How Do I Support My Pastor When We Disagree?

By Bob Kauflin @ http://worshipmatters.com/

A reader wrote in to ask:

How do I serve and support the role of my Senior Pastor when his approach to corporate worship may sound a little different than what I get from your conferences?

Great question, and not the first time I've been asked. This question reveals what happens when the worship leader and musicians are getting biblical training and the pastor isn't. It highlights the need for pastors to think about worship theologically, rather than basing their thoughts on past experiences or the culture.

But what do you do if you're in a church where the pastor is asking you to do things that you don't think are going to serve the church in the long run?

The first thing we need to do is examine our heart to make sure we can humbly receive whatever the Lord might be saying to through the pastor. Often pastors are discerning enough to know something's wrong but may not know the best remedy. It's our job to listen carefully, make sure we're hearing what they're saying, and discuss alternate solutions.

Here are some examples. Maybe he says he wants you to do more "upbeat" songs to get the people going. That could sound like he doesn't care about the truth, and wants you to musically manipulate the congregation. Or, it could be that you tend to pick slow songs all the time and people are falling asleep. Maybe he doesn't think you need to be to pre-occupied about theology when it comes to song choices. Perhaps you tend to only choose weighty songs that don't take new believers into account. I know that's been my tendency and I've appreciated input in that area. Maybe he's told you, "Just pick songs that people like and that tell God how much we love him!" You could be choosing songs that are difficult to sing and don't include songs that enable us to express our hearts toward God. Corporate worship is most effective when it combines objective truth with subjective response. Or he might ask you to stop talking and just play the songs so you don't interrupt the "flow." What he might be saying is that you sound like a frustrated preacher who does talk too much when you're leading. Or maybe you tend to wander aimlessly whenever you say something.

Don't assume that when your pastor asks you to do something different that you have to defend your actions. Learn from what he's saying.

However, if you discover that you really are in disagreement over certain specifics of leadership, it's good to talk through them. It can be helpful to ask your pastor to read an article or a chapter of a book, or to listen to a message that clearly defines what you think he's missing. Then ask if you can discuss it together. Vaughan Roberts' True Worship might be a great place to start. You might also consider two seminars I gave at the last WorshipGod06 conference, Corporate Worship as Pastoral Care and Healthy Tensions in Corporate Worship. It might also be good to have a conversation about the purpose of congregational singing. It’s not to produce a spiritual high in people or to simply enable us to express our feelings towards God. The clearest direction we have is that it’s supposed to help us teach and admonish one another (Col. 3:16).

Above all, it's good to make sure that we're regularly communicating to our pastor that we want to serve his vision for the church, and make his job as easy as possible. I don't want my pastor to ever feel hesitant about bringing correction, adjustments, or questions to me. I'm there to serve him, not the other way around. That means I should frequently ask him how I can serve him more effectively, and if there's anything he'd change about what I'm doing.

One last thought. Sometimes I think a certain decision is HUGE, when in reality it's more a preference. Even if I don't agree that doing a certain song would be edifying, I want to try to make it work if my pastor asks me to do it. And if you're in a church where your pastor in regularly asking you to do songs that you think are unbiblical, unhelpful, or unwise, it may be time to start looking for another church.

How To Prevent A Church Split, Part 5

By Thabiti Anyabwile

In this last post of the series, it seems appropriate to end where we began: with the importance of the pastor in preventing church splits.

The most natural thing in the world is for a congregation to appreciate and respect its main preaching pastor. It happens without much effort in many cases, as the pastor opens the Word of God to the people of God Sunday after Sunday. That act of teaching is an act of love. And the longer one does it with a congregation--the people and the pastor growing in intimate knowledge of one another--the more the affections grow.

On the whole, I think this is as God intends it. If you can look out onto a people hoping to hear the Word of God fed to them by you, and not grow in fatherly affection for them, something is terribly wrong. Something essential is missing in the heart of the preacher. For after all, preaching is not merely or primarily an intellectual exercise. It is primarily an exercise of the heart… the preacher pouring His into the Word of God, then pouring out into the people, and the people opening theirs to be filled with the glorious riches of God in the preaching moment. If love is missing, the heart is defective.

And so it’s also natural that the primary preacher accrues a certain kind of authority in the eyes of the congregation as well. Loving authority stemming from loving teaching and preaching seems to be the plan of God.

But the human heart is also an idol factory. Without Spirit-filled thinking, men and women may easily begin to “worship” the pastor. No one will use that word to describe their affections and allegiance, but their hearts and actions will be fairly close to “worship.” At the least, there is such a thing as being overly devoted or loyal to a pastor. The problem affected Corinth and it affects many churches today.

