Note: What follows is adapted from a paper submitted as part of my education under the Antioch School. The requirement for the paper was that I design "a set of guidelines for establishing local churches anywhere according to an advanced biblical understanding of Paul’s concept of establishing local churches, including instructions for 'house order' of local churches."
If our work is to be establishing churches, then we need to know how to establish churches in a way that is flexible enough to fit into contexts as widely different as first-century Jerusalem and modern New York, rigid enough to do the work Christ has intended for the church without straying from His intended model, and drawn from scripture as the normative expectations Christ and the apostles had for the church. The process we see Paul implement time and again essentially falls into three stages: assemble a body, impart solid teaching, and entrust to established leaders. This article will explore a definition and the necessary elements of each step.
We see more of this work in Acts than in Paul’s letters, largely because Paul was often writing letters to bodies he’d already assembled. There is limited exception to this, in that Paul occasionally gives instructions to his recipients on how to identify people who should not be in the body and thereby performs work related to, but not actually within, the assembly stage. Throughout Acts, however, we see the initial practice in more detail. Jesus assembles His followers and gives them instruction to wait as a body for the work He has for them to commence.(1) In response to Peter’s sermon at Pentecost, those who believe are baptized into the body and begin sharing their lives with one another. Paul consistently goes to a gathering place (usually a synagogue), delivers the gospel message, and then sets apart those who believe into a new body.
Even when we see individuals become Christians, they do so in community. Cornelius and the Philippian jailer are both saved alongside their households, Apollos is familiar enough to the church of Ephesus after his conversion that they were willing to send a letter vouching for him when he traveled to Corinth in the very next verse. We tend to focus on Paul’s miraculous encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus, but his conversion was not complete at that point; the Holy Spirit doesn’t descend on Paul, a repeated sign for the moment of true conversion in Acts, until Ananias comes to welcome Paul into the church body. There is, in fact, only one exception in all of Acts: the Ethiopian eunuch is not immediately brought into a local church body when he is baptized by Philip. Church history tells us that he brought the gospel back to his own country and a community of faith was immediately formed there, but we have no record of this in scripture. The oddity of this event is, itself, indicative of how the alternative is the accepted norm throughout scripture. I am of the belief that every valid(2) denomination and theological movement within Christianity is really good at highlighting at least one, but not more than a small handful, of truly important elements of the faith that other denominations or theological movements overlook or undervalue, and that we would benefit greatly by more deeply considering these pockets of truth we can learn best from outside our own traditions. Sometimes they become so absorbed by this truth that they let something else wither entirely or develop a wrong understanding of a related concept out of misplaced focus, but the foundation they are using for this is still worth understanding. This is one area that I would argue the Roman Catholic Church has us at a theological disadvantage: there really is no salvation outside of the church. The See has, in some times and in some ways, taken this to a questionable place, but the proper solution cannot be the rugged individualistic salvation we have accepted so long in Baptistic, Pentecostal, and other related environments. We are not, I would argue, saved as individuals; rather, we the church are saved together.(3) Upon adoption as children of God, we are brought into communion with the rest of His children. We are members of the body, indeed, we cannot be outside of the body of Christ without being apart from Christ. Salvation inherently gives us a body to which we belong, and our growth must happen within the context of that body. There are few places where this is more apparent than in a church plant. I have been a member of four church planting teams, one of which I led, and these have produced some of my closest relationships to date. The scope of the work, when faced with a small band of Christians, pushes people in a distinct way. I have heard much about how church planting work tests one’s faith and missional focus, quickly weeding out anyone not prepared for the work and any aspects of our lives that interfere with the work, and this is all true; but I have heard significantly less about how it connects the people involved. My wife and I have grown considerably in our relationship through the ups and downs of church planting. When we were working in Greenfield with one other couple, we became family. Our kids were constantly together and began to act like siblings, the mother of that family is still my wife’s best friend; a divorce and seven years later, and we make a trip to New Jersey every year to see her and her husband and the kids even when we don’t have the means to visit my biological family the next state over. We all grew together, we invested in one another, we hurt for one another, we rejoiced together, and although no lasting church was established in Greenfield from that work, I believe we have displayed the kingdom of God more accurately alongside them than we have in many churches with longstanding buildings and budgets. We have another family with a similar level of connection, and that grew out of working together on a church planting team in Fitchburg. The mistake we make too often is conflating the importance of unity with the styles we use in our gatherings. We are commanded not to forsake the assembly; we are nowhere commanded to sit facing a stage and listen to a half hour lecture. I don’t have much against our modern practice of gathered worship—other than the strict rigidity with which we practice it—but this structure is not essential and is, at times, detrimental to that which is essential. That is, getting everyone together at a specific time on Sunday morning, singing a set constant number of songs, praying at scheduled intervals, listening to a sermon, and receiving a benediction is not a bad model in and of itself, but our insistence on it as “what church looks like” diverts our attention from how the church is actually intended to function. It’s easy to view our unity as defined by how many of us are sitting in the same room at the same time hearing the same message, but that isn’t where the unity of the body is practiced, and having the room become too large makes it impossible to practice any real unity. The body, in order to look like the church as established by Christ, must be grounded on intimate relationship guided by solid teaching under the authority of established leaders. The guidelines for proper assembly, then, are that the body is gathered in an environment that facilitates and encourages intimate relationships, the body invests in the spiritual growth and practice of spiritual gifts by all members, the body puts structure as secondary to purpose, and the body is prepared to send out members to establish a new assembly before it grows too large to accomplish the previous guidelines. There are a few concrete ideas that arise from this—such as the need to have some offline connections and relationships and gatherings, the need to guide spiritual formation in the proper way of Christ, and the need to send out church plants rather than growing too large for deep community—but much of the practice of this will be contextual and must be flexible to be applied correctly in different environments and with different people. If the purpose of the church involves the healthy growth of Christ’s body, both by multiplication and by maturity, as this blog has argued it does, then the structures that accomplish that purpose must be curated to the place and time and people to which it ministers.(4) These guidelines direct the boundaries of that flexibility, but must remain broad.
The assembled body must be built upon and maintained by the truth of who Christ is and to what He has called us. The way we ensure this is through deep, consistent, and accurate teaching, delivered by some number of established leaders who are faithful to the truth of scripture. This teaching is broadly concerned with a right understanding of God, a right understanding of our relationship to God, and a right understanding of our relationships among ourselves.
A right understanding of God is the basis of all theology, and is concerned with the nature and works of God in all matters. Every other teaching flows from this; everything about the church is defined by who God is and what He has done and is actively doing and will yet do. Here is covered such topics as the nature of the Trinity,(5) the person of Christ, the work of salvation, and God’s ultimate victory at the end of the age. This topic is vast, and must be constantly revisited and expanded upon in order that its application in the other topics is held to the standard of truth. A right understanding of our relationship to God is focused on who God is to us and who we are to Him. This topic tells us about our need for salvation, how our salvation has changed our standing before God, and how we are to grow in the new life to which God has called us. Here we see how submission to God is imaged in our submission to church leadership and the submission of wives to husbands and children to parents, how the mission of Christ has been handed to the church and therefore what goals the church must seek to achieve, and what it means to become children of God and heirs of His promise, among others. This teaching must be delivered frequently to ensure the church is aligned with its role in God’s plan, but it must also be a source of guidance for all the church does as a body and how the church invests in individuals. The first topic tells us what God we serve; this topic tells us how we, as a body, best serve Him, and must be always on our mind and in our teaching to ensure we approach our mission properly.
A right understanding of our relationships among ourselves guides our understanding of life within the family of God. This topic is about how we engage with one another, what authority and submission look like in daily practice, and how to live out the love that Christ has poured out so lavishly on us. Here we get into the nuts and bolts of the house order, describing the terms of our submission to authority within the church and within the home, detailing the practice of the nested dualities I covered in a previous post, applying the calls in scripture to view others above ourselves and love our neighbors as ourselves. This teaching is almost always an application of one of the other topics, but is important and must be included whenever application is being delivered. Our assembled body must be guided on how to be an assembled body, and this topic concerns itself with that more than any other.
When I was planting in Greenfield, I mapped out a sermon series that lasted one year as our very first study. Essentially, it worked through the Old Testament and sought to understand its themes through the lens of Christ, beginning with creation and ending, at the beginning of Advent, with Christ as the culmination of all the other things we’d discussed. The aim of this study was multifaceted; it revealed how the work of God and the heart of Christ was present throughout all scripture, it focused our attention on Christ in all matters, and it trained us to see Christ as the focus of every story and every theme throughout the Old Testament. The idea was that new people coming into the church would learn who God is through His dealings with mankind, and established Christians would be reminded of the role of Christ in redemptive history and the application of the Bible’s lessons. That the church would begin rooted in this understanding and what it means for us. I was not able to finish the series before the church folded, but have kept the basic outline just in case I have opportunity to explore it again. Because this is the nature of the guidelines for imparting solid teaching; that established leaders point to God through His word to reveal His nature, call the body to live in light of our role in His purposes, and guide the body to daily lives reflecting the truth and glory of God among us. That teaching plan I started to put into practice was aimed at these very objectives, but obviously it is not the only way to apply these guidelines. The objective is simple: teach often, teach faithfully, and apply the teaching to every aspect of the life of the church and the lives of its members.
