All right, Bible Warfare, How to Defend
Your Faith. This is lesson number 10 in the series. We're going to talk about
church organization tonight. Last week we reviewed the major
religions in the world and we examined their beliefs and teachings in, kind of,
a survey fashion concerning salvation or heaven or paradise or the hereafter. And
one of the things that I remarked was that every religion has some teaching
concerning the afterlife. Most people who seek out religion are usually seeking
out that religion for what it offers them concerning their, quote, salvation.
And we noted some important points when comparing this area of belief among
the 12 major organized religions and philosophies of the world. There are more
than twelve religions, but most of them can fit into the, underneath one
of the major ones. So there are many offshoots of Hinduism, many different
types of Buddhism, but the major organized ones number
twelve. So a couple of things that we learned, just to kind of review a bit.
Eleven of the twelve religious systems relied on law-based or works-oriented
methods of achieving salvation or paradise or ultimate peace, whatever
you want to call it. That was a very interesting idea. Eleven of the twelve
used law-based things. In other words, you've got to do something,
you've got to try. In Hinduism you keep coming back, and why are you
coming back? In order to improve. You've got to improve and try and get better
until you earn your way into paradise. We also said that Christianity was the
only religion where the burden for man's salvation rested with God, and was
offered freely to man on a basis of faith. Christianity, the
philosophy of our religion, our theology, concerning
salvation is unique among all the religions in the world.
I mean, they have different ways that they dress and they have different
customs and they have different ways to worship and they describe their gods in
different ways and all of that business, but when it all comes down to it, when it
comes down to the important part of, okay, what happens after death or what is the status of paradise, for all the other religions you have to
work your way in. Christianity is unique in that way, God offers freely to man
his/her salvation based on belief, based on faith. I believe that God has given
this to me through Christ. Now of course, I express my faith through repentance,
through baptism, through faithfulness, but nevertheless
God is the One that has the burden of paying the moral debt for my
sins. I don't make restitution for my sins. One of
the most misunderstood ideas about Christianity is that somehow we have to
make some kind of restitution for the bad and stupid things that we have done.
We need to understand the crux, the core of Christianity teaches us that
Jesus Christ on the cross makes 100 percent of the restitution necessary for
all the bad and horrible things that we may have done in our life. He makes
restitution for that. We do not make restitution.
We can't. That's the point. We can't do it. We can't offer to God what is necessary
to make restitution for the sins that we have committed. In other religions you
have to. The various spiritual exercises and discipline and asceticism and all
that business, that all counts as points, but not in Christianity. And then
another point, when compared, the nature of salvation in the Christian religion
is far superior in value and experience than any of the
others. I said if you only had one thing to study or discuss with someone
concerning the difference between Christianity and another
thing, and if you get to choose, choose salvation, choose to discuss the quality
of salvation, the experience of salvation that is offered by Christianity in
comparison to the experience of salvation offered by some other religion,
and how you get there. And when you compare these two things it becomes very
obvious that Christianity is superior. And once a person knows the difference,
they would not choose any other method or reward than the one that Jesus offers
through His cross, okay. So those are some of the things we talked about last
week, in case you weren't here. We've discussed it at length many questions
about church life and of course salvation, which we were talking about
last week and this evening. We're now going to move on to some questions that
were asked by fewer people and cover a wider range of topics. For example, what
is meant by congregational autonomy? We're always talking about
congregational autonomy. Well, where does that come from? I believe that
part of this question has to do with why we don't have a headquarters or regional
supervisors. I've been asked that. People want to know about the
church. Where's your headquarters? You seem facetious if you
say, well, our headquarters is in heaven. Oh yeah, smarty aleck. No
really, our headquarters is in heaven. Yes, but where is the
Oklahoma headquarters for all the churches? There is no headquarters
anywhere. And people find that hard to believe. Really? Well, how do you do