If we are to prevent church splits one thing we must do is make sure that the natural affections and authority that accrue to the teaching office is dispersed among the leadership of the church. We must find obvious, subtle, and effective ways to attach the allegiance of the people to the church and the leadership as a whole. Four things come to mind. I’m sure there are others and welcome the feedback.

Teaching
One practical thing we can do is make sure that other gifted men in the leadership and the body have an opportunity to exercise their teaching gifts. We certainly should use such men in Sunday school and small group settings. But we should also provide them opportunity in the more public meetings of the church: Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings (if you have them), and mid-week Bible study.

Men don’t have to be seasoned, professional preachers. They should be clear communicators or the meetings won’t be edifying. But taking a “risk” on a younger man or a man with little preaching experience is a perfectly fine thing to do. A couple of churches I know use the Sunday evening service in part with this purpose in mind, and they often find new teaching gifts in the body and are able to help hone those gifts.

As the congregation grows more accustomed to hearing more of their leaders love them through teaching, we help to inoculate the body against one chief cause of church splits: disproportionate attachment to one leader. And as a rule, the more charismatic a leader you are, the more important this sharing of teaching authority becomes.

Comments
If we’re the main preaching/teaching elder, the other way we can spread authority and esteem for the entire body and leadership is to make specific, edifying comments about other leaders in the body.

I don’t mean we need to flatter our leaders. Our words should be true and proportionate to the situation or quality we’re commenting on. And they should be specific enough in detail to model for the congregation how to give godly encouragement and why they should be thankful for their leadership.

And our comments to the wider church should always underscore, not undermine, the leadership of the church. Wherever there may be disagreements or discontent among leaders it should be expressed and resolved in meetings with the other leaders. The surest path to wider congregational discontent will be for leaders to act, comment, or react in ways that suggest fraction and division among the leaders. When members stumble on issues that divide the leadership, or issues that the leaders are currently weighing, we should politely and with positive tone invite their continued prayers for the leaders as the discussions continue. We must cultivate a culture and discipline in our churches that “makes every effort to maintain unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:1-3), and this culture must begin with and be modeled by the leadership. Our public comments go a long way in spreading authority, supporting that authority, and preventing or amplifying tensions that lead to division.

Submission
I have served as an elder in two churches prior to being given the gift and privilege of serving as senior pastor at FBC. Both of those pastors, Peter Rochelle and Mark Dever, were good models of submission to the elders as a whole. They were “first among equals,” but they did not abuse that position and authority. They accepted counsel, they listened, they contributed, and they were longsuffering with those of us who disagreed and in many cases knew less about an issue than they. They were willing, despite better biblical and theological knowledge and greater wisdom from experience, to submit to the direction of the entire group. That was humble submission.

That’s not to say there weren’t times when they were strongly convicted about an issue and would hold the line. There were times of disagreement, sometimes strong disagreement. In those times, the group of elders needed to be humble and to submit. We needed to determine more precisely (a) what questions needed to be answered, (b) what decision criteria were operative, (c) what mutual goals should govern us, and (d) what exact timeline for making a decision was necessary or wise. In those situations, by God’s grace, mutual submission, trusting that all who shepherd have the same goal—the glory of God revealed in His bride the church—provides much needed unity in the leadership. This can take time to build, but toiling for it is necessary for protecting the church from splits. We must war against our sense of “entitlement” as pastors or elders, and against the conceit that whispers to us that we see more clearly or more learnedly than our brothers who lead with us, and give ourselves to cultivating godly humility that submits.

Leading
Lastly, leaders must lead. Pastors must lead. There is a danger of being overly passive in the face of situations and decisions that require clear thinking and charting a course. In those cases we must lead.

And we can’t be afraid to lead. There may be 1,000 things we must be sensitive to, but we must resist the paralysis that comes from over-analyzing and tea leaf reading. Leadership is as much an act of faith as prayer. We must trust that God is at work in our leadership of the church, and that He will providentially rule in our prayerful efforts.

And we must not be afraid to lead the church toward a split in order to prevent a split.

This may sound counter-intuitive. After all, the entire series of posts is about preventing splits.

I’m convinced that merely showing up and being yourself will be a “splitting” factor for some people. We can not give in to fear of man and seek to please people. It is required of stewards that they be faithful. And sometimes being faithful requires upsetting some apple carts. You don’t necessarily start out to do so, but in the course of applying God’s Word and pursuing faithful church practice some disgruntlement is bound to happen. When it does… we must keep leading. For some, this will have the feel of “forcing” an ever so gradual “split” of sorts, as people who are opposed to biblical faithfulness peel away and leave.

