Annotated Summaries from the Building of the Church

Annotated Summaries from The Building of the Church,

by Charles Jefferson

and

Love God with all your Mind, by J. P. Moreland

The Church building idea in the N.T.

pp. 5-6 – Staid tradition favors the view that the church is reached through the preacher. But why don’t we see more of the other—reach the preacher through the church? For the church is older than the pulpit. The church created the pulpit, not the other way around. The living Christian society (the body) keeps alive and nourishes the preacher— for he is but a joint and ligament; there really is no clerical class.

pp. 8, 17-18 – There are clergymen who no longer preach about the church; they prefer a more contemporary, favorite theme, the kingdom of God. But the church is about ecclesiastics, and the kingdom about philanthropy. A preacher must begin with a right relationship between himself and the church. The preacher will be tempted to hold back unpalatable teaching, and swing toward either a being a flatterer, or a demagogue. p. 21 – Preachers face the danger of sermonizing instead of building the church. Many a pastor conceals a lean hungry heart because he has never gotten close enough to his people. Preaching is already a lonely business—ministers need an atmosphere of warmth and Chrisian affection, of love for the church and being loved by it.

pp. 22-23 – Paul tried to destroy the church but found out that the living Christ is closely identified with His church. Thus, to despise the church is to wound Christ— Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?

pp. 26, 32 – The priority, train believers in the art of building a brotherhood. Glorious change occurs when the Christian congregation, when once grasps the idea firmly that all the followers of Jesus have for themselves the heavenly appointed vision to build the church. It will spread from the congregation outward to discipling the nations.

Building the brotherhood

pp. 43-44 – In Peter’s epistles, the brotherhood is Peter’s term for the church (1 Pet 1:22; 2:17). See the love commands in Peter’s letters and in the Gospel of John. p. 45 – Unless a church is a brotherhood—a company of men and women whose purposes and sympathies are intertwined and whose lives are interlaced and blended— we may call it a church, but it does not bear in the body the life marks of the Lord Jesus. p. 46 – The minister’s crowning period of his life is knitting hearts together of the men who are to constitute the nucleus of the church. Our Lord, whose heart was heavy in the upper room—pained by the estrangement of hearts; girded himself with a towel and washed the disciples’ feet; a manifestation of being members one of one another. p. 47 – A man proves himself a Christian by loving the brethren in Christ. The first inevitable fruit of his conversion is loving the brethren. There is no higher blessing than the communion of Christ, comradeship in heart, and union in love, “that they may be one.”

p. 48 – Regarding proof of the divine power of Jesus, the evidence that He came into the world—the author says the world is not converted by reason, eloquence, or philosophy, but by the love Christians have for one another (Jn 17). This can sound even novel, but Christ declares His mission to be binding men together in indissoluble bonds (Jn 17). The brotherliness of those who believe establishes the truthfulness of Jesus’ words. The world is brought to God by Christians loving one another.

pp. 49-51 – In primitive Christianity, the central social institution was the home. The Lord’s Supper was associated with the dinner table. Believers traveling could always count on the hospitality of Christians wherever they journeyed. This kind of brotherhood has been lost. Roman Catholic reductionism turned the church into a rigid hierarchy with the laity a class apart—a class absolutely alienated from the practice of Peter’s fervent love commands. Preaching is not sufficient to make a church; neither is the administration of the sacraments—the bond of brotherhood must be present.

p. 52 – A church is a brotherhood—a school for training in fellowship, a home to cultivate social virtues, graces, and sympathies, and holy service by common allegiance to the Son of God. City churches as opposed to village churches are often made up of members who do not know each other.

p. 53 – The first work of preachers is to create ample warm fellowship inside the church, and to do so that it may be endowed with wisdom, power, and judgment.

p. 54 – Jesus in John 17—believers must learn how to live together to convince the world that He is what He claims to be. No ordinary love is called for; but love fashioned after His own; a love that produces a supernatural unified community.