Paul, having bound a body together and delivered the word of God faithfully to them, identified those who were gifted and growing in maturity in such a way that they could be trusted to continue the work after he was gone. These were drawn from the body itself and placed into the role of leadership, held to a higher standard to ensure they were fit for the duty, and taught the functions of a leader to properly guide the body. These people were expected to teach faithfully, to protect the body from false teaching, to maintain the house order of the church body, to carry out the work of church discipline, to identify and train new leaders, and to send out parts of the body to establish new bodies as appropriate.
Paul details the means for selecting these leaders in his letters to Timothy and Titus, but their work is constantly visible in all his letters. The leaders were the ones expected to impart the teaching Paul was including in his letters, they were the ones being called to oversee any acts of discipline Paul called for, and they were responsible for the daily application of the principles Paul explained. Peter directly addressed his letters to the leaders themselves because of these responsibilities. In the house order, the leaders were those who held the honor of leading and directing the church, and the responsibility to do so in a manner that glorifies God and serves His purposes. The leaders are those who impart the teaching, who guard the body, who constantly refocus the body on Christ to ensure He is the foundation of the body’s work and unity. The guidelines, then, are that the church has leaders in place who have been properly identified by an established church body and trained in service to Christ, who maintain the standards of leadership described by Paul, who are treated as authoritative by the body, who are able to teach and willing to correct, and who are able and willing to identify and train new leaders. These leaders should be placed within the biblical duality of elders and deacons, with the office of elder reserved for men. There must be a plurality of leadership; one man’s mistakes cannot be given enough power to damn the mission of the entire body.
The guidelines which must shape all churches in all places and times, then, are the broad ideas illustrated through these areas of concern. That the church must be an assembled body living in deep relationship that glorifies God, taught faithfully on the nature of God and the work He is doing in and through that body, under the authority of established leaders who center the body on the truth of God and guard it against distraction and alternative purposes. Establishing a church is the process of putting all these guidelines into place and fulfilling them, leading to the spiritual maturity of the body and its members. Our flexibility within them is necessary to engage with where God has us and who He has put into the body, and we should try to mold our systems to our context rather than being ruled by the systems we’ve inherited. But these guidelines are to be respected both as a direction to aim and as boundaries to what we cannot do; the body of Christ can no more tolerate a lack of leadership or the presence of bad leadership than our mortal bodies can tolerate cancer. We can bend within the principles described by Paul, but cannot break or try to escape them.
Footnotes
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The reason my blog is called "The Worst Baptist" is because of the reception I have had in many Baptist spaces to some of my views, mostly on matters of application. I disagree broadly with Evangelical trends concerning political matters, I'm still a bit more Charismatic than many Baptists who don't have a background in Pentecostalism (and some that do), and I have an anti-authority streak you could land a plane on. These, and other (often related) matters, put me at odds with my Baptist brethren, and have raised suspicions about my true affiliations more than once. So the name of the blog is kind of a joking acknowledgement of that. I don't actually believe I'm the worst Baptist, I am simply comfortable knowing that there are those who would view me as certainly among the worst of the Baptists. But the fact remains that, regardless of how good or bad I am at being a Baptist, I am a Baptist. And part of the reason I ended up among the Baptists in the first place is that I affirm the Baptist view of baptism. Which doesn't take very long to say, certainly not long enough for its own blog post. But I was asked a little while back by a Lutheran friend to explain the Baptist view of baptism, so I'm going to take this opportunity to do so.
Baptists believe that baptism is done by immersion. That is, if you have not been dunked into the water and then brought back out of it, whatever else happened, you haven't been baptized. Now, this was not always the case; the first Baptists performed baptism the same way everyone else did at the time, by pouring water over the subject. This was something that had to be worked out, but if we're honest, it's one of the simplest aspects of our beliefs about baptism to explain: the word "baptize" most literally means "immerse." The English word baptize is just a transliteration of the Greek word βαπτιζω (baptizo), which means to immerse and wash. It is only used in the New Testament to signify a ritual immersion, so it may have taken on a certain connotation in the culture of first century Palestine, but even under these conditions the actual meaning of the word always found its root in immersion. The early church took an existing practice of ceremonial immersion and saw in it a picture of redemption and applied it as such. As far as we are concerned, the Baptist practice of baptism by immersion is little more than a return to this practice. That is not to say there isn't some degree of wiggle room here. Technically speaking, one of the possible meanings for βαπτιζω is washing, and washing doesn't technically always include immersion. Nor does every form of Jewish ceremonial washing include immersion, at least not of the whole person; it is possible that the practice being described in scripture was more like non-immersive methods of ceremonial washing. However, given that it was not the only word used for washing, and that it is primarily used for immersion and has clear ties to βαπτω (bapto), which means to dip, I maintain the historical Baptist position that the scriptures which use the term are most easily read as involving immersion. As will be discussed later, the Didache (the earliest known non-Bible writing of Christian teaching) also discusses baptism. In this instance, it demands immersion (in running water), and allows for the pouring of water over the head of the baptized only in the instance where absolutely no better method can be performed (1). It is not only the wording of scripture then, but also the practice of the early church, that baptism done properly relied on immersion or the closest one could come to immersion. The result of this is that I, as a Baptist, not only insist on practicing baptism by immersion, but cannot accept a baptism delivered by another means. Baptist churches generally have a requirement that a person be baptized in order to be accepted as a member of the church; if someone is joining a Baptist church and points to their being sprinkled as a baby, I and the bulk of Baptists hold that they have not met that requirement and must be baptized. This isn't strictly because of mode, however. It also comes back to whether or not what was administered to them was even theirs to receive.
Baptists believe that baptism should be reserved only for those who have made a confession of faith. As I've discussed before, this is related to our belief that the covenant community only includes those who have been redeemed, that is, those who have saving faith in Christ. Ultimately, what this comes down to is the nature of the new covenant in Christ. You see, it is generally agreed upon by the various denominations within Christianity that baptism is a sign of entry into the covenant community of Christ (some hold it as more than a sign, but none hold it as not at least a sign; that is, they may hold it as a sign and as something greater, but it is always a sign, and as a sign it is always a sign of entry into the community). Therefore, the question of who gets baptized and who doesn't, and when baptism should be applied, ultimately comes down to the question of who is in the covenant community and when they enter it. Baptism should be applied to a person who is entering the covenant community at the time when they enter; defining one category will inherently define the other. The Baptist (and Baptist-adjacent) view is that the covenant community is composed only of those who have been redeemed by the blood of Christ; there are other views which hold a different view of who belongs to the covenant community, and therefore who receives baptism. Now, in my last post I argued for a definition for the church that is incompatible with a view that anyone not yet saved is part of the covenant community, but I want to lean a bit more into how that plays out here. Paul did baptize people into bodies that were not yet churches, see for instance the story of Philippi in Acts 16. Here, Lydia and her household are baptized on their reception of the gospel, and the jailer and his household are baptized on conversion, but the body was still not yet a church when Paul left the city. Which would suggest that the local church and the covenant community are not perfect synonyms, and usually the language used is that baptism is part of entry into the church. But I have used the phrasing 'covenant community' on purpose in the paragraph above; that is, we baptize into the body of Christ, of which the local church is an expression. Essentially, you can have a covenant community where there are believers gathered for the advance of the gospel in service to Christ, but it is not a church until it reaches a certain level of establishment. The definition of 'church' is a refinement of the definition of a 'covenant community,' in which all churches are covenant communities but not all covenant communities are churches. But the fact remains that the covenant community must be composed of those who are actually within the covenant. Astute readers will note that I cited a passage often used to argue for the baptism of infants. The argument essentially goes that, since whole households were baptized, we can reasonably assume children were included, and therefore Paul baptized children. But assumptions cannot guide us here. The fact is that households are not ever guaranteed to have children in them, even in our modern day, and especially then. At the time of writing the Acts accounts, the concept of a household included everyone who participated in the life of the home, which included extended family and servants. Note also that the description of baptizing whole households happens in the context of people who were in certain stations of society. These are people like a rich woman, a jailer who was tasked with significant responsibility, a centurion (encountered by Peter) with a body of servants actively discussed in the text. Their households absolutely did include more than merely themselves and a possible spouse, but there is no reason to believe that this must have included children. There were, in all cases, enough people in the home to use a broad term such as 'household' without the addition of infants. We cannot, therefore, safely assume there were children being baptized in those instances, and the rest of the New Testament offers no support for the baptism of children. Even the statement that "the promise is for you and your children," as is sometimes cited by pedobaptists, is a statement of scope and perpetuity rather than a statement of infants as members of the body, as evidenced by the rest of the statement, "Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off, as many as the Lord our God will call to Himself." (Acts 2:38-39, NASB). That is, the promise being tied to baptism here is for those who are brought to Christ, regardless of generation or location. Where the Bible offers no direct support for the baptism of infants, it does consistently address churches as places where the members are assumed to be in Christ. In every letter of the New Testament, the recipients are held to the standard that they have already accepted the gospel of Christ, and at no point is there discussion of people being part of the church but not saved by Christ, unless it is an urging to remove them from the church. Further, the teachings of the early church did not align with the idea of infant baptism. Consider the way baptism is described in the Didache, where baptism happens "after first explaining all these points," that is, the preceding body of the Didache, and the command to "require the candidate to fast one or two days previously"(2). Both elements cited here operate only within an environment where the one being baptized has some ability to receive and respond to instruction. All told, then, the Bible contains no stated baptism of infants and has no knowledge of a definition of the church which includes those not yet saved, and the known practices of the early church required a candidate for baptism to be capable of receiving instruction and following that instruction. "But," one may argue, "what about Jesus' command not to forbid the children from coming to Him?" And to this I would state simply that we don't. We point our children to Christ, we encourage them to rely on Him for salvation and rejoice in Him for His goodness, and we baptize children as soon as they make a confession of faith. The only way to read this behavior as keeping children from Christ is to operate on the understanding that baptism itself carries the power to bring people to Christ.
