In this last post of the series, it seems appropriate to end where we began: with the importance of the pastor in preventing church splits.

The most natural thing in the world is for a congregation to appreciate and respect its main preaching pastor. It happens without much effort in many cases, as the pastor opens the Word of God to the people of God Sunday after Sunday. That act of teaching is an act of love. And the longer one does it with a congregation–the people and the pastor growing in intimate knowledge of one another–the more the affections grow.

On the whole, I think this is as God intends it. If you can look out onto a people hoping to hear the Word of God fed to them by you, and not grow in fatherly affection for them, something is terribly wrong. Something essential is missing in the heart of the preacher. For after all, preaching is not merely or primarily an intellectual exercise. It is primarily an exercise of the heart… the preacher pouring His into the Word of God, then pouring out into the people, and the people opening theirs to be filled with the glorious riches of God in the preaching moment. If love is missing, the heart is defective.

And so it’s also natural that the primary preacher accrues a certain kind of authority in the eyes of the congregation as well. Loving authority stemming from loving teaching and preaching seems to be the plan of God.

But the human heart is also an idol factory. Without Spirit-filled thinking, men and women may easily begin to “worship” the pastor. No one will use that word to describe their affections and allegiance, but their hearts and actions will be fairly close to “worship.” At the least, there is such a thing as being overly devoted or loyal to a pastor. The problem affected Corinth and it affects many churches today.

If we are to prevent church splits one thing we must do is make sure that the natural affections and authority that accrue to the teaching office is dispersed among the leadership of the church. We must find obvious and subtle, planned and spontaneous ways to attach the allegiance of the people to the church and the leadership as a whole. Four things come to mind. I’m sure there are others and welcome the feedback.

Teaching

One practical thing we can do is make sure that other gifted men in the leadership and the body have an opportunity to exercise their teaching gifts. We certainly should use such men in Sunday school and small group settings. But we should also provide them opportunity in the more public meetings of the church: Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings (if you have them), and mid-week Bible study.

Men don’t have to be seasoned, professional preachers. They should be clear communicators or the meetings won’t be edifying. But taking a “risk” on a younger man or a man with little preaching experience is a perfectly fine thing to do. A couple of churches I know use the Sunday evening service with this purpose in mind.  They often find new teaching gifts in the body and are able to help hone those gifts.

As the congregation grows accustomed to hearing more of their leaders love them through teaching, we help to inoculate the body against one chief cause of church splits: disproportionate attachment to one leader. And as a rule, the more charismatic a leader you are, the more important this sharing of teaching authority becomes.

Comments

If we’re the main preaching/teaching elder, the other way we can spread authority and esteem for the entire body and leadership is to make specific, edifying comments about other leaders in the body.

I don’t mean we need to flatter our leaders. Our words should be true and proportionate to the situation or quality we’re commenting on. And they should be specific enough in detail to model for the congregation both how to give godly encouragement and why they should be thankful for their leadership.

Moreover, our comments to the wider church should always underscore, not undermine, the leadership of the church. Wherever there may be disagreements or discontent among leaders it should be expressed and resolved in meetings with the other leaders. The surest path to wider congregational discontent will be for leaders to act, comment, or react in ways that suggest fraction and division among the leaders. When members stumble on issues that divide the leadership, or issues that the leaders are currently weighing, we should politely and with positive tone invite their continued prayers for the leaders as the discussions continue. We must cultivate a culture in our churches where members “make every effort to maintain unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:1-3), and this culture must begin with and be modeled by the leadership. Our public comments go a long way in spreading authority, supporting that authority, and preventing tensions that lead to division.

Submission

I have served as an elder in two churches prior to receiving the privilege of serving as senior pastor at FBC. Both of those pastors, Peter Rochelle and Mark Dever, were good models of submission to the elders as a whole. They were “first among equals,” but they did not abuse that position and authority. They accepted counsel, they listened, they contributed, and they were longsuffering with those of us who disagreed and in many cases knew less about an issue than they. They were willing, despite better biblical and theological knowledge and greater wisdom from experience, to submit to the direction of the entire group. That was humble submission.