things if you've got no regional supervision or anything like
that? No, we don't have that. So we're now going to move on to questions that
are asked concerning this particular topic. I believe that part of
this question, again, has to do with the confusion that people have about how the church is organized. Many
churches or, quote, denominations are organized based on different
models. So let's start there. For example, the Roman Catholic church
follows the empirical Roman model of government. I should have put a slide up
there, showing the Roman model of government. You have the Emperor, you
have the Senate, you have the - and it just goes down. all the way
down. And if you put next to that the organizational model for the Catholic
Church, it's exactly the same. The way that power is broken down and
responsibilities, same thing. There is a supreme leader, the Pope, just like in the
Roman Empire there was a supreme leader, the Emperor, you see. There is a
college of advisers in the Catholic church, called Cardinals. Roman Empire, the
Senators. There were regional leaders, governors in the Roman
system. Well, there are regional leaders in Roman Catholicism, they're called arch
bishops. They oversee various territories, which are each led by lesser ranking
clerics that are called bishops, who are responsible for several churches. And
then the local priest is responsible for the local church. And so,
the Roman Catholic church model is really based on the Roman empirical
model. The Protestant, many Protestant denominations, they did away with the
papal head. In other words, they got rid of the idea of the Pope in their church
organization, but they maintained the same top-down ranking system. They simply
gave different names to the positions and they gave more power to the regional
groups of leaders, who serve as a kind of religious court. Synods,
for example, in the Presbyterian church. Same idea though.
There's leadership at the top, except they don't have one
single leader, they have, they break it down in that fashion, in
different regions. The evangelical churches, they have a modified system
based more on the American political system than the old European classical
or ecclesiastic model. If you know anything about evangelical churches, like Southern Baptists, they have conventions, they have regional groups
that vie for votes, they send delegates to the conventions that have a vote. And
so, when a piece of doctrine or something, some way to do
something in the church comes up, well, at the convention the
delegates they vote yes or no, up or down. Is this what we're going to do?
That's how they decide things, very American. They sit on boards or councils.
There's competition as to who will be selected as a delegate to go to the
regional conference and which one of these is going to sit on a board. How do you think that in certain denominations openly gay
practicing homosexuals became full-time ministers, even bishops? How do
you think that happened? It was decided upon in a convention, and that
convention was packed with liberal thinking delegates. And when that vote came up, the
ones who said, well, wait a minute, in the Bible it says that this is an
abomination, they were in the minority. They got voted down.
That's how you get there. The people who voted in favor of a thing
like that, their argument was, well, Paul, the cultural argument, Paul was a product of his times. In those days
homosexuality was looked down upon, but today we're so much more
enlightened, we're so much more advanced. We've got to let go those things,
that argument won the day. Sectarian groups: Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses,
Seventh-Day Adventists, they have a more patriarchal approach, where a relative or hand-picked successor to the original founder wields great influence and great power. These leaders have veto power over the various church and
regional leaders and agendas. There's some things in the local congregations
of Jehovah Witnesses that they have to kind of run up the chain of
command, that goes all the way to the top leader, in order to be
approved. So they have a patriarchal system. Now a few weeks ago I explained
that what made us different from all other Christian groups or churches
was twofold, two things that make us different. Number one, we believe that the
entire Bible is inspired and therefore the Bible is our authoritative guide in
matters of morals, spiritual things, religion. The Bible is what guides
us from beginning to end. We believe it's inspired. You have people in
other religious groups that say, well, we believe the Bible is inspired, yes they
say that, but if you scratch the surface a little bit and you dig down,
they don't always believe that the entire Bible is inspired. Yeah,
everything's inspired, except a couple of chapters in Romans. I had
a fellow from the United Kingdom write to me, he's a member of the church,
one of the congregation's there. And I believe he's in, I believe he's in England. And he's a Bible Talk guy.