In every instance of baptism in scripture, it occurs after the person has repented. This should, itself, be sufficient evidence that baptism affirms salvation but does not confer it, except for one statement in the Bible that requires a moment of discussion. This is the statement in 1 Peter 3:21 that "baptism now saves you." Let us begin by looking at the statement in context. For Christ also died for sins once for all, [the] just for [the] unjust, so that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit; in which also He went and made proclamation to the spirits [now] in prison, who once were disobedient, when the patience of God kept waiting in the days of Noah, during the construction of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through [the] water. Corresponding to that, baptism now saves you--not the removal of dirt from the flesh, but an appeal to God for a good conscience--through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who is at the right hand of God, having gone into heaven, after angels and authorities and powers had been subjected to Him. |
The Conceptual Church | |
But the point here is that, although the believers in Ephesus had already gone through the establishment process, they were now entertaining false theology and practices that necessitated a Pauline delegate to put them back on track and establish the proper order Paul had entrusted to the Ephesian elders in Acts 20. In its present state, Paul never describes the body in Ephesus as a church in his letters to Timothy2; but this will be explored more later. Paul is using the term for a condition in which the church is operating well, but he isn’t using it for the body at that time. He has a goal in mind for Ephesus to reach, and it is the body having achieved that place that he refers to as a church. This indicates some awareness that a local body must be at a certain level of maturity, or at least have certain traits in place, in order to be properly called a church; but it is an incomplete argument if left to stand on this point alone.
The Church Universal | |
These uses do not show Paul directly defining the local church, but they do show him applying the expectations of the universal church to the local church. From these uses, then, we learn that Paul expected the local church to follow Christ as its head, display Christ’s wisdom, glory, and authority in the world, and to operate with the knowledge that Christ has purchased it with His blood. These are broad ideas, but the application of them defines the parameters for Paul’s expectation of local churches. A local church is not part of the universal church, and therefore not a church at all, if it doesn’t apply these broad principles to its structure and life.
The Established Local Church | |
This is the crux, then. Paul would leave cities prematurely for a small assortment of reasons, but he never leaves a church when he does so. He gathers disciples early, but only after ensuring they have the word and mission in hand and have elders over them does he call them a church. That is, there is a clear point at which a group of gathered believers transitions from being a collection of disciples to being a church, and that point always has certain traits in place. This runs the danger of being an argument from silence, however, so let’s shift gears and look at it from a different angle.
This is, after all, the general idea Schaeffer is driving toward in “Form and Freedom in the Church” as presented in our reading. Schaeffer lists eight norms that must define a local church in order to be a church, and while he seems to argue for norms that are unnecessary within his list, the foundation of the list is solid: that there are criteria Paul used to determine the churchness of a body, if you will, and that we should be using the same criteria in our understanding of the church today.
The points that Schaeffer hits on well cannot be adequately discussed without separating them from those he does not, so allow a brief aside for that division to be drawn. Schaeffer’s eight norms are that a church is made up of Christians, that they meet together in a special way on the first day of the week, that there are elders responsible for leading the church, that there are deacons responsible for the material aspects of the church, that the church takes discipline seriously, that there are specific qualifications for elders and deacons, that there is “a place for form on a wider basis than the local church,3” and that baptism and the Lord’s supper are practiced. We can see the validity of each of these by comparing them to the text and to the broad principles laid out in the discussion of the Universal Church above. That the church is composed of Christians is at best alluded to in scripture, and indeed Schaeffer himself does not point to any specific passage as making that point, but it is a clear requirement in light of the understanding that the church operates with Christ as the head and that the church is the body for which Christ died; that is, in order for the local church to meet those criteria inherited from the universal church, the members of the local church must be Christians. There is no such logical connection, however, between the universal church criteria and Schaeffer’s statement that the church must meet in a special way on the first day of the week, and even the two passages he presents as supporting this claim do not actually speak to that claim at all; therefore this criteria will not be treated as valid here.
Three of his criteria can be composed into one assertion without losing any of its power of assessment. That the church has elders, that the church has deacons, and that there are specific requirements for those offices are all essentially pointing to one claim: that the church is only a church if it has leadership in place in accordance with the Bible’s definitions for elders and deacons. This leads directly to the claim that the church must take discipline seriously, as Paul urges churches multiple times in his epistles and which must be in place for the leadership so established to have any real authority in the operations of the church. What remains are the sacraments, which are generally assumed to be happening by Paul (although he occasionally sees need to clarify how they are to be happening) but draw directly from the giving of Christ for the body and the display of the glory of Christ, without even exploring the fact that Christ commanded them and they therefore point to His headship and authority; and the place for form beyond the local church. This one, we must be careful about. Applied in a way that says churches must be in network would rule out the church in Jerusalem as a true church until other churches were founded, but ignored entirely would rule out the discussion of the universal church as a means of assessment entirely. The Bible does not handle the issue in either manner, so neither should we. Therefore it will stay, but will not be discussed except to say that, for our purposes here, it has been sufficiently addressed in the section on the universal church.
The points that remain, then, are that the church is a collection of Christians that administers the sacraments as handed down by Christ under the authority of Biblically-defined leaders with the power to discipline members. By what criteria do the leaders discipline members? By the advancement of the gospel, the headship of Christ, the display of the glory of Christ, and to the standard of a body for which Christ gave Himself to establish a spotless bride. And indeed, Paul never describes a church as a church unless he knows for certain that it meets this definition. Ephesus was called a church when it did so, but was not called a church when it was no longer displaying the glory of Christ and had adopted teachings that showed them to be outside of the headship of Christ. Galatians and Romans, two epistles written to ensure the church had the basic teachings of Christianity down to bodies that may not have had elders in place to guide and discipline based on those teachings, do not refer to those bodies as churches. Titus was sent to cities, and not to churches, to appoint elders.
In every instance in which Paul or Luke describe a body as a church, it is an established church; that is, it is a church that meets the definition from the previous paragraph. In every place where Paul worked, he worked toward the aim of bringing a group of disciples to the place where they met that definition, even returning to hostile territory to ensure he didn’t leave the disciples with an incomplete job. Even when a great opportunity to establish a new church came his way, he turned aside from that opportunity to focus on finishing the work of establishment elsewhere. Paul sends Titus to finish work he could not finish himself, out of a desire to see that the work was fully and properly finished. Paul never considered his work complete in a place until a church was established by the criteria thus far described; and neither should we. If this is the goal Paul had in establishing churches, if the definition of a completed work was a body that could be rightly called a church because it was composed of Christians practicing the sacraments under the authority of Biblically-defined leaders with power to discipline the body under the headship of Christ and for His glory, then we cannot bandy the word around for anything less. This is Paul’s definition of an established local church, and it must also be ours.
2Or, indeed, in his letter to the Ephesians themselves.
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Formatting note: As last week, I have chosen to leave this in bullet format partly because it seems to work for the objective and partly because I am currently plagued by the same recurring headaches that made me write it as bullet points in the first place.
- As established, the local church has a mission
- Great Commission, developing disciples, establishing churches
- In order to participate in establishing a church, the established and the establishing church are in some form of partnership
- Partnerships are fundamentally relationships in which resources are shared for a common goal without sacrificing identity
- The local church is an autonomous body with the ability to enter into partnerships.
- What does autonomy mean?
- Simply that a church is not required to be in partnership and can choose its own partnerships and methods without direct supervision from an outside agency or another church
- It should not be confused with church sovereignty, which would hold the local church completely above partnerships and accountability, though this confusion is common
- One result of this is the fact that the established church does not have direct control of the way the new church operates
- What does autonomy mean?
- Three broad generally-accepted categories of partnerships
- Churches
- Parachurch Organizations
- Secular Bodies
- There are subtypes, but that’s beyond the scope of this assignment
- The local church is an autonomous body with the ability to enter into partnerships.
