The Need for Reformation in Evangelical Ecclesiology

My responsibility tonight is to address the issue of the reformation that we need in our ecclesiology, and I will do that as the Lord grants me aid. But as I do that, allow me to say that this is an area that the Lord has helped me to see and to understand more clearly over the process of the last two years, as He prepared us and then launched us into this new area and the avenue of ministry serving him in South Central Africa in Zambia. It helped me to focus on the church, to focus on the Lord's mission and the centrality of the Church in the Lord's mission. And it also helped me to understand this issue of the reformation that we need with regard to the church. We need this reformation first and foremost because we are losing our grip on the understanding of the church of the local assembly. In fact, it's quite ironic that when you look at, for example, our Reformed Confessions, our Confession of Faith, the Second London Baptist Confession, you find this long chapter, chapter twenty six on the Church. Fifteen paragraphs in this long chapter on the Church, and only the first one refers to the Universal Church. Chapter twenty six, Paragraph one. The Catholic or Universal Church, which with respect to the internal work of the Spirit and truth of grace, may be called invisible, consists of the whole number of the elect that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one under Christ, the head thereof and is the spouse, the body, the fullness of Him that filleth all in all. Then there are fourteen more paragraphs that talk about the local assembly. Why do I point that out because I find it quite interesting that when you talk to most Christians today, their emphasis is on the universal and not the local. When we refer to the church, our tendency is to not talk about that idea of the church and its local expression, but in the bigger and broader idea of the church. And ironically, when we talk about the bigger and broader idea of the church, we actually shrink it. What do I mean by that, Well, in this doctrine, the universal Church is not just all of the believers in the world today, but it's all those who have been and all those who will be. So ironically, as we are moving from the local focusing our eyes on the universal Church, we are limiting it in its scope because we only refer usually in our minds to those who are alive today. We're losing the local and there is a crisis in our ecclesiology as a result. We see this crisis in a number of ways, but I want to address three of them in particular in the time that I have. First of all, I believe this crisis is being manifested in an aversion to church membership. We have an aversion to church membership. Jonathan Lehman, in his book The Church and the Surprising Offense of God's Love writes, and I quote in my experience, asking the average Christian how important committed church membership is to his or her Christianity will yield and answer somewhere between not at all and sort of. Many Christians are happy to attend a particular church indefinitely without formally joining. Others are happy to visit different churches from one month to the next and continue this pattern for a year or more. Still, others don't attend church at all and try to sustain their spiritual lives through self directed use of Christian books, fellowship groups, radio stations, or other forms of Christian media. Should you attempt to explain the importance even necessity of joining a church. To someone with such a mindset, you will probably meet with, at best a shrug of the shoulders, or, more likely the charge that's legalism, or that's dogmatic, or that's not loving. We've lost the local, And of course it doesn't matter to us that we've lost the local, because again we have this heightened view of the universal. But of course our heightened view of the universal is actually a diminished view of the universal. So we've lost the local, partly because of passages of scripture that we have famously misused and misquoted, chief among them Matthew eighteen. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them. Brother. We don't need no churches. We just need two or three, because the Bible says, where two or three are gathered there he is. Well, there are a couple of problems with this. Obviously, there's the contextual problem. But before we go to the contextual problem, let's just look at the common sense problem. Heymen, somebody y'all know about my thirty second theology rule. Right, most stuff we mess up in theology, we wouldn't mess up if we just close our eyes and thought about it. For thirty seconds. Because if you close your eyes and think about it for thirty seconds and you believe that all you need is you know one or two other people, and then you got a church and then you got the Lord's presence, you in trouble. Because here's why. If that's true, then you can't even roll out of bed in the morning and pray because God won't be there. I mean, if that's what this verse means, God forbid that you're a single person living on your own. You got to get up in the morning, walk over to your neighbor's house, knock on the door and say, hey, are you up because I want to pray? And God won't be there unless there's two or three. So this doesn't even pass the thirty second theology common sense test. Then when you look at the context test, you realize that not only is this craziness, but you realize that the top three craziness versus in the New Testament are right here, one after another, all being explained the same way. This is not our text tonight, but we just got to go here for a minute. Matthew eighteen fifteen. If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you. So if it's me and I take one, that would be two of us. If it's me and I take two, that would be three of us. I'm