gracEmail
Edward Fudge
PREACHERS
AND PATTERNS
A gracEmailsubscriber in Australia writes: "There's a movement afoot (house churches
are part of it) that claims that preaching and teaching to
Christians in a congregation is to be done by the elders, and
that any paid full-time evangelist ought to be evangelizing
the lost. These folk say the idea of a located pulpit minister was a
second century invention of men." [Today's questioner serves within the
Churches of Christ, one part of a larger movement to achieve
Christian unity through a "restoration" of "the New
Testament church.]
*
* *
If we view Timothy and Titus as models for a paid ministry and use
Paul's letters to them to write a job description, we see that job as one
of proclaiming the gospel but also of equipping believers of all ages and
genders to serve God, training them in godliness, encouraging and exhorting
them to good works and standing against genuine heresies from outside and from
within. The Apostle Paul had assigned Timothy and Titus to their posts in Ephesus and Crete respectively. Almost certainly, once their churches were established and
well-ordered, Timothy and Titus moved on and started the process over again. In
that sense, if we look in the New Testament we will not find today's
full-time pulpit minister employed long-term by the church -- but neither will
we find today's "church" or any reference to a pulpit.
If we really
were required to "restore" the external forms of the first-century
church, I think we would need to return to informal house-church fellowships
without paid staff, budgets, buildings or programs. As a general rule,
most believers would earn a secular living and volunteer their Spirit-gifted
ministry of whatever sort, although Jesus and his follower Paul both
recognized the propriety of financially supporting those who
forego normal livelihoods to devote themselves to spiritual service. However,
the fact is that we are never told to imitate the first-century externals and
our whole tradition of patternism needs to be
rethought. We should rather look to the New Testament (and to a lesser
extent the Old Testament as well) for the gospel message, for specific
instructions with universal intent, for general principles and for
illustrative applications. Equipped with that biblical guidance, we should
then look to the Spirit to help us apply scriptural truth to our own
circumstances, trusting God to enable us to be his gospel people in our own time and place.
The house-church scenario laid out in the first paragraph above is an admirable model -- perhaps
even the best and most "scriptural" one -- but it is not
intended to be an exclusive pattern. The point is not our size, our structure
or our labels. It is our character, our mission and our relationships with God
and each other. However we "do church," we should do it as
kingdom people with kingdom agendas, which calls into question our stewardship
of God's resources as commonly used today (mostly for our own convenience,
comfort and pleasure). Of course, we ought not to deceive ourselves
and to fib to others by claiming that we are "restoring the New Testament
church" if we are merely tinkering with externals while
ignoring our very reason for being. To help us avoid that, we ought
always to be repeating to ourselves the words: "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory."
God knows that the Enemy is constantly enticing us (whether we meet in a
home or a cathedral) to think and live by the dreadful counter-statement
to that: "For mine is the kingdom, and the power,
and the glory.
For more on church leaders' vocation or call, click here.