- Churches
- The only partnership that definitely exists in scripture
- Arguments could be made to view Paul’s mission team as a parachurch organization, but I believe this to be somewhat inaccurate and anachronistic
- Acts does not discuss the church working with secular bodies
- Paul receives support from churches other than Antioch
- Paul organizes churches to support church in Jerusalem in epistles
- Shared mission, resources, methodology
- North Central Collective
- Local example in which four churches have agreed to a partnership
- This partnership includes a growing relationship, a shared vision and mission, shared resources, and agreement about how to best apply those resources to that mission
- Churches are in relationship and accountable to one another but do not have authority over one another
- Very good at highlighting the benefits of close, regionally-minded partnerships
- Southern Baptist Convention
- Large example in which thousands of churches have agreed to a partnership
- This partnership includes a shared vision and mission, a clear statement of agreed-upon doctrines (The Baptist Faith and Message), a large pool of shared resources, and agreement on channels that will apply those resources to that mission
- Churches are in cooperation and may have relationship and accountability on a local level, but have no authority over one another and have limited, if any, relationship on a national level
- Very good at highlighting the scope of work a partnership can accomplish
- The only partnership that definitely exists in scripture
- Parachurch Organizations
- Mission focus
- Engel & Dyrness argue that missions should be the “guiding hand in all the church’s programs” rather than simply one more program (p122)
- Missional authority lies with church
- “one of the lingering effects of the structure of missions created in an earlier day is the attitude on the part of many missions executives and missionaries that the churches are simply the source of resources—money and personnel, or perhaps gifts in kind.” - Engel & Dyrness, “The Church in Missions” from Changing the Mind of Missions: Where Have We Gone Wrong?, p122
- If the mission has been given by Christ to the church, authority on how the mission is carried out must rest with the church and not external agencies
- Churches must retain control of what their involvement in parachurch activity is and how they will engage with that activity
- Mission focus
- Secular Bodies
- Partner to the extent that churches can retain mission focus and control of own actions
- Separation of church and state
- The church is not to put itself as a whole under the direct authority of the secular government or any other secular agency
- The church does, however, recognize the authority God has given governments in certain areas and must respect that
- The church may accept direction from secular agencies on a limited basis on specific ministry activities
- Where the church wishes to engage with areas that a secular agency has authority, it will have to determine whether or not submission to that authority’s rules and systems in that specific ministry is workable with the identity of the church
- If it is not, the church may need to seek an alternative method
- Fourth category: Individuals
- We describe the church as family throughout Antioch School
- This is good and appropriate; the church is a family
- The church is also a partnership, and as such should have the ability to see every member as an active participant in its mission
- This is good and appropriate; the church is a family
- Paul talks about churches as people
- He addresses individuals
- He talks about the unity of the people in the church
- Passivity
- Engel and Dyrness cite studies that show only 10% of people in an average church are active beyond Sunday morning
- They conclude, as do many others, that the vast majority of people in churches are passive participants because of the institutional model itself
- We describe the church as family throughout Antioch School
- I propose an alternative to this conclusion
- The people in our churches do not view themselves as active participants because the church itself does not view them as active participants
- Our entire model of church relies on people sitting passively and receiving
- The vast majority of people in a Sunday service will do nothing because we don’t invite them to do anything
- We put the preacher on a stage behind a podium where there is clear, visible division between him and the body, and have him talk without any opening for engagement
- We have designated leaders who pray on the stage in front of the whole body without any engagement from the body
- When we have someone we believe is suited for ministry, we send them away to be trained for ministry somewhere else, away from laity
- Here, Antioch itself helps address at least that problem
- The only things we actually invite most people to do generally are give money and sing
- So often we interrupt the singing so we can tell everyone to sit down and listen to a special person do ‘special’ music
- And then we tell them “go out and put into practice what you have learned” and get surprised when what they have learned is that the work of the church is the work of someone else
- This is, I believe, part of the source of the issue Roland Allen is talking about when he says on p144 of The Way of Spontaneous Expansion, “We have looked upon such spontaneous activity,” speaking here of spontaneous individual mission activity, “as something strange and wonderful...we have not known how to expect it, we have not known how to deal with it, and consequentially it is not unnaturally more rare than it ought to be.”
- Many articles do not go far enough in their call for reform because they still ground themselves on the idea of encouraging people to get up and do something out there without telling us to start by inviting and training people to do stuff in here
- I believe that all of our other partnerships would be more clearly understood and actively engaged if we began by asking how we can view the church as a partnership, how we can treat the congregation as active participants in our gatherings, how we can train them to associate the Christian life with action
- If we asked what everyone in the body is bringing on a Sunday morning, and where we can have an opening for that to be put into action during every aspect of the gathering, without demanding conformity or enforcing passivity from the people
- In 1 Corinthians 14, Paul describes church gatherings as having everyone involved, bringing whatever gifts they have to the service and the service having place for them
- We know that Paul advocated for all this to happen under the guidance of established, trained leadership, and not as a free-for-all
- We know that Paul advocated for all this to happen under the guidance of established, trained leadership, and not as a free-for-all
- If we got into a habit of viewing one another as partners on mission, and learned to see how what unites the church is our shared faith and our shared mission, and see the places where we lay our own desires down for the advance of the mission and the places where we maintain our individual natures and habits and styles and gifts, and how all of this serves the larger purposes of God under the authority of established leaders, then I believe we would have an instinctive sense for how the church partners with other churches under the authority of Christ, how we partner with parachurch organizations without giving over things that belong to the church, and how we engage with secular bodies without losing our identity as a church on mission.
- All of these partnerships, all of these things I’ve talked about, I believe they all start right here, in our churches.
- If we can have churches that view themselves internally the way the Acts churches did, then we can have churches who engage with each other and the world externally with the same impact as the Acts churches did.
- The people in our churches do not view themselves as active participants because the church itself does not view them as active participants
Formatting Note: Due to headaches, I was not able to convert my thoughts into an article or paper format, and instead turned in a bullet list of major points I felt such a paper would need to cover. I have elected to leave it in this form when posting it here because I kind of like how it works.
All scripture passages are NASB unless otherwise noted.
- A missionary should be identified and affirmed through both the sending church and the Holy Spirit.
- Terms:
- A missionary is here defined as someone who is being sent out from an established church to perform the work of establishing another church in another context, regardless of the cultural and physical distance from the sending church.
- The sending church is here defined as an established local church that is actively participating in the establishment process of another church.
- Justification:
- Acts 11:22: The news about them reached the ears of the church in Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas off to Antioch.
- Acts 13:1-3: Now there were prophets and teachers at Antioch, in the church that was there: Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen who had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch, and Saul. While they were serving the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, "Set Barnabas and Saul apart for Me for the work to which I have called them." Then, when they had fasted, prayed, and laid their hands on them, they sent them away.
- Acts 16:1-3: Now Paul also came to Derbe and to Lystra. And a disciple was there, named Timothy, the son of a Jewish woman who was a believer, but his father was a Greek, and he was well spoken of by the brothers and sisters who were in Lystra and Iconium. Paul wanted this man to leave with him; and he took him and circumcised him because of the Jews who were in those parts, for they all knew that his father was a Greek.
- Acts 18:24-27a: Now a Jew named Apollos, an Alexandrian by birth, an eloquent man, came to Ephesus; and he was proficient in the Scriptures. This man had been instructed in the way of the Lord; and being fervent in spirit, he was accurately speaking and teaching things about Jesus, being acquainted only with the baptism of John; and he began speaking boldly in the synagogue. But when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside and explained the way of God more accurately to him. And when he wanted to go across to Achaia, the brothers encouraged him and wrote to the disciples to welcome him;
- “It is significant that in all the subsequent ‘sendings’ of missionaries in Acts, the emphasis made by Scripture is never upon an individual volunteering or upon his own subjective sense of call, but always on the initiative of others.”1
- “Whereas we seem to have emphasized exclusively the individual’s subjective sense of a highly personal call of God, and often reinforced this by emotional appeals for individuals to volunteer, the New Testament by contrast stresses either the corporate initiative of congregations or the informed initiative of missionaries in selecting suitable people.”2
- Acts 11:22: The news about them reached the ears of the church in Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas off to Antioch.
- Means:
- Identification and affirmation of a missionary involves the recognition of maturity and giftedness in an individual that makes them suitable for the work of church establishment. This person is then set apart for the work of mission.
- In almost every instance of a person becoming a missionary in Acts, they are identified as such by the Holy Spirit through the means of the local church or an established and informed church leader. This practice is so overwhelmingly common in Acts that it should be taken as the primary means of identifying missionaries.
- In the odd case of Apollos, we have no record of who sent him to Ephesus to teach and make disciples, but we can infer that he was not operating under the guidance of a local church, as he is shown to have no existing relationship to any local church. In this instance, the initial push toward mission work seems to have been stirred in the heart of Apollos directly; but this being a solitary event in the scripture record suggests this should be taken as a valid, but unusual, means of initiating the process.
- Every leader identified as a missionary in Acts, including Apollos, is affirmed by a local church, which takes on a managerial role in the work of the missionary.
- Emphasis on identifying, affirming, and sending the missionary is on the Holy Spirit working through the local church.
- Terms:
- The missionary should be trained through a system approved by the sending church.
