When God’s Word Changes Our Minds About Church

One of the difficult adjustments of home church life has been the discovery that, “Hold it a minute, that’s not what God’s word teaches!”

I have regularly had to adjust long-standing beliefs I had learned in denominational churches of the institutional mindset and reconsider what the New Testament writers were teaching the church of the first century, and what that required of me if I was determined to let the breathed-out words of God teach me, reprove me, correct me, and train me in righteousness.[1]

I want to clarify that this journey in Jesus Christ has not moved me to the contemporary trend of accommodating sin in the church that the apostles would never have dreamed would happen so far ahead in the future. This has not led me to a man-centered interpretation of Scriptures that allow for us to believe whatever we want to believe as it suits our fancy, tickles or ears, or makes us comfortable in something God clearly rebukes. Neither have I come up with any fancy schemes of prophecy, or end times-events-timetables, or new packages of systematic theology. I have not merged aspects of the old covenant with the new, or isolated any particular Scriptures into a doctrinal mindset that requires the denial of other teachings of God’s word. I do not claim perfection in anything I believe or do, but still must identify that growing up in Christ with a heart to live by “every word that proceeds from the mouth of God”,[2] has confronted me with things I already believed and did that were often not at all required by Scripture, and, at times, were in direct contradiction of God’s breathed-out words.

Stepping out from the manmade restrictions of denominational thinking and institutional organizing has allowed me to listen for what the Spirit is saying to the churches with a heart ready to walk in what the apostle Paul called, “the obedience of faith”.[3] I often discovered that I was not only dealing with the need to adjust my thinking and beliefs, but also that I was far more immature in my Christlikeness than I had ever imagined, and the need to grow up in my Savior was glaring in its expectations.

There has been no doubt that, in a quest to submit to the teachings of God’s word in faith, both beliefs and practices have been reproved, or shown to be wrong. This acceptance that I have been wrong prepared the way for whatever correction the Holy Spirit was working into my life through the living and active word of God.[4] These adjustments to belief and practice contributed to my training in the righteousness of faith,[5] that ongoing work of God to transform me into the same image as Jesus Christ “from one degree of glory to another”.[6]

I’m writing this today for the simple reason that I was once again confronted with something that was a challenge to the remnants of denominational/institutional belief and practice, and I had to open my heart to prayerfully meditate on what I was reading with as much openness to hear what the Spirit was saying to the churches at that time, and a willingness to adjust to what this means for the churches at this time.

It began with the next phrase I was praying through in the book of Hebrews, “Obey your leaders and submit to them...”[7] No matter how foreign obedience and submission may seem in the contemporary church,[8] it is not difficult to understand the definitions of the words “obey” and “submit”. They are parallel thoughts that indicate the way churches are to let the leaders lead by letting the followers follow.[9] In the same ways as shepherds lead and guide a flock and the sheep follow wherever they are led, so the care of the flock of God requires some to be leaders, and the rest to follow as they are led. This, of course, is with the understanding that Jesus Christ is head of his church, and we are all seeking to live as his people, his church, his body, his holy temple, growing up in him as the new covenant teaches.[10]

         

As I considered what it meant to obey and submit to our leaders in the church I was reminded of the apostle Paul’s detailed teaching on this in Ephesians.[11] While the whole passage deserves our humble attention, I can only focus on his description of leadership in the church in order to get some sense of who these leaders are we are to obey and follow. In other words, what did the apostles picture when they instructed the church to follow its leaders?

Paul explained, “And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ”.[12] The “saints” refers to all the believers in the church, all those who have been set apart unto God as holy and righteous by grace through faith. This is synonymous with “the body of Christ”. The saints, all members of the body of Christ, are to obey and submit to their leaders.

The leaders are listed as, “the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers”. Again, for at least the semblance of brevity, I will not define each term, for I think they are understood sufficiently to allow us to consider what this group of men looked like to the earliest gatherings of the body of Christ.[13] My focus is on the simple fact that, when the writer of Hebrews told the church to obey and submit to its leaders, he meant exactly what had already been taught, this plurality of apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers.

I hope we will all agree that at this time in history the apostles who taught these things had no sense of either denominations nor church buildings. Perhaps we would be surprised by how much such practices condition what we believe when the apostles had never even heard of such things. In other words, they were NOT saying, obey and submit to the leaders of your denomination in general, and the leaders of the local church that meets in your specific building in particular. There were no denominations or buildings for that to apply! If we interpret Scripture by these boxes we are not free to go back in time and sit at the feet of the apostles to first know what they were talking about, and then honestly and sincerely see what that requires in our application (weird and difficult as that may be).

