Why You Will Join the Wrong Church

Interesting and helpful read on church life from 9Marks . . . 

The most read New York Times article from 2016 had nothing to do with politics, culture wars, or comic book movies. Instead, the most-read article of 2016 was all about commitment.

The piece, titled “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person,” was written by Alain de Botton. In it, de Botton takes shots at our culture’s idea that the ultimate foundation for commitment in marriage is romantic affection, that feeling of compatibility that means the other person will finally fulfill my needs and make me truly happy.

We all know this is misguided, so much so that de Botton predicts every married person will eventually find inadequacies so severe in their spouse that it will prompt them to ask, “Did I marry the wrong person?” He humorously notes, the relational arc of a marriage leans away from idealistic romantic sizzle as “maddening children . . . kill the passion from which they emerged.”

CHURCH AND OUR CULTURE

As I read de Botton’s article, I couldn’t help but see how much of our culture’s view of love and commitment mirrors how many Christians view church membership. Many Christians’ broken relationships with their churches resemble patterns of the divorce culture and its attendant assumptions about authority, love, and compatibility.

Almost every Christian knows what it’s like to question whether they joined the “right church.” After an initial “honeymoon stage,” we begin to see our church’s problems with greater clarity than we see its strengths. The sermons start to seem too intellectual, or not intellectual enough. The church begins budgeting for ministries that don’t seem deserving of the dollar figure on the spreadsheet. The small groups don’t meet our needs in the ways we’d hoped.

More personally, the needs of other church members begin to encroach increasingly on our own personal freedoms. Some members sin against us—even without knowing just how deeply we’ve been wounded. Without even realizing it’s happening, we begin to wonder whether our local assembly is the “right” place for us. Of course, we remind ourselves that there’s no such thing as a perfect church—something we’ve even told our fellow church members. And yet, we can’t help but grapple with the nagging question: “Did I join the wrong church?”

“DID I JOIN THE WRONG CHURCH?”

The problem with this question is that it assumes church life shouldn’t be hard. It assumes the “honeymoon stage” should continue in perpetuity or that something has gone awry if we experience significant disappointment or hurt from our relationships with other members or the church’s leadership.

But these assumptions reveal a deep and unthinking commitment to consumerism: only if the perks of membership outweigh its inconveniences will we think it’s worth it to stick it out. Regrettably, many Christians seem trapped in a perpetual cycle of this type of cost-benefit analysis.

I’ve found that Christians most often push eject on their membership not because they’re upset at the church’s budget or because they disagree on matters of polity. Instead, Christians leave their churches for the same reason people leave their marriages: a lack of relational depth and affection. In other words, many Christians leave their churches because they just don’t seem compatible with the church or because the relationships leave them feeling a little dry.

Personal relationships, however, were never meant to serve as the foundation for our sense of church commitment. If we pursue relationships as the foundation of our belonging, we’re more likely to be inescapably trapped in the consumerism and “met-needs” mentality at the heart of our divorce culture. However, instead of valuing consumerism, the Bible roots our membership in the idea of a covenant, which offers an infinitely superior alternative.

COVENANT PRECEDES COMMUNITY

Tim Keller notes in his book on marriage that a covenant “creates a particular kind of bond . . . a relationship far more intimate and personal than a merely legal, business relationship. Yet at the same time, it is far more durable, binding, and unconditional than one based on mere feeling and affection. A covenant relationship is a stunning blend of law and love.”

When the Bible speaks about the church, it refers to it as a covenant community. Church members aren’t just part of a shared interest group. They’re covenanted to one another by a sacred promise to oversee one another’s membership in the kingdom and faithfulness to King Jesus (Matt. 18:15–20). The New Testament unfolds the details of that sacred promise: We regularly gather together (Heb. 10:24–25), bear one another’s burdens and sorrows (Gal. 6:2), encourage one another (Heb. 3:12–14), pray for one another (Jas. 5:16), and forgive one another (Col. 3:13). Many churches helpfully formalize these biblical instructions into a church covenant, a set of promises members make to one another when they enter into membership.