- Terms:
- Training here refers to all forms of preparation for the work of mission. This includes, but is not limited to, doctrinal education, discipleship, leadership practice, target language study, and target cultural exposure.
- Justification:
- Acts 18:26b: But when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside and explained the way of God more accurately to him.
- “In a very real sense, this is our work for which we feel responsible, as an extension overseas of our own local evangelistic ministry” (emphasis original).3
- “Para-church structures are useful to the extent that they aid the Church in its mission, but are manmade and culturally determined.”4
- “Since they are manmade and culturally determined, all para-church structures should be subjected to continuous rigorous sociological and theological analysis to determine their effectiveness as instruments of the church” (emphasis original).5
- Acts 18:26b: But when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside and explained the way of God more accurately to him.
- Means:
- Some aspects of missionary preparation are matters that must be handled within the church. Discipleship, for instance, should not be outsourced in general. Aspects of the mission which directly reflect on the sending church’s understanding and practice should also be handled by the church.
- More advanced training can be handled in the church if it has either the internal resources to handle it or a partnership, like the Antioch School, that provides certain resources to be utilized by the church in education.
- While there is no scriptural precedent for external seminaries or Christian colleges, they are not inherently an invalid approach. However, the means by which they function and recruit should be revisited in light of the expectation that the sending church is ultimately responsible for the people they send out. This will be covered more clearly in competency 5, but the basic idea is that the church should have some say on what external education program is used by the missionary, or at least the ability to review the education a missionary receives and determine its suitability.
- Terms:
- The missionary should be equipped through the participation of the sending church.
- Terms:
- Equipping here includes, but is not limited to, financial support, manpower, and necessary materials.
- Justification:
- Acts 15:39-40: Now it turned into such a sharp disagreement that they separated from one another, and Barnabas took Mark with him and sailed away to Cyprus. But Paul chose Silas, and left after being entrusted by the brothers to the grace of the Lord.
- “Sending churches are there to support a plant, not to control it.”6
- “It is crucial that you have the support of your sending church...your sending church has the money, resources, and manpower you need.”7
- Acts 15:39-40: Now it turned into such a sharp disagreement that they separated from one another, and Barnabas took Mark with him and sailed away to Cyprus. But Paul chose Silas, and left after being entrusted by the brothers to the grace of the Lord.
- Means:
- The sending church needs to take responsibility for sending the missionary.
- The sending church can do so in cooperation with other bodies; in Paul’s epistles, he thanks churches beyond Antioch for supporting his work.
- Other bodies include missions agencies, provided these agencies serve as a means to support the mission of the sending church rather than an authoritative body over the church.
- The specific list of resources a missionary needs in a specific context may vary, and the sending church should be open to exploring those needs with the missionary.
- Equipping a missionary means letting go of those resources, with the understanding that they will be applied to the mission field as the field requires, not as the sending church dictates. By this point in the process, the church should be willing to trust the missionary to make decisions in the field that best reflect the mission of the sending church.
- Terms:
- The missionary should be adaptable in seeking opportunity to connect to their target context.
- Justification:
- Acts 10:24, 27, 33: On the following day he entered Caesarea. Now Cornelius was expecting them and had called together his relatives and close friends...As he talked with him, he entered and found many people assembled..."So I sent men to you immediately, and you have been kind enough to come. Now then, we are all here present before God to hear everything that you have been commanded by the Lord."
- Acts 14:1: In Iconium they entered the synagogue of the Jews together, and spoke in such a way that a large number of people believed, both of Jews and of Greeks.
- Acts 16:13: And on the Sabbath day we went outside the gate to a riverside, where we were thinking that there was a place of prayer; and we sat down and began speaking to the women who had assembled.
- Acts 17:16-17: Now while Paul was waiting for them in Athens, his spirit was being provoked within him as he observed that the city was full of idols. So he was reasoning in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Gentiles, and in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be present.
- Acts 28:30-31: Now Paul stayed two full years in his own rented lodging and welcomed all who came to him, preaching the kingdom of God and teaching things about the Lord Jesus Christ with all openness, unhindered.
- “The fact is that faithfulness to unchanging biblical truth often requires changing structures as time passes.”8
- Acts 10:24, 27, 33: On the following day he entered Caesarea. Now Cornelius was expecting them and had called together his relatives and close friends...As he talked with him, he entered and found many people assembled..."So I sent men to you immediately, and you have been kind enough to come. Now then, we are all here present before God to hear everything that you have been commanded by the Lord."
- Means:
- The missionary should be prepared to be on mission at all times in their context.
- The missionary should seek any opportunities that the Holy Spirit has prepared.
- The missionary should seek places where people may be open to the message.
- The missionary should not limit themselves to one means of accessing the community, or any number of means that the missionary planned in advance.
- The missionary should be free and prepared to adapt methods to changing circumstances, whether that change is initiated by the Holy Spirit or the culture.
- The mission must remain constant as circumstances change.
- Justification:
- The missionary should make disciples and collect them into a unified body.9
- Justification:
- Acts 2:44: And all the believers were together and had all things in common;
- Acts 17:4: And some of them were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, along with a large number of the God-fearing Greeks and a significant number of the leading women.
- Acts 17:34: But some men joined him and believed, among whom also were Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.
- Acts 2:44: And all the believers were together and had all things in common;
- Means:
- As established above, the missionary is by definition someone working to establish a church. With the understanding that the church is the primary vehicle for fulfillment of the Great Commission, that church should have as its target those who are not yet disciples.
- Therefore, it is necessary that the work of the missionary involve making new disciples, forming them into a church, and establishing that church.
- The closest thing we see in scripture to a churchless Christian is the Ethiopian eunuch, who is saved and then continues on his way to Ethiopia where there is no church at that time. However, the historical record pretty clearly shows that said eunuch went ahead and made some disciples and gathered them into a church.
- Justification:
- The missionary should identify and train leaders for the local church.
- Terms:
- The local church is, for the purposes of this paper, a means of distinguishing from the sending church. The local church here refers to the church that is being established by the missionary.
- Justification:
- Acts 14:23: When they had appointed elders for them in every church, having prayed with fasting, they entrusted them to the Lord in whom they had believed.
- Acts 20:28, 32: “Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His own blood...And now I entrust you to God and to the word of His grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified.”
- Acts 14:23: When they had appointed elders for them in every church, having prayed with fasting, they entrusted them to the Lord in whom they had believed.
- Means:
- Paul consistently established leaders at each church before leaving it, and sent others to continue establishing leaders when necessary,
- The process for ensuring leaders are established is functionally identical to steps 1 and 2 above; with training aimed at work within the local church primarily rather than outside of it.
- According to Paul’s command to Titus, a church cannot be considered fully established until it has suitable leaders.
- Terms:
- The missionary should report to the sending church.
- Justification:
- Acts 11:4, 18: But Peter began and explained at length to them in an orderly sequence...when they heard this, they quieted down and glorified God, saying, "Well then, God has also granted to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life."
- Acts 14:26-28: From there they sailed to Antioch, where they had been entrusted to the grace of God for the work that they had accomplished. When they had arrived and gathered the church together, they began to report all the things that God had done with them and how He had opened a door of faith to the Gentiles. And they spent a long time with the disciples.
- Acts 11:4, 18: But Peter began and explained at length to them in an orderly sequence...when they heard this, they quieted down and glorified God, saying, "Well then, God has also granted to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life."
- Means:
- Griffiths argues in Missionary that the furlough period of a missionary should be spent primarily with one congregation, preferably the sending church, both to serve the church’s interest in missionary involvement, and to equip and refresh the missionary.
- With the rise of modern technology, even a missionary who is not expecting a furlough can more easily visit the sending church and/or maintain communication to share updates.
- In the situation of a missionary whose work is not long-term, they should be expected to return to their sending church on the completion of their mission and the church should be expected to be attentive to an overview of what was done.
- Regardless of method, this step should be seen as an opportunity for the sending church to have its focus returned to mission, to verify that the missionary is remaining true to the assigned mission, and for the missionary to celebrate successes and receive comfort on difficulties from a body that knows them well and invests in the work.
- Justification:
- The missionary should maintain relationship with the new church.
- Justification:
- The entirety of the Pauline epistles and many of the General epistles.
- Acts 15:36: After some days Paul said to Barnabas, "Let's return and visit the brothers and sisters in every city in which we proclaimed the word of the Lord, and see how they are."
- Acts 18:23: And after spending some time there, he left and passed successively through the Galatian region and Phrygia, strengthening all the disciples.
- Acts 20:2: When he had gone through those regions and had given them much encouragement, he came to Greece.
- Means:
- The options available to modern missionaries in maintaining relationship with the churches they have established are as varied as the options available to a missionary maintaining relationship with their sending church.
- There is also the option that the missionary never leaves the local church after it is established.
- Justification:
2 Ibid., 13.
3 Missionary, 19-20. Griffiths is specifically justifying the responsibility of the local church in supporting missionaries through finances and prayer, but it is not a stretch from his point to include responsibility to prepare those same missionaries, especially if the missionary is viewed through the understanding here quoted.
