Audio Transcript:

Welcome to Missions on Point, the Propempo perspective on church and missions.

Thank you for joining us. This is episode 245. This is the second episode of a series about the church and parachurch ministries. We focused most of our time last time on the confusion surrounding the existence of parachurch ministries. It’s not too difficult to sense the inherent problem with the explosion of parachurch ministries, especially in the West. Someone thinks that a church is not doing what it should be doing, so they found a parachurch ministry to do it better and inevitably leave the church behind in the dust. And countless ministries that have started out under the label of Christian have utterly abandoned their origins. But rather than ditching parachurch ministries altogether, we need to recognize their benefit. There is a right place for ministries that exist apart from the church. More importantly, churches should not be doing everything. We need to focus on the essential ministries of the church and churches should prioritize these activities. And that is what we hope to do today: to lay the basic framework for the essential ministries of a church. And I want to begin with the caveat that individual churches may nuance these essential ministries in slightly different ways. The point is simply this: that local churches need to be the ones who make it very clear what is essential about their gathering. I’ve heard of churches doing everything that you might find in a small town, like running bakeries, fitness centers, and barber shops.  Some Sunday morning productions rival the cutting edges of Hollywood.  How can a church look so different in the affluent West than in the rural third world, or even from what a church has looked like throughout history? 

If there is something that God has called the church to do, then that must be universally true for every church of every nation throughout all of time. The church is unique. Local churches specialize in activities that all other institutions fall far short of. In fact, many organizations mimic the church and look a lot like it, attempting to provide the services of the church, but they can’t actually live up to those desires, because they are not a church. In fact, that should be a giant red flag if an organization claims to be doing what the church does but better. A Christian university’s chapel time might seem to the college student to be a better worship experience than their local church. And while it certainly is more akin to a rock concert, I would argue that the purple-haired old lady fumbling to plunk out a hymn on a slightly out-of-tune piano with a baby crying in the back, actually provides a better worship experience. Likewise, a missions agency might claim to be better at doing missions than your church. But, just like with the approximate rock concert, it all really depends on what you are looking for. And most importantly, do we desire what God desires? It turns out, God has actually given to us what he wants for us. He has told us what the church specializes in, and why it is absolutely essential.

We must be grounded in the timeless and cultureless essentials about the church that are found in God’s word. Like I said last time, the reason for the confusion of our present day is because there has been a departure from the gospel and a departure from the authoritative source of truth about the gospel: the holy, eternal word of God, the 66 books of the Bible. Some people call this the regulative principle of worship, meaning that we should only do what the Bible prescribes us to do. While other people claim what is called the normative principle, meaning that we are free to do anything as long as it is not prohibited in scripture. I’m not actually entering that debate right now. I’m simply saying that the Bible makes the priorities of the church clear. The Bible does tell us what we must do. The Bible gives us God’s intentional design for local churches which serve God’s purposes to bring himself global glory. God’s word is sufficient for knowing God’s purposes for God’s divinely inspired institution, the church.

So, what does God’s word say? Well, a good place to start is Jesus’ summary of the fulfillment of the law: to worship God and to love another. The local church is the place that God has designed for him to be worshipped. And the church is the place that God has designed for us to fulfill that “new but old commandment” that the Apostle John teaches us about: to love one another.

Next, I would turn to the Great Commission in Matthew 28. We have a whole podcast series on Missions on Point about that. Summarily defined, the Great Commission is the authoritative cross-culturally aimed making of disciples by the church, where we baptize them into the Trinity-worshipping community, to grow into maturity in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. We worship God by making disciples. And every phrase of the Great Commission implies the critical importance of the local church for that process. Check out that podcast series for more details. And this is really at the heart of Missions on Point, that you cannot fulfill the Great Commission without the church at the center of missions. The church is the place that God has designed for his worship and it is the place designed for cross-cultural disciple-making. Cross-cultural discipleship is the church’s specialty.

As we continue in the New Testament, we now come to the book of Acts, and the birth of the church. A great starting point for knowing the essentials of the church is found in Acts 2. The Holy Spirit comes at Pentecost, and the church is birthed. The church is the place, as 1 Corinthians 14:25 says, where an unbeliever may enter our midst and have the secrets of his heart disclosed, so that he falls on his face, worships God, and declares that God is really among us. The church is God’s temple, where his Spirit dwells.

And immediately after this monumental moment of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit we have the basic functions of the church described. Acts 2:42 gives to us four essentials of the church. It says, “And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” There are four essentials here: the Apostle’s teaching, the fellowship, the breaking of bread, and the prayers. Let’s consider these four a little bit.

