual activities take place. Church planting is to start this seed of a church and eventually making it become a full-fledged church. Note that if we get the “why we congregate” wrong, or it remains an undefined concept amongst us, we will get everything else wrong on doing church.

Articles on why we attend Church

For those people who are either wanting such a place for their spiritual edification (defending themselves against the advances of Satan personally against them) and those who are wanting to plant new churches, the issue becomes very important.

What is God’s Definition of His Church

Note that there is a big difference between the universal church (every saved person in all time of the NT), and a local church. In the universal church, there are only exclusively saved people. But in the local church, there is always a mix of saved and unsaved. Jesus spoke of the tares mixed in with the good wheat. That is what we are talking about.

One of our key points for the leadership and membership of a local church is to understand what distinguishes a saved person from an unsaved person.

Note that our focus should be in following the New Testament pattern, as well as being precise in the elements we would install in such a church. Let’s review these, then.

The Coming together as “Church“

In this tract, we examine the requirement for those in the church. God is love. His essence is love, and we have to define biblical love as a voluntary spiritual activity. We control love, because true love is a decision of the will. We are not loving if we return good treatment because somebody has treated us good. Love is a spiritual decision of the person because God has commanded it. We are to love God, so how does that happen? By examining how we love our fellow man. We are to love our wives. We are to love our enemies.

The major elements of a church are first and foremost the services. Then it’s evangelism, the fellowship and help one to another and to other works of God.

Matthew 18:20 For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.

God blesses even two Christians who gather together to worship God. So this is not an impossible thing, and many people are destitute as far as having a good church near them. They can start one. This is called a church plant.

Church Services

The principal activity of the church in its services is to worship God. We define this by the actual reading of the Scriptures, then explaining those Scriptures. This informs the members of God’s character, His qualities (virtues), His actions, and God commandments for Christians.

Worship actually takes place when the people present in the service actually apply these elements as changing their own moral character to be like God. Another part related to this is praise. Thanksgiving, hymns, and spiritual songs, as well as testimonies by the members to the group are rehearsing what we believe through the Scriptures, and a kind of reminding and exhortation to continue believing and practicing these elements. Singing spiritual songs and hymns are very important in this part.

Another part is to receive the tithes and offerings of God’s people for the continuance of the work both locally in that particular church (paying what is deserving to those who minister publicly and have dedicated their lives to this ministry) and also outside the local church, i.e. missionaries and other ministries that the church supports.

Evangelism

Every individual Christian as well as corporately the entire local church should be involved in evangelism. This is not necessarily getting more people into the local church, anyway that they can. It is presenting the unadulterated gospel so that the unconverted turn to Christ. Part of this element is to direct the new convert to a good church of good sound doctrine and practice. If the person lives near the church, then they are directed into that fellowship, and if not, efforts are made to find a good church near them.

Prayer

Everything in the Christian life and having to do with church should be saturated in prayer. Nothing will work correctly if it is not sustained in prayer. Individual members of the church have particular situations needing prayer, and each individual should pray in their houses, but also these should be born by the church corporatively.

Church Growth

Every church wants to grow, to be bigger, to do more, to be more influential. Unfortunately, very few seem to achieve that goal. But part of the problem here is understanding how each and every member and each and every church fits into the will of God. We need to undertand what is success in the ministry, and what is not success. The world defines success by Hollywood and Madison Avenue standards, what is fame and glory, and what is sheer business.

In this tract (Ch31), I explain why churches and obedient ministers of the Gospel reject these ideas of success. Obeying God is always more important that worldly recognition of you accomplishing something. God’s will is supreme here. It is easy to build a big church if you use Hollywood methods, with big business. Give away free stuff, and people will line up at your door to get in every Sunday. If you have basically a nightclub atmosphere with sheer entertainment, again, people will line up at your door. If you present the gospel and hardness of holiness and piety, stressing repentance of sin, few will want to be a part of that.

Satan’s attacks against God and His People, the Christian, the Church

Matthew 16:18 And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

We need to understand that Satan is constantly attacking the work of God, God’s children, and God if he can. This is an absolute essential concept in every church. The term, “being broadsided,” means something takes you by complete surprise and overwhelms you, and this is what happens when churches and their leaders do not understand the spiritual battle that they are in.

Individual Christians need to understand this because many churches have false prophets leading them, and the Christian needs to be on-guard against uniting with something that is not promoting God’s will. That lack of spiritual perception will come back to plague them many a time.

Church Planting is about the Desire to Congregate

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