p. 55 – Love is the badge of discipleship. Love is a power that overcomes. Ministers should not shrink from this work of building Christian brotherhood, as if it were a narrow and unworthy endeavor. The world wants a universalist brotherhood of man. But Christ’s redeeming work makes a brotherhood solely of the regenerate. These two conceptions of brotherhood, the world’s all-inclusive brotherhood and Christ’s blood-washed brotherhood of the chosen and called, are in tension.

p. 56 – It is easy to preach broadly and vaguely using ‘we’. It is much harder to preach singly. It is pitiful when preachers, in trying to be broad become narrow, it is a great mistake. What is needed is definiteness and specificity in application.

p. 57 – The brotherhood is a spiritual creation; a work in which men are recreated in Christ in which their hearts and lives are bound together. This miracle is Christ’s life in His church manifested in fellowship. Without this spiritual fellowship, faith is empty, hope darkened, and love is starved. Through the communion of the saints, those watching get to see what God is and what He is able to do. Count it your joy and privilege to train the members of your church in the fine art of living together. p. 58 – You’ve heard it said, the church is a hospital for sinners. Christ the Great Physician is at work in the body life of the church. Every world evil can be attacked within the church of Christ. The supernatural brotherhood is the divine remedial solution. Ministers ought to be clear about their task—they are to teach the conditions necessary to live together as brothers (i.e. prefer the other, please unto edification, submit to one another, forgive, bear burdens, demonstrate long-suffering, love the brethren, show hospitality, preserve unity, etc.)

pp. 59-60 – One can’t kindle a fire until the branches are brought together. The first priority is to get the people together so that in Christ sympathies and affections can be shared. The man who loves his wife sacrificially will find that his love overflows to the body of Christ (note the principle of the enlarged sphere). The church was established by our Lord for this kind of love. The weakness of the modern church is its dwarfed affections, and stunted sympathies.

p. 60 – So many modern pastors do not know how to open hearts. They may address kingdom problems, but they are not sufficiently interested in intertwining lives, and binding men into fellowshipping bundles in which sympathies are woven together for the advancement of Christ’s glory. There is meagre communal sympathy in the church today. Only where love is kindled in the church will compassion be kindled for the far off unreached in foreign missions.

pp. 62-63 – A lack of brotherly affection incapacitates members for the worship of God. As John states in his epistle, one cannot love God whom he has not seen if does not love his brother whom he does see (1 Jn 4:20). Brotherly love is a test for loving God. When Christians become more interested in one another, they become more interested in God, which yields growth in grace. The preacher’s work is building up the brotherhood, from which reviving streams will flow.

p. 65 – To strive to make the church the most effective brotherhood, belonging to one another must be lived out. No unfortunate member shall go unfriended. No invalid unvisited. No bewildered soul unadvised. No one needy unassisted. No one needful of mercy ignored. Men cannot live by sermons alone. Unless a church offers fellowship, it is doomed. Worship without spiritual fellowship is contrary to the nature of the true believer. Men cannot love a church if all it offers is the privilege of listening to sermons and paying pew rent.

p. 66 – A man’s love for the church is proportional to his relationship between himself and fellow members. Merely listening to sermons does not make one a church member. Cultivating rich fellowship is the essence of membership and is the task of the preacher. There is a sharp distinction between a church and an audience.

p. 67 – A superficial minister works to grow an audience. In that arrangement folks scatter after the performance. An audience is a crowd, a church is a family. An audience is a gathering, a church is a fellowship. An audience is a collection, a church is an organism. An audience is a heap of stones, a church is a temple. Only a genuine disciple of the Lord can build a church. So many churches today are audiences and not brotherhoods.

p. 71 – The grace of Christ flows through social bonds. The Lord is the master stonemason. He fits closely together the living stones in His temple. But a biblical metaphor of even closer contact than stones is that of a living body. Each organ exists for the life and prosperity of the whole organism, each is needed by all. The church as a brotherhood creates an atmosphere in which gospel truths blaze. The pastor unassisted cannot possibly hold all the members vertically aligned. His success and the true fruit of his labor and that of the corporate body is the ability to build and maintain a compact and conquering brotherhood. To do so, many sermons, a culture of discipleship, and much biblical instruction must frequently address the duties Christians owe to one another.