That’s not to say there weren’t times when they were strongly convicted about an issue and would hold the line. There were times of disagreement, sometimes strong disagreement. In those times, the group of elders needed to be humble and to submit to the senior shepherd. We needed to determine more precisely (a) what questions needed to be answered, (b) what decision criteria were necessary, (c) what mutual goals should govern us, and (d) what exact timeline for making a decision was necessary or wise. In those situations, by God’s grace, mutual submission and trusting that all who shepherd have the same goal—the glory of God revealed in His bride, the church—provided much needed unity in the leadership. This can take time to build, but toiling for it is necessary for protecting the church from splits. We must war against our sense of “entitlement” as pastors or elders, and against the conceit that whispers to us that we see more clearly or more learnedly than our brothers who lead with us.  We must  give ourselves to cultivating godly humility that submits.

Leading

Lastly, leaders must lead. Pastors must lead. There is a danger of being overly passive in the face of situations and decisions that require clear thinking and charting a course. In those cases we must lead.

And we can’t be afraid to lead in this dance. There may be 1,000 things we must be sensitive to, but we must resist the paralysis that comes from over-analyzing and tea leaf reading. Leadership is as much an act of faith as prayer. We must trust that God is at work in our leadership of the church, and that He will providentially rule in our prayerful efforts.

When People Leave

And we must not be afraid to lead the church toward a split in order to prevent a split.  This may sound counter-intuitive. After all, the entire series of posts is about preventing splits.

I’m convinced that merely showing up and being yourself will be a “splitting” factor for some people. We can not give in to fear of man and seek to please people. It is required of stewards that they be faithful. And sometimes being faithful requires upsetting some apple carts. You don’t necessarily start out to do so, but in the course of applying God’s Word and pursuing faithful church practice some disgruntlement is bound to happen. When it does, we must keep leading. For some, this will have the feel of “forcing” an ever so gradual “split” of sorts, as some people peel away and leave.

If this is necessary, then hopefully that’s a one-by-one peeling, with people leaving in positive rather than disruptive ways. But if we’re being faithful, we must remember that we’re building deeper foundations that hopefully the church can rest upon for generations to come. We must not let the short-term struggles that arise upset the long-term goal of preserving the unity and growing the entire body into full maturity in Christ.

Earlier this week, Mark Dever over at T4G posted this great quote from David Wells’ Above All Earthly Pow’rs:

This Word of God is the means by which God accomplishes his saving work in his people, and this is a work that no evangelist and no preacher can do. This is why the dearth of serious, sustained biblical preaching in the Church today is a serious matter. When the Church loses the Word of God it loses the very means by which God does his work. In its absence, therefore, a script is being written, however unwittingly, for the Church’s undoing, not in one cataclysmic moment, but in a slow, inexorable slide made up of piece by tiny piece of daily dereliction.

With tremendous economy of words, Wells articulates why it is churches split. They abandon the Word of God.

I don’t necessarily mean the kind of abandonment that rejects the Word altogether. I don’t mean they assault the Word by denying its inspiration and authority or doubting its historicity. I think Wells is describing, and I think church splits occur because churches demonstrate in their practice their belief that the Scripture is not sufficient for faith and conduct.

In Wells words, “a script is being written, however unwittingly, for the Church’s undoing, not in one cataclysmic moment, but in a slow, inexorable slide made up of piece by tiny piece of daily dereliction.” What an apt description of so much of church and individual Christian life.  This “daily dereliction” of the Word of God contributes to the unraveling of the church. It’s a slow Bible burning.

When, where and how does this “daily dereliction” occur?

Preaching

First, Wells points out that it occurs in too much preaching today. Better minds have written better treatments of the problem with preaching today… so I have only one comment on the subject. I make it with fear and trembling knowing that my own inadequacies as a preacher are displayed every Sunday before God, the elect of heaven, and a couple hundred saints and sinners. But here it is: failure to preach God’s Word clearly, fully, urgently and only is treason against God our Father, Christ our Lord, and His bride the church. It’s high treason. By preaching God’s Word “clearly, fully, urgently and only” I don’t mean every sermon is perfect, that every sermon includes everything that could be said about a given text, or that illustrations and analogies are a no-no. I merely mean that if the “Word of God is the means by which God accomplishes his saving work in his people” as Wells puts it, then failure to preach it is to oppose God at the point of His divine rescue of the world with the very means of that rescue. Preaching that fails to center on the Word of God is treasonous.