He discovered Bible Talk and he was baptized and he started going to church
there a couple years ago, and he wrote me back and he feels that
perhaps the church that he's with now, he doesn't understand why they do certain
things. And he said to me, our minister doesn't believe that Romans 9, 10, and 11, that's just Paul ruminating, he's just talking out loud. That's not really an inspired thing. That's not
an inspired thing. Well, wow, Romans 9, 10, and 11 is where Paul is
explaining why the Jews stumbled and didn't accept Jesus as the Messiah. I
don't know about you, but to me that's pretty important, why the Jewish nation
rejected its own Messiah. That's a lot more than just ruminations.
That's extremely important. He didn't mention any other things, but he wasn't sure. And what I said to him, I said, well it's always dangerous,
especially when the leaders in the church, those who are charged
with teaching the church, when the leaders in the church begin skipping
through the Bible and saying, yeah, now this isn't inspired, oh this is
inspired. This is important and this is not important. When human
teachers are taking on that kind of responsibility, that's not a good road to
go down. So in the churches of Christ, we believe in the complete
inspiration of the Bible. Does that mean we can explain everything?
No. How does God create something from nothing? Can you explain that to
me metaphysically, biologically physiologically? Can you
explain that? Mathematically, can you make me an
equation that'll equal nothing, there's nothing and then there's
something. I can't understand that. How does the Spirit of God dwell
inside of my body? Can you explain that to me, exactly how that
happens? No. Does that mean that it's not true? Well, no. I mean to modern man who
thinks that anything he cannot explain must not be true or valid, but there are
many things. The Bible even says, "We know "by faith." I think in the book of Hebrews,
we know by faith that God created what, God created. He took from nothing.
How do we know that? Well, we know by faith. Were we there on the day of
creation? Well no. Well, how do we accept it? We accept it by faith. So
the point I'm trying to make here is just because we cannot explain it
logically at times, doesn't mean it's not true, and doesn't mean that we have to
kind of eject that from the Bible. There are many things we couldn't explain, but
with time began to understand. I think this is an old apologetic argument. The Hittites, the Bible mentions a
tribe of people called the Hittites and for many, many years archeologists
and historians said there is no archaeological record of a group of
people that lived in the Holy Land called the Hittites, and it was the
major argument of atheists against the inspiration of the Bible.
I mean, if it's wrong on the Hittites, it might be wrong about other things in it.
And it was a major sledgehammer that they kept smashing Christians with.
There are no Hittites. You see what I'm saying. And it was one of those things
that you accepted by faith, because you didn't have the physical evidence to
demonstrate that they existed until, I think, it was 1940 something
or other, and whoops, whoops, archaeologists stumble across - as they
usually do - they're digging around, whoops, they stumble across a city, a village,
Hittites, writing, references, history, objects. And guess what? All of it fits
with what the Bible said, the Old Testament said about the Hittites. Now no archaeologists and no ancient historian
doubts the existence of - I mean they're extinct now, but no one doubts that they
existed, because now there's proof. But long before the proof came along, the
Bible was talking about these people. As a matter of fact, most archaeologists use
the Bible in order to search for these things, because it is the best record, the best piece of information in order to find these
ancient places. Anyways, I'm digressing a little bit. The thing that people need to
know about us is, we believe the Bible is completely inspired. And then the second
thing, we believe that the Bible teaches that we should consciously be trying to
establish and operate the church as closely as possible to the teachings, the
commands, and the guidelines given to us in the New Testament. Someone will say, why should we do that? Because this is what the New Testament teaches us
concerning these matters. What does the New Testament teach concerning the church?
The New Testament teaches us that we should organize it and make it function
according to the rules and information contained in the New Testament. That's
what it teaches. We call this New Testament Christianity. Pretty handy
isn't it? What kind of Christian are you? I'm a New Testament Christian. Well, you
go to the church of Christ. What kind of church is that? Answer, that's a New
Testament church. That is the correct answer. Not - they say to you, so what kind
of church is that? And you say, well yeah, we don't use instruments. No. That's not a good answer; or we baptize people, full immersion. That's not - yeah, we
do that. Yes, we do that, but that's not the answer to that question: what kind of
church is that? You go to the Choctaw - what kind of church is that?
