Toward a Healthy Church

By Tracy Tyson

The church is incredibly important. It is too important to base our understanding on traditions of men, marketing experts, or church growth gurus. What does God say about the church? You will not find all the answers in this book. But I hope that this short book will give each of us a greater desire to see the Lord glorified in His church in all nations. To God be the glory!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tracy Tyson
• Release date: Dec 26, 2010
• ISBN: 9781458130624

Tracy Tyson

The Lord Jesus Christ has saved me, although I was an undeserving rebel against Him. I desire to follow Him and see His Name glorified in the earth. God has blessed me with a wonderful wife, 3 boys, and a baby on the way. I teach elementary students at a Christian school in New Mexico. I love Jesus because He first loved me.

Book preview

Toward a Healthy Church

By Tracy Robert Tyson

Smashwords Edition

(Copyright 2010)

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: Love

Chapter 2: Truth

Chapter 3: Prayer

Chapter 4: Holy Spirit

Chapter 5: Discipleship

Chapter 6: The Body

Chapter 7: Conclusion and Cautions

Preface

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Thank you for taking the time to think through these things with me. I trust if you are reading this, it is because you have a desire for the church of the Lord Jesus Christ to show His glory to the world. These thoughts grew out of questions in my own heart concerning the church. This book does not address everything, for there are many things almost all evangelical churches get right (the deity of Christ, the infallibility of God's Word, the resurrection, etc...) I live in America, and most of the churches I have seen and been a part of are American, so it addresses some things within our conservative evangelical American church. It is not my desire to be offensive or confrontational, but I do want to examine everything in the light of the Scriptures.

Whether I know you or not, I hope you will feel free to e-mail me with any feedback you have after reading this ([e-mail]). My desire is to know the truth and faithfully follow our Lord. It is possible that I have missed some things or stated them wrongly. I know I have much to learn. Please feel free to share your thoughts with me. If I have not written gently enough or have seemed overly critical, please forgive me. I have written out of love for our Lord and His church. I have written this with the intended audience being conservative, evangelical church people.

There are some things in here you will probably agree with. There are other things many of you might not agree with. I would simply ask you to search the Scriptures to see if what I have shared is true. Some of what I am advocating is very different from the present church form. This makes me a little nervous, as the men I respect the most and have learned the most from are pastors with churches that are fairly traditional in their form. Yet, I do think I see something beyond this in the Scriptures.

I also want to say that some of the things I write about are not yet real in my own life. I have not arrived, but I am seeking these things. Particularly in the area of prayer, my life is not yet what it should be. I know that the church needs to pray more than we do, and also that I personally need to pray more than I do.

If you would like to sit down and talk through some of the concepts (by phone or in person), that would also be helpful. If you have anything that would be good to add, please let me know. Thank you for taking the time to read this. May the Lord continue to conform us to the image of His dear Son, and may He cause rivers of living water to flow from our lives into the lives of those around us who so desperately need our Savior.

Tracy

Introduction

So for the sake of your tradition you have made void the Word of God. These words were spoken by the Lord Jesus Christ to the Pharisees nearly two millennia ago. Evangelical Christians in America today love to point our long, pious fingers at those hypocritical Pharisees. We mock them, talk about how blind they were, and label other people as Pharisees when we disagree with them. But are we ever in danger of being Pharisees ourselves? The Word of God tells us that the stories in the Old Testament were written as examples for us (1 Corinthians 10:11). The interactions between Jesus and the Pharisees were also written down as examples. While each of us would readily admit to being a sinner and say that we are only saved by God's grace, the reality is that each of us is in great danger of becoming like the Pharisees.

In retrospect, it is easy to see how wrong the Pharisees were, but it is not so easy to see where our own traditions invalidate the Word of God. It is easier to see in others. You can probably quickly list off a number of unbiblical traditions from various other denominations. But what about us? Is it possible that some of our traditions are unbiblical?

It’s so easy to point our fingers at everyone else, while we dutifully recite that we live by every word of Scripture, for all Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness... (2 Timothy 3:16) And yet while we are pointing out the speck in the eye of others, bystanders laugh at the fact that there is a plank in our own eye.

Much of American evangelical Christianity today is based more upon the traditions of men than it is on the Word of God. This is apparent to many serious observers and students of Scripture. I think that, with the best of intentions, we may have become conformed to the world and missed what God has for us. I believe that one area where evangelicals have used our traditions to make void the Word of God is in our concept of the church.

I want to be clear from the outset that this is not an attack on the church of Jesus Christ. That is in vogue in our day among emergent leaders and many young people. Popular books encourage rampant American individualism and assure us that we need to find our own path and our own way of following Jesus. But even men such as these are not teaching a new doctrine, for God spoke about such people in Jeremiah's day: Thus says the Lord: ‘Stand in the ways and see, And ask for the old paths, where the good way is, And walk in it; Then you will find rest for your souls.’ But they said, 'We will not walk in it.’ (Jeremiah 6:16) Like the people in that day, many today are refusing to walk in the old paths. They know that something is wrong within the church, and yet instead of going to Scripture and seeking the Lord, they are remaking God in their own image.