If this is necessary, then hopefully that’s a one-by-one peeling, with people leaving in positive rather than disruptive ways. But if we’re being faithful, we must remember that we’re building deeper foundations that hopefully the church can rest upon in strength for generations to come. We must not let the short-term struggles that arise over this or that issue to upset the long-term goal of preserving the unity and growing the entire body into full maturity in Christ.

How To Prevent A Church Split, Part 4

By Thabiti Anyabwile

Earlier this week, Mark Dever over at T4G posted this great quote from David Wells’ Above All Earthly Pow’rs:

This Word of God is the means by which God accomplishes his saving work in his people, and this is a work that no evangelist and no preacher can do. This is why the dearth of serious, sustained biblical preaching in the Church today is a serious matter. When the Church loses the Word of God it loses the very means by which God does his work. In its absence, therefore, a script is being written, however unwittingly, for the Church’s undoing, not in one cataclysmic moment, but in a slow, inexorable slide made up of piece by tiny piece of daily dereliction.

With tremendous economy of words, Wells articulates why it is churches split. They abandon the Word of God.

I don’t necessarily mean the kind of abandonment that rejects the Word altogether. I don’t mean they assault the Word by deny its inspiration and authority or doubting its historicity. I think Wells is describing, and I think church splits occur because churches demonstrate in their practice their belief that the Scripture is not sufficient for faith and conduct.

In Wells words, “a script is being written, however unwittingly, for the Church’s undoing, not in one cataclysmic moment, but in a slow, inexorable slide made up of piece by tiny piece of daily dereliction.” What an apt description of so much of church life and individual Christian life: a “daily dereliction” of the Word of God leads to the unraveling of the church.

When, where and how does this “daily dereliction” occur?

Preaching
First, Wells rightly points out that it occurs in too much preaching today. Better minds have written better treatments of the problem with preaching today… so I have only one comment on this subject. I make it with fear and trembling knowing that my own inadequacies as a preacher are displayed every Sunday before God, the elect of heaven, and a couple hundred saints and sinners. But here it is: failure to preach God’s Word clearly, fully, urgently and only is treason against God our Father, Christ our Lord, and His bride the church. It’s high treason. By preaching God’s Word “clearly, fully, urgently and only” I don’t mean every sermon is perfect, that every sermon includes everything that could be said about a given text, or that illustrations and analogies are a no-no. I merely mean that if the “Word of God is the means by which God accomplishes his saving work in his people” as Wells puts it, then failure to preach it is to oppose God at the point of His divine rescue of the world with the very means of that rescue. Preaching that fails to center on the Word of God is treasonous.

Counseling
Second, abandonment of the Word of God occurs in counseling. The impulse in the Christian ministry is to approach counseling as “talk therapy.” The tendency is to over-empathize and to under-discipline. I mean “discipline” in its broadest sense. The Word of God is to shape the person’s affections, thoughts, desires, and choices and, thereby, discipline, form or mold the person. When I fail to do this, I’m writing a script for the unraveling of that person’s life and the church’s life… and they stand there “unwittingly” being shaped by the wrong tool. I’m convinced that I miss far too many opportunities to simply open the Bible and apply it to the persons and cases before me. When I do that, I demonstrate my lack of confidence in the sufficiency of the Scripture. I’m not taking up the nouthetic—integrationist debate here. I’m simply saying that even though I think I’m more nouthetic in my attitude… in my practice, I’m quite lacking. And that’s to the detriment of my church’s unity and the ability to prevent a split. In those closer encounters between pastor and sheep, I have the opportunity to model what it means to bring every thought captive and to not go beyond what is written and to thereby teach that sheep how to do so in her or his own life. Modeling and teaching that should pay dividends when a question arises that threatens to split the church. If habitually and instinctively individuals resort to the Word of God at such times, bringing themselves under its imperatives, then I’m a long way toward warding off painful division. And the church is a lot closer to being of one mind… God’s mind.