Counseling

Second, abandonment of the Word of God occurs in counseling. The impulse in the Christian ministry is to approach counseling as “talk therapy.” The tendency is to over-empathize and to under-discipline. I mean “discipline” in its broadest sense. The Word of God is to shape the person’s affections, thoughts, desires, and choices and, thereby, discipline, form or mold the person. When I fail to do this, I’m writing a script for the unraveling of that person’s life and the church’s life… and they stand there “unwittingly” being shaped by the wrong tool. I’m convinced that I miss far too many opportunities to simply open the Bible and apply it to the persons and cases before me. When I do that, I demonstrate my lack of confidence in the sufficiency of the Scripture. I’m not taking up the nouthetic—integrationist debate here. I’m simply saying that even though I think I’m more nouthetic in my attitude… in my practice, I’m can be derelict.

And that’s to the detriment of my church’s unity and the ability to prevent a split. In those closer encounters between pastor and sheep, I have the opportunity to model what it means to bring every thought captive and to not go beyond what is written and to thereby teach that sheep how to do so in her or his own life. The congregation learning to live on the Word should pay dividends when a question arises that threatens to split the church. If habitually and instinctively individuals resort to the Word of God at such times, bringing themselves under its indicatives and imperatives, then I’m a long way toward warding off painful division. And the church is a lot closer to being of one mind… God’s mind.

Decision-making

Third, I think churches often split because they’ve abandoned the Word of God in charting, teaching and communicating, explaining and/or defending future directions for the church. The place where you really need good elders and leaders is in resolving those questions, issues or disputes that have no clear biblical answer and are therefore a matter of Christian liberty or wisdom. It’s easy to chart, communicate and defend a decision when it’s a matter of right or wrong, obedience or disobedience. But when it’s a matter of wisdom… things become a bit trickier. The tendency at times is to insist you’ve felt or received “God’s leading” or a particular “calling” as an explanation. Or, there are knee-jerk, defensive appeals for “submitting to leadership.” Our people see through this. After all, they have “leadings” and “callings,” too. The church develops the habit of resolving disputes by deciding who offers the strongest insistence that “God told me so” or “you need to submit.” In a congregational context this is deadly. It teaches the people that there really is no authority outside of ourselves when it comes to the less clear matters, which in the minds of most people are the most important or at least the most impassioned matters.

Even in cases where the decision rests on wisdom or prudence, we should continue to demonstrate how that decision is wise in light of clearer commands and examples in Scripture. We should rehearse or display for our folks something of our wrestling with and searching of the Scripture in order to arrive at this decision so that they see us submitting to God’s Word in the unclear or tough times. We do this with the hopes that they will learn to habitually do the same in cases that threaten a church split.

Pastor’s Personal Life

Fourth, and finally, the centrality of the Word of God must be demonstrated in the pastor’s own personal life. This is almost axiomatic. But as a different Wells put it: “we’ve reached the point where the first duty of intelligent man is to restate the obvious.” When I survey the lives of televangelists and many of the popular authors some Christians enjoy and give ear to, I’m more than a little afraid about what they are imbibing. Today, to be a “successful pastor” means imaging forth upper crust attitudes, ambitions and achievements. The Word of God is not only not central to those lives, but it’s not even in the picture except to justify worldly desires.

The Word must surely be central to our ministrations, but it must also be central to our personal devotion and choices. Pastors need to model this, even as we’re learning to practice it in the church. I’m afraid that sometimes the reason I’m not helping people bring every thought captive is because my every thought isn’t captive. If I’m not sufficiently arrested with the glories and beauties of the Savior revealed in His Word then I won’t instinctively and habitually point others there. And that works against one of my major objectives… preventing a church split.

This week, I’m re-posting a series of thoughts on preventing church splits. Part one introduces the subject.

As a boy, I loved reading the Encyclopedia Brown mystery novels. It was engaging and stimulating stuff. Sherlock Holmes for us young shorties.

I still love a great mystery novel or suspense thriller. Mystery creates much of the wonder of life. And because it leaves us in wonder, a kind of admiring awe, mystery creates a godly humility.

Christianity is a mystery from start to finish. Its truths stagger the mind and refresh the soul… One God in three Persons, creation ex nihilo, Perfect Infinity squeezed into the finiteness of a virgin’s womb, sinless perfection, substitution and propitiation, simultaneously just and sinner, resurrection, new birth, and I could go on. These are grand, towering, staggering, “biggie-sized” truths. They are mysterious in the best sense of the word.