These covenant obligations are the foundations of our church commitment and should function as the backbone to church life. Covenant precedes community. We might even say covenant creates community. The covenant promises members make to one another blossom into the life-giving relationships our hearts crave.

Rooting commitment in our covenant promises doesn’t mean that church relationships are nothing but soulless duty. Instead, covenant commitments are the food that nourishes our relationships with other members. The more we hold ourselves to our covenant promises, the more our relationships blossom and endure through seasons of difficulty. Again, as de Botton perceptively notes in his article, “Compatibility is an achievement of love, it must not be its precondition.” The world argues that affection is pre-requisite to commitment. But the biblical picture is actually quite the opposite: commitment and service create affection.

I’m amazed at how this principle works out even in my own life. A few years ago, after a couple in our church had a baby, my wife and I signed up through the church’s member care ministry to bring them a meal. Our act of service, however, wasn’t rooted in a pre-existing relationship with this couple. In fact, we barely knew them. We simply wanted to be faithful to our covenant promises to “bear one another’s burdens.” Yet that service, rooted in our covenant commitment, ultimately blossomed into a sweet friendship between our two families. We weren’t expecting a relationship to bloom, but that’s what happens when you hold yourself to covenant promises, even with people you barely know.

COVENANTS CARRY YOU THROUGH SUFFERING

The reason God roots the most important relationships in the world—like marriage and church membership—in covenants is to ensure they endure through fire. Have you ever noticed how traditional marriage vows were designed to ensure couples prepare to love one another well in the midst of suffering? Couples pledge themselves to one another even in “poverty” and “sickness” until parted by death.

This same expectation of future trials also marks the promises church members make to one another. We pledge to “bear one another’s burdens,” (Gal. 6:2) and patiently bear with and forgive the sins of our brothers and sisters who wrong us (Col. 3:13; Eph. 4:32). If we make our covenant commitments the ground of our life and relationships in the church, we come to expect the rough patches and prepare to face them with godliness.

While our affections for our church and its members can be fickle, easily dissipating as soon as circumstances shift unfavorably, our covenant commitments never fade. As Keller notes, covenants are by their very nature oriented toward the future. They “are not a declaration of present love but a mutually binding promise of future love.” In some sense, the whole point of a covenant is to pledge our love and fidelity for the rough times ahead. Thus, covenants carry us through suffering. Once more, de Botton incisively notes, “Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.”

FOR YOUR OWN GOOD, STICK WITH THE “WRONG” CHURCH

Joining a church, like seeking a spouse, is daunting. Loving others makes us vulnerable and committing ourselves to a church immerses us in the needs of other sinners. Eventually, every congregation will find a way to get under our skin, frustrate us, or even wound us—and we will do the same to them.

Our relationships will ebb and flow, as will our affection for the church. But the solution is not always looking for a better fit. Instead, we renew our passion and reignite our sense of belonging by holding ourselves to our membership covenant—sacred promises that bind even the “wrong” people together.

Book Review: The Pastor as Public Theologian, by Kevin Vanhoozer and Owen Strachan

Found this book review by Jeff Mooney at Nine Marks helpful.  I have a growing concern about the theological landscape in my own small town tucked away in Homer, Alaska.  One local bible teacher was teaching and publishing Pelagian views (how can this go on without anyone noticing) and another pastor teaching inclusionism.  Someone started attending our church last year after repeatedly hearing works based and moralistic teaching coming from the church they recently left.  Every Christian is a theologian because they think about and make statements about the nature of God and their faith.  If this is so, then we all need to be challenged to think more clearly about our faith, especially pastors . . . 

Back in seminary, I remember hearing a question from a seminary student who thought he was smart. The guy asked something about the “relevance” of the Bible in our modern world, to which the speaker responded, “The Bible is eternal. You’re the one that’s irrelevant.”

Though that’s a bit overstated—human beings are, after all, also eternal—I couldn’t help thinking of this incident when reading Kevin Vanhoozer and Owen Strachan’s helpful book, The Pastor as Public Theologian: Reclaiming a Lost Vision. The authors’ contention is that the biblical and historical office of the pastor transcends faddish variety and should therefore be reclaimed, whether or not they are perceived as “relevant” by current trends.

