Introduction to Rhythm
The Shape of Things to Come, prt. 3
Wildwind Community Church
David Flowers
September 20, 2008
You will sometimes hear about churches that pride themselves on being “New Testament churches.” I’m not against using that title, necessarily, but there is a minor problem with it. The problem is that no one really knows exactly how New Testament churches were run. Therefore there probably isn’t a single church on the planet right now that is being run just like any church we read of in the Bible. Now, if it had been an overwhelming concern in the mind of God to make sure that churches today were structured and run exactly as they were structured and run 2000 years ago, do you think God would have been pretty capable of communicating that to us clearly? I think so. The fact that he didn’t leads me to conclude that God is not interested in whether or not our church runs like the churches in the New Testament.
Now don’t get me wrong. There are some characteristics of the New Testament church that if we miss them, I’m convinced we’re not doing church right. For example:
Colossians 3:12-14 (NIV)
12 Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.
13 Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.
14 And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.
This is just a tiny sample. The New Testament is filled with passages like this. Overwhelmingly, the Bible speaks of how the church should look in terms of the character of the people in the church. The Bible does not address church government. Except in an indirect way:
1 Timothy 3:1-7 (NLT)
1 This is a trustworthy saying: “If someone aspires to be an elder, he desires an honorable position.”
2 So an elder must be a man whose life is above reproach. He must be faithful to his wife. He must exercise self-control, live wisely, and have a good reputation. He must enjoy having guests in his home, and he must be able to teach. 3 He must not be a heavy drinker or be violent. He must be gentle, not quarrelsome, and not love money.
4 He must manage his own family well, having children who respect and obey him. 5 For if a man cannot manage his own household, how can he take care of God’s church? 6 An elder must not be a new believer, because he might become proud, and the devil would cause him to fall. 7 Also, people outside the church must speak well of him so that he will not be disgraced and fall into the devil’s trap.
In this passage on those who serve the church as leaders, what does the Bible address? Character. This is the goal of every Biblical passage I can think of that addresses the church.
And so I say again: God is not interested in whether or not our church runs exactly like the churches in the New Testament. What God is interested in is that people in his churches are being formed in faith, growing in that faith, and learning to respond to the rhythms of God’s grace in their lives.
Why do I bring this up? It’s simple. I bring it up because I want you to know that since God didn’t lay down a set of rules for how every church is to be run – there’s no handbook – no manual of church government – it is then left to the leadership of every church to determine how this work of forming people in faith, growing them in that faith, and helping them learn to respond to the rhythms of God’s grace in their lives can best be done.
How many Christian denominations are there in the world? First, let’s get terminology clear. Often when someone says, “What religion are you?” what they really want to know is “What is your denomination?” Religions are systems of belief, such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Taoism, Shinto, and Hindu. Denominations are the various branches or subgroups contained in each religion. Jews are Hasidic, Orthodox, etc. Muslims are Shiite and Sunni. Christians are Baptist, Catholic, Methodist, Free Methodist (that’s us!), Evangelical Free, Nazarene, Wesleyan – well, how many do you think there are in Christianity worldwide? The correct answer is roughly 38,000. I kid you not.
Each of these denominations claims, to some extent, to be following the Bible. Each believes it has a more accurate take on scripture than most of the others. Add to this the fact that some denominational systems (such as the Free Methodist system we are part of) allow wide latitude in how their local churches are run, and you have a huge variety of belief systems that have sprung from Christianity, and a far greater variety still of church governmental structures that have sprung up – each believing, I’m sure, that their way of running their church is at least as good as, if not better than, everybody else’s.
Have I blown your mind yet? Actually that is my goal. Because you must realize that THIS is the environment in which one church splits off from another and says, “We’re going to start a new denomination – we GET IT more than the church we’re coming from.” This is the environment in which local church pastors will seriously believe that their church runs according to the Bible and others don’t. And THIS is the environment where attendees and members of local churches will say things like, “I’m leaving that church – their membership system isn’t Biblical.” News flash. There’s no such thing as a Biblical church membership system!
Now some will say, “I couldn’t agree more. DOWN WITH IT. Let’s not have church membership at all.” The only problem there is that one of the few things we do know about the New Testament church is that they DID have church membership. In fact, the standards for membership in those first churches that sprung up after Jesus ascended into heaven were so rigorous that few if any of us in this church today would have any interest at all in being a member of those churches. But in the interest of being Biblical, do we have to structure our churches the same way today that they did 2000 years ago? Is that what God has called us to – is the 21st century church supposed to be a carbon copy of the 1st century church?