p. 72 – Linking lives and building the brotherhood is our work. Yet it is a work so daunting, baffling, and taxing, that it brought the Son of God to the cross. Ministers are to take stock of the magnitude of the task. If they do so, they will realize the havoc sin has wrought and will recognize how unsocial, narrow, and cold human nature is. And they will discern that church members have in their hearts but crude conceptions of the obligations of Christian discipleship—as if social bonds in the church go no deeper than those of a lodge or country club. It is easy to listen to sermons and give money, it is not so easy to get past self. When genuine brotherhood is absent in a church, petty irritation, egoism, wounded vanity, and the divisions of social strata erode the foundations of supernatural community.

p. 73 – Indeed it is difficult to be brotherly to one another. Many act like the heathen in their home church by abandoning the obligations of Christian discipleship yet giving money to reach foreign heathen.

p. 74 – Many a pastor called to minister in an assembly has tragically found that the church is only an audience. Certain behaviors can poison the atmosphere such as little friendliness toward the poorer members, a generation age gap erecting social barriers, folks sitting in the same seat for years without warmth toward those ten feet away. This pathetic aloofness reveals the crucial need of the members to be fused into a body which the Lord can use.

p. 76 – A minister must never lose sight of the aim to build in response to Christ, the Master Builder. For our Lord is building an all-new kind of humanity made up of differing social levels, callings, and backgrounds, held together organically by life in Himself in common. Working for the building of this brotherhood is a minister’s hope and at times his despair. He must never lose sight of this aim. For if he does, nothing is easier than seeing folks organize the church like the world organizes itself, along natural social lines, lines formed along natural commonality breed mischief.

p. 77 – Our immediate task is not to Christianize the world, but to Christianize the church. That is the only way to reach our society. That is to bind together the largest number of Christian hearts in the closest fellowship for Christ’s use and service.

Love God with all your Mind, by J. P. Moreland

p. 189 – A regnant church business model has changed the role of the pastor. Slowly the pastor as authority on theology and biblical teaching gave way to pastor as CEO, administrator, and organizational leader. At the same time the church was increasingly viewed as a ‘hospital’ to soothe the empty self rather than as a war college to mobilize and train an army of men and women to occupy territory and advance the kingdom until the King returns. True, the church is both a hospital and a war college; appointed by God to be the pillar and ground of the truth (1 Tim 3:15), and to be boldly active in destroying fortresses raised up against the knowledge of God (2 Cor 10:3-5). But the war college description of the church is increasingly rare. The stakes could not be higher—the war is being prosecuted in the folks around us, in their hearts, minds, and destinies. Church members passively settling into religious tradition won’t get the job done. There must be both a recognition of the need for change, as well as a bold and realistic recognition of the cost of making that change.

Refurbishing the Local Church for this needed change

p. 190 – #1) No senior pastors. The local church in the N.T. contained a plurality of elders. The N.T. knows nothing of a senior pastor. The emergence of the senior pastor in the local church is a factor that has undermined the health of the local church. Author, Moreland notes as a seminary professor that countless men go into the pastorate to get their own significance needs met. The senior pastor model tends to produce codependency. In that unhealthy social dynamic, pastors exercise their egos and parishioners are passive. And sadly, in the CEO model the pastor is described as having a particular church, or as Pastor Smith’s church. Parishioners come to support his ministry. That is an aberration of the new covenant and of N.T. ecclesiology, according to which the entire congregation are ministers. In the senior pastor CEO model, the pastor becomes isolated—a condition which dries him up spiritually. The N.T. model is the solution—the church being taught by a plurality of voices. This plurality of shepherds, elders, and pastor-teachers should be equal, and not graded according to whether possessing ordination, layman status, or a seminary degree.

p. 191 – The senior pastor model is weak for a host of reasons. No one person has enough gifts, vital relationships, maturity, or perspective to shape the personality, texture, and culture of a local church. And, since Christ is Head of His church, the structures of the church ought to reflect the reality of His Headship. According to the N.T. a group of under shepherds, not a senior pastor should best collectively see and enjoy Christ’s guidance of the congregation.

