The Most Difficult Issues for a Church

This could be a part two to the first post this week.

Thirty-three years ago, my wife and I, married two weeks, moved with nothing to California, the San Francisco Bay Area, to start a church.  We stayed until July of this year, 2020, when we moved to Southern Oregon, Jackson County, to begin again.  The church in California is solid with good leaders trained in our church.  Now we're missionaries, but we're doing the same thing that we did when we came to California, except with a lot more knowledge and experience.  Lord-willing we'll do it a few more times, if the Lord tarries and we live.

I can say that I've now been at two places to start two churches, but I've also seen enough in other places to know what I'm about to tell you.  I should say that it corresponds to what you will read in the Bible too.  The latter should precede the former, but that's not always how it occurs in real time.  Sometimes life experience seeks out the teaching and application of the Bible.  The two feed off of each other, but the Bible reveals the truth.  It is the final authority.

My experience is that the most difficult issues for a church are the ones where a desire of the flesh clashes with what the church teaches.  It looks like someone won't consider scriptural teaching because he knows it means giving up something that he doesn't want to lose.  If the church would go ahead and allow for his desire, it seems, he might listen and come along.  He won't change on it.  He can find a church that won't challenge this desire of the flesh.  Will the church confront and disallow this continued disobedience to scripture with the threat of his leaving?

The less ways that a church might clash with people's desires of the flesh, the more people a church might keep.   Today these desires are totally accepted by society and most churches.  The church that won't accept them is now an outlier.  Will the church require compliance to scripture in those areas that conflict with people's desires of their flesh?  When one person is allowed freedom to disobey, that resistance will spread.  What one person gets away with will transmit to others.  Soon, that's not the belief and practice of the church anymore.  The church has not kept that teaching.  Then it easily affects other churches, that also give up on that truth.

Church leaders don't want to lose people, but that doesn't mean that they won't lose anything, when they don't lose the people they have because they have relented to their people's desires of the flesh.  They will give up teachings and practices that clash with those desires.  Leaders imagine their church will lose a majority of its younger people, because they want the music, dress, entertainment, social media, and friends of the world.  With the internet, they can find a version of Christianity that will allow for anything.  Leaders know that, some competition is occurring here, pressuring them to compete against potential departure, like keeping a customer.

The item coveted by the flesh is an idol.  Covetousness is idolatry (Col 3:5).  Jeroboam wanted to keep his people in the Northern Kingdom, so he built altars with golden calves at Dan and Bethel (1 Kings 12).  They might have an instinct against the convenience of the fleshly desire to obey by traveling down to Jerusalem to worship.  Jerusalem offered an invisible God.  Jeroboam provided a visible alternative, which could compete with the convention, tradition, or norm, the old way, of Jerusalem.  The visible calf was the comfort Aaron offered in Exodus 32 when fear struck the people at the base of Mt. Sinai.

Early in California I ran to the grocery store to pick something up there and a church member was two people ahead in the express lane.  He sat down one bottle of hard liquor on the counter.  I didn't know about this.  So what do I do?   I wanted to say nothing.  I wanted to stare at candy bar selection to my right, play like I didn't see him.  These are the most difficult issues in a church.

I look at the giving records of the church, and certain members with very high paying jobs are giving little to nothing in the offering plate.  They just drove their new expensive car into the church parking lot, so they can afford that.  Do you think they want that conversation about giving?

Someone with no time for evangelism has plenty of time to hang out with friends.  He or she has regular recreation and party time.  Ask for a fun trip and he's ready to go.  He "can't" come to a work day.  Entertainment references and pop knowledge come from his lips, but rarely to never a scripture verse or biblical expression.  Is he or she going to like your confrontation over this deluge of popular culture?

Is it appropriate that one of the women of your church shows cleavage?  A partial view of her breasts is readily available?  This isn't the Trinity.  This isn't the doctrine of justification.  This is whether God allow for women revealing this body part in public.  If you talk to her or have one of your ladies talk to her in a kind way, how's that going to go?

I could give many more examples, but these are the most difficult issues in a church.  A church leader might think that any one of these issues might send someone away from the church.  A person who leaves might not even say that's the reason.  He can find something else to leave about, that will sound legitimate to him.

Instead of dealing with an issue of the desires of the flesh, one might chalk that up to an issue of growth.  Here is a weak person, who just needs to be given time to grow.  One year later, he still needs time to grow.  Ten years later, when he's worse or at least no better than ten years before, he still needs time to grow.  The issues remain.

How a person responds to scripture on any issue is one of the chief indicators of true conversion (James 1:19-27).  The major reasons for church gathering according to Hebrews 10:24-25 are provocation to love and good works and exhortation.  Scripture is profitable for reproof and correction.  In preaching the Word, the preacher reproves and rebukes.  Paul commanded Timothy in Titus 2:15 to rebuke with all authority.  I know that's not all of what the Bible teaches about relationships in the church, but the most difficult issues in a church are when someone considering membership or a church member functions according to desires of the flesh and that practice must be be addressed in the ways the passages say:  correct, reprove, rebuke, etc.

Consider these two statements.  "We had thirty show up."  "We had fifteen show up."  Which of these is better?  Let's say that thirty were showing up until a desire of the flesh was confronted, and now fifteen are showing up.  When you report that you had thirty, that sounds better than fifteen.  Thirty sounds like you might be doing a better job.  I understand.  Many church philosophy books or church growth manuals today explain the plan for getting thirty by allowing for desires of the flesh.

Keeping allowing for desires of the flesh long enough and in order to keep people, and then these desires become part of the doctrine and practice of a church.  Much longer and this characterizes almost all the churches of the entire country.  Churches that have kept reproving desires of the flesh, they are far away and few between and are now so far out of the mainstream that Christians think they're some kind of a cult.  They're bad.  They are in fact perverting the grace of God that allows for desires of the flesh.

So few people are denied desires of the flesh that they must be permitted.  Grace justifies their permission.  The church becomes like the world.  The church that isn't like the world is now wrong.  This all started with the most difficult issues for a church.