That's a New Testament church. Yeah, the beauty of that answer is it
invites another question. And the question that it invites is, New
Testament church, what kind of church is that? The answer to that is, it's a church that follows the New Testament in the way
it's organized and the way it functions. And usually when you say that,
they go, oh, that makes sense. Just those two points. If you could just
get those two points across when you're talking to somebody about church, it's
amazing what you've established, because after those two points are made, every
other question they ask you is going to be answered in the same way.
Well, what about such-and-such? Well, okay, the New Testament says... So our
church is a New Testament church, because we follow this principle, the
principle of following the New Testament instructions for how the church
should be organized and function. Now, historically, the effort to use strictly
the New Testament organization and teaching and practice has simply been
referred to as restorationism. We are part of the restoration movement,
historically. Are we part of the reformation movement? No, we're not part
of that movement. We're part of the restoration movement: to restore the
organization and the function of the church as it was in apostolic times. We
are trying to duplicate this first century model in the 21st century, that's
what we're doing. If you want, like, the big picture. I mean, we have the little
picture, right: Wednesday night church, groceries for poor people,
supporting missionaries, preaching. If you get down in the weeds about what we're doing,
but if you stand back and ask, what is it all about?
What are you people trying to do as a group? As a group, what we're trying to do,
is to restore the operation and function of the church as it was in the
first century. Obviously they didn't have electric lights, they didn't have
microphones or TVs, but those things are not important. The New Testament
doesn't talk about that in any way. The New Testament says we should go out
and preach Jesus and baptize repentant believers. Now how we go: by car, by boat,
by plane; how we preach: through TV, radio, video, whatever, there's no
instruction on that. The instruction is simply, go, preach Christ, immerse in
water those who repent and believe. That hasn't changed in 21 centuries.
That's the same thing, okay. So with this mindset and approach, when
the question arises, how are we going to organize the church on a local and on an
international level? Well, we go to the New Testament to see what instructions
we have there about this topic. We've got instructions about how to
baptize somebody: by immersion in water. Well, we also have instructions on how do
we organize the church and how should it function. We have this instruction in the
New Testament. And when we review the New Testament about church organization,
there are many teachings and examples concerning ministry, the qualification of
leaders in the church, and the makeup and organization of the New Testament
church. So according to the New Testament, a Christian church was made up of the
following groups: you had baptized believers, you're a member of the church
if you believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, you repent of your sins and
you are immersed by the authority of, or in the name of the Father, Son, and the
Holy Spirit. If you have done that, you have been added to the spiritual body of
the church, Acts chapter two, verse 47. Now in the church there are several roles
or offices of leadership in this organization: Ephesians 4:11, First
Timothy 3, Acts 20, all these passages. For example, you have Apostles. Who
were the Apostles? They were the messengers of Christ,
specifically the 12 in the upper room at Pentecost, and Paul the Apostle,
later called to preach to the gentiles, that's one group that was in
the New Testament church. The Apostles were men who witnessed the baptism of
Jesus, His ministry, they witnessed His death, they witnessed His resurrection
and His ascension. That's what made them special. The term apostle means somebody
who is sent, like an ambassador is sent with a certain authority. Well, they are
sent to proclaim. They were sent to proclaim what they had witnessed.