#2) Equipping is what pastoral staff and elders should be doing (Eph 4:11-16). In terms of informing us on the nature of the local church and its leadership, Ephesians chapter four is the most critical part of the N.T. Evangelists and pastor-teachers are given by God for a very specific function, to equip others for ministry; not to do the ministry themselves and have others come and passively support them. For example, the effective exercise of one’s gift of evangelism is not measured by how many they have won, but rather by a track record of training others to evangelize. A sizeable problem with the senior pastor model is that it centralizes the ministry around the church building and around the pastor himself. He is ‘where the action is at’. Thus, we bring people for him to evangelize, counsel, and so forth. In this model, or view, there is little need to equip parishioners, to develop their gifts, talents, and ministries because their job is to support the minister. But according to Ephesians 4 this tradition has it backwards. In the N.T. ministry is decentralized, and the function of pastor-teacher is to equip others to do the ministry. If we were more serious about this approach, we would do a better job of providing theological, biblical, philosophical, and counseling forms of training. How else will church members be adequately trained and equipped to do ministry?

#3) There is a need to discern the distinction between N.T. church functions, and cultural forms. It is crucial to make a distinction between forms and functions in the church. A N.T. function is an absolute scriptural mandate that every church must do, namely teach and edify believers, worship God, evangelize the lost, and incorporate the ordinances, etc. N.T. functions are unchanging and nonnegotiable. By contrast a form is a culturally relevant means of fulfilling a biblical function. Forms are valuable because they are a means to accomplish those functions. But they should be constantly evaluated and either kept or replaced considering their effectiveness. Examples of forms are youth directors, Sunday school, worship teams, retreats, vacation Bible school, drama, concerts, etc.

p. 192 – Keep in mind that we are genuinely, honestly free in Christ to adjust any forms, in any way we wish, when constrained by the Word and common sense. But our forms must be subjected to the metrics of biblical teaching and effectiveness. If a specific church is not fulfilling its N.T. function to teach and equip its people, then it must change how it operates. For serious harm is done by confusing forms and functions. Often this occurs by clinging to the former, as if it were done in the interest of guarding orthodoxy, we’ve always done it a certain way. No church has the right to adjust its N.T. functions, but it is its duty to examine its forms. Because churches have refused to do so, there will be much to answer for at the Judgment Seat of Christ.

#4) A church’s approach to sermons ought to reflect a biblical ecclesiology.

p. 193 – The pulpit as a filling station, dictating what people are to believe can make parishioners inappropriately dependent. Preaching ought to help set conditions for the saints to develop first-hand, not second-hand convictions. A Berean spirit is to be encouraged and commended. A rotating pulpit can be a catalyst in this regard.

p. 194 – No single individual ought to preach more than half (26) of the Sundays each year. For one man to dominate the pulpit exerts a disproportionate influence. For the church will inevitably take on that person’s strengths, weaknesses, and emphases. Who is adequate for this? No one. By rotating speakers, the body of Christ receives exposure to God’s truth being poured in through a number of different personalities, and that is far healthier. In a rotation or bureau of speakers, the most qualified speaker can help equip the others with their deliveries over time. This is yet another forum for discipleship. Regarding, who occupies the pulpit, consider a test at this point. If the main preacher at your church went to another church, would it inordinately impact your church’s attendance and effectiveness? If the answer is yes, it would, then your church is going about it in the wrong way—leaders are not being developed in the body, and the pulpit is not being adequately shared. For no one who preaches week after week can do adequate study for every message or deeply process and internalize the sermon topic spiritually. If a pastor attempts that pace, he will find himself relying on his oratory skills and abilities at putting together and delivering a message. It may be barely noticeable, but his verbal ministry can easily descend into giving talks instead of preaching his heart passions and feeding others the fruits of his deep studies and interface with the God of Scripture.

p. 195 – The church in which author J. P. Moreland serves utilizes a four-man pulpit rotation. Each of the four men in turn begins a four-to-eight-week series. This gives each man a chance to work on his subject for a long time so that he will be prepared both intellectually and spiritually.