Editorial
From the Newsletter of Revesby Presbyterian Church
February 2010
Rev Dr Peter Barnes
Is the minister of a church to be seen as akin to a CEO of a company? Should he be a public relations expert? Should each local church have a Finance Department? Should we aim at a particular clientele? And should we have to read the plethora of literature on leadership, and go to interminable conferences on how to be an effective leader? Ought we to franchise the church in the way that MacDonald’s franchises its eating places? ‘Find a hurt and heal it’ – is that how we are to go about growing a church?
The first thing to realise is that it is God who gives true growth to His kingdom. As Paul told the Corinthians: ‘I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth’ (1 Cor.3:6). We cannot confer new life to the sinner. We cannot grant the Holy Spirit to anyone. This does not mean that all we do is mechanically repeat the message. Paul had strategies. On his first missionary journey he seems to have adopted a ‘preach and return’ approach. He preached in the Galatian cities of Lystra, Iconium, and Lystra, and later returned there to strengthen the disciples, encourage them, and appoint elders in each church (Acts 14:22-23). Clearly, Paul had some kind of provisional plan in mind as he moved from place. He did not simply love to go a-wandering with a knapsack on his back.
Paul invariably went to the Jews first, then the Greeks (Rom.1:16; Acts 13:46). He also had a strategy in addressing his hearers. He aimed to be all things to all men (1 Cor.9:19-23). To the Greeks, he could cite pagan poets (Acts 17:28), while to those in the synagogue, he stuck firmly to the Old Testament in explaining that Jesus is the promised Messiah (Acts 13). Clearly, there is more to growing a church than being armed with a Bible and being full of good intentions.
For all that, the primary emphasis for the church is not getting our techniques and strategies right. It is essentially about prayer, teaching, and pastoral care. The apostles declared that they would give their attention to prayer and the ministry of the word (Acts 6:4). It is prayer that reveals how weak we are. Paul never ceased to pray for the Christians at Colossae (Col.1:9), and so could call on them in turn to ‘Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving’ (Col.4:2). Paul does not use the language of having a ‘quiet time’. He writes of prayer in terms of struggling or striving (Col.2:1). Any pastor will tell you that it is far easier to preach to your people for half an hour than to pray for those same people for the same length of time. No wonder the disciples asked Jesus: ‘Lord, teach us to pray’ (Luke 11:1), and even the great apostle himself confessed that ‘we do not know what to pray for as we ought’ (Rom.8:26). So often, we do not have because we do not ask or we ask with corrupt motives (James 4:2-3). We learn to pray by praying.
Secondly, it is about being faithful to God’s Word. When William Wilberforce rose in the British House of Commons in 1789 to give a three hour speech on the evils of the slave trade, he challenged his hearers: ‘Having heard all of this you may choose to look the other way but you can never again say that you did not know.’ That is something like what Paul says to the Ephesian elders. Because he proclaimed the whole counsel of God to them, he was innocent of their blood (Acts 20:26-27). Conversions are not in our hands. It was Ezekiel’s responsibility to speak the truth; he was not accountable for how people responded (Ezek.3:18-19). ‘Preach the word’ was Paul’s last exhortation to Timothy (2 Tim.4:2).
A. W. Tozer’s comment is apt: ‘It is true that the church has suffered from pugnacious men, but she has suffered more from timid preachers who would rather be nice than right. The latter have done more harm if for no other reason than that there are so many more of them.’ We are not selling a product; we are proclaiming the truth. We are to proclaim all that God has given us in His word. As John Flavel put it: ‘The gospel offer of Christ includes all his offices, and gospel faith just so receives him … It must be an entire receiving of the Lord Jesus Christ.’
Thirdly, we are to seek to live out the gospel. People will often ‘feel’ the truth before they believe it. Jesus Himself said that people will know that we are His disciples if we have love for one another’ (John 13:35). This cannot be divorced from our commitment to God’s truth and to prayer, but it is a warning to us that the gospel is not simply cerebral. It does more than just rearrange our mental furniture. In the second century Justin Martyr claimed: ‘Many have been overcome, and changed from violence and bullying, by having seen the faithful lives of Christian neighbours, the wonderful patience of Christian fellow-travellers when defrauded, the honesty of Christians with whom they did business.’ Ordinary people sought to live out in their day-to-day lives what it means to die to self and live for Christ. Joni Eareckson Tada concludes one of her contemplations with the surprising prayer: ‘Lord Jesus, cultivate in me a Bible-blessed spirit of losing.’
There is no easy method of winning souls, and no sure-fire techniques. John Chapman tells us that the first fifty years are the hardest. Programmes and techniques are second to a consistent spiritual life. It is pointless for the Church to declare a decade of evangelism and engage in a lot of activity if the Church herself is moribund or apostate. Our first call is not to be successful but to be faithful. We live in a ‘feel good’ society. People want to feel good about themselves, and religious people want to feel good about their relationship with God. Yet on the Day of Pentecost, Peter’s hearers were ‘cut to the heart’ (Acts 2:37). We have a message which the world needs but does not want. Our task is not to manipulate people so that they receive some kind of truncated version of the gospel but to pray, to proclaim the word of God, and to live out that word that God will indeed bless His work.
With warmest regards in Christ,
Peter Barnes