The Free Methodist Church of which you are a part if you attend Wildwind sprung up from the preaching and teaching of a radical man named John Wesley. Wesley practiced a radical method of bringing people to know Jesus better that he called “classes,” but classes were nothing more than what we today understand as “small groups.” He came up with a list of 21 questions that members of each “class” had to answer each week. Yes, 21! Here they are:
Wesley’s questions:
1. Am I consciously or unconsciously creating the impression that I am better than I really am? In other words, am I a hypocrite?
2. Do I confidentially pass on to others what has been said to me in confidence?
3. Can I be trusted?
4. Am I a slave to dress, friends, work or habits?
5. Am I self-conscious, self-pitying, or self-justifying?
6. Did the Bible live in me today?
7. Do I give the Bible time to speak to me every day?
8. Am I enjoying prayer?
9. When did I last speak to someone else of my faith?
10. Do I pray about the money I spend?
11. Do I get to bed on time and get up on time?
12. Do I disobey God in anything?
13. Do I insist upon doing something about which my conscience is uneasy?
14. Am I defeated in any part of my life?
15. Am I jealous, impure, critical, irritable, touchy or distrustful?
16. How do I spend my spare time?
17. Am I proud?
18. Do I thank God that I am not as other people, especially as the Pharisee who despised the tax collector?
19. Is there anyone whom I fear, dislike, disown, criticize, hold a resentment toward or disregard? If so, what am I doing about it?
20. Do I grumble or complain constantly?
21. Is Christ real to me?
How would you like to answer those questions in front of a group of people every week? We don’t know that this was done in the early church, but Wesley did it to great success. I suspect if I asked Brent to make those question mandatory for everyone in our small groups to answer today, it would be met with a little resistance, if not simply because small group would have to last five hours a week to get everyone through all those questions! And yet, when you hear the questions, aren’t they good? Aren’t they soul-searching questions that require you to drop the pretense and just get real? We may not be asking those questions today, but we say we value getting real. Maybe we need to ask each other these questions more often.
The point is that if you were part of John Wesley’s church, this is what you did. John Wesley understood that it was his job as a church leader to create a system within which his people could flourish spiritually in their understanding of God’s grace. But Wesley had something going that we do not have going today. In Wesley’s day, the church’s worldview was assumed. Not everyone was Christian, but Christianity was generally assumed to be true and trustworthy. There was no media then except for books and newspapers. There were few advertisements. There was nothing, on the whole, to shape people away from a worldview based in God. Today, there is very little on the whole, other than the quiet flame of the still-surviving church, to shape people TOWARD a worldview based in God. Nearly every voice in our culture comes from a world where God is absent – Missing in Action – from the public schools to the TV news to our sitcoms and movies and theater and magazines and books, to our pop songs to our advertisements to our involvements in community groups, to our political leaders to our doctors and lawyers and therapists and university professors. Nearly every voice in modern American life comes from a world where God is MIA – where the idea of God’s irrelevance to all of life has been adopted first by our intellectuals, taught in our universities, and then that view has trickled into our scientific publications and journals and then into Popular Science and school textbooks and into the minds of our children who then grow up not necessarily disbelieving in God, but simply not seeing where God is relevant in their lives in any way.
This is our world. This is the field where tens of thousands of pastors are laboring day in and day out, where against the bombast of largely God-absent media and politics and education and entertainment and the self-satisfaction and individualism they ignite – where we shout in our loudest voices – God is, and God matters! And his church, though it be on the downswing in America, has been assured by Jesus himself that we will prevail – that one day every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.
This is our world. And the job of every church leader in every church throughout all of history, is to know the culture around them and structure a church that clearly sounds the call of God to its people and the surrounding community. We are practitioners of the ways of God in a world that cares little and simply assumes the irrelevance of what we say. We are listeners. We are charged with keeping our finger on the pulse of the secular heart – studying how it beats and what might be able to reach it. And we are charged also with keeping a finger on the pulse of the Christian heart, too many of which are beating the rhythm of the world around them. Too many Christian hearts beat not for the vision of Jesus for our world, but for our own petty and dishonorable agendas. Too many Christian hearts are easily offended by the suggestion that we have grown too comfortable, and too many Christian hearts have become more interested in holding on to what is theirs rather than giving to Jesus all that is his. Too many Christian hearts are more preoccupied with what the church asks of them than what they are already freely willing to give up to Jesus and to the church – the local body of believers where Jesus actually becomes real.
