The Soul of a Church
If it is a blunder for a minister to ignore the church, then it is more severe to slight the church by mishandling it. Some ministers shape the church as though it were a lump of clay. They do not give it credit for having a soul. They begin at once to reorganize it. They set out before breakfast to reshape it to their will. Nothing about it suits them. The modern minister does not know that the church has a disposition and character of its own, that its personality is distinct and solid. He doesn't understand that the church is an organism with sacred traditions. Its customs are hallowed and must be respected.
Blessed is the pastor who realizes that he is only a sojourner as all his fathers were. He stands in the long line of succession. Other men have toiled. Now he is entering into their labors. The emerging pastor shouldn't start as though the world was just beginning. The church was there before he was born. It will be after he is dead. He is not a clerical Robinson Crusoe on a desert island. The beach is covered with the footprints of giants in the faith. If he is a man of sense, he will take note of them. He should observe their direction and follow, ignoring the lone track moving away from the church—this is the modern man's bumbling idiocy.
The first task of the emerging pastor is to take notice of his church. Study it. Strive to understand it. Be sympathetic of it. Plan for it. Make yourself useful for its future. Make yourself a part of it by taking the journey with them. In this way, you will come to love it, and this is the heart of an emerging pastor.
Young pastors are often rich in notes taken from theological class work or from ideas rummaging around in the fog of early theological development. This is a blunder. Pastors should work from the church toward their notebooks. The church determines the character of the pulpit's instruction and the sequence of it. The church is a growing organism and the preacher must know the stage of its development before he can feed it. He cannot use material from his notebooks before he finds out whether it is the right material. Possibly the contents of his notes may be wet sawdust, possibly gunpowder. They may dampen and deaden, or they may cause an explosion. Sometimes pastors are blown out of their pulpit by working from ill-gotten lessons from their notebooks. A physician always examines his patient before he prescribes medicine. An emerging pastor should find out what his church is able to digest and assimilate, and then go to his study in search of the remedy.
The Emerging Pastor's Freedom
Churches have a reputation for binding and gagging their pastor. But some pastors need limitations. A pastor does not have the right to proclaim from the pulpit everything he reads or anything that pops into his mind. Every pastor is free, but freedom has its limitations. Certain pastors are confused about their ministerial freedom. They think of themselves as being the church and forget the faith was delivered to the saints—the entire body of Christ-followers. The emerging pastor is only a part of the whole. A theological education does not give him the right to set himself in a class apart, and to count himself independent of the Christian brotherhood. He is not a pulpit pope. He has his rights, but so does the rest of the body. He wishes to be free, so does his brethren.
There is a liberty of hearing as well as a liberty of speaking. In asserting what ministers call their freedom, they may rob others of their liberties. Christ's church stands in the world as the ordained teacher of definite conceptions of God and humankind, of duty and destiny, of Jesus of Nazareth and the Holy Spirit, and of the church and the sacraments. If a pastor comes to reject any of the beliefs entrusted to the church as fundamental doctrines, there is nothing for the pastor to do but retire.
The pastor should never renounce the vintage doctrines of the church once delivered to the saints. To do so is not exercising ministerial freedom, but failing to keep one's word. If a minister has surrendered the Christian creeds, let him exercise freedom by withdrawing from the church. The minister who wants to know ministerial freedom should work, not from himself toward the church, but from the church toward himself.
The Emerging Pastor Is Not a Dispenser of Goods
Some say the American minister is in danger of degenerating into a flatterer or demagogue, unable to preach hard-hitting truth about moral evil. Show me a minister like this and I'll show you someone whose knees knock in the pulpit. He is afraid of his church. But love casts out fear. If a minister loves his church and proves it by giving his life, the church will listen without contempt when he attacks certain moral evil. He talks like a friend to a friend, a teacher to a beloved pupil, and they listen because they feel loved.
The ministers who do not love their churches get into trouble for talking plainly. They stay in their study through the week, wishing for a larger church, secretly despising their flock. Then on Sunday, they thunder against the people's sins and wonder why they are reviled for doing it. No minister has the right to chide or condemn the people, unless he has won the right by loving them. The pulpit doesn't have to spew flattery to keep the people faithful. Love the church and preach the gospel. You cannot have one without the other.