just saying this is gonna be important a little bit later, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a gentile or a tax collector. Now here are the big three right here, in order, All three explained by the same context. Number one, Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. There's one we riped, kicking and screaming out of context all the livelong day. You ever been in a church where they bind the devil Satan? We bind you. I actually want to go up to him after and say, hey, I just want to ask you something. Do the rest of the churches right here know that y'all got him this week, because I mean, that's you know, if you if you bound him, then you know, here's the other thing I want to know. Do you let him go every week? Because I mean, if you, if you can bind him, I'm just gonna go on and recommend you keep him that way. Obviously this is in reference to church discipline. Then here's the second one. Again, I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by My father in heaven. Come on, let's just touch and agreet. This has nothing to do with that. This has to do with the authority of the church in the area of discipline. And now we get to for where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them. This has nothing to do with what constitutes a church. Nothing. It has everything to do with the authority of the church in exercising and executing discipline, in making proclamations about people being in and people being out, those whom we bring in through the front door of baptism, and those who we declare to be out through the back door of church discipline. That's what this binding and loosing is about. That's what this agreeing is about. That's what this to or three is about. And so we start with losing the local and thinking about the church only in terms of the universal, but not all of the universal, just that middle slice. Then we rip this verse kicking and screaming out of context in order to justify our misuse of the other theological idea, and the result is we lose the local. It doesn't matter anymore. It's not important anymore. It's not significant anymore for most of us. The second way this is manifested is in reliance on alternative sources of spiritual nurture and care. So we have this view that you know, we view the church only from this universal perspective, and then only that middle slice. We have this two or three gathered together misuse of scripture, and then we add to that the availability to consume spiritual material in our day like never before television, radio, YouTube, sermon audio. Now that these things are inherently wrong or inherently bad, but when you combine them with this loss of the local, you get things like this that one person wrote to me. My husband has decided that until we relocate and find a church, we will worship together as a family in our home. We use a variety of means in our little home worship, and one is to listen to your audio sermons or that just blesses me so much. We are here until September of this year, and I fear that we will exhaust all of your audio sermons before we move. If you have any more audio or video recordings of your sermons or suggestions of others with similar approach and values as you, we would greatly appreciate it, because you know, all you need is two or three and sermon audio. There is no hint of angst here, not the least. And no, we're not talking about people who live in some deep dark corner of the world where they can't find other believers. No, we're talking about somebody who lives in the Midwest, right here in these United States. We've lost the local and the last manifestation of this is what I call misguided missions. And again, this is something that has become just painfully obvious as we have gone through the transition that we've experienced over the last couple of years. Listen to this from Joel James and Brian Pieterbach, two missionaries serving in Southern Africa as well evangelical missions in Africa is changing, or more accurately, it has changed. In the past, the bulk of the theologically conservative missionaries in Africa to do church planting and leadership training no longer. Today, many of the new missionaries being sent are focused on social relief, with the church tacked on as a theological addendum. I would add, if at all, by all appearances, there has been a megashift in evangelical missions away from church planting and leadership training toward social justice and social action. By the way, now to the tune of five to one, for every one dollar spent planting churches and doing theological training, there's five dollars spent on social gospel activities, mercy activities, and the part of the world where I live. If you throw a rock, you will hit some young female from the West who has a self defined call to come and save Africa, one orphan at a time, and praise God for such hearts of compassion. But when there is no sense of God's purpose and mission in church, when there is no sense of the Church as desending agent, when we have this idea that all I need is to have a strong impression in my own heart and the ability to raise support. And that is enough for me to go be in the field representing Christ as a missionary. We have an ecclesia life logical problem. These are not the only areas that scream to us that we need a reformation in our ecclesiology, but they are prevalent enough to make the point. So now let's look at our text. Turn your Bibles with me, if you will, the Book of Hebrews, Hebrews chapter thirteen, Hebrews Chapter thirteen. I believe, in the midst of this tsunami, if you will, of theological transformation in the way we think about the Church, that there are some things here in this text that need to be said again and again and again. I want us to look at Hebrews thirteen seventeen, but back up first and look at verses seven and eight. Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God, consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. Go down to verse seventeen. Obey your leaders and submit to them. And in case you think he's referring to those who you decide are your leaders, because you like to listen to them on sermon audio. Let's continue to read, for they are keeping watch over your souls as those who will give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you. Amen. As we examine this text, I believe that there are at least three things that we need to take note of, and again, three things we need to press over and over and over again. The first is this the very existence of spiritual leadership in the church. The existence of spiritual leadership in the church. Yes, that's something that we have to argue that there is spiritual leadership in the church. There are those who are called to lead in the church and those who are called to follow egalitarianism. Reactions to abuse and so on have led us to a place where we recoil at any assertion of leadership. When we talk about leadership in the family, when we talk about fathers as the leaders and heads of their households, there are people who rise up and take notice and are ready to go to war because that kind of language, according to those in opposition, just the mere mention of that kind of language opens the door to abuse. And so when you argue that there are those who lead in the church, that there are those who have authority in the church. There are people who recoil at that idea, because any leadership is abusive by its very nature. But the text says, obey your leaders and submit to them. Folks, I don't write the mail, I just deliver it. You don't have to like that, but you can't argue with it. The Bible makes it clear that there exists within the church spiritual leadership. Now let me hasten to say that even within the context of that leadership, we always see that leadership referred to in the plural. Now. I know that there are those who have different ecclesiology. I know that there are those who believe in single pastor models and so on. I did not come here to fight tonight. I respect your right to be wrong. When you see elders in the New Testament, it's in the plural. You see leadership here, it's in the plural. The apostles were in the plural. And so the idea here is that the church is led by a group of men. Amen. And yes I did say men amen, somebody. It's amazing to me that even that has become controversial the idea that the elders in the church are to be males. God loves women and I do too. Amen, But there are things that women are called to do. There's other things that they're not. And it should be no more offensive that the Bible says that men are to lead in the church and serve as elders than it should be offensive that women are the ones who get to have babies. Amen. Now I've seen that happen, and that's not something I want to do. I'm just acknowledging the fact that there's some things you guys get to do that we don't get to do. There exists spiritual leadership in the church, and when we lose the local one of the things that we lose is this spiritual leadership. And so we have bands of rogue Christians going around doing whatever it is they feel to do under absolutely zero spiritual authority. We need a reformation in our ecclesiology. And I know because I hear this from people often, what what brother in that? What in that? What Paul did? Is it? Well? Yeah, because you know Paul, Paul had Jesus himself as his teacher. Paul was under the authority of no man really is that the case. Open your bibles with me, if you will, and look at the Book of Galatians. Look at the Book of Galatians. Look at Galatians chapter one, and look at verse eighteen. Paul has come to faith. Paul has gotten the gospel directly from Jesus, and he says in verse eighteen, then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Sephus or Peter, and remain with him fifteen days. What was that about, Oh, I don't know. Why don't we keep reading? Go down to chapter two in verse one. Then after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along with me. I went up because of a revelation, and set before them, though privately, before those who seemed influential, the gospel that I proclaimed among the gentiles, in order to make sure I was not running or had not run in vain, not even the apostle. Paul operated as a rogue Christian, taught directly by the Lord himself. He goes first in three years and speaks to Peter, and then after fourteen years he goes and sets before them the gospel that he's been preaching so that he could be checked on it. There exists within the Church this spiritual authority, and it is important that every believer finds him or herself under said spiritual authority. There are no rogue Christians, and submitting to the Universal Church does not answer this, which is made clear by the next phrase. For they are keeping watch over your souls. I don't care how many of Josh Bise's sermons you listen to on the Internet and the interwebs. That does not equate to him keeping watch over your soul. Those who lead the Church are not primarily there as entertainers, but as shepherds, keeping watch over the souls that the Lord has brought to them, has assigned to them, keeping watch first and foremost examining professions of faith and entering into membership and the waters of baptism those who have credible professions of faith, and then feeding them through the regular preaching of the Word, through those ordinary means of grace, again and again and again applied to their lives, through visiting them, through encouraging, through admonishing, through correcting. This is what happens. You don't get that by sending someone a private message on Facebook, and yet we do it, don't we? I get two or three a day. First, let me say that I love your ministry. I appreciate it so much. I have a question I want to ask you, because you know my pastor doesn't agree with me on this. When I read those I don't write back. I just I talk back. I read that line right there, and my response say is yeah. You usual keep waiting for my response, but sometimes I will write back, and usually here's what I write back. You've asked me to comment on this issue, and you've told me that there's disagreement between you and your pastor. So here's essentially what you've just said to me. My pastor and I don't agree with this on this, and I'm writing to you, so vote. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to respond either in agreement with my pastor so that I can get in line, not submitting to my pastor, but submitting to you because I respect your authority and not his, or disagree with my pastor, so that I can go and continue to stir up strife in my church in your name. Oh oh well, when you put it like that, how else am I supposed to put it. But you see, we've lost the local, and so in our minds, here's what we think. If I listen to you and appreciate what I hear, you're my pastor, and so I should be able to come to you with whatever I want to come to you with because you're my pastor. After all, we're part of the universal Church, are we not? Do you see the progression? This is what happens when we lose the local. And again, I am not arguing that it's wrong for us to have access to the things that we have access to anymore than I would argue that it's wrong for us to have access to personal copies of the Bible. Amen, having access to personal copies of the Bible has led to some complications. Would you not agree? Amen? There's some folks I just wish didn't have one. I'm just going to tell the truth, But they do, and it is an absolute blessing. What a privilege? Do you realize that the majority of Christians who have lived throughout history didn't have access to a Bible? But you and I have multiple copies just laying around. In fact, we lose them and misplaced them regularly. Talk about an harassment of riches. There are still nearly three thousand people groups in the world who don't have the Bible in their language. And yet I would venture to say that everyone in this room has multiple copies. Praise God for that. We can go on the internet and we can type in any topic and we can find sermons and lectures and anything else that we want. In fact, there are people in this room, and I'm not just talking about those who are pastors. I know there are a lot of pastors in this room. There are a lot of people in this room who are not pastors. And you have more theological training than a large number of people who are leading churches around the world. So don't hear me saying that it's a bad thing and it's a wrong thing for us to have access to this information. But with this access comes a responsibility. And when you combine this access with the loss of the local, when you combine this access with misinterpretations of scripture as it relates to the very nature of the church, When you combine this access with this idea that all authority is abusive and we are no longer under any spiritual authority, what ends up happening is I become my own confession. I become my own systematic theology, and I go around the world wide Web listening for echoes that say back to me what I've already decided to believe. And if I have to find five, ten, fifteen different solses to build a wall around myself that makes me impervious to any kind of correction or authority, I'll do it because it's available and it's possible. We need a reformation in our ecclesiology. We need to go local. We need to commit ourselves and submit ourselves to people who are going to disappoint us, the pastors who are not rock stars. The nature of that spiritual leadership is such that we keep watch over souls, and for those of us who are pastors, this changes things. One of my great worries when our church started putting all of our sermons on on sermon audio. And those of you who've listened to me for any amount of time know that that that was a big deal for us in our church, and I was outvoted by my fellow elders on that issue. I didn't want us to put our our our weekly sermons upon sermon audio anyway. That's that's that's neither here nor there. It's there God. I pray that God uses it, but didn't didn't want that to happen. One of my worries was that it would change the way we thought about feeding our flock, and instead of being men who were regularly on our faces begging God to give us food for people whose names we know, we would instead slowly become men who ask God to help us perform well for the audience listening beyond. It changes things, and even for those of us who exercise this spiritual oversightcuse, it changes things. It changes the way we view that sacred interaction that takes place when we stand up in front of our people and shepherd them from the pulpit. It changes things. Finally, not only do we see the existence and the nature of this spiritual leadership in the church, but we also see in this text its purpose. Notice what it says here, as those who will have to give an account, Notice the sense of finality here. Obey your leaders and submit to them for their keeping. Watch over your souls. But what kind of watch they're keeping? Watch over your souls as those who will have to give an account. In other words, you and they are going to face God someday, and the way that they are exercising the spiritual leadership will stand with them before God. It will stand with you before God. There's an amazing thing that happens to a pastor the first time he does a funeral. And I've argued that a pastor does not and cannot understand pastoral ministry until it buries a member, because there is something about shepherding