Many young people today are dropping out of the church entirely. They find the church hypocritical and irrelevant and decide to follow Jesus on their own. Unfortunately, the accusations they make against the visible church in America have some merit. The only problem with dropping out of church is that the cure is worse than the disease. It is impossible to follow Jesus on your own. The Word of God shows that the local church is very important. William MacDonald is correct: The New Testament assumes every believer to be attached to some local church; otherwise he would be free from the discipline of any assembly, and such a freedom would be fraught with the gravest perils for the individual. There is no concept, anywhere in the New Testament of a private relationship between a believer and God where he is not in fellowship with other believers in a local church. All believers are to be in a local church. In fact, the Word of God explicitly says that we know we have passed from death to life because we love the brethren, and he who does not love his brother abides in death (1 John 3:14). It is a great deception to think you can follow Christ and not be a part of a local church.

Elton Trueblood writes that The best critics of anything stand on the inside. This applies to church, as well. It is only those who love the church who can help the church. All who hate, despise, or neglect the church are enemies of the One who bought the church with His own blood. The Lord Jesus Christ loves His church, He died for His church, He is in the process of purifying His church that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she will be holy and without blemish (Ephesians 5:25-27).

I am not someone standing outside the church and taking pot shots at it. The church is a beautiful thing. I myself am involved in a local church and love it. I struggle and fail in many points, and I am seeking to be more like Christ, but I have not arrived and do not have all the answers. I do have questions, and I want to take those questions to the Word of God, for I believe that the Word of God, rightly interpreted by the Holy Spirit, is sufficient and has answers to our questions.

To reiterate, the Lord Jesus Christ loves His church. It is incredibly important to be in a local church. If you are not in a local church, you are in disobedience to God's commands, and you are missing His designs for you. The Lord loves His church with a deep, abiding, unconditional love, and He calls us to love the church as well.

This does not mean that we must pretend everything is going well when it is not, but it does mean we must always be thinking, speaking, writing and praying for the church, because we love her. If we ever lose this, we are doing the work of the devil in tearing down the church for which Christ shed His blood. Let us remember that the Lord Jesus Christ ever lives to make intercession for the saints, while the devil is the accuser of the brethren. I pray that from this day forward we will always side with Christ and not with Satan in this great struggle.

You may be a good brother or sister who disagrees with some of what I have said already. I am not saying that if you do not conform to a certain church pattern, you are backslidden or apostate. Rather, I simply wish to say that, for many of us, God has more for us than we are currently experiencing. Our form hinders us from experiencing the width and length and depth and height of the love of Christ. May we long to know our Lord Jesus Christ more and become increasingly like Him.

The reason I am concerned with our church structure is not that I have an agenda to push, something to sell, or even a great desire to be proved right. The reason I am concerned is that the Lord Jesus Christ is infinitely glorious and majestic and beautiful. However, many of us go to church to worship that living God, but frankly find our time together to be boring. Such things ought not so to be, my brothers. I long to see us delivered from this deception, so that we might know and worship Christ in spirit and in truth.

I also want to acknowledge that I may be mistaken about some things. I am open to correction, and sincerely hope that some brothers will love me enough to show me my error, if I am not seeing these things correctly. When someone shows us we are wrong, they have done us a great service. I am seeking to follow the Lord Jesus Christ, as I ask what the Word of God has to say concerning church. May the Lord give me and all His children much wisdom.

Function Dictates Pattern

As you might imagine, there are many theories about what church should look like. Each purports to have strong scriptural support. To tell the truth, the New Testament simply does not say a whole lot about the pattern of the church. There are some instructions regarding the pattern. But the reason there are many different patterns of church government among serious, godly brothers today is that the pattern is not all that clear. I started studying the church thinking primarily about what the pattern should be. However a more fundamental question is: What is the function of the church? What is the church supposed to do? In the absence of clear guidelines on exactly what the pattern should be, there is some freedom in the pattern. So in order to pattern the church as the Lord would have us, the bigger question is, What is the church supposed to do? What is it supposed to be like? Once we know the answers to these questions, it will help us see a little more of what the pattern could be like.

Francis Schaeffer makes the same point in slightly different words:

Anything the New Testament does not command concerning church form is a freedom to be exercised under the leadership of the Holy Spirit for that particular time and place. In other words, the New Testament sets boundary conditions, but within these boundary conditions there is much freedom to meet the changes that arise both in different places and different times. I am not saying that it is wrong to add other things as the Holy Spirit so leads, but I am saying that we should not fix these things forever--changing times may change the leading of the Holy Spirit in regard to these. And certainly the historic accidents of the past (which lead to certain things being done) have no binding effect at all. It is parallel to the evangelical church being bound by middle-class mores and making them equal to God's absolutes. To do this is sin. Not being able, as times change, to change under the Holy Spirit is ugly. The same applies to church polity and practice. In a rapidly changing age like ours, an age of total upheaval like ours, to make non-absolutes absolutes guarantees both isolation and the death of the institutional, organized church.

I would add that when we speak of changing under the leading of the Holy Spirit, we know that the Spirit of God would never lead us contrary to the Word of God.

It is an interesting study to contrast the Old Testament guidelines for the worship of God with the New Testament guidelines. In the Old Testament, the guidelines are very, very specific. There are regulations concerning the color of the ephod, what the pomegranates on Aaron's robe should look like, what the hooks for the veil should be made of, etc. In the New Testament, there is not even a clear guideline to say whether we should meet in a building or outside or in a house. In the Old Testament, the priests had to wear a very specific type of clothing when they were ministering to the Lord. In the New Testament, there is not a great emphasis on what type of clothing we should wear. Provided worshippers are modest, there is a great variety of apparel which could be worn to the glory of God.

Why this great difference? The Word of God which came in the Old Testament was tied to one nation and culture. This does not mean that God did not care for other cultures. Far from it. God's design was for the Jewish nation to manifest His glory to the nations. For the most part,