Decision-making
Third, I think churches often split because they’ve abandoned the Word of God in charting, teaching and communicating, explaining and/or defending future directions for the church. The place where you really need good elders and leaders is in resolving those questions, issues or disputes that have no clear biblical answer and are therefore a matter of Christian liberty or wisdom. It’s easy to chart, communicate and defend a decision when it’s a matter of right or wrong, obedience or disobedience. But when it’s a matter of wisdom… things become a bit trickier. The tendency at times is to insist you’ve felt or received “God’s leading” or a particular “calling” as an explanation. Or, there are knee-jerk, defensive appeals for “submitting to leadership.” Our people see through this. After all, they have “leadings” and “callings,” too. The church develops the habit of resolving disputes by deciding who offers the strongest insistence that “God told me so” or “you need to submit.” In a congregational context this is deadly. It teaches the people that there really is no authority outside of ourselves when it comes to the less clear matters, which in the minds of most people are the most important or at least the most impassioned matters. Even in cases where the decision rests on wisdom or prudence, our best judgment about a particular question, we should still demonstrate how that decision is wise in light of clearer commands and examples in Scripture. We should rehearse or display for our folks something of our wrestling with and searching of the Scripture in order to arrive at this decision so that they see us submitting to God’s Word in the unclear or tough times. We do this with the hopes that they will learn to habitually do the same in cases that threaten a church split.

Pastor’s Personal Life
Fourth, and finally, the centrality of the Word of God must be demonstrated in the pastor’s own personal life. This is almost axiomatic. But as another Wells put it: “we’ve reached the point where the first duty of intelligent man is to restate the obvious.” When I survey the lives of televangelists and many of the popular authors my people enjoy and give ear to, I’m terrified at what they are imbibing. Today, to be a “successful pastor” means imaging forth upper crust attitudes, ambitions and achievements. The Word of God is not only not central to those lives, but it’s not even in the picture except to justify my belly’s desires. The Word must surely be central to our ministrations, but it must also be central to our personal devotion and choices. I need to be the model of this, even as I learning to practice it in the church. I’m afraid that sometimes the reason I’m not helping people bring every thought captive is because my every thought isn’t captive. I’m not sufficiently arrested with the glories and beauties of the Savior revealed in His Word to be instinctively and habitually pointing others there. And that works against one of my major objectives… preventing a church split.

How To Prevent A Church Split, Part 3

By Thabiti Anyabwile

How many people do you know in your church? Of them, how many do you know well?

Even in small churches, the tendency often is to "count" the number of relationships one has by the number of people we "know," that is, whose names we know or whose faces we recognize. We "know" them because we see them occasionally or we speak with them from time to time... polite but disinterested "how ya doing?" chit-chat after the service.

We couldn’t tell you much about who their close friends are or who they spend time with in church. We couldn’t tell you important spiritual information about them… how they came to faith in Christ, what their home life was like growing up, or what their current spiritual victories or struggles are. If they serve in an obvious public way we could point that out, but we couldn’t talk intelligently about the ways that person needs to be served.

Okay... if you're in this category of folks, if there are others like this in your church, it's time for you to start praying against a church split. A split may not imminent but some of the conditions for one are present.

Every church split, by definition, involves people who are alienated in their affections toward one another. The splits occur when this alienation is hardened and seemingly intractable. But the roots of the split extend back to that time when everyone seemed to be getting along (meaning there were no obvious conflicts) but really didn’t know one another. That period is the calm before the storm. Introduce an offense, teach something that crosses someone’s pet sin or tender spot, and what appeared to be placid water begins to foam and roil until a major storm approaches the shores of the church.

As pastors I think it’s our duty to act while things are calm, to take a preventative step before these conditions for a split are aggravated. And, so far, I think one of the best antidotes to a split are wide, healthy, and spiritually encouraging relationships in the body.

Hospitality
We must relinquish our passive approach to friendships. That’s the bottom line. We’re too passive in cultivating meaningful affection for one another. We wait for the relationship to come to us. We want it to be “natural” and to “just flow” or “click.” I suppose there is a thing as trying too hard, but I think most of us a far from that. We try too little. We’d rather the coziness of being alone with our own thoughts, interests, and “friends” from some yesteryear like high school or college. We don’t like the toil of getting to know others and opening ourselves up (much less prying into their lives) in a substantive, transparent way.

One correction to this is an active hospitality ministry. By hospitality, I mean the cultivation of a wide network of relationships in the church through any number of invitations, engagements, and entertainments. The emphasis here is on the wideness of the relationships, not the particular activity over which you build them. Some part of our people’s time must be given over to meeting as many fellow members as possible, especially members not like them (i.e., different age, social/economic class, family backgrounds, ethnicity).

