Accountable Christians

When I was a student pastor in seminary, I read through the minutes of the country church I pastored. A couple of things caught my eye. In the mid 1800s the church paid the pastor with a bushel of potatoes and two gallons of whiskey. Wow! It must not have been a Southern Baptist Church at that time.

The second thing that caught my eye was the practice of church discipline. I remember reading of one gentleman who was caught drunk and using bad language. He was brought before the congregation in their monthly Saturday business meeting, charged with his sins and “churched”. That means he was voted out of the membership.

Three months later he came back before the congregation, publicly repented of his sins and gave evidence of his reformation. The church forgave him and reinstated his membership in the church.

We don’t practice church discipline any more in a public fashion and it is my impression that few churches have any means of practicing church discipline privately. As pastor of a church I once became aware of a male member making inappropriate remarks to a female staff member. I took two deacons with me and confronted the man with his sin. He immediately confessed and agreed to apologize to the staff member and also promised never to do such a thing again. Later he came to me and thanked me for handling the situation as we did. As far as I know he never repeated his sin.

There are a number of people in the convention today who are concerned that our life styles as Christians are hurting our ability to reach the lost with the Gospel. They refer to the declining number of baptism and the fact that surveys show that Southern Baptists have a life style similar to the lost world. In fact some surveys have shown that in spite of our proclaimed family values, Southern Baptist divorce rates exceed the general population.

Do we need to do more as churches to uphold our stated values in the lives of our members? Should churches have minimum standards of behavior to which they hold their members accountable? Is it important to expect certain levels of moral behavior from our members? How should we enforce accountability to the church? Are there certain sins in the lives of it members with which a church should always deal? Should members be held accountable for attendance, giving and otherwise participating in the work of the church?

What do you think?

Becoming Missionaries

I am concerned that our baptism rates keep dropping while our population keeps going up. We are becoming less and less effective at reaching the lost people in our communities. One of the problems seems to be that our culture is changing rapidly and the church is becoming irrelevant to most of the people in our communities. Our culture no longer sees the value in the Christian faith that it once saw.

How do we cross the growing cultural gap while remaining faithful to our Biblical faith? I believe we must now view our communities as being non-Christian. We must also see ourselves as missionaries being sent into a non-Christian culture. This change in thinking can help us adjust our approach to our communities.

What would we expect a missionary to do when leaving their cultural context and going to a strange and lost culture? If we can learn what missionaries do to reach different cultural settings then maybe we could adapt their methods to our church’s outreach to our communities.

I would expect a missionary to identify with the people where he was going. That means learning their language, their values, their social structures, their taboos, their life-styles and then adopting these everywhere they do not conflict with the gospel.

Next I would expect the missionary to begin developing relationships with individuals within the culture. He could begin with meeting needs of individuals and helping them solve problems in their society. Working shoulder to shoulder with the people to help others and make their community better will break down many barriers.

As God gives opportunity the missionary should share his faith and lead others to faith in Christ. These first converts should then be taught that their responsibility is to reach their family and friends. Those who are “native” to the culture are best able to reach other “natives”. What we are looking for is an indigenous church planting movement within a lost culture.

Let’s face it; most of us are no longer native to our community’s lost culture. We are part of the Christian sub-culture. We no longer have the language, values or life-styles of our lost neighbors. We must learn to be missionaries to our own communities if we expect to be effective in reaching them for Christ.

We must begin to plan how to get ourselves outside our churches rather than planning how to get the lost inside our churches. We must find more ways to serve God in the world where the lost are rather than in the church where the saved are. As much as we can we must learn to love and serve the lost in our communities so they can learn to love and serve our God rather than the gods of this world. Let’s become missionaries! What do you think?