When we consider the layers of leadership in Paul’s list I think it is fair to begin with the idea that apostles and prophets were the foundation of the church,[14] so they are just as much the foundation of the church today for us who have only their writings as for those in the early church who also had their personal contributions. Our obedience and submission to the leaders involves a readiness to obey and submit to whatever is given us in the New Testament writings no matter whether there is any evangelist, pastor, or teacher, around to tell us what to do. And, all the present day leaders of the church must work to teach and apply all that has been given through the apostles and prophets so that every generation of the church is led to live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.[15]

Evangelists in the early church were men gifted to proclaim the gospel wherever they went, drawing new believers together into the churches that could begin growing in each particular location. They were at the frontlines of Jesus’ mandate to go into the world and make disciples, baptizing those who confessed Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and then beginning the teaching of all things Jesus commanded so that these disciples would follow their Savior as he continued building his church.[16] The ongoing teaching of obedient faith would then fall on the pastors and teachers appointed in the church to continue this ministry.

Shepherds, or pastors, were those men appointed by the apostles,[17] or by their representatives like Timothy and Titus,[18] to shepherd the flock of God after the heart and mind of the great shepherd of the sheep, Jesus Christ.[19] As alluded to earlier, we cannot picture shepherds as individual denominational men over an institutional local church that meets in one building exclusive of the rest of the believers in a given community. That’s not what the church was like in the first century, so we cannot impose such a limitation on God’s word. In the early church, all the believers in a whole city were referred to as the church of that city,[20] and the shepherds were those men in that city who had the qualifications to shepherd the flock of God in what they were taught from the apostles and prophets who had laid the church’s foundation, and the evangelists who had preached it into its early stages of growth.

Teachers, whether a sub-group of the pastors, or men who could teach but without necessarily having the gifting to shepherd,[21] were given the place of teaching the things that were given to them from the apostles. We see this when Paul told Timothy, “You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus, and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also.”[22] Paul as an apostle was instructing his disciple-son Timothy in how the church would continue teaching the whole counsel of God from beginning to end. Timothy would take what he heard from Paul (representative of what all the apostles taught the churches), entrust all this teaching to men Timothy deemed faithful, but also with the qualification that those men could teach others as well. In this way the apostolic teaching, now contained in the written words of Scripture, would remain the foundation of the church throughout all of time. Every generation would see faithful men receiving what they have been given, passing it on to the next generations of the church, with the church obeying and submitting to this brotherhood of leaders who were watching over their souls.[23]

I cannot develop this further at the moment, but I leave this with you for your own exploration of how much or little your church’s view of leaders follows that given in the New Testament, and how much or little your church obeys and submits to its leaders in the comprehensive way taught by the apostles. I obviously do not have an answer to how to live this out to the fullest when the majority of Christians in our communities prefer the autonomy of their denominational group that meets in a specific building week after week. However, I know that God’s word still applies today as it did when it was breathed-out by Father, so there are shepherds and teachers who are over the flock of God as broadly as Jesus means it, and we know what he wants us to do when any of these leaders seek to shepherd our souls into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ and his church.

© 2017 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8 ~ in2freedom@gmail.com

Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers.)

---

[1] II Timothy 3:16-17

[2] Matthew 4:4

[3] Romans 1:5; 16:26. In each of the letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2-3 Jesus concludes with the statement, “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches” (Revelation 2:7, 11, 17, 29, 3:6, 13, 22).

[4] Hebrews 4:12

[5] Romans 1:16-17

[6] II Corinthians 3:18

[7] Hebrews 13:17

[8] We likely know how Satan loves to stir up bad and hurtful experiences with church leadership in order to manage our hurts and fears into unbelief and disobedience. Both pastors and churches have been hurt by each other, and hurt feelings have a way of demanding authority over our beliefs and actions, so it is not difficult for the evil one to lead people who are already tending towards self-protective systems into one more expression of justifying why we simple aren’t ready or able to walk in the obedience of faith.

[9] In such a short presentation I cannot deal with all the “exceptions” of when people should not be leaders, or how they might be leading in their own ways instead of those of the word of God. I am not thinking of a specific leader who has come to mind for you since I cannot judge whether that leader is or is not walking in God’s will. My aim is to begin with what God’s word teaches, agree that we want to hide God’s word in our hearts so we will not sin against him, and then apply the words of Scripture to our situations so that, no matter what anyone else is doing, we are obeying what is written in faith, trusting the Holy Spirit to lead us in how to follow the leaders within Jesus’ church.