We must teach our people to open up their lives by opening up their calendars and their homes. If our churches are going to be healthy enough to survive difficulties, then our people must have enough credit with one another—drawn from the tenderness of sharing meals and meaningful conversation—to trust and assume the best. We must know one another broadly enough and deeply enough to know when someone else’s apparent anger is really deep hurt, or when someone’s resistance is masking pride, or when a brother’s disappearance from the fellowship is likely a sign of trouble with sin. And we can’t see beneath the apparent in one another’s lives if we don’t actually cultivate friendships with others. And an active hospitality ministry in the body is one way of doing that. Of course, church-wide fellowships are another. But the point is that we don’t want to “professionalize” fellowship and hospitality by reducing it to only those church-sanctioned events and failing to discourage active hospitality by/from members.

Discipleship
Most churches I’ve belonged to have not had active discipleship efforts in place. Some people in “natural friendships” find time to encourage one another, pray together, or have regular accountability meetings. These tend to be some of the more mature members who find their way to each other. But the majority of people are not in that kind of relationship, at least not with members of their church. They find a lot of encouragement and love from Christian friends at work or at other churches. But they find little stimulus and nurture from the people with whom they covenant together in the local church. In other words, when our main source of spiritual care (apart from sermons and public gatherings) comes from those outside our church, our affections are likely to be stronger for those outside the body than for those inside. This makes it easy for us to “quit” on others because they’re not the source of nurture and love anyway. This is why some people can easily leave the church at the first sign of trouble and find a home in a church across town. Their hearts were already there with people that they loved more than their church family.

If hospitality builds wide relationships, then discipleship builds deeper ones. Is it too much to expect that every member of the church has at least two intentional, spiritually-focused relationships in the church… a relationship with someone more mature that is building into their lives and a relationship with someone as or less mature into whom they are building? And this, I would suggest, should be in addition to those relationships formed in small groups. So add two to the number of folks in your small group.

We will be healthier if we take some responsibility for one another’s spiritual lives. The membership is to be the frontline of spiritual care. If our affections lie with another country or just with our unit (i.e., small group) then our first line of defense against splits will be easily divided and run over. The enemy will establish key beach heads, take over key forts and bridges, and lay siege to the city.

Modeling
As pastors, we are called to be examples in everything. That includes hospitality and discipleship. So, we must be chief among those who serve in this way. I realize that many pastors barely have a place to call a retreat, a place to escape the pressures of the ministry. But they will never have a place of retreat among their own people if they don’t begin to push the enemy out of the camp by carrying on an active hospitality and discipleship ministries among the people.

It’s no accident that the Lord of the church includes “hospitable” among the qualifications for church leadership. Why? Well, not simply because “hospitable” is another way of saying “he’s a nice guy” or “he’s friendly.” Hospitable includes an active disposition to serve others by engaging and entertaining them. It is being generous with your self, giving yourself away to others. That tends to directly oppose the slow decay and passive approach to relationships in the church. It’s vital that we leaders model healthy relationships in the body. We must do that with fellow leaders, and we must do that with members in the body.

Sentinels and Watchmen
One concluding thought. It seems to me that some churches split because someone ignored the warning signs for far too long. They heard the fearful cries of the villagers on the outskirts of the city when the enemy first struck, but they did not sound the alarm. They could see from afar off the smoke rising from the battle, but they did not blow the horn. There are those of us who have been called to be watchmen upon the wall, and there are those among us who like sentinels are scouting the area for trouble and opportunity. We must be faithful in reporting and responding to what we see and what we find.

What do I mean? Take elders and deacons, for example. As leaders in the body, serving as “shock absorbers” is one part of our responsibility. This is a perspective I picked up from the brothers at CHBC. When a disgruntled parent in the nursery, or a member offended at a sermon, or disaffection in the ranks is first observed, do we as elders and leaders absorb that shock or do we multiply it? Do we understand that we have an opportunity to diffuse a situation before it multiplies? Do we recognize that very often a certain nod of the head, knowing sly smile, shrug of the shoulders, or raising of the brow signals to our people that we agree or approve of their actions, which tear away at the relational foundation of the church?

More damage is done with a facial expression or body language from a leader who fails to be a shock absorber than by any number of petty pains or hurts that weak or wounded sheep may express. Our job is to absorb these minor shocks to the body like a black hole, to submerge them into the deep void of forgiveness, and to work to make sure the complaint is heard, addressed appropriately (which could range from resolving a real problem to rebuking a sinning sibling), and stopped with us.