4 Howard Snyder, “The Form of the Church” in The Community Of The King Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1977. 159.
5 Ibid., 167-168.
6 Peyton Jones and Ed Stetzer, Church Plantology: The Art And Science Of Planting Churches Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2021. 368.
7 Ibid., 369.
8 “Form,” 143.
9 This part almost sounds self-explanatory because you can’t make a church without gathering some disciples but then you run across a handful of church plants that recruit almost entirely from other churches and haven’t baptized anyone and you start to realize it really isn’t that clear to some people and you get so annoyed about it that years later you have to be reminded that this thought would be better served in the footnotes than the body of the paper.
The book of Acts follows a select few missionaries; it largely focuses on the missionary team that included Paul, whether that was with Barnabas and Mark on the first missionary journey or Paul, Silas, Luke, and Timothy by the time the second missionary journey reached Europe. Beyond this, there is a brief aside about the work of Apollos in Acts 18:24-28, and little else. However, that aside does indicate that the means we see Paul utilizing were treated as normative during that period.
Apollos arrives on the scene with skill at speaking, an understanding of scripture (v. 24), established instruction, and a partial grasp on the truth of Christ (v. 25). He is identified by leaders in the church as a potential leader, given further training (v. 26), then commissioned and sent out by a church body (v. 27). When he arrived, he was able to use his gifts and training to help the church that was already active in that area (v. 27-28). We later learn in 1 Corinthians that Apollos goes on to have a significant impact on the early church, to where some misguided believers were grouping themselves by whether they were reached by Paul, Peter, or Apollos (See 1 Corinthians 1:12, 3:4, and 3:22).
It is helpful to consider this story, as it is the main example we have in Acts of what missionary preparation and sending looked like when it did not directly include Paul. It is easy enough, if all we talk about is Paul’s work, to put his work in one category and our own in another; the case of Apollos contradicts this tendency. That Apollos follows the same basic missionary path as Paul, despite neither meeting Paul nor being sent out by the same church that sent Paul, indicates that the model we see from Paul was expected to be the model used by others as well. It is, therefore, reasonable to conclude that it is the model we also are expected to use.
Hesselgrave reaches this same conclusion, and defines the model, when he states that “there is explicit teaching in the Epistles which directs us to carry on the same activities in a similar way—namely, to go where people are, preach the gospel, gain converts, gather them into churches, instruct them in the faith, choose leaders, and commend believers to the grace of God.”1 Priscilla and Aquila are part of the church in Ephesus and have been identified elsewhere in scripture as leaders. These leaders find Apollos, instruct him in the faith, identify him as a leader, then send him where people are to preach the gospel, gain converts, and commend believers to the grace of God. Thus, as Paul is sent out by the church in Antioch, Apollos is sent out by the church in Ephesus. Given this relationship to the church in Ephesus and the description that “he greatly helped those who had believed through grace,” we can conclude that he operated under the authority of at least one established local church in his work (Acts 18:27, NASB).
We get very little information in Acts on what Apollos actually did while he was in the field, aside from refuting arguments against Jesus as the Christ and helping the church in Achaia, but given Paul’s description that “I planted, Apollos watered, but God was causing the growth,” it appears Paul believed Apollos was participating in the same process of establishing churches that Paul himself was (1 Corinthians 3:6, NASB). Thus, we have Apollos either described as, or hinted at being, someone who was trained by the local church, identified as a leader, and sent out by the local church to establish local churches in a different setting, just as Paul does throughout the lengthy descriptions of his work. That which was displayed by Paul and was handed down to Apollos has also been handed to us. The modern missionary has the same job description and model to follow as Paul and Apollos had, as we serve the same God on the same mission using the same means—the church—as them.
Historically, the primary means by which the local church extends its mission to the global stage has been by sending out individuals who have a working partnership with the local church and operate in a different, frequently overseas, local context. A working partnership is more than simply sending money, however, and requires that the church actually participate in global work on a fairly regular basis. One way local churches have addressed this need in recent years has been short-term mission trips. Short term missions, however, are a fairly new phenomenon in American Christianity. Bob Garrett, then-professor of missions at Dallas Baptist University, wrote in 2008 that “in the 1960s and into the 1970s most denominational mission boards and missionary sending agencies were still sending out exclusively career personnel” and went on to explain that the rise of short term missions was not only unexpected, but actively opposed by some.1 That it is now one of the primary activities of many American churches is a significant shift; and not necessarily one that has been handled well. As Brian Howell noted in an interview,
I am not for the narrative that has typically driven these trips: ‘We are going because there’s this tremendous need out there that we have to meet. And there’s this burden that we have as the wealthy country to go and do something in another place.’ I support transforming this narrative so that it becomes, ‘How can we connect with what God is doing in other parts of the world? How can we learn to be good partners with Christians already in these places? How can we participate in what the church is already doing in these countries in effective ways?2
This is not to say that other work cannot be part of this model. Short-term mission trips, service ministries abroad, and long-distance tools such as radio ministries and websites can all serve the mission of the church if they are carried out with the mission always serving as the focus. Griffiths warns that other approaches and organizations, good as they may be at achieving good purposes, must never cause us to “lose sight of the fact that such organizations are only auxiliary, ancillary, secondary and supplementary to the chief task of missions, which is to plant new churches” (emphasis original).4
This is, after all, the example we see in Acts. The church in Antioch was established by faithful people who came from the church in Jerusalem, with the short-term assistance of leaders sent by Jerusalem and the long-term work of Barnabas. This church then sent Barnabas and Saul out into the field, where they established churches while remaining in contact with, and under the authority of, the church in Antioch.
The role of the local church in missions, then, is to focus its energies and resources toward the establishment of a new local church, using whatever tools are suitable for the context and can be used faithfully, by making and gathering together disciples who will continue to engage in and pass along the church’s mission, under the authority of the local church, in accordance with the Great Commission.
2 Jeff Haanan and Brian M. Howell, “Better Partners: How Can Short-Term Mission Best Advance God's Mission?” Christianity Today, January-February 2013, 79. http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A315069366/ PPRP?u=vol_b43nbc&sid=PPRP&xid=b20c0ba8 (Accessed January 12, 2019).
3 David J Hesselgrave, “The Heart of Christian Mission” in Planting Churches Cross-Culturally: North America and Beyond Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000. 22.
4 Michael Griffiths, “What Do Missionaries Do?” in What On Earth Are You Doing?: Jesus' Call To World Mission InterVarsity Press, 1983. 39.
Acts, then, is a guide. It plays out within a specific context, and we must consider the degree to which that context influences specific actions taken, but doing so can reveal an understanding of what purposes and methods were guiding those decisions. If the apostles were operating under the orders of Christ, then their purposes and methods are Christ’s purposes and methods, and if that is the case, these must also be our purposes and methods. Paul’s exhortation to “be imitators of me, just as I also am of Christ” rings true for the entire book of Acts; to whatever extent the apostles were imitating Christ, we must also imitate them (1 Corinthians 11:1, NASB). Luke’s concern, that we be confident in what we have been taught, must include what we’ve been taught about the functions and purposes of the church. After all, in Acts he shows us what those functions and purposes are.
Identifying the Principles of Acts
The work of identifying those principles begins with studying the stories of Acts. The narrative of the book shows what these principles look like in action within a specific context, and we cannot draw the principles out of the narrative without studying the narrative for elements that are specific to context, elements that are common across multiple contexts, and a careful analysis of the actual practices and teachings of the apostles within the narrative.
To that end, the narrative of Acts can be broken down into major chunks. This class uses a system that looks for places where Luke appears to be wrapping up one portion of the narrative and beginning another; others may focus on immediate context or the broader life of the church as it develops throughout the book. Regardless, the purpose of breaking the narrative down is to see the principles raised and applied across multiple circumstances. Each of the primary principles, the things that must be in place across all churches across all time, would have to appear in every major chunk of the narrative. Therefore, this paper will operate on the following major chunks:
- 1:1-6:7: Initial practice and growth. This stage of the church’s development relied heavily on...
- The recognition, definition, and establishment of leaders;
- The practice of constant, invested community;
- Submission to teaching;
- Faithfulness in the face of opposition; and
- The work of the Holy Spirit.
- 6:8-9:31: Persecution and expansion beyond Jerusalem. This stage of the church’s development relied heavily on…
- The work of leaders in continuing to guide and expand the church;
- The work of the community in geographic expansion;
- Submission to teaching;
- Faithfulness in the face of opposition; and
- The work of the Holy Spirit.
- 9:32-12:24: Peter and the Gentiles. This stage of the church’s development relied heavily on…
- The work, identification, and establishment of leaders;
- The expansion of the community beyond the Jewish sphere;
- Submission to teaching; and
- The work of the Holy Spirit.
- 12:25-16:5: Spread into Asia Minor. This stage of the church’s development relied heavily on…
- The identification, training, and establishment of leaders;
- The geographic expansion of the church into Gentile territory;
- Submission to teaching;
- Defining terms of the community;
- Faithfulness in the face of opposition; and
- The work of the Holy Spirit.
