Out of the kindness of our church and her elders, Mary Lee and I are away on a two-week study leave for me to work on completing a book tentatively titled, How To Choose a Church: Lessons from the Apostolic Church in Jerusalem. Dear Mary Lee has suggested I post a short excerpt and ask for your prayers for the completion of the work, and that it would serve the Church well. So would you please pray for this work?
Maybe it would be good to mention that most of the posts, but particularly the last two--on divorce and remarriage, and why David and I still call ourselves "evangelicals"--were written some time ago and, since then, have been awaiting posting.
Here's the preface...
PREFACE
For about fifteen years, now, Mary Lee and I have ministered in a university community where a large part of our congregation moves each summer. Once or twice, we’ve lost as many as a quarter of our members in a year, most of them leaving shortly after commencement for graduate school or a job in a new location. So we have a steady stream of members asking us, “Do you know a good church in Nashville,” or “Do you have any recommendations for how to choose a church?”
Sometimes we can recommend a church. More commonly, though, one of our pastors meets with the member, gives him a few contacts in his new city, and makes a couple suggestions on how to choose a new church home. Like many of the questions we answer over and over again, we began to wonder whether there was a helpful book we could recommend? Nothing too long. Just something to provide a start in the right direction.
For years, I was in the habit of saying the best question to ask of a church’s elders or pastor was whether they practiced church discipline. There are so many factors in making the choice of a church home that, rather than listing them all, I thought this would be a silver bullet, able to pierce to the heart of the matter, quickly weeding out those congregations that didn’t fear God and were unconcerned about holiness.
Hearing back from our members the responses they got to that question, though, it became apparent there were few churches that would admit to not practicing church discipline. Typically, the elder or pastor would trot out a case of discipline—sometimes many years earlier—that had involved a notorious sinner. He’d recount how they’d excommunicated the man. Then he’d look at our former member and ask if he had any other questions?
Trouble was, the cases used as illustrative of each church’s commitment to discipline almost always involved a crime or some serious sexual sin; never greed, gossip, or divisiveness—things that were more a matter of subjective judgment than objective fact. Also, the examples the pastor or elder gave always involved the formal disciplines of public censure or excommunication. They would never speak of the normal discipline a healthy church carries on week in, week out—from the pulpit through correction and rebuke, as a part of conversations before or after Sunday school classes, or during the fellowship of a weekly home fellowship group.
This is to say that everyone thought of discipline only in terms of the formal response of a church to sin that had become so notorious that the shame of not dealing with it had become painful enough for the church’s elders (or deacons) that their commitment not to cast the first stone was finally overcome by their stronger commitment to avoid the scorn of their congregation.
Maybe you’ll understand my saying that this is a very limited understanding of the discipline of the Apostolic church as its inner community life is recorded for us in the New Testament. But more on this later.
As the years went by, it became clear we’d have to come up with a few more suggestions of questions to ask in choosing a church. This book is the result.
Although our church is reformed in its doctrinal commitments, with the Westminster Standards part of our Constitution, I’m hopeful this book won’t be too offensive to brothers who aren’t reformed. Rather, I hope what I’ve written is sufficiently anchored in the record Scripture provides us of the Apostolic church that a broad cross-section of evangelical or Bible-believing Christians will find it helpful. Because finally, it has not been my purpose to convince readers of the correctness of my own personal preferences regarding this or that aspect of church life, but to show what Scripture commands concerning the worship and fellowship of the Household of Faith, the Church of the Living God, the Pillar and Foundation of the Truth, the precious Bride of Christ.
May the Holy Spirit use this little work to help you find a church where you and your loved ones may grow into maturity in Jesus Christ, kept safe for the great Marriage Feast of the Lamb.