Another group that was part of the church: prophets, those who spoke the word
directly given to them by God. Am I a prophet today? Yes, I am, by virtue of
the fact of what I'm doing, except I did not come by my ministry miraculously, as
did the prophets in the first century. My ministry comes to me through just
old-fashioned study, reading, study, research, writing, but it's the same
ministry in the end. In the end I'm communicating the meaning of God's Word,
the difference was in the first century the prophets had no access to New
Testament material yet. It hadn't been written. They spoke directly from God, just like the prophets in the Old Testament did, okay. They were like walking Bibles. Another
group: elders, pastors, bishops. Different words. I think we had a class on this. Elders or presbyters, same word describing the same person, referring to
that person's maturity or age. You could call that person a pastor or a
shepherd, okay, which referred to the ministry of that individual, as a
shepherd a care giver. And then bishop or overseer. Again, different words
describing not the age of that individual, not the task
of that individual, but the authority of that individual. That individual is given authority by God through the church and
the Word of God, to oversee, to lead, if you wish. All right, so different terms
that refer to the same person: an older or experienced Christian man, who is a
spiritual leader and mentor in the congregation, and serve mainly as
teachers. And then you have, evangelists. We call them preachers. We call them
ministers. Same thing, different terms referring to one who ministered the Word
of God to the church and proclaim the gospel to the lost. For example, I am
ministering the Word to the church this evening, okay. On Bible Talk.tv,
I am proclaiming the gospel to the world. And yet, I'm using - where as Paul
had to walk and go from city to city, thankfully with modern technology,
Hal and I are able to go from city to city anywhere in the world and proclaim
the gospel to individuals, but it's the same task, we're just using different
technology today. Evangelists are also responsible for planting new churches,
they're responsible for organizing the church along the lines of the New
Testament pattern, okay. That's a task of the evangelists. Another group: deacons,
men who minister to the various needs of church members. So we need to understand
elders had a ministry of leadership, evangelists have a ministry
of the Word, and deacons have a ministry of service. Each ministry
given to each man by God through the church according to God's Word. We also
have teachers. Teachers, those qualified and trained to
teach the Word. And then of course, there are the saints. The saints are baptized
believers. Now, every member of Christ's body is a saint.
The term saint simply means one who is separated. So you're a saint if you are
separated from the world. How? Through repentance and baptism. You're separated
from the world through repentance and baptism, and become part of the body of
Christ. And your position in the body of Christ is as a saint. So every single
person in the body of Christ or in the church is a saint;
however, some saints, because of their skills or gifts or training or
experience, some saints are appointed to serve in some particular role or other.
So all the saints serve Christ in one way or another, but some of those saints
are given special responsibilities within the congregation: elders, deacons, evangelists. You see what I'm saying? So everybody is responsible for teaching other people as they can, but teachers
are given the responsibility to teach the entire congregation. See what I'm
saying? Alright, so once the New Testament was completed, a couple of centuries it took for, not only it to be completed and
circulated and then brought together into one text, took a while, but once the
New Testament was completed, the work of the Apostles and the prophets was then
being done by the Word itself. For example, it says, "All scripture is
inspired by God and profitable for "teaching, reproof, correction, training, for
righteousness." Well, in the beginning, the Apostles did that and the prophets did
that. Why? Because they miraculously had the Word of God within them. And they
taught with authority because they were teaching through the power of the
Holy Spirit. They didn't have the record yet, God was putting the
record on their hearts and they were recording it, okay. Today we still have
the same roles in the church, except that the Apostles and the prophet whose work
was complete in the first century, their work is now done through the Bible.
So the Apostles were the witnesses of the resurrection of Jesus and they went
about making a witness of that. Today they're gone, right. And what
made them special is no one else was present at the baptism and resurrection
of Jesus, just these twelve. Well, with Paul, 13. And they were proclaiming
what they saw. Well, they recorded their witness and today the work of
proclaiming a witness of the resurrection is now done through the
Word of God. The work of the prophets, who served the church by educating the
church what was the mind of God at the beginning. Their work is no longer
necessary. We don't have people who have the, quote, gift of prophecy: being able to
know the future or predict the future or to know through the Holy Spirit what
God is teaching. Well, today we have everything contained in this book here,
concerning what God wants to teach the church. So the role of the prophet is no
longer, the miraculous prophet, we don't need him or her anymore.