- 16:6-19:20: The Church in Europe. This stage of the church’s development relied heavily on…
- The identification, training, and establishment of leaders;
- The geographic expansion of the church into Europe;
- Distinguishing the community from the world;
- Submission to teaching;
- Faithfulness in the face of opposition; and
- The work of the Holy Spirit.
- 19:21-28:31: Paul’s path to Rome. This stage of the church’s development relied heavily on…
- The faithfulness and continuity of leadership;
- The support of community;
- Submission to teaching and guidance;
- Faithfulness in the face of opposition; and
- The work of the Holy Spirit.
It is important not to get bogged down on questions we cannot answer. As Getz notes in Sharpening the Focus of the Church, “forms and structures are not absolutes in the Bible;” and as nonabsolutes, they cannot be our focus1. Instead, we must focus on the things that stand out as recurring principles, and the ways their various forms and structures tell us about the nature of those principles.
Leadership
In the first section, leadership is a driving force under the guidance and authority of the Holy Spirit. Jesus establishes this norm when He tells the disciples at the beginning of Acts that “...you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem and in all Judea, and Samaria, and as far as the remotest part of the earth” (Act 1:8, NASB). These disciples then give the first massive public witness to Christ at Pentecost, assemble the early church, teach in the temple and homes of believers, and answer to the Jewish authorities about the nature of the church and its beliefs. It is also these same disciples who then identify the need for another group of leaders, and it is their guidance that defines the functions of the first deacons and the traits that should be expected of them.
It is one of these identified leaders, Stephen, who is central in the drive of the second section of Acts. Through his faithfulness and boldness in preaching, he draws the attention of the Jewish leaders who go beyond previous questioning and kill him. This initiates a system of persecution carried out against the early church, during which Philip (one of the disciples) works in the Jewish-adjacent contexts of Samaria and a foreign believer in the Law. Meanwhile, the other key leaders remain in Jerusalem and continue to guide the church as it expands in response to persecution.
In the third section of Acts, the gospel reaches Gentiles through the preaching of Peter as initiated and led by the Holy Spirit. As Fee and Stuart note, it is important to recognize that God “did not now use the Hellenists, in which case it would have been suspect, but Peter, the acknowledged leader of the Jewish-Christian mission”2. The other leaders, in response to Peter’s account of the event, welcome the Gentile converts and this opens the door to the work of Antioch in focusing on Gentiles in their context, with the assistance of Barnabas, a leader sent to Antioch by the Jerusalem church, and Paul, identified by Barnabas as a fellow leader.
In the fourth section of Acts, the narrative follows Paul and Barnabas as they are set aside for work by the Holy Spirit and then as they carry out that work. As they carry the gospel through Asia Minor, they also make a point of establishing leaders wherever they see a church come together, even returning to dangerous settings to see that work completed. When Paul and Barnabas finish this work, they return to Antioch where they submit themselves to leadership by reporting all that happened to the church that sent them and its leaders.
The fifth section of Acts continues to follow Paul who, now separated from Barnabas, brings Silas as another leader and identifies Timothy as a man with promise to lead. Again, in every church they establish throughout this part of Acts, they do not stop until they have established leaders to continue working with the church after Paul’s team has left. And in the final section, as Paul makes his way to Jerusalem and, from there, to Rome, he continues to lead and to meet with leaders he has set in place and ensure they are prepared for the work ahead without him.
Through the entire book of Acts, then, the theme of leadership and its responsibility to care for the church and pass that work along to new leaders remains in constant focus. Luke tells us that the initial work of the apostles in leading the church was focused on teaching and prayer, and that in expanding the leadership of the church into a new office the apostles stated, “Instead, brothers and sisters, select from among you seven men of good reputation, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may put in charge of this task. But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word,” establishing a set of expectations for church leadership (Act 6:3-4, NASB). He shows how leaders were confirmed through the existing leadership structures, even when they have been identified by name by the Holy Spirit in the setting aside of Paul and Barnabas. He shows how those leaders did not consider their work finished in establishing a church until there were leaders in place, and though we have very little information on the exact nature of leadership training in the early church, Luke always places leaders in training under the care of, and working alongside, existing leaders within the context of active ministry. These principles, then, should guide us when we make our own plans for selecting, training, and sending out leaders today.
Community
...all the believers were together and had all things in common; and they would sell their property and possessions and share them with all, to the extent that anyone had need. Day by day continuing with one mind in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they were taking their meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord was adding to their number day by day those who were being saved.
Acts 2:44-47, (NASB)
The nature of the community has its first radical change in the third section of Acts, when gentiles are brought to faith and begin to be welcomed into the community. We get our first picture at this point, expounded in the epistles, that the community is united in Christ apart from any social divisions that would want to separate it. The community in Antioch is in prayer and fasting together when they receive the call to set Barnabas and Paul aside, in the fourth section of Acts, and it is that same community to whom Barnabas and Paul return and deliver a report. As Barnabas and Paul go about this work, they focus on establishing communities of believers, and Paul continues this emphasis when he moves into Europe during the fifth section of Acts. Finally, the community repeatedly comes around Paul to support him on his way to Rome.
The book of Acts consistently puts its work and its leaders in the context of community. This community is deeply invested in one another, sharing every aspect of their lives. It describes the community as being actively engaged in the work of ministry, rather than simply benefiting from it. It presents the community as having a certain authority of its own in mission, in the way it is able to act autonomously when apart from the apostles, in the way Paul submits himself to the church of Antioch in his work, and in the way the assembled church in Jerusalem is tasked with working out the details of the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15. The Christian community, then, is intimate, active, and authoritative.
Teaching
However, it is not the act of offering teaching alone that defines so much of the church through the book of Acts, but the willingness of the people to submit to that teaching. It is this unity under the teaching of the apostles, whether delivered directly by apostles or not, that defines the nature and scope of the community of the church. The birth of the church comes at Pentecost, and its first act is to teach the truth of the gospel. The first burst of conversion happens when about 3,000 people submit to this teaching. Over and over again, as the gospel spreads, it takes root where people submit to the teaching of the apostles and align their lives with this teaching. And when the book is nearing its final section and Paul is on his way to be arrested, he calls together elders who have lived in service to the teaching he imparted to them and hands over the task to continue teaching to those who will continue to submit to that teaching.
Faithfulness
In the first section of Acts, the church begins to face opposition in the form of the Jewish leaders arresting Peter and John and ordering them to stop teaching. They refuse, more than once, and make it clear that “...we cannot stop speaking about what we have seen and heard” when facing initial threats from those leaders (Acts 4:20, NASB). This escalates, and in the second portion of Acts, Stephen dies as the first Christian martyr. With Saul actively hunting the church, the believers did not stray from the gospel they had received, but carried it with them into the wider world. Post-conversion Paul is routinely opposed during his missionary journeys, stoned and left for dead on his very first outing, and his story as recorded in Acts ends with him under arrest and awaiting trial for his work of carrying the gospel.
While the opposition to the gospel is not a primary theme of the third section of Acts, it is so prevalent throughout the book and offers so much background to the third section that it warrants inclusion as a constant theme in Acts anyway. The church is constantly running afoul of both religious and civil leaders, and faces threats of punishment—and acts of punishment—with constant and unwavering faithfulness to Christ, the teachings of the apostles, and the community of the church.
Holy Spirit
Throughout Acts, the Holy Spirit moves to bring about all of the key elements of the book. The church is born from teaching delivered only on the arrival of the Holy Spirit. The teaching of the apostles is guided by the Holy Spirit, the unity of the body is unity in the Holy Spirit, the leaders of the body are identified and equipped by the Holy Spirit, and the church endures opposition thanks to the power of the Holy Spirit in securing them.
The Acts narrative frames every major step of the mission as the work of the Spirit first. The apostles do nothing of great importance until the Holy Spirit descends on them. The Holy Spirit kills Ananias and Sapphira in response to the damage they are doing to the unity of the body through their lies. The first deacons are selected on the grounds that they are “full of the Spirit,” and Stephen faces death with certainty of purpose granted through this same “being full of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 6:3; 7:55, NASB). The Holy Spirit teaches Paul what lays ahead of him and calls Ananias of Damascus to welcome him into the church, stirs Cornelius to hear the gospel and Peter to share it with him, identifies Paul and Barnabas for the task of undertaking the first missionary journey, redirects Paul when it’s time for him to enter Europe, and drives Paul to Jerusalem to face arrest and shipment to Rome. Acts is thus Holy Spirit driven, with Him working on every facet of every key element of the book in every major section of the book.
The ultimate lesson, then, is that the nature of the church is deeper than it looks. Imperfect but convincing community can be attained through human means, leaders can be trained to teach most anything, and people can be stubborn in the face of opposition with little prompting so long as they have reason to do so. What defines the church, and ultimately defines the form these other elements take, is that the Holy Spirit directs and fills every aspect of what the church is and does. This is the core element of the book of Acts: that the church is the vessel through which the Holy Spirit operates in the world, and the church has a responsibility to unite under this charge, to hold leadership accountable to this charge, to submit to the teachings that define this charge, and to hold fast to this charge even when all forces of the world are turned against us.