If we’re going to prevent church splits, we must be the kind of leaders who can take a hit without escalating the battle, who can diffuse issues in a godly way that actually strengthens relationships in the church. And we must be models of what it means to actively, tenaciously, intentionally, and loving pursue deep and wide relationships in the body of Christ. At her core, the church is a mass of spiritual relationships—individuals to the Lord and to one another, forming something more than the sum of her parts, forming a body. Lose these relationships and we unravel the church.

How To Prevent A Church Split, Part 2

By Thabiti Anyabwile

As a boy, I loved reading the Encyclopedia Brown mystery novels. It was engaging and stimulating stuff. Sherlock Holmes for us young shorties. (If any of you have any of the stories and you’d like to part with them for a modest fee, please e-mail me).

I still love a great mystery novel or suspense thriller. Mystery creates much of the wonder of life. And because it leaves us in wonder, a kind of admiring awe, mystery creates a godly humility.

Christianity is a mystery from start to finish. Its truths stagger the mind and refresh the soul… One God in three Persons, creation ex nihilo, Perfect Infinity squeezed into the finiteness of a virgin’s womb, sinless perfection, substitution and propitiation, simultaneously just and sinner, resurrection, new birth, and I could go on. These are grand, towering, staggering, “biggie-sized” truths. They are mysterious in the best sense of the word.

But there is at least one other mystery in Christianity. In fact, the Bible itself uses the term “mystery” to describe it. There is the mystery of the church (Eph. 3). The church is the revelation of a mystery hidden in ages past but now revealed by the Spirit of God to His holy apostles and prophets. That mystery is that there is one people of God—Jew and Gentile in one body, heirs together, and partakers together of the promise—and that the intent of God, His eternal purpose, is that the church should reveal His wisdom to heavenly powers (3:10, 11) and be the repository of His glory along with Christ (3:21).
Take that in for a moment….

That makes this next mystery all the more puzzling. It is mysterious to me that the centrality of the church is so little preached today. What explains its absence from the vast majority of sermons, Bible studies, and Sunday school classes? How did it just vanish from the thinking of Christians? It’s a detective mystery worthy of Encyclopedia Brown. And it's a problem that we must fix if we are to ever see our people desire life with all God's people above their own self-interests and affinity groups.

To prevent church splits, we must regain the centrality of the local church in our preaching and practice. We must lay heavy biblical emphasis on the centrality of the people of God throughout redemptive history and in contemporary Christian life. We must preach and emphasize the fact that the church is central to God’s affections, self-identification, and eternal plan. It must, therefore, be central to ours.

The Church: The Center of God’s Affections
The Scripture tells us that earthly marriage is a picture (dim and imperfect, surely) of Christ’s love for the church… again called a “mystery” (Eph. 5:25-32). The church is his bride, which He is purifying and preparing for the consummation. He gave himself for her and is her Savior. In other words, the church is the center of the Savior’s affections. Our preaching must make this plain, and not just from the obvious places like Eph. 5. We must underscore this in all of Scripture which is the story of God creating for himself a people upon whom He sovereignly places His love.

As a preacher, I must work against the strong currents of individualism that reads all of Scripture as a “personal love letter” from Jesus to each individual. As an evangelist, I have to undermine the popular sentiment that says “God has a plan for your (read individual) life” and “you need a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” Well… God does have a plan for His people and it the center of it is involvement in His church, His body, His royal nation. The emphasis almost everywhere is on plural nouns, not first person singulars. It is vitally important that we make it clear that discipleship by definition includes following Christ in the company of His people, in fact, loving His people.

The Church: Central to Jesus’ Self-Identity
We must also preach and make clear that Christ Jesus strongly identifies with the church. Recall that arresting question He asks Saul, “Why are you persecuting me?” Paul’s imprisonment and abuse of Christians was actually done to Christ. All of the body of Christ imagery says nothing if it doesn’t mean that Christ identifies with His people. And throughout the biblical record, the Lord identifies with His chosen, calling them by His name, protecting and providing for them, dwelling in their midst.We have to teach and preach this so that our people will see the rightness of identifying with Him. Though the Lord saves us individually, Christ identifies fundamentally with the church. And our identification with Him is clearest when we too associate with the church. All of the ordinances (baptism and the Lord’s supper) the Lord left us are designed to make this allegiance clear. They say more than this, but not less than this: that we identify with Jesus by identifying with His body, the same body that He identifies with. We must help our folks understand this so that their allegiance to the Lord is expressed in large measure through their allegiance to the church—not the pastor, not the music, not particular church programs, or conveniences like service times. Their allegiance must be raised to the level of Christ, which is an allegiance to the entire people of God.