Today we have all of the mind of God contained in the Bible, in the Old
Testament, in the New Testament. And so, the task of the apostle and the prophet
is now completed by the Word of God. So today, again, all the same roles, except
the Bible provides the witness and the message of Christ. Now there's a reason
why I've gone over all of these roles, and I think you're all familiar, I'm preaching to the choir here. I think you're all familiar with the
roles, but there's a reason that I've been careful to explain each of these roles. If we understand that these are the
roles authorised by the New Testament, then it means that any other position or
office or authority in the church, aside from these roles, are merely inventions
of human beings. They're man-made offices, man-made roles without the blessing, the
authority, or any basis in the New Testament. So a man can call himself the
Archbishop of Chicago or whatever, responsible for several other, or
Archbishop of Illinois, responsible for several cities and several
bishops. And he may live in a mansion, many do, and have a chauffeur and live like a high-flying politician, and have all that authority,
but all that authority that he wields in that particular group has not been given
to him by God, has not been sanctioned by the New Testament. So if someone says, how's
your church different from mine? Well, it's different in that we don't have
any roles in the church that are not authorized by the New Testament. That's
why we don't have Cardinals, we don't have - Do we have bishops? Oh yeah, we
have bishops. Do you have Cardinals? No. Where do you see Cardinal in here? You
don't see that. How about arch bishops? Because I don't see archbishop. Deacons?
Oh yeah, we have deacons. Why? Because we have instructions here to elect and
select deacons and put them to work. Another thing that is quite remarkable
when studying this question is what you do not see in the New Testament
concerning church organization. You do not see any of the modern systems of
church hierarchy that exists in these other groups that I mentioned before.
In the New Testament church, each congregation was autonomous and led by
its own local leaders. This is how we are extremely different than others. There
are very few church groups, there's a church group, I think out of England,
called Congregationalist churches and that's one of their
features, they're autonomous, like we are. Oh yes, different churches
ask for advice and received help from the Apostles back in the day,
from the Apostles in Jerusalem, but this was because they did not yet possess the
entire New Testament record. And the Apostles, they were the source
of scriptural authority back then, but today we have the scriptural
authority right here, and we have plenty of people in the church that know it and
can study it in order to resolve issues and problems and make decisions
according to what the Bible says. We also notice that every mention of
congregational leadership in the Bible, for example, in Acts 20 or Philippians
chapter one, verse one, every time Paul or someone refers to the leaders in a
congregation, they always refer to a group of elders or bishops or overseers,
there's always more than one. There's never a spot in the New Testament where
they refer to only one who is the pastor of a single congregation, it's always to
the elders. Paul, it says Paul called to himself the elders from
Ephesus. There were more than one. There's always more than one, it was a collegiate
type of leadership. And so, this leads us to the conclusion - today we ask
ourselves, so how many elders should we have in our congregation? Let's say we're
organizing a brand-new congregation. How many elders should we have? Well,
according to the New Testament you need more than one, you need at least two.
You can have 10 if you want. I know in Edmond, how many do they have? Forty?
I mean, but they've got 2,000 people. Yeah, they need a lot of elders there. Here, we
don't have that many, but we still have a good number of elders who lead, okay.
So when we put the pieces together concerning congregational organization,
this is the picture that emerges, not from the church of Christ. This is the
picture that emerges from the New Testament. First, churches met mainly in
homes or in cluster of homes in each city, and sometimes they
used public places, when these places were available. We
read about that in Acts chapter 19, verse nine, and throughout the book of Romans.
Another feature: each congregation had a number of leaders depending on the size
and the maturity of their congregation. These leaders included elders and
teachers and deacons, who had specific responsibilities for different areas
of church life. As the Apostles died off, the recorded word replaced the
need for prophets, and there were more evangelists. And so, the preachers
remained longer with individual congregations and served as missionaries
to other nations. At the beginning, there weren't enough preachers to go
around. So preachers served several congregations - teaching and encouraging,
much like Geoffrey Karima. Geoffrey Karima in Kenya, he serves maybe five
to eight different congregations. He's a circuit preacher. And in his home town
that's where the school of theology is, and that's where they train future
preachers. And the reason for the training is he wants to provide
preachers for all these churches that he's servicing. Okay, well that's pretty
much how it was at the beginning, there weren't enough preachers to take care of
all the congregations. That's why Paul would go and plant a church and then
maybe two years later would come back to that church to see how they were doing.