THE “WHAT” OF THE BOOK 

Vanhoozer and Strachan wrote the book to address two urgent needs: a clearer definition of the office of pastor, and churches who seek to be shaped by such pastors. However, if you think that this is simply another collection of essays by stuffy academics that malign worship bands and altar calls, then you’re mistaken.

According to the authors, the office of pastor began its demise due to a division of labor that explicitly separated the work of the pastor and the professional theologian. This division created two disparate classes: the theologian as the thinker and the pastor as the practitioner. That said, Vanhoozer and Strachan aren’t interested in the pastor becoming a specialist in the academic world. Instead, they contend the pastor must be a public theologian.

At this point, definitions are in order: “pastor” fundamentally refers to one who spiritually shepherds a congregation. When Vanhoozer and Strachan encourage him to be a “public theologian,” they mean he should seek to be a leading thinker for the congregation, a generalist who exegetes the Word and the world so that he might shepherd people toward loving God and embracing all things in Christ. The rest of the book puts flesh on these bones from biblical, historical, and theological perspectives.

THE “WHO” OF THE BOOK

The primary target for the book is the educated pastor. There’s certainly room at the reading table for the self-taught, but Vanhoozer’s chapters in particular might be challenging. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and found it personally uplifting and even focusing for my ministry.

For these reasons, I suspect many pastors will be instructed and encouraged by it, especially those who are tempted to be either the overtly academic pastor or the overly pragmatic “shepherd.”

For better or worse, the book will appeal mostly to the Reformed world, and both writers are seemingly geared toward a “higher” church tradition. The concerns and categories that Vanhoozer uses reflect this orientation. For example, I have yet to run into a non-denominational pastor (or perhaps a Baptist one) who automatically thinks of communion when they think of worship (164) and even fewer who think at all of catechism (p.161). Throughout the book, I often thought about how Pentecostal and so-called “traditional” Baptist pastors might react to their arguments and paradigms.

My fear is that some might put the book down before getting through the introduction. Those pastors who fashion themselves as “blue collar” or “just Bible” pastors might hear Vanhoozer and Strachan’s call to reclaim the position of leading theological thinker in their congregations as something totally foreign. But I hope that doesn’t happen. If the so-called “traditionalist” and Pentecostal pastors will stay with this book, enduring the more distant moments, then I’m convinced they’ll see the beauty of what Vanhoozer and Strachan are saying. There’s a unique call to shepherd the bride of Christ, to practically and thoughtfully love Christ and all things in Christ, to minister the word of God to people, and to help them interpret the scriptures, their world, and their individual lives.

THE “HOW” OF THE BOOK 

Vanhoozer provides the introduction and the theologically reflective chapters. Strachan provides a glimpse into the biblical portrayal and requirements for the leaders of God’s people and a brief contour of the office of “pastor” from church history. The authors admit up front that they’re academics rather than pastors, acknowledging this as a weakness. But to shore up this weakness, the writers bring in the experts, local church pastors, to portray the authors’ theses in practical portraits throughout the book.

Overall, the pastors’ input was very helpful. However, I found it more beneficial to read their remarks out of order. For example, I stopped in the middle of Part 2: The Evangelical Mood, and jumped to David Gibson’s helpful chapter on death. I stopped in the middle of the last chapter dealing with pastors as artisans in the house of God and jumped to Guy Davies’s pastoral perspective on the drama of preaching. This practice isn’t necessary. The chapters make good sense as they are laid out, but I found reading out of order allowed me to keep my focus on the sub-topic at hand (ministry between death and resurrection, preaching, etc.) rather than return to it later.

CONCLUSION

Overall, I applaud this book. The call of the pastor to be both practical and theological is rigorously biblical. There’s nothing more theological than the practical shepherding of Christ’s people, and there’s nothing more practical than robust theological thinking and speaking to Christ’s people. Regardless of perceived relevance, true thinking about the office of pastor is always refreshing.