The Church: Central to God’s Plan of Redemption
We must, finally, help our people see that the church is the center of God’s redeeming and self-glorifying plan in heaven and on earth. That’s what we gather from Eph. 1:10, 22-23; 2:14-22; 3:9-11, 20-21. It’s through the church that the evangelism of the world is carried out. The church reveals God’s wisdom and glory. The church proclaims the defeat of the “principalities and powers in the heavenly places.” Through the church, the Lord will gather all things under His feet.

Our people must know that God has not plan of redemption and no plan for spiritual edification and maturity outside the church. They must know that participation in church is about far more than their individual needs. Participation in the church is essential to advancing the plans of God to bring to himself glory, to redeem humanity, and to bring all things to completion. And they must be taught to prize all of that above their individual selves. We must teach them that if it’s God’s glory they wish to pursue, then one of the easiest things they can do is to join, commit to, and love a local church—which is God’s eternal design for them anyway.

I suspect that if our people are immersed in these truths week to week, taught to read the Scripture with at least one corporate lense, and encouraged to live out the faith with “one another,” we will begin the process of inoculating our churches against the plague of church splits. This I take to be my objective as a pastor.

Next time, Lord willing, we’ll consider the importance of relationships in protecting the church from splits.

How To Prevent A Church Split, Part 1

By Thabiti Anyabwile

I have a new and growing conviction. It's occupying a lot of my thoughts these days... good thoughts, I think. I don't know why it hasn't always been a conviction, at least not quite in this way. But, nonetheless, I am convinced that one of my fundamental objectives as a pastor is to prevent church splits from happening.

I don't mean that it's my responsibility to make sure no one leaves, or to settle every dispute in a way that preserves unity at all costs. No, there'll be times when a "split" will humanly speaking be inevitable, and I trust that the Lord has good purposes in causing or allowing them to happen.

What I mean is this: I have some basic responsibilities as a pastor. I must teach and preach God's Word; I must pray; I must be an example; and, I must carry on a visitation ministry. That's basically what I think a pastor is to do (admittedly a bit oversimplified). But I am increasingly convinced that I am to do those things with a particular perspective. I'm to do those things with an eye toward the developing and continuing unity of the church. Said negatively, I'm to work in such a way as to prevent the splintering of Christ's local body in my charge.
It seems to me that preventing splits is a bit like preventative health care. Most of us trolly through life without caring much about our health. We eat any and most everything. We don't exercise regularly. Our sleep habits are terrible. We overwork ourselves at high-stress jobs, and we seldom take vacations. Then we go to the doctor for a checkup or because some pain or another won't go away. That's when we hear the news: our bodies have actually been carrying on a covert coup against us. We're told that our blood pressure is high. Cholestorol is clogging up blood flow. And then there is the dreaded "O" word that seems to be wreaking havoc on youth in particular--obesity.

We react with surprise at the news. Not the kind of surprise that's completely unsuspecting; we knew that neglecting ourselves could result in these things. No, we're surprised because it happened to us. "High blood pressure... that's aunt Annie's problem. Obesity... that's uncle Bobo's issue." The reality of the problem--completely preventable if it had been at least a part of our focus--comes crashing home. We're sick and now there is only the drudgery of changing life-long habits and/or undergoing some radical procedure.

I think church splits are a lot like that. Churches adopt lifelong bad habits, deny the warning signs (the sleeplessness, headaches and chest pains), and then are surprised when part of the body carries out the silent coup. They don't think it will happen to them no matter how bad things get. And then it does and the pain is great.

There were early warning signs:
Growing numbers of cliques and factions. Cliques present themselves as "natural friendships," groups of people who "get along" because of some shared interests, backgrounds, or ideas. But without care, these groups will harden into impenetrable factions that use their common interests as a rallying cry against the rest of the body.

Low concern for the church qua church. We live in a Christian era that stresses the individual like no era before it. Most people think Christianity is about me and "my personal relationship with Jesus." That littly phrase, "my personal," acting as a kind of double possessive, is deadly to the body. And it's often compounded by the next warning signal.

Self-interests dominate group interests. If life is all about "my personal relationship" then I'm likely to be quite self-seeking. I want to be stimulated. I want to be served. I want my preferences met. I... I... I... till there is no "we" left. And where that exists, there will be little concern--certainly not ultimate concern--for the needs and mission of the larger group, the church.

