Is Church More than a Sermon?

But anyway, we were talking to a group of Millennials at the turn of the year, Millennial women, who were interacting with us about their experience in the local church and talking about all the other places they get input. When we were all done – we had met with them for two hours – and when we were all done, we asked them, "What two podcasts would you like for us to do that would be of interest to your demographic?" The first one was a podcast on infertility, which I told them immediately was a topic I would have never thought to do a podcast on. So, I thank them for that.

Then the second one was, "Why should we go to church?" which produced its own kind of post facto conversation after they raised it. So, we thought, "That's actually a good question." I think that with the way in which institutions in general are viewed, and the way in which the church sometimes is viewed with suspicion in our larger culture, that's a very fair question to ask. So, my opening question to you gentlemen is, besides the fact that Jesus did talk about church – which is a minor detail, okay?

All right.

My position on that is that these are actually means by which God nurtures and sustains us in grace as we participate in those, and therefore, ought to be things that we look to, that we go to, that we participate in for our own spiritual nurture and growth.

A liturgical community, that we are people who are to live together, not just gathering for a worship gathering, but actually really do that much-abused phrase "life together." Life on life. But that liturgical community of disciples that continue to grow in becoming more like Jesus and then joining Jesus in his mission in the world. A liturgical community of disciples on mission that – I think it was Alan Hirsch that I first heard say the idea, "It's not so much that the church has a mission; it's that the mission has a church," that God has a mission in the world.

He has called us, as his people, he has swept us up into this grand mission that the church comes out of this way in which God is purposefully engaged in accomplishing his mission in the world. Then he invites us into participation in that mission. So that's what it means to be a Christian, it seems to me, is that we would be people who identify with Christ and his body and participate in this liturgical community of disciples on mission.

The other thing I would say that's very important is I absolutely do not believe you can grow spiritually in any meaningful balanced way apart from the means God has given for spiritual growth, which is the community. The New Testament uses – Paul uses the image of growth – this is an agricultural term for growing spiritually – several places, about nine times. Every single one of them is in the context of the corporate community. It's not – sorry, it's not, "Read your Bible, pray every day, and you'll grow, grow, grow," as the AWANA song goes.

It's gather together, pray for one another, exhort, encourage one another, exercise your gifts for the benefit of one another, and that is if there's a key to spiritual growth, it is in the gathered community. Yes, with all of the aches and the pains and the hardships and the frustrations, but also all of the joys and the celebrations and the encouragement and the uplifting experiences that we have. It's both of those things, and it always has been.

So, we may have a – hopefully Dallas Seminary has orthodoxy covered, but we don't have as our leadership, ordained elders, deacons established for the working out of that ministry. We are not regularly observing the sacraments of the church.

Also, evangelism, edification, exaltation is how I break down the works of the church. We may be, in a scattered way, training and preparing and attempting these things in various ways, but it's not the focus of Dallas Seminary to be an evangelistic or mission organization or a building up the whole body of Christ. Last time I checked, you didn't have to pay tuition at church.

We have a fundamentally deficient view of the local church if we see it merely as providing us with spiritual, religious goods and services that we consume. Perhaps there are other places where we can consume religious goods and services. You can download great sermons on your phone, and yet, there's something very different about that than sitting week in and week out and being pastored by the person who stands in front of you in the pulpit and proclaims God's Word.

And the ongoing life together in community, the sacramental life of the church – that's not something that we do, or at least not with any regularity, around here. I think that idea of mission, that part of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus is not just to be with Jesus and become like Jesus, but to join Jesus in his mission in the world.

While we may, again, have occasional opportunities as a community here at DTS to engage in God's mission in some sort of one-off kinds of ways, part of our calling as believers is to participate in the mission of God through our participation in the local church.

So, that's part of the inward turn that comes with our fallenness and sin, but it's only exacerbated by the culture that we participate in. So, we bring that formation with us into church, and we become consumers of church, and yet the opposite is actually true of what we are supposed to be as humans, what the orthodox theologian, Alexander Schmemann, says we are to be: homo adorans, the being that adores, that worships. What a fundamental kind of reorientation that happens in us as we are reinforced in that inward turn through participating in a consumer culture.

So, there are ways in which, I think, inevitably our experience of churches is impacted by consumerism, but I think we have to be aware of that dynamic and fight against it to the degree that we can.

Darrell L. Bock: Yeah, I'm from Minnesota.

