Marks of An Effective Church, Part 2
Selected Scriptures
The marks of a dynamic church, or the marks of an effective church. This is a break in our study of 1 Corinthians. The reason we're doing this is in recent days I had occasion to be at a Pastor's Conference, as I told you last time, and heard Dr. Howard Hendricks from Dallas Seminary speak. And he gave some of the things that he had found to be the common denominators of the great churches, the successful churches, the God-Blessed churches, the dynamic churches that he had visited all across America. He gave some of these things, didn't particularly support them biblically - didn't have time to do that - he just gave them. But it really set me to thinking.
So I took those basic things and I pursued them and I studied them in the scriptures and I added to them some that I felt are from my own viewpoint or my own mind out of the Word of God also, to be included in a list of the marks of a dynamic church. We came up with about 12 of them that we wanted to share with you, gave the first five last week and will conclude with the final seven this morning.
Now, I just want to say this again by way of introduction. There are many kinds of churches large and small, many cultures in which the church local assembly that is exists; there are all different ways to minister - as different as every different individual. The Holy Spirit gives different gifts in offices and administrations. We're not saying that all churches have to be the same, or that all have to conform to the same programs or the same patterns or the same methods or the same procedures.
But in all of the various procedures, in all of the vast, the plethora of types and styles of churches, there are some common denominators that are true of every successful, dynamic, effective church. They may be administered in different ways, they may be realized through different avenues, but they will be there.
Now, not all successful churches have all of these; all of them have some of them, and the more they have, the more dynamic they are. These, then, are the marks of a dynamic church - not only from scripture do we see these, but from actually looking at churches and actually discerning what it is that has made them effective.
Now, I'll just review the first five by naming them, and then we'll proceed on so that we can complete our study.
The first mark of a dynamic and effective church is a plurality of godly leaders. A plurality of godly leaders. The Bible teaches that there is to be in the church leadership that is godly, and that there are to be multiple of leaders. That is the heart of the church. That is the top of the church, and from there comes the direction for the church.
Second thing, a dynamic church will have functional goals and objectives. That is, it knows where it's going and it has delineated the procedure to get there. It has functional goals and objectives.
Thirdly, a dynamic church has a strong emphasis on discipleship. And by that I mean making people Christians, bringing them to Christ, and then nurturing them so that they can in turn reproduce. That the view of the strong church is a concerted effort to teach and bring people to grow and reproduce.
Fourth, a dynamic church will have a strong emphasis on community penetration. The style, the program, the approach may vary, but in all successful churches, dynamic churches, there is a strong concerted effort to penetrate the community. To reach the unsaved. To make a dramatic effect upon the society in which that local assembly exists.
Fifth, a church that is effective will have an aggressive, active, ministering people. It will not be a church where the paid people do everything. It will not be a spectator-type arrangement. It will be an active, aggressive, ministering body. People who know their spiritual gifts, and who use them.
Alright, now let's proceed from there. Number six in our study, a dynamic and effective church will have an intense, mutually caring spirit - and there's a lot of ways you could state that. It will have an intense concern for one another. It will be involved in the lives of its people.
Now, so many churches are simply places where you go to watch it happen, and we've seen this so many times in our studies. But we cannot sit in isolation. We cannot just come in, sit, and walk out the back, and say we have really been involved in what the church is doing.
There is a tremendous responsibility laid at the foot of every Christian to minister to another believer, and the New Testament is absolutely loaded with this - not only in the area of ministering our spiritual gifts, but in just responding to one another.
As I was driving down here for our prayer meeting early this morning, I was listening to a radio preacher, and he was preaching and he was waxing eloquent and he was just screaming at the top of his voice, and he was in one of those "amen" kind of congregations where you can hardly hear the preacher for all the people shouting back. And when they weren't giving it he'd say, "Now let me hear it there brethren, let me hear it!" So they'd all holler at him. And he kept saying this, "When I was a boy, I remember when people went to church! And what we need to do is go to church! We gotta get back to church!"
"Yea, brother, oh yeah!" All this yelling is going on - for about five minutes, he just kept saying "Go to church! Go to church!" You know, I thought, "All those people are there". That's what they're doing. But what he needed to do was tell them what they're there for. All they know they're there for is to just kind of pump that guy up so he'll keep hollering at them. They hadn't the faintest idea - I'm confident - of what they were supposed to be doing. And he just kept saying, "America needs to get back to church!" America never really found out what they were supposed to do when they went, so they left. Never wanted to come back, without telling them what to do when they get there.
Why do we go to church? Well Hebrew simply says this: "Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together as the manner of some is" - why? "In order that you may provoke one another to love and good works". You're not here just to listen, you're here to stimulate each other. Every one of you ought to be like a little battery, and you ought to be affecting other people.