The Crucial Work is Church Building
The pastor who believes delivering sermons is his only mission in the world will likely go from church to church, staying only long enough to exhaust his sermonic repertoire. He is sermonizer, not a church builder. He has failed to understand his supreme work as a minister of Christ. He does not understand the goal of preaching. His knowledge does not run beyond the ABC's of his calling. He becomes a professional soul-winner, persuading sinners to follow Christ and join the church. But it does not occur to him that the most difficult part of the minister's work is with people after they have joined the church.
The emerging pastor is a teacher, and a teacher's real work begins after the pupils are enrolled. He is the general of an army, and a general's critical task is preparing them to conquer the foe. He is a master-builder that shapes the church into a shrine of the Eternal. The crowning and crucial work of an emerging pastor is not conversion only, but church building. A minister who spends all of his time converting souls is an evangelist and should not be entrusted with a church. So the emerging pastor should be careful while reading of the exploits of famous evangelists who move in triumphal procession across the land.
The work of the evangelist is spectacular and often bewitches youthful eyes, causing them to forget the local church and wish for a larger stage and a more thrilling part in the great drama of world redemption. It seems more Christ-like and sacrificial to some than the work in the course of ordinary ministry. But the work of the evangelist is not as taxing upon the mind and heart as the work performed by a person who through a long series of years gives himself to the church. The evangelist deserves a high place, but not the highest. The place of honor belongs to the minister who is devoted to the soul-exhausting labor of building a church. Year-after-year, he builds the same parish by instructing the parishioners in the high and difficult art of living together in harmony while bringing spiritual forces to bear upon the moral problems of the community. If the minister does not cultivate the grain and gather the harvest, the scattering of seed by the evangelist from a larger stage would be useless.
Ministry for the Long Haul
The emerging pastor must train hesitant and stumbling feet to walk toward the goal of becoming Christ-like. If he says at the end of his second year in a parish, “My work is done,” he does not know the definition of church building. It may be that his stock of star sermons is exhausted, or that the available sinners have all handed in their names. But if he understood a minister's mission, he would see that his work has scarcely begun. In two years, a minister can learn something of the nature of his church, but the critical and arduous work of building is still ahead of him. Men who engage in the building of the church realize the work is never finished.
In the early years, it is easy to think of the work of the minister as involving one person—the man in the pulpit. It's exhilarating to preach because one finds relief in self-expression. But as the years go on, there is less delight in the mere act of saying things, and the heart craves more and more the fellowship of kindred minds. No preacher lives to himself or dies to himself. His endowments and attainments are only one factor in the work of preaching. He must take note of the church's attainments and endowments and become an organ functioning in an organism, finding his life in the vital relations by which he is bound to other lives. For the emerging pastor, ministry is not a one man show, but a body of believers working in harmony. This is the blueprint for revolution.
Revolution Begins With the Church
What a transformation there will be in public worship, what a revolution in many a disciple's life, and what a reformation in the conduct of many congregations, when once the idea is firmly grasped that all the followers of Jesus, both in the pulpit and in the pew, have the heaven-appointed mission to build the church. A good definition of a Christian would be, “a builder of the church of Jesus Christ .”
Many of the church members of the first century didn't grasp the idea of church building. Religion to them was an individualistic possession, a treasure to be prized, an experience to be enjoyed. They did not conceive of themselves as members of a society, organs of an organism, or stones in a temple. People followed their own agendas. They gave full vent to their anger and pulled apart the unity of the congregation. Corinth being the worst. Self-indulgence and conceit were vices in full bloom. It was to the Corinthian church that Paul unfolds his idea of building the church. He shows how the abuses of public worship arise, then he counsels them with one sentence: “Let everything be done with a view to building.”
Inscribe this motto above the minister's desk. Never let him forget it. Above everything else, he is a builder. He deals in affirmations, not denials. He constructs, and only incidentally tears down. He is an architect and not an iconoclast. So let every sentence of the sermon construct a view of building up men who are alive, not tearing down men who are dead. It is not courage, but lack of sense, that usually gets pastors into trouble. When the question arises, “Which should be sacrificed, the preacher or the church?” the man who follows Paul will be swift to make the right choice. The most pious of ministers will become the most dangerous and wicked, if he thinks himself larger than the church. Men who tear churches to pieces deserve to be cast out with publicans and heathens.