Yeah, so it is – just be aware that that's going on, and it's not going to transfer necessarily out of this culture. But yeah, it isn't about you, and telling people, "It's not about you and it's not –" It's interesting, you can tell people what it is, and they'll all agree with you. Church is not a building, right? Then talk about changing the furnishing and changing the fixtures, and pretty soon you realize, well, in many peoples' minds, it is a building. You tell people it's not about you until you start taking things away that have nothing to do with the mission of the church, but is the reason they're actually showing up.

So, this is a constant battle. You're going to be dealing with these questions of, "How do I actually embody Philippians 2 in the gathered congregation, not looking out for our own interests, but for the interests of others?" It's a constant challenge.

So, when we have reduced the gospel to a consumer product, as David Bosh says, we have truly made it the opiate of the masses.

Let me ask you another question. I actually think this is an interesting one. This is the one that came from the group of women that we interviewed besides, "Why should we go?" This is a little more penetrating, a little more focused, and it goes like this, "Why should women go to church if they are able to receive more respect and use of their God-given gifts in a more influential way outside the church?"

God makes no indication that there is any differentiation of the distribution of spiritual gifts among genders, among men and women. So, the women in our communities have received gifts from the Spirit to be used for the edification of the body, for the building up of the whole church, both men and women. So, it's been part of my task, even as a professor here to do everything that I can to try to really be an advocate for my women students as well as women that serve in very significant leadership roles within the life of our local church.

So, there is sometimes a conflation of – so even you may hold that only men are to be elders, men and women deacons, or whatever your view is, what about all the rest of the membership that is every one of them, male or female, young or old, are supposed to be involved in the work of the ministry? That's where the conversation needs to move, and so there needs to be some reform in that area. I would also challenge some of the traditional ways we understand leadership roles and ordination and how that works. I'm a very strong supporter for the ordination of women ministers in the deacon/deaconess office. I teach that. I've taught that in class for ten years and have written on it.

But I do know that there are some traditions that that sounds liberal, even though as far as I can tell, it's the original view of the early church which would, by definition, be the most conservative views. So, challenging some of these presuppositions and preunderstanding, I think, there's a place for that, but, I'm just going to echo, ditto everything Barry has just said.

But every organization has that as well, and sometimes I think Christian organizations can have a shadow mission that is sort of growth for growth's sake, growth because of what that then sort of demonstrates to the world about our importance or, I mean, all kinds of ways in which that can be a shadow. Yet, as we sort of reframed the conversation yesterday, wouldn't we want to say that we desperately want to expand our influence within our community for the sake of seeing people come to faith in Christ, and seeing them built up in their faith, seeing them transformed into Christlikeness?

That's something that we ought very much to desire, and so there's a sort of narrow path, I think, that we have to try to walk in the way that we talk about that so that it doesn't become a shadow mission, so that we don't just become that successful church because we have the numbers. But, in fact, that we're seeing the influence of the church, the impact of the gospel spread more and more in our community.

So, you're not going for the pastor. You're not going for the church in this abstract sense. You're going for the assembly of believers, your brothers and sister with names and faces. So, just again, the reeducating of what is the church itself, and what is that supposed to look like?

So, okay, here's one: "Most of us in this room are giving and contributing to our church, not consuming, almost to our detriment, but the church isn't enriching us spiritually." What would you say to that?

So, I would encourage – it's a being plugged in, going through those struggles, I think, is in the long run going to contribute to a person's spiritual growth. But I guess I would need some more follow-up. What concretely are they experiencing, and what is the expectation?

There's a variation on this question. It goes like this, and I think these questions have their finger on something that was the frustration we were feeling from millennial women as well. "In a culture where it is encouraged to identify ourselves individually and where community identity is frowned upon, how do we stress to millennials the importance of the community identity in the church?" In other words, we're already swimming upstream when it comes to emphasizing the corporate versus the individual.

So, and perhaps this is a variation of a question I was thinking about asking earlier, which would go something like this: "How do we who one day are people who are training to be in church leadership actually help people to have the right expectations about what a church is and ought to be?"

It could be though in the context here this idea that you are filled with the Spirit, y'all be filled with the Spirit in the sense of, as you are gathering together, exercising your gifts, the Spirit – it's more the Spirit indwelling the corporate body, and it is a plural passive imperative. Show up, gather together, do the things you're supposed to be doing, and the Spirit is filling y'all, the corporate idea. So, we forget, yes, we are – our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit, 1 Corinthians 6, but don't forget 1 Corinthians 3 and Ephesians 2 and all these other passages where it's the church that is the temple of the Holy Spirit.