You know, the New Testament has so much information about the response of believers toward one another. It says we are to confess our sins one to another; James 5:16. In Colossians 3:13 it says we are to forgive one another; in Galatians 6:2 it says we are to bear one another's burdens. In Titus it says we are to refute one another. In First Thessalonians 4:18 it says we are to comfort one another. Hebrews 10, Hebrews 4 and a lot of other places says we are to exhort one another. Romans 14:19 we are to edify one another; Romans 15:14 we are to admonish - which means to counsel with a view toward a change in behavior. James 5:16 we are to pray for one another.
All of those - one another, one another, one another - over and over and over and over. We have a responsibility to each other. You haven't done it when you've managed to park your machine, walk in here, sit down, get out there without having said anything to anybody. We're not only here to hear teaching, but we're here to be sensitive to the lives of those who are about us, and this should carry through the week, through the month, through the year, through the life.
You know, I look at the life of our Lord Jesus Christ and I see somebody who was involved - with individuals. Who was a caring, sensitive, loving friend; personally integrated into peoples' lives. He brought joy to a wedding. He went to a wedding, and he brought joy. He so identified with drunkards and winebibbers who wanted to change, that men started calling him a drunkard. He met with the weak and unimportant people, and he made them eternally important. He met with perverse and hostile people and revealed a warmth that made him approachable.
I always think about the story in Mark Chapter 5. Here is Jesus, God in human flesh. He lands in the sewers in the country of the Gaterines - Garasa - across the Sea of Galilee. You know who came to the meeting? A mad man. And he says, "Well, what do you have to do with me, Jesus of Nazareth?" Now this was a real far out guy who lived in the tombs, cut himself with rocks, and they tried to tie him up and he'd break the chains. The people avoided him, obviously - not too many people went out and said "would you like to have lunch with us at our picnic".
Well here's Jesus, he crosses the Sea of Galilee to meet the guy, the guy comes out, they meet - I love this story - Jesus took care of him. It cost somebody a herd of pigs, but it was a small price. And finally the story closes, and it says that Jesus was there, ready to leave, and the man was sitting at Jesus' feet, clothed and in his right mind. He got involved in one man's life and transformed his life.
I always think, too, of Mark Chapter 5 when Jesus was in the crowd. And it says that the crowd was crushing him. And he turns around and says, "Who touched me?" Remember that story? And a little lady had crawled up and grabbed one of the tassels on his robe and yanked it. And he said "who touched me", and the disciples said "are you kidding?" He says no, it was a special touch, and he pulled the lady out and said "come here", and he healed her. That's the kind of person he was. He was involved in the lives of people; he was totally sensitive.
There were some people getting to stone an adulteress in John 8, remember this story? Jesus walked up and started writing on the ground, and somebody said what was he writing, maybe he was writing the sins of the people who were throwing the stones. But he said to them, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone", looked at the lady and said, "I don't condemn you; go and sin no more". He was in the business of being sensitive to peoples' needs on an individual level, and this is the kind of pattern he set for us.
The church, people, is a loving community that we must share with one another. And I think so often we think we've satisfied ourselves that we've gone to church; we've waltzed in the building, sat down, and gotten back in the car and gone about our business...God help us if that's our perspective.
Number seven. Church is not only to be mutually caring, but a church that is dynamic and effective will have a genuine, high-level devotion to the family. A genuine, high-level devotion to the family. One of the reasons here at Grace Church that we have had what we've had with family efforts is because we're so committed to the family.
Dr. Barshaw and his ministry and the family program - which incidentally is going to have a new face and things are gonna change and you're gonna see some exciting things around here in the first of the year - his Bible study and his time each year with fathers, with dads; the effort to work in the homes, to try to stimulate godly fathers and godly mothers; the women's ministry, the genuine woman; all of the things that we try to do with seminars and teaching, to work with men, to work with women, to work with young people - is to stimulate a godliness in the family. Because we believe that God has this as a priority.
You know in recent years, the church has forgotten the family. It's sort of rejuvenated now, but if you go back ten years and try to find a book on the Christian family, there weren't any. In the last ten years, there's a zillion of them. If you go back far enough , you can remember when the family all did it together. If you go back far enough, some of you can remember when the family went together and sat in the same pew always. And you always sat together. And then we got a program at the church, and everybody blitzed and went everywhere. Like here. You come at Grace and you go in three services, three acts, and everybody's going all over - you might run into your kid out there if you recognize them in the crush. Or maybe you might even meet your wife, I don't know. But its' a very difficult thing. It used to be that everybody went together.