As Christians, we forget that we are little temples to be carefully built into the walls of a vast temple. “Don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple and that God's Spirit lives in you? If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him; for God's temple is sacred, and you are that temple” (1 Corinthians 3:16-17). It is interesting how this imagery of the temple haunts the Apostle, shaping and coloring his language.
Paul believed the temple is built of immortal souls. To work for the enlargement and adorning of this temple was to Paul the greatest privilege of being a minister. He inflamed everything with the vision of building the church. He ransacks his vocabulary in search of word pictures to project his image of the church's character and mission. “Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit” (Ephesians 2:19-22).
Sometimes Paul thinks of the church as the household of faith—the family of God. Other times it becomes the body of Christ, the organism that Christ uses to perform His works and accomplish His mission. Still again, it rises before him beautiful and radiant as the bride of the world's Redeemer. It is the medium of revelation, the organ through which the Almighty speaks both to mankind and to angels.
The task of building belongs to all believers, and in order to train believers in the art of building, ministers of various ranks and gifts are selected and anointed by Christ. The building of the church is the supreme aim of every minister who holds Paul's view of ministry. Paul wrote, “Build one another up” (1 Thessalonians 5:11). It is an exhortation of perpetual significance.
Paul is a builder. He employed the word “edify,” which in Anglo-Saxon is “build.” His conception of himself as builder dictates to him the vocabulary of his sermons. And some ministers forget this mandate. They employ scientific, or philosophical, or literary, or bookish terms that go over their congregation's heads. If all ministers from the day of Paul held fast to Paul's conception of the aim of preaching as church building, not so many of them would have soared into the clouds of scintillating phrases, or plunged into the muddy depths of what they were pleased to call “intellect.”
The conception of church building controls and directs the minister's conduct. Whatever builds up the church is his duty. Whatever tears it down, he should avoid.
Christ and the Church
If we are to accept the Book of Acts as authentic history, and believe in the guidance of the Holy Spirit, then we cannot escape the conclusion that Jesus organized the church. He is the Founder. The men closest to Him in life and death, and who were flooded with His spirit after a cloud had received Him from their sight, began organizing believers into churches baptized in His name. The promise had been: “But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you” (John 16:13-14). The first thing the Holy Spirit revealed was the church. The church is the inevitable and indestructible creation of God's spirit.
History proves that the church is an essential component of Christianity. The principles of Jesus will not influence society without the assistance of the church. The amount of work He accomplishes is based on the character of the church. Whenever the church prospers, society improves. Whenever the church languishes, society degenerates. When the church is vigorous and spiritual, the social atmosphere becomes restorative and clear. When the church becomes worldly and corrupt, the sun turns into darkness and the moon into blood.
The principles of Christ take root in pagan lands only when planted and watered by the church. The gospel would not have spread beyond Palestine or out of Europe into England , nor out of the Old World into the New if the church had not been on a mission. Therefore, “I will build my church” (Matthew 16:18). Christ is the architect. “Unless the lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain” (Psalm 127:1). He is at work.
The church is not a private enterprise of ours. It is His. We are coworkers with Him. He is ever by our side. The gates of death will not prevail against it. Critics rage and brilliant writers imagine a vain thing when they say the glory of the church is departing. He that sits in the heavens laughs. The Lord holds them in derision. The church is not obsolete. Humanity has not outgrown it. Its noon is not behind it. Its triumphal career has only begun. We are toiling amid the mists of the early morning. It is the rising sun that smites our foreheads, and we cannot even image the continuing glory. We work upon an enduring institution.
After the flags of republics and empires have been blown to tatters, and the earth itself has tasted death, the church of Jesus will stand in glory, free from blemish and mark of decay, the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. Therefore, my beloved brethren, in these confused days, be steadfast, immovable in the presence of the world's bellowing antipathy, always building your life and the lives of as many God entrusts to your keeping, into the church of the Lord. We know such labor is not in vain.
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