So, both of these things have to be true, but you find your identity – it is actually a myth that you can have an individual identity apart from the other, the "I" and the "thou." I mean, this is well-established, your identity is formed in community. Socially, psychologically, whatever, in the church, our identity in Christ is to be formed in community, the body of Christ. So, there's something – and I don't also want to deny that the mystical – this is the Spirit indwelled corporate body, there is something mysterious and supernatural going on there as well. Make yourself available, plug yourself in.

But in real relationships, I think the people who are most disappointed in their church experience are the ones who don't have an actual assembly experience. They have an attendance experience, or they have an audience observation experience, and for whatever reason, there's a disconnect between the pastor. The pastor might be a preacher, but he's not a shepherd, or they don't have a shepherd, or they don't have any of the one-anothers. They don't have older men teaching the younger men, older women teaching the younger women. All of these dynamics that are really in place, and if they were followed, I think would create a different kind of experience in fashioning that identity that they're looking for.

So, too, for me to pray these words, "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name…" and go through that prayer to pray, "Give us this day our daily bread." An unwillingness to actually be a part of the means by which God would actually answer that prayer, I don't think we pray in earnest. So, there's some sense in which not only as we pray this prayer, that we pray for one another, but that praying that prayer for one another –

[Laughter]

I was waiting for him to answer. Yeah, I would agree for sure. On the other hand, Christlikeness is self-giving. I mean, if you look at the life of Christ, if you look at Philippians 2 it is, the idea really is if most or – forget it – if some even are coming together wholly sold out for the benefit of the other, you are going to show up and receive in that context. But that's the whole idea of the Spirit working through the community.

So, as you are others-centric, you are going and obviously you're receiving. Yes, the Lord's Supper, the eucharist, I mean, you are receiving the bread and the cup as if from the hand of Christ himself. He is the one inviting you to the table. Absolutely, there is that expectation. The cup of blessing. Well, whose blessing? So, I think that there is this implication that there are blessings that you receive, but that I guess I'm more of the opinion that when I go to church, attend services, I have to remind myself to err on the side of the other. Don't look out for your own interest, but also the interests of others. "Have this mind in you which is also in Christ Jesus."

I feel like that's the emphasis probably because it is absolutely natural to look out for me and impossible to look out for the other. It's a supernatural enablement that is necessary for agape kind of other-centric self-sacrificial orientation. So, I would say put the pressure or put the emphasis on the others-centricness.

I think it shapes the way we engage spiritual disciplines. How much do I have to give up, but what am I going to get back? I'm not sure I really want to give up anything if I don't know there's some guarantee on the other end that I'm going to get something back. The fact is that's just fundamentally not the way that spiritual disciplines work.

No, no, no, no, no.

Do you want a little more?

But actually, part of what the growth involved was recognizing that I can experience deep community with people who are different than me. Duh, that's kind of the point in some sense, right? That we find ourselves in rooms with people that we wouldn't otherwise be in the room with, but that's for our good.

The moment we went overseas where you're talking about 2 or 3 percent of the population being believers, 2 or 3 percent of the population attending a service on a Sunday. The only time the church was filled was at Christmas and Easter where they had triple services, and the rest of the time, you'd walk in on a Sunday, and you might see 30 people and two-thirds of them or three-quarters of them looked like they were on Medicare.

All of the sudden, you realized that in many communities around the world, you don't have a choice, that the church – if you're going to church, that's the church you're going to. So, how do you adjust to that?

But for four decades, they have been faithful in their commitment to this place, and we are better because of it. I think that they would say, and they are better because of it.

Are there situations in which for your own good, safety, whatever, health you may need to withdraw from a family? Yes, but that should be about as rare as you would withdraw from a church. It would take a lot for me to leave a church. Look, I don't like most things that happen in most churches, frankly.

To say that, "Well, that's a sideshow versus the real, the main event, which is the church," and then you come to church, and it's dry and it's slow-moving, and these people I don't even know them. I don't like them. You just want to go back to Young Life, right? Let's be honest. So, it's a huge controversial issue. But I would say parachurch literally means coming alongside of the church and helping the church accomplish its mission and its vision ideally. It's not supposed to displace or replace.

In other words, is the danger of a pastor that you are so committed to the task that you're asked to perform, particularly in speaking and teaching, that you actually don't pastor? Okay? Then the follow-up question that comes off of that is, "Are we creating our own problem?" Okay, I think it's an interesting question.