[10] Everything I am sharing here is with the understanding that we are talking about the leaders of the church who know that the church belongs to Jesus (his church), and that we are seeking to become all he is working into us for his glory. Even when the apostles called the church to follow its leaders, they also identified the kind of men who were wolves and false teachers, making clear that we are to stay away from such men. However, no matter how often or how deeply we have been burned by bad leadership, Jesus is still head of his church, and he is still presenting men to lead his people, and the people are to obey and submit to these men who are working together to lead the church.

[11] I am thinking specifically of the paragraph of Ephesians 4:11-16, with the larger context of Ephesians 4:1-16. All that is taught in Ephesians balances on the doctrine taught in the first three chapters, and the application of how to live this faith as described in the last three chapters. God has given us all we need to grow up in Jesus Christ, and that includes the brotherhood of shepherds who lead the flock that follows its leaders.

[12] Ephesians 4:11-12

[13] Yes, the words “group” and “men” are intentional. It may seem foreign to our traditions to think of leaders as a group of men rather than all the individual pastors of all the denominational expressions of local churches. I have more often heard people refer to “my pastor” than “our pastors”. And, of course, the rejection of God’s design of man in the image of God as male and female (Genesis 1:26-27) has led to many unnecessary disagreements over how to live as men and women in Jesus Christ both in the church and in the family. While limiting what I share to what the Bible teaches might reduce my circle of fellowship, I hope that those who disagree will at least enter into the same diligence to understand the mind of the Spirit as revealed in the God-breathed words of Scripture with a willingness to change our minds on anything we carry contrary to God’s revelation.

[14] Ephesians 2:20 (context: Ephesians 2:11-22).

[15] Matthew 4:4

[16] Jesus promised to build his church (Matthew 16:18), and instructed his apostles in what is commonly known as the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20).

[17] Acts 14:23 (context: Acts 14:19-23)

[18] Titus 1:5; I Timothy 3:1-7 puts the qualifications for elders on Timothy (an outsider), not on a board within the local congregations that had formed through the preaching of the gospel.

[19] I Peter 5:2 (context: I Peter 5:1-4). I cannot develop this into my Pondering at the moment, but it is significant that elders, those we understand to be, or include, the pastors and teachers of the church, were not chosen by the congregations, but by the apostles and their representatives. Every denominational/institutional church I have been in has demanded the autonomy for the congregation to choose an “outsider” to come in and lead them, when the early church had “outsiders” come in and appoint elders from the men who were already in the church! And yet, to suggest such a thing is often considered almost blasphemous, even though the denominational, institutional, autonomous local churches that meet in individual specific buildings is completely foreign to Scripture.

[20] Again, that is the way Jesus spoke of things in his letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2-3, that each city he addressed had only the one church in that city, no matter how many home churches were required to care for that one church. Each of the letters to the churches in the rest of the new testament also affirm that when the apostles wrote the church of a city they only had the one church in mind, that local expression of the body of Christ.

[21] There is reason to believe that some shepherds were gifted to shepherd the flock, but not necessarily at teaching.

[22] II Timothy 2:1-2

[23] A key component of the exhortation in Hebrews 13:17 is that the church obeys and submits to leaders who are watching over their souls for their growth and maturity in Jesus Christ. While it may seem foreign to think of leaders as all the men in a community who ought to be working together in this care of the church, and it might seem strange that Jesus would expect his church to obey and submit to this brotherhood of leaders even in a day when culture decries any suggestion of submission to authority whatsoever, it is often the case that it is strangely foreign to the local gatherings of the body of Christ that leaders are interested in the care of people’s souls rather than the operation of a denominational institution. However, our love for Jesus as head of the church he is building still opens our hearts to seek the reality of what he teaches in his word, and to live all it means to be members of his church, his body, whether we quietly lead in unknown gatherings of his brothers, or accept that God has given men to lead us even from a distance. We simply accept that this notion of the church obeying and submitting to a brotherhood of men who are caring for the souls of God’s people is a pure and wonderful expression of the greatest possible fellowship in the world (hence why it is so incessantly attacked by the world, the flesh, and the devil), and so we open our hearts to God to pray for this to happen wherever we are, and to increase the maturity of every aspect of this relationship between God and man no matter what difficulties we may be facing. Even the most impossible situations call us to pray for what is written in God’s word, and to submit to every expression of God’s answer to our prayers.