Most of Acts 15 is occupied with the Jerusalem Council, at which they addressed the question of the day: how Jewish do gentile converts need to become to be considered Christian? That is, as non-Jewish people were entering what was then a predominately Jewish movement, how much did they have to adopt Jewish practice to be welcomed as members? The short answer in that particular instance was very little. It was observed at the council that the Holy Spirit was being poured out on gentile converts, which seemed to indicate God's acceptance of them (us, let's be honest here), and that acceptance into the church had been established as being a function of grace and not keeping the Mosaic law. Therefore, it made no sense to demand that people make themselves as Jewish as they could before they could be considered Christian.
Which, as it happens, reminds me of something else going on. I've been trying to figure out a way to say some of this, but I think instead I'll let someone else present the general concept and then just show how it applies.
Drew Brees should probably retire pic.twitter.com/61nuI7jjys
— shannon sharpe (@ShannonSharpe) June 4, 2020
See, when countries like England and Spain and France were out conquering the world, they had this notion that having Christians in the culture made the culture Christian. When Spanish missions were popping up in the new world, for instance, they did not simply tell the native peoples around them about Christ and offer whatever gifts they had in service to the community. They demanded cultural conquest; in their minds, being Christian wasn't simply a matter of serving Christ as Lord and rejecting the authority and draw of sin. It wasn't simply being Catholic, as the missionaries were. It was living like the Spanish do, thinking like the Spanish do, speaking the Spanish language, eating Spanish food. Being Christian meant, for all intents and purposes, being thoroughly Spanish.
This notion carried over to the new world. People around the world recoil at the concept of missionaries because they, or their elders, have memories of people coming in and establishing an American lifestyle and an American style of worship and American values and calling it all the gospel. This is why my wife and I, as hopeful future missionaries, are targeting a sending agency that would put us under the authority of native-born church planters, to lend them our skills and gifts but let them decide how the actual work is carried out; we are refusing to establish little outposts of America and call them churches, even accidentally.
And this is happening at home. Consider the recoil against identity politics. I have heard some version of this at all kinds of levels, from major movements within denominations to individual elders at little local churches, that "well, we want to support people who are hurting, but we don't want to get wrapped up in identity politics." But what are identity politics? Basically, they're nothing more than people saying "because of this, or these, aspect(s) of who I am, I have these specific concerns and issues and goals." See, what we are saying when we talk about wanting to avoid that, is that we want to help people who are hurting, as long as they are hurting in ways we understand. As long as they are hurting in ways we hurt. That people who do not share our history, or our experiences, or our backgrounds, or our relationship to government authority, must nonetheless act like they do before we can view them as brothers and sisters with an equal share of Christ and an equal right to be supported as family. In fact, we sometimes treat it as an attack on the gospel itself to consider the possibility that people with a different ethnic background are facing different problems. As Shannon pointed out, we expect them to look at the flag and our nation's history through our lens rather than their own before we're willing to consider their concerns valid.
Because this is what we've convinced ourselves Christianity looks like. Being a Christian means viewing the world and one's nation and one's flag and history the way white Evangelical Republicans do. And the result is that my Facebook wall has dozens of posts from people saying they do not, and cannot, understand how certain forms of protest help advance the cause. Hear me on this: no one cares if you understand. Very little of it is aimed at making you understand (blocking traffic does tend to have the implicit "if you're this angry about being unable to advance for an hour, imagine how angry you would be if your entire culture was unable to advance for decades" statement, but not everything does). The question is, are you listening? And if you are listening, what are you going to do about it?
What is it going to take for us to listen? How many people are going to die before we decide to work with the hurting, to mourn with those who mourn, to weep with those who weep, to stand as agents of the Author of Life against forces that are bringing death and destruction? How badly must the world break around us before we realize that our own brokenness is feeding into it? How much more will we burden our brothers and sisters, people in our churches and serving the same Christ, not only with the trials they already face, but with our silence and judgment in the face of it?
"Now therefore why do you put God to the test by placing upon the neck of the disciples a yoke which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe that we are saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, in the same way as they also are."
Acts 15:10-11 (NASB)
St. Paul the Apostle, Public Domain, from Wikimedia Commons
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Be imitators of me, just as I also am of Christ.1 Corinthians 11:1 (NASB) While there is some dispute about the value of it, there is no argument against the claim that the church, as it exists today, is stamped with the theology of Paul of Tarsus. Regardless of denomination, there is a certain degree to which every church is an imitator of Paul, even when we disagree heavily about what that means. But if we are imitating Paul as he is imitating Christ, the question that must be asked is who he believed Christ to be.
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There is a surprising lack of material on Paul's understanding of Christ, considering this is the very foundation upon which everything else we have of him is built. In seeking resources for this, I found only two books that spilled any ink on Paul's understanding of Christ, and one was citing the other. If there are journal articles that handle this matter in any detail, they were lost in hundreds of pages of results that seemed to exclusively contain more doctrinal arguments than anything. Paul urges strangers to encounter Christ, he tells his readers to look to Christ in all they do, he strives to live a life that can be rightly said to be Christ living through him. If we treat Paul as a theologian writing doctrine in a vacuum, we will get a lot of very good theology, but we will miss the point of what Paul was trying to communicate. In all things, Paul is writing about Christ.
“Pauline Christianity forms the heritage of western Christianity to this day, and therefore it is all the more important to understand as fully as possible Paul’s conception of Jesus Christ.”
Also, while I identified a host of passages about the work of Christ and His current status in regards to the present age, this post will focus entirely on the actual nature of Christ, whether eternal or incarnational. I am hoping to cover the other passages over the course of summer break, and now that I think about it I'd like to do a similar study as this with other Bible authors. May God grant me time on this Earth to write everything I want to write about this.
Christ as Lord | |
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
The fact is, Paul almost never says the name of Jesus without appending a title, either Lord or Christ in our translations. This is the most fundamental truth of who Jesus is as far as Paul is concerned: he is God, and every mention of Him is apparently lacking if it does not in some way acknowledge that fact. This is, in fact, the first thing he learns about Jesus during his conversion; in Acts 9:5, Paul recognizes that whoever is speaking to him is certainly the Lord, but asks for further identification. When he receives the answer that this Lord is none other than Jesus, he immediately obeys Him. This fact will inform everything else Paul ever says or does concerning Jesus. Clarifying what it means for Jesus to be Lord, then, will tell us a great deal about everything else.
“What is perhaps even more noteworthy, however, is that there are a number of passages where Paul appears to apply Old Testament passages referring to the Lord to the figure of Jesus Christ.”
Image of the Invisible God | |
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.
The claim that this God has fully revealed Himself, in the accessible form of a human being no less, was a revolutionary claim. This is not like Zeus, stepping down from a mountain to sleep with some randomly noticed maiden. That God, who cannot be known except at a great distance, who cannot be approached without extensive ritual and shedding of blood, should take on our mortal flesh and walk on our dusty roads is insane. The depth of what this would have meant for the first Christians may be lost on us, who have always known of Jesus in this way.
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For God, who said, "Light shall shine out of darkness," is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.2 Corinthians 4:6 (NASB) |
Character of God | |
“In that sense images of Christ are for Paul also in some ways images of God.”
Therefore no one is to act as your judge in regard to food or drink or in respect to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day-- things which are a mere shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ.
Son of God | |
But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons.
This is no light language, either. A lot of the terminology Paul uses for Jesus play into positions of authority across the full spectrum of time. Whether this is about preeminence or calling Him firstborn or heir of God (Romans 8:16-17, 29; Colossians 1:18; etc.), describing Him as the head/husband of the church and all things (Ephesians 1:19-23, 4:15; Romans 12:4-5; etc.), or the supreme judge and ruler at the end of the age (2 Thessalonians 2:8; 2 Timothy 4:1, 8; etc.), Paul regularly views Christ as bearing the full authority of God.
But the work the Father had for the Son was not to take place entirely on a throne in Heaven.
Incarnation | |
Jesus was the fulfillment of a great number of promises, and two of them relate to His ancestry. The first is that He was to be a descendant of Abraham, which Paul identifies as true of Him (Romans 9:3-5, Galatians 3:16). The other is that He was the son of David that would sit forever on the throne (Acts 13:22-23, Romans 1:3-4, 2 Timothy 2:8). His specific family is noted in Galatians 1:19, where He is stated as the brother of James.
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And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's descendants, heirs according to promise.Galatians 3:29 (NASB) |
The gift is not like that which came through the one who sinned; for on the one hand the judgment arose from one transgression resulting in condemnation, but on the other hand the free gift arose from many transgressions resulting in justification. For if by the transgression of the one, death reigned through the one, much more those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ. So then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men, even so through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men. For as through the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous.
Summary | |
“In summarizing this passage, we can see that several of the Pauline christological images are maintained. He uses the composite name, Christ Jesus, to describe both earthly and exalted status and events, with the figure moving between them. Although he is seen to be in the appearance of God, and equal with him in some way, Jesus Christ also is subordinate to him, being obedient to the point of death and consequently being exalted by him to a position of preeminence in the universe.”
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