There is, I mean, it is a weighty task to stand in front of the people of God and speak to them on God's behalf; and to do that without thoroughly to do so is foolish.

Yet the reality is – I spoke to a woman. She approached me at an event recently in downtown Dallas. I have no idea who she was. She came up and gave me a big hug, and "Oh, we love IBC so much." So the more we talked, she said, "Now, we haven't been there in a few months, but I watch the messages online." It really struck me that in our attempt to actually try to provide something for those who can't be there for a compelling reason, it's now become easier and easier for them just not to show up.

We refuse to call that an online campus and to make that sort of, in any way, communicate that that could be your normal church experience. I went to an online campus of a church one time just to check it out, and the pastor got to the end of the sermon and offered a sinner's prayer, and had everybody there raise their hand. There's literally an icon next to a version of the sinner's prayer that I could click on if I wanted to pray the sinner's prayer. I just kind of remember thinking, "Is there going to be an icon for me of bread and of wine?"

Just right click?

[Laughter]

So then our experience of church becomes mediated, and we just suck the life out of it in that sense, that just as connectivity is a terrible replacement for real community because actually, that connectivity only leads us further towards isolation. We see the way that actually plays out. So too this experience of church mediated entirely through technology is a pseudo experience of what the church is called to be.

No, no. Yeah, don't misunderstand me. So, here's my position. I, generally speaking, generally speaking – it's a rule of thumb – if I move into a new area, I'm going to look for the closest church that is generally part of my tradition. I come from a Bible church, low church, Baptistic kind of church tradition. Ideally, that's where I would kind of land, and assuming they're just as imperfect as every other church that I've been to, which is probably the case, I'm not the best person to ask to evaluate a church because I tend to be overly critical. But at the same time, I totally keep that all to myself, bottle it up.

But I just have a high tolerance for imperfection. Some people don't. I probably would visit a few churches. If I showed up there, and they had a real big problem with legalism, that's just a battle I don't want to fight; or if they had other things that are totally not going to work with me and make me absolutely frustrated, I wouldn't even start there. What I'm primarily talking about is you get to a church, you commit to it, you become a member – I'm a strong believe in church membership – that's your church family. You don't then, "Eh, you know, membership is not working out for me."

I knew a guy who had three, may have been four, three simultaneous church memberships. That's a problem. That's what I mean by church shopping, but when you first get to a place, you have to find what's going to be a decent fit. It's not the time to start jumping traditions or trying something completely new. So, I have no problem on the front end of that.

So, I mean, it's that ever-elusive balance perhaps, in some sense that in learning to ride a bike, you learn to find balance by losing it, and then correcting. I think that that's certainly, I think, was an indication of my experience in a lot of ways when I was going through as a student was that sense of deeply connected and spiritual formation and loving what I was getting through my classes and mentoring from a professor, but realizing that that was actually diminishing my commitment to the local church. There was a need for correction.

So, I think we find ourselves – it's a tension that doesn't easily resolve, but like most tensions in life, it's not necessarily meant to be easily resolved. It's meant to be lived in and figure out how to navigate.

[Laughter]

[Laughter]

Our hope is that this has kind of been a good time to reflect on the local church, your commitment to it. I dare say that one of the benefits of being involved in the local church is that when you come to seminary, you do live in a kind of theological bubble, which is tight and dense at the same time. One of the things that I've found valuable as a student attending church, local church was actually getting and not losing sight of what it is that most people are struggling with from day to day.

That's very different than the kinds of questions I was writing papers on, not because those papers weren't relevant, but because forgetting what it means to translate theology into everyday life, which is tricky, and to lose that connection is to lose an aspect of your ability to minister long-term. So, I think that's another benefit that comes from being involved in the local church. Let me close this in a word of prayer, and with that, we'll be dismissed.

Father, we do thank you for just the opportunity to gather together and to reflect on why it is that you call us together, what it means to be your people, what it means for the Spirit to reside in us, what it means to be gifted in ways that we are able to serve one another. You don't gift us to gift us for ourselves; you gift us in order that we might be able to be part of the vessels that you use to encourage, to suffer, to listen, to hurt, and to love. Help us to do that well, by your Spirit. Help us to tap into that which you have given us through your grace, and be a means of grace to others so that we might reflect that little bit of light that you give to us as a reflection of who you are.

We ask that we may do that well, not just as individuals, but in community so that your name may be lifted up and that people may come to appreciate the kind and gracious and rich and glorious God that you are. We ask these things in Jesus' precious name. Amen.