1. First, we have The Apostle’s Teaching. Christians come together to worship and submit to our Lord Jesus Christ as disciples who seek to obey all that he has commanded us. And as such we must be devoted to the Apostle’s Teaching. The Apostle’s teaching is the New Testament, the collected eye-witness accounts of our resurrected Lord, and his instructions for the church. Together with the Old Testament, with its wisdom and prophetic foreshadowing of Christ, we have been given the authoritative teaching for the church regarding the gospel of Jesus Christ. Our devotion to God’s word in all that the church does is critical for anything that is done by the church. The gospel in God’s word is what he has entrusted us to faithfully steward. And if a church is not utilizing God’s word, can we rightly call it a church ministry? Furthermore, the Apostle’s Teaching is a term that we can use to talk about right doctrine. The church exists to guard the revelation of God. It’s a pillar and buttress of the truth. So this means that local churches need to provide leadership when it comes to holding fast to the true doctrine of God. It’s why preaching and teaching are such important parts of what we do when we gather. But it also means that the church plays a guardian role for anything else that would call itself a Christian ministry.
2. Second, is The Fellowship. Not only do we care about God’s word, but we care about God’s people. All of God’s word must apply to all of God’s people.  Being devoted to the fellowship is a whole lot more than making sure that we have a potluck meal, though I really like potlucks.  Local churches are people-oriented in all they do.  We have to know each other and be in each other’s lives if we are going to be making disciples of one another. It’s the only place we can really obey all of the “one-another” commands of scripture. This, together with the previous point is what Jonathan Leeman says the church does as it guards the who and the what of the gospel. Not only do we hold fast to right doctrine, but the church identifies the people who believe that gospel message. So, the church exists to identify who a Christian is. So, if your ministry has Christians, it needs to look to the Church to identify them as such.
3. Third, The Breaking of Bread. The breaking of bread is clearly distinct from the fellowship meal. It refers categorically to the ordinances of the church.  The Lord’s Table is the regular means we have of marking off who the people of God are.  It’s not hard to assume this same devotion applies to our baptizing of believers and bringing them into the family of God.  It is, after all, an essential component of the Great Commission.  What this devotion means for us is that we are committed to the institutionalized church. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are unique activities that only a church can do, and your parachurch ministry should not be doing them.
4. Fourth and last, The Prayers. There is a devotion here to specific prayer offered by the church. This isn’t just your closet devotions. Prayer must be an intentional part of the public worship. It’s not just tacked on as something we open and close with. The whole of worship is interactive. We’re communing with God. We’re responding to him.  We listen as God speaks to us, and then we respond in song and prayer. We’re exercising our faith together and seeking his will and his commission for our lives as a church. Yes, your parachurch ministry can pray and ask for God’s wisdom. But there is a uniquely special kind of submitting to God together in prayer that we do as a church. For nowhere else do people know your entire life and pray for every aspect of it. And nowhere else do we seek to submit to the Lord about every dimension of our lives.

These are the four essentials that we find in Acts 2:42. The last essential of the church that I will mention here comes from the pastoral epistles in the New Testament, 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus. In these letters, we see another unique essential quality of the church, and that is spiritual authority and leadership. An essential element of the church is the right administration of the offices of the church, namely elders and deacons. We need these people in our lives because they provide spiritual authority, and order and unity in the church. The people in your parachurch ministry cannot do what elders and deacons do for you. And one evidence that we are overly reliant on parachurch ministries is that we downplay our relationships with the elders and deacons in our church.

Much more could be said about these essentials for church ministry. To repeat the seven that I’ve listed here, we have: 1. Worship, 2. The Great Commission, 3. The Apostle’s Teaching, 4. The Fellowship, 5. The Breaking of Bread, 6. The Prayers, and 7. Church Offices. When it comes to a church, we must at least have these, and we must major in these.  Many churches take on so much else that crowds out the most important components.  Perhaps with a simpler more essential view of church ministry like this, we’ll then see the rightful place that other ministries can have in the life of the Christian and in the context of the church. We’ll talk about that more in the coming weeks. For today, be encouraged about God’s design for the church, and trust that as we get the church right first, then all other ministries will begin to find their rightful place in a Christian’s life.

Thanks for joining us today on Missions on Point. We trust that you'll find more help and resources on our websites at Propempo.com and missioserve.org. We are so thankful for those who support us, enabling us to produce this podcast. Now to God be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus forever and ever. Amen.