someone, ministering to someone, instructing someone, walking with them through suffering and difficulty, and then presiding over them when they are dead that says to a pastor, this is what all your work was about. You did not preach to this person so that they wouldn't choose to go to the church down the street. You did not preach to this person so that you could motivate them to tithe more. You did not preach to this person so that this person would somehow esteem you and make you feel better about yourself, or you make them feel better about themselves. You preach to this person with a view toward this moment right here, so that when you stood and presided over them before they were put into the ground, you could then say I've done right by you, I finished my work with this one. It is at that moment that you understand what it means to be a shepherd. It is at that moment when your sermon prep is forever changed. It is at that moment when that sense of urgency with which you mount the pulpit is forever altered. And it is at that moment when you realize, more than any other time in your life, that you are not, you have not been, nor will you ever be worthy of this task. But we don't get that when we lose the local we don't understand it. Again, God be praised for all of the many opportunities that He's given. God be praised for opportunities like this to come to a conference like this. But truth be told, there are some of you who are here because you're conference junkies. If you can't say amen, you ought to say ouch, and you just go from conference to conference looking for that next high, because there's something that happens here that you just don't get anywhere else. And my prayer for you is that God would give you exactly that exactly that mentality for what goes on week in and week out in your local church. That on the Lord's Day, Every Lord's day. You would sit there and you would realize there's something that happens here week in and week out that I cannot get anywhere else. Praise God for conferences where big name speakers come and talk about these lofty themes. However, it pales in comparison to sitting down in front of the man whose feet have been under my table, who knows my weaknesses and my struggles, and who loves me nonetheless, and who is preaching his guts out out of the deep well of that love that he has for all of us. Until you realize that I can't compete with that, you've lost the local. Until you understand that the best conference that you've ever been to can't touch that, you've lost the local. And until you're more grateful for that man who labors to bring before you the ordinary means of grace week in and week out than you are for that uniquely skilled person somewhere far away that you enjoy listenings to. You've lost the local, and you are in desperate need of a reformation in your ecclesiology. We all are. Let me leave you with this from an article the Journal of the evangelical theological society called the suicide of Christian theology theology in the sixties, young people seeking careers and older people seeking meaningful community associations have recognized what ought to have been obvious to the theologians. If Christian faith read deuces to humanistic values, then why bother with church membership or church careers. The Peace Corps, social work, psychiatry, and the rotary offer more meaningful opportunities for secular association and service, and they are not debilitated by a conceptual vocabulary which even their own leaders do not take seriously. If we don't understand the magnitude of the local church, if we lose an appreciation for the ordinary means of grace, if we don't appreciate the existence and the nature and the purpose of this spiritual authority, then what's the difference between us and the Rotary Club? If all this is is entertainment, then what bother? But if we understand that God is about something, and that Christ came to redeem a people for himself to his father's glory, and that the spirit is about the business of applying that redemption in the lives of believers, and that through the application of the ordinary means of grace on a regular basis, that redemption is continuing to be applied and our faith is continuing to be nurtured and strengthened. If we get that, then we have come to experience that reformation in our ecclesiology that will once again turn the world upside down, one local church at a time. Are you a member of a local church. Do you love your local church? Do you submit yourself to the leaders in your church or do you work to undermine that leadership. Do you have an appreciation for the simple yet profound blessing of the Lord's Day and the ordinary means of grace? Or have you lost the local God has a plan, it's the local church. It's Plan A, and there is no Plan B. Let's pray, Gracious God, our heavenly Father, we thank you for the great privilege of knowing you and being being known by you, for the tremendous blessing of redemption, and for the ordinary means of grace, For the thousands upon thousands of local assemblies that you have called together, for your people to be assembled, to be nurtured, to be built up and edified, to be corrected rebuked, to be cared for, and to be shepherded through this life. God, we thank you for the immense privilege that that is, and confess to you that all of us, in one way or another, have fallen victim to the spirit of the age and lost the local Grant by your grace, that we might celebrate and appreciate all of the manifold blessings that you have provided, but that enjoying in enjoying them, we might never lose sight of the privilege and blessing of the local church. I thank you for those under the sound of my voice who have given themselves to serving the bride shepherding the flock. Grant them grace to endure this we pray in Christ's name, Amen.