And then of course, we had counter-cultures starting to grow, and everybody wanted to be somebody so everybody found a group. And this is very necessary, because of the mask on society, there needs to be that. So everybody's gravitated. Old people aren't old people, they're senior citizens. There's an identity there. And kids aren't just kids anymore, they're in the youth group. And the youth group has its own thing, and we gear everything to them; we have a certain _________, well you know in a lot of churches it's the youth group that's wagging the whole church. And a lot of people are sort of coming along for the ride.
Well this happened some years back, but we could see it developing in the late '60s or even the early '60s - all the things were oriented toward the kids. Pretty soon we begin to leave the parents behind. There used to be a total balance with the family. And this is something you really have to struggle to see exists.
I wanna show you how important the family is to God to stress this point. Exodus Chapter 20 and 21 lays it out for us, and we'll make a couple of other stops as we go through the scriptures and show you what I mean. Exodus 20 is the Ten Commandments, you remember this one, verse 12: "Honor they father and they mother that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord they God giveth thee." From the very beginning, from the very beginning. Right before the command not to kill was the command to honor your father and mother. God had laid it out this way - to give respect and honor to your parents, young people, is God's command. Chapter 21 verse 15 gives you the idea of how serious God is about it: "And he that smiteth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death".
I'll never forget an indelible incident in my life when I was a kid. I saw a friend of mine punch his father so hard he knocked him into the bathtub. And you know, you might hear that and think that's funny - God doesn't think that's funny. He that smites his father or his mother shall be what? Surely put to death. That would have been cause for capital punishment in the Old Testament.
You say, "I'd never do that, I'd never hit my father or my mother". How about thinking evil thoughts, or how about if you wouldn't hit them, maybe you'd curs them. Look at verse 17: "He that curses his father or his mother shall surely be put to death". Execution was God's standard. Do you think God wanted control in the family? Do you think God wanted order in the family? Not only did he not want you to smite your parents, but he did not want you to even curse them. Not even curse them. You ever heard of any young people who have bad things to say about their folks? Worthy of death in the Old Testament.
I'm only telling you this because I want you to know that God is very serious about the responsibility of the family members to one another. This is a high priority. And this is something that we must teach young people; the responsibility that belongs to them towards their parents.
Now this is elucidated in a broader base in Proverbs 30, and I wanna take a minute to show it to you because I think it's something you can use to teach your own children to pass onto others. Now here he's talking about the younger generation, basically, coming along. And you'll find as I read Proverbs 30 versus 11 and following, certain things that really ring home. It could be a description of our generation of young people today. "There is a generation that curses their father and does not bless their mother." Would you say that's true? Young people who curse their fathers and do not bless their mothers? In many cases their mothers and fathers don't deserve it, but that doesn't excuse them.
Verse 12: "There is a generation that are pure in their own eyes, yet are not washed from their filthiness." They think that they have no need of their parents' instruction. They've got all the answers. They really don't know how bad off they are. Or verse 13: "There is a generation, oh how lofty are their eyes. Their eyelids are lifted up -" you know what that is? Conceit, pride, all the answers, hot stuff, big time, really rived. "There is a generation -" verse 14 - "whose teeth are like swords, and their jaw teeth like knives to devour the poor from off the earth and the needy from among men". This younger generation grows up and you know what happens? They take advantage of other people. They're not honest, they're dishonest. We see them in America. Young men - dishonest, cruel. Some of the finest young men who we saw in situations that hit our country and things like Watergate, some of what should have been the finest of our young men whose lives were operated on this kind of principle. Taking advantage of people for their own gain.
Verse 15, here is the illustration: "The horse-leech has two daughters crying 'give, give'". You say, well that's weird, what does that mean? What's a horse-leech? Well, you can figure out what it is by just the name of it. It's a thing that leeches on horses; you don't need a Lexicon for that. What is it saying? A horse-leech had two teeth, or two whatever they would call them, that stab into the flesh of the horse and suck the blood out. And he says this generation is like a horse-leech; all they're in it for is what they can get out of it; sucking the blood out. They are never satisfied, never satisfied.
Verse 17, wow: "The eye that mocks at his father, and despises to obey his mother, the ravens in the valley shall pick it out and a young eagle shall eat it". Now that's pretty strong language. That's what God says about a child who doesn't honor his parents; who lifts up his lofty eyes against them - the ravens will pluck it out and the eagles will eat it.
Now when you read something like that, you get the idea that God is serious, don't you? You know in First Samuel Chapter 2, remember the story of Eli the priest? Eli took care of everybody's spiritual problems but never took care of his own kids. This is one of the great disasters in the Ministry. Pastors who don't take care of their kids, don't take care of their families. Too busy doing this and that.