Like every church, Wildwind is called to know our culture and structure a church that clearly sounds the call of God to you – our people – and to the community around us. So here is what I know. I know that a church where people do not serve cannot possibly be a healthy church – that point is made over and over again in the New Testament. That’s why we ask members at Wildwind to serve. I know that a church where people are not giving will soon cease to be a church and I don’t think there’s a single person here today who would want to see that happen. We are called to be generous and I happen to believe that if we don’t excel in this area we will miss one of the most important aspects of what Jesus wants to grow in us. That’s why we ask our members to give. I am convinced that the best growth happens in small groups, and I know that we can come and sit and absorb sermons and worship music every week and remain completely unchanged. We can do that in small group too, but it’s harder, and I want to make it difficult for our people to NOT get to know Jesus! That’s why we ask our members to commit to being active in a small group. Some people say, “Why the serving and giving and small group? God just wants my heart.” My friend, where is the human heart expressed if not in what we give our money, our time, and our effort to? Could any of us say to a spouse, “I will love you and commit to you forever, but my money, my time, and all my efforts are for me only.” Of course not – it doesn’t even make sense!
See, the world around you is trying every single day to squeeze you into its mold. And do you know how the world is doing it? Through the commitments it asks you to make.
Commit to our school system and get an education. Commit to our financial system and go to work. Commit to our value system and fend for yourself. Commit to our religion and pursue your own needs relentlessly. Commit to our time schedule – up at this time, out the door at that time, into the office at this time, back home at that time, in bed at that time, then commit that you’ll do that every single day for the rest of your life. Commit to our movies and our music and our television and buying our products. Commit to our view of human relationships and our understanding of the human mind.
And we do it. Man, in practically everything I’ve spoken of, we make those commitments. We TiVo those TV shows and read those books and keep that schedule and make those choices the world wants us to make, and hang on as tightly to our money and property as the world says is wise. Then those things exercise their effects on our minds and hearts and create lives that are chaotic and stressed out, and people who are unaware of their infinite value before God whoever they are, people who are lost for one simple reason – because in all these commitments, God has been lost. They have found the world and committed completely to it, and in return it is creating them. They are saturated by it and the world’s tension and frustration and confusion and chaos runs in their bloodstream because that is what they have committed themselves to. While Jesus says,
Matthew 11:28 (MSG)
28 "… Get away with me and you’ll recover your life…
Most of us (both inside and outside the church) will gladly make all the insane and unreasonable commitments the world asks us to make, six days a week. Then some of us will come to church a day a week hoping the church can help us reverse the insanity those commitments have brought into our lives. And then, to put the cherry on top, when the church asks us to make a few commitments – when the church says, “Let’s take some tangible steps to become people who are getting away with Jesus,” the response far too often is, “What? People don’t like to make commitments. You can’t ask that.” But like I just said, most of us have made so many commitments to the world and its system that we don’t even realize they are commitments. I would just ask you, all those commitments you have made to the world and its system and its values and ways of doing things -- what are those commitments costing you? What are they extracting from you every day? See, people are willing to pay a very high price for something they believe will benefit them. Jesus says,
Luke 14:28 (NLT)
28 …count the cost.
“…the commitments you have made to this world might not be all they are cracked up to be. And the commitment of carrying your cross and following me might turn out to be the far better option.” The truth is that our society is an EXTREMELY high commitment society, as long as those commitments never require us to be committed to anything other than ourselves. But Jesus says,
Luke 14:28 (NLT)
28 …count the cost.
There will be a cost to doing our own thing. So the idea that membership in this church or any other costs too much – let’s dispense with that talk forever, right here and right now, shall we? Most of us have made hundreds of commitments to hundreds of things and I wonder how many of them are really delivering like we hoped they would.
Every church is charged with establishing a way of life that it encourages its people to enter into together, asking people to make tangible commitments to each other and to God. That is what we have done in our membership commitments at Wildwind. Our goal for this year is to use our membership commitments and many other things I’ll be sharing with you to help us begin to create new rhythms in our lives so that we will come to see the commitments we make to this world for the shallow and empty things they are and the commitments we are asked to make to God and to his body the church as the real rhythms of our lives. Next week I want to talk to you specifically about what Wildwind is going to ask of its members this year. Our commitments for membership at Wildwind are not changing much this year. We’re asking more of our members in a very specific way, and less of them in most other ways. I will talk to you specifically about this next week. And I want to leave you with something to think about. Once I’ve had a chance to walk you through this next week, I will throw open the doors of membership at Wildwind and ask you to come in. Will you listen carefully to what I have to say next week, and keep this week in mind, and then seriously consider linking arms with us in membership at Wildwind? You don’t HAVE to and you can attend forever without it, but will you be willing to consider it?