Isolated and absent members. It's understandable, given the first three symptoms, that some number of members will be isolated in the body, without any meaningful relationships, or absent altogether. Large numbers of isolated and absent members actually have the peculiar effect of making it more difficult to pastor those who are attending. Isolated and absent members make it more difficult to know who is in your care and who is not. And at various points they will cause you to expend a lot of energy trying to "catch up with them" and diagnose their spiritual state. But there's another problem. These isolated and absentee members actually undermine the very fabric of fellowship and relationships in the body. They make it normal to be a part of a church and simultaneously anonymous and uninvolved with others. So, there becomes no relational context in the church to support a wider concern for the church, making splits easier to ponder.

Lack of humility. Pride is a lethal foe. Combine pride with any of the symptoms above and you can just hear the emergency room attendant yelling "STAT" into the loud speaker. Pride surfaces itself in an unwillingness to hear feedback, be it a word of correction, instruction and even encouragement. Pride in the cliques says, "we've got it all together and those folks over there need to get with us." Pride in "lone ranger Christians" contends that she/he doesn't need the church. Absent members exhibit pride when they say, "Leave me alone; this is my life." This pride is deadly serious.

Mixed allegiance to the pastor(s)/elders. Sometimes some members feel a fierce allegiance to the pastor(s), while others feel fairly opposed or indifferent to him/them. And when church members clump together on the poles of love and dislike, you can just about be certain that some significant number of them have taken their eyes off the true Head of the Church, Jesus. One cries "I'm with Appollos," and another cries "I'm with Paul." The fact that everyone is not crying "I'm with Jesus" and "We follow our pastors as they follow Jesus" should be of real concern.

Low emphasis on the Word of God. I can't state this problem better than David Wells' observation (HT: Mark Dever). Quite simply, if we lose the centrality, sufficiency, and authority of the Word of God, we unravel the church as we abandon the only rule of faith and conduct.
These are some of the early warning signals for a church split. Imperceptible at their start, they grow very slowly in most cases. When you feel mild discomfort from them, they've usually rooted themselves to some extent. And by the time you feel real pain, those roots have formed huge balls and arteries that wrap themselves around the foundation of the house. Excavating them will be painful and costly. But in many cases, by the time you feel the pain, the conditions for a split are quite abundant.I'm convinced that it's my job to pastor in such a way that I try to ward off, retard, uproot or cut out these problems before they give birth to greater sin. I need to approach the basic task of pastoring with at least one eye toward prevention. And I need to look beyond the horizon of this present congregation to consider those who are coming after us, to take the long view with the hopes of leaving a congregation that would be healthy for generations should the Lord tarry.Since pastors tend to impress upon their congregations something of their own personalities, their strengths and weaknesses, and that impress tends to linger through subsequent generations and pastorates, for good and for ill, I need to work hard at being an example of one that loves like Jesus loves and one that encourages and teaches others to pursue unity and peace. That's my task, I think. That's the task of every Christian. In the next couple of posts, we'll explore some ways of thinking about and living out this task.

Church Discipline vs Invasion of Privacy

If a church member commits adultery and the elders enact church discipline, informing the congregation, is that an invasion of his privacy? That's the issue in a couple of churches in Texas that have found themselves sued for this issue.

Articles on Conflict Resolution

Monergism.com has listed quite a few articles on Conflict in the Church. The article A Guide to Godly Disputation by John Newton comes highly recommended by the site. It was written by Newton in response to a minister who was about to write an article criticizing a fellow minister for his lack of orthodoxy. Newton's counsel included this:

This leads me, in the last place, to consider your own concern in your present undertaking. It seems a laudable service to defend the faith once delivered to the saints; we are commanded to contend earnestly for it, and to convince gainsayers. If ever such defenses were seasonable and expedient they appear to be so in our own day, when errors abound on all sides and every truth of the gospel is either directly denied or grossly misrepresented. And yet we find but very few writers of controversy who have not been manifestly hurt by it. Either they grow in a sense of their own importance, or imbibe an angry, contentious spirit, or they insensibly withdraw their attention from those things that are the food and immediate support of the life of faith, and spend their time and strength upon matters that are at most but of a secondary value. This shows, that if the service is honorable, it is dangerous. What will it profit a man if he gains his cause and silences his adversary, if at the same time he loses that humble, tender frame of spirit in which the Lord delights, and to which the promise of his presence is made? Your aim, I doubt not, is good; but you have need to watch and pray for you will find Satan at your right hand to resist you; he will try to debase your views; and though you set out in defense of the cause of God, if you are not continually looking to the Lord to keep you, it may become your own cause, and awaken in you those tempers that are inconsistent with true peace of mind, and will surely obstruct communion with God.