Dr. Hendricks shared a story and he said that some guy called him up and said, "Dr. Hendricks, we're having a big Bible conference, we want you to be our speaker. Can you come?" He said, "No, I can't come." The guy says, "Why can't you come? This is a crucial thing for our city, for our town, for our community. Why can't you come? Do you have another appointment?" He says, "No, I gotta play with my kids." He said, "You gotta play with your kids? Don't you realize that our people need teachings?" He said, "Yeah, well my kids need me."
He was right, you know that? Because if he ever lost his kids, then all the credibility of his ministry is gone - pus his heart is broken. So sometimes if I don't come, it's because I'm playing with my kids. Is that wrong? That's not wrong. I don't wanna be like Eli. You know what Eli did? He didn't play with his kids. You know what grew up? Two really bad kids - Hophni and Phinehas. They didn't have a good start with those names, but you know, they could have done a lot better for them. But they turned out to be bad. And you know what God said to Eli? He says you know Eli, when I first chose Aaron, and I first started this whole Priesthood thing and the chain in which you're in - when I started that thing, I told those priests they'd be priests forever. And that this would be the line. But you know, your sons have so violated my law, that I'm gonna call a halt right here. And you're two boys Hophni and Phinehas are gonna die on the same day. Do you think Eli's heart wasn't broken? Too busy ministering, taking care of everybody else, couldn't take care of his sons.
I'll never forget a story that a guy told me, he was an evangelist. He said that he overheard his kid talking, this little boy was talking to the neighbor boy. He was always gone on evangelistic meetings, and his boy wanted to do something with the neighbor. He said, "I can't do anything with you cause I gotta go with my dad - my dad and I are gonna go down to the park and play". And this evangelist's son said, "Oh. My dad can't play with me, he's too busy playing with other people's children". He said nothing ever affected him as much as that did.
Listen, we have an obligation to our families. That's a high priority; there's a high price to pay if you lose out. So you know, we're concerned about that. We want solid marriages, right? Solid homes. So we have a family ministry. We just began a few months ago, because of this commitment, a premarital course. Anybody that wants to be married at Grace Church - anybody - must have a five week course that involves study, homework, projects, assignments, tapes to listen to, all kinds of things to do. They're assigned to a contact couple, that is a married couple in the Church that has a great relationship, a good solid couple, and they are to just work individually with those people before they ever come to the place of marriage.
Somebody said when we first started that, "Why do you make people go through all that?" Because we know what it's like to sit in the offices week after week after week and pick up the pieces of the marriages that never got started right.
There must be this kind of commitment to the family, and there is - in every church, really, that is going to be dynamic. I mean it's clear, isn't it, that husbands that love their wives, wives committed to their husbands, children obey their parents, and parents you don't have to provoke your children to wrath, but you're to admonish them and nurture them. It's all there, and it has to be made clear.
Alright, number eight. Gotta keep going. Boy you can really fire away on these. Number eight. A dynamic church will also have a strong Bible teaching preaching ministry. I really believe that dynamic churches are churches where there are solid teaching and preaching at the heart of it. I don't think you can make up for an anemic pulpit; I really don't. I don't think sermonettes for Christianettes cut it. I don't think platitudes and stories and all that make - I think there has to be in a great church, the heartbeat of the church is a dynamic presentation of the truth of God.
I think about Dr. Chriswell when he went to Dallas First Baptist Church. He's only the second pastor in its history - they've only had two; George Truitt and Chriswell, two great men. And when he got there he said to the Board, he said, "You know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna teach through the Bible. I'm gonna start in Genesis and I'm just gonna go verse by verse until we finish the entire Bible". They said, "You'll empty the place, you can't do that!" He did it. Didn't empty it; it's the biggest church in America. 15,000 members. You know why they go there? Because there's somebody there who teaches them the Word of God and does it in a way that they can respond to, and change their lives. There's no substitute for that.
There must be at the heart of the church the beating pulse of the solid pulpit that teaches and preaches the Word of God. You know, that's our rallying point. Let's face it - you arrive in the morning, get out of your car and split, and everybody goes a different direction. But the one common denominator we have is here, isn't it. And this is really the pulse that carries the church. If we never had this - and there was a series of articles suggesting some years back that we shouldn't have it - we wouldn't have that common growth together. I'll never forget reading those articles, a series of them.
And the suggestion was that we don't have churches anymore like we have _________. We get rid of buildings, and we don't have to do all of that. And every family would be a unit, and the father would be the priest. That's ideal. The only problem is, you still gotta have this because a lot of fathers aren't doing it. And if somebody doesn't teach the wives and kids, they won't. Right? But, every family with a father. And then you take five families, you'd have the five family group and one of those fathers would teach t