But there is at least one other mystery in Christianity. In fact, the Bible itself uses the term “mystery” to describe it. There is the mystery of the church (Eph. 3). The church is the revelation of a mystery hidden in ages past but now revealed by the Spirit of God to His holy apostles and prophets. That mystery is that there is one people of God—Jew and Gentile in one body, heirs together, and partakers together of the promise—and that the intent of God, His eternal purpose, is that the church should reveal His wisdom to heavenly powers (3:10, 11) and be the repository of His glory along with Christ (3:21).

Take that in for a moment….

That makes this next mystery all the more puzzling. It is mysterious to me that the centrality of the church is so little preached today. What explains its absence from the vast majority of sermons, Bible studies, and Sunday school classes? How did it just vanish from the thinking of Christians? It’s a detective mystery worthy of Encyclopedia Brown. And it’s a problem that we must fix if we are to ever see our people desire life with all God’s people above their own self-interests and affinity groups.

To prevent church splits, we must regain the centrality of the local church in our preaching and practice. We must lay heavy biblical emphasis on the centrality of the people of God throughout redemptive history and in contemporary Christian life. We must preach and emphasize the fact that the church is central to God’s affections, self-identification, and eternal plan. It must, therefore, be central to ours.

The Church: The Center of God’s Affections

The Scripture tells us that earthly marriage is a picture (dim and imperfect, surely) of Christ’s love for the church… again called a “mystery” (Eph. 5:25-32). The church is his bride, which He is purifying and preparing for the consummation. He gave himself for her and is her Savior. In other words, the church is the center of the Savior’s affections. Our preaching must make this plain, and not just from the obvious places like Eph. 5. We must underscore this in all of Scripture which is the story of God creating for himself a people upon whom He sovereignly places His love.

As a preacher, I must work against the strong currents of individualism that reads all of Scripture as a “personal love letter” from Jesus to each individual. As an evangelist, I have to undermine the popular sentiment that says “God has a plan for your (read individual) life” and “you need a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” Well… God does have a plan for His people and it the center of it is involvement in His church, His body, His royal nation. The emphasis almost everywhere is on plural nouns, not first person singulars. It is vitally important that we make it clear that discipleship by definition includes following Christ in the company of His people, in fact, loving His people.

The Church: Central to Jesus’ Self-Identity

We must also preach and make clear that Christ Jesus strongly identifies with the church. Recall that arresting question He asks Saul, “Why are you persecuting me?” Paul’s imprisonment and abuse of Christians was actually done to Christ. All of the body of Christ imagery says nothing if it doesn’t mean that Christ identifies with His people. And throughout the biblical record, the Lord identifies with His chosen, calling them by His name, protecting and providing for them, dwelling in their midst.

We have to teach and preach this so that our people will see the rightness of identifying with Him. Though the Lord saves us individually, Christ identifies fundamentally with the church. And our identification with Him is clearest when we too associate with the church. All of the ordinances (baptism and the Lord’s supper) the Lord left us are designed to make this allegiance clear. They say more than this, but not less than this: that we identify with Jesus by identifying with His body, the same body that He identifies with. We must help our folks understand this so that their allegiance to the Lord is expressed in large measure through their allegiance to the church—not the pastor, not the music, not particular church programs, or conveniences like service times. Their allegiance must be raised to the level of Christ, which is an allegiance to the entire people of God.

The Church: Central to God’s Plan of Redemption

We must, finally, help our people see that the church is the center of God’s redeeming and self-glorifying plan in heaven and on earth. That’s what we gather from Eph. 1:10, 22-23; 2:14-22; 3:9-11, 20-21. It’s through the church that the evangelism of the world is carried out. The church reveals God’s wisdom and glory. The church proclaims the defeat of the “principalities and powers in the heavenly places.” Through the church, the Lord will gather all things under His feet.

Our people must know that God has not plan of redemption and no plan for spiritual edification and maturity outside the church. They must know that participation in church is about far more than their individual needs. Participation in the church is essential to advancing the plans of God to bring to himself glory, to redeem humanity, and to bring all things to completion. And they must be taught to prize all of that above their individual selves. We must teach them that if it’s God’s glory they wish to pursue, then one of the easiest things they can do is to join, commit to, and love a local church—which is God’s eternal design for them anyway.

I suspect that if our people are immersed in these truths week to week, taught to read the Scripture with at least one corporate lense, and encouraged to live out the faith with “one another,” we will begin the process of inoculating our churches against the plague of church splits. This I take to be my objective as a pastor.

Next time, Lord willing, we’ll consider the importance of relationships in protecting the church from splits.