And so, we do the same thing today, in a very same
way. Another point, these autonomous or this autonomous congregational-style
remained in place until it was replaced, if you wish, by the Catholic
model, or the empirical model, gradually, in the second, third,
fourth century. There we go. So if we want to practice New Testament Christianity,
we need to renew the model of autonomous congregations with local leaders all
held together by a common belief and commitment to follow God's pattern in
the New Testament for church structure and organization. Churches of Christ,
there may be, what, 20, 25,000 congregations of the churches
of Christ in the world. We can't count them, because so many of them are house
churches. So many of them are beginning churches, because we don't have
a superstructure with a Pope at that top, and regional
leaders counting heads. We can't count how many there are, but those
congregations who have matured to the point where they have a property where
they meet at, and they put out some information, they have a local
preacher that serves, those congregations that have grown to
that point, there's thousands, tens of thousands of them all over the
world. You can't go anywhere where you cannot find a church of Christ. Well,
certainly not in the United States. As a matter of fact, in the United States,
they show different statistics for different denominational groups,
let's put it that way, and we're not the largest by far, we're larger than the Jehovah Witnesses, let's put it that way, but one
category where we excel, all right, is that we're spread out more evenly than
any other group. In other words, if you added up all the counties in all of the
United States, churches of Christ have congregations in more counties than any
other religious group in the United States. Why is that? Because most of the churches of Christ are about 100 to 150 people, and serve a very tight community. I've said this before, and of course,
Edmond church, Memorial church, they're hybrids, they're the exception,
they're the point zero, zero, one percent of churches of Christ, the
churches that have two thousand, three thousand members, a wonderful thing. Big
churches can do big things, but they're the exception to the rule.
Most churches of Christ are like us, One hundred and fifty. And then get to a kind of a medium-sized like us,
maybe three or four hundred people. That's about the size of the church of
Christ. That's a manageable size. Usually when you get much bigger than
that, you have to change the way that you do church. And a good
position is, once you start getting very big, usually the decision is, what do we
do? Do we just make a bigger place where people can sit and listen to the sermon?
Or do we take our resources, our human resources and our physical resources and
maybe check around to see where is there no church. One of the churches that
supports Bible Talk is the Gold Hill Road church of Christ in South
Carolina. And I really admire that congregation. They're about our
size. They're about our size, same attendance, but in the last eight years, they've planted two new churches,
because they get so full and instead of moving and building some big auditorium to seat the thousand people, what they do
is they get volunteers and they'll pick maybe 75 to 100 people and
that group will then form another congregation. They'll look around to see
where there's no church, where there's no congregation, and they go and buy the
land, build the building, and the hundred people go in and boom they're ready to
go right away. And how do they know what to do? They have the blueprint. And the
elders at the Gold Hill Road church, they're not, they don't over
see that other church. That other church is an autonomous church. But they
know what to do. Why? They follow the same pattern that Gold Hill Road. And one of
the things, one of the arguments against that then, I was talking to the
preacher there, he says, well, people are usually afraid. They think, man if we're 400, if we didn't take 75 to 100 people, man that's a big hole. We're going to, our budget is going to go down, and the church is
going to shrink. and every time they do this, that hole fills up in three months. The
Lord provides in some way, but that hole just fills up. And I seem to think it's
because all of a sudden there are a lot of missing parts. And people who normally
don't do much, they step up to the plate, because the guy who is a real go-getter and he decided to go with his family to the new church to get it
started, well all the stuff he was doing, nobody's doing anymore, and so somebody
who's been kind of sitting back and watching, all of a sudden realizes, you
know what? I think maybe it's time I got up and I got a chance to serve, that I
didn't have before. So just a little insight as to the churches of Christ
and our New Testament pattern for organization and function. That's it.
Thank you very much for your attention. I appreciate it.
