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DON’T LET THE CHURCH DESTROY YOUR FAITH
Let Your Faith Build Up the Church by Chuck DeVane, Pastor Lake Hamilton Baptist Church Hot Springs, Arkansas ____________ CHAPTER FOUR: IN THE WILDERNESS Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases. — Psalm 115:3 And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. — Romans 8:28 In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will. — Ephesians 1:11 Before Israel inherited the promised land, they wandered through the wilderness for forty years. Before the Lord Jesus Christ began His public ministry, He walked in the wilderness for forty days. My first wilderness trip took about four years. Every worthwhile journey goes through the wilderness. It is a time of preparation, testing, and solitude. In the wilderness God seems to be absent, yet He is never more present. The church cast me into the wilderness by creating seminaries. I spent three years in my first one, then one year in my first church, which turned out to be a place even deeper into the wilderness than the seminary. It was a time so stressful it caused me to question my calling, doubt my salvation, and almost lose my faith. My father warned me, but the church did not destroy my faith. Many of the struggles over these four years were of my own making. God was there to make it all work together for good. Are wilderness wanderings the inevitable path of missteps and mistakes, or does the hand of the Lord lead us there? As the great theologian Forrest Gump said, “I think both things are happening at the same time.” My wilderness was plagued with bad advice and poor decisions at every turn, yet God and godly people were prepared to meet me at every step the way. If I had it to do over again, it would choose a different path, yet I am glad I cannot change a single thing. For God, then and now and always, is in control. I rushed to seminary before selling our home and saving enough money to carry us over for the prescribed three years of study. Therefore, I had to work full-time while completing a very demanding graduate school program in the self-imposed timeframe. Sixteen hour days were the norm, and I spent precious little time with my family. I'd leave early in the morning before they woke up and often came home after they’d gone to sleep. I can still see my oldest daughter, Christie, sneaking out of bed early in the morning and going to her window to wave at me and blow me a kiss as I left. I look back now and wonder why I was in such a hurry. In the providence of God, the man who hired me out of college had been transferred to the city where the seminary was located. This connection allowed me to transfer and work in the new city. During my time with this company, I watched them take scoundrels who committed sexual harassment or immorality and fire them, while my experience in the church has shown me that scandalous pastors often get promoted. The company paid good salaries and provided excellent benefits, something most churches are not willing to do for their pastors. It is a shame that secular companies have higher standards than the church of Jesus Christ. I was a good worker and witness there, and could have stayed as long as needed to complete my seminary training. But, the unpleasant aspects of seminary life made me want to finish as fast as possible. I did not do much research or pray much over seminaries and there was no one in my church, including the pastor, who had ever attended one. I had read a book by a seminary professor, though, and decided to attend that particular school. It proved to be a mixed blessing that God worked together for good. They promoted some of the evangelistic techniques that had misled me in my first church experience, yet I do believe their heart was in the right place. Some of the professors were there for nepotistical reasons and were not well qualified. Others were outstanding. They let go of the professor who wrote the book during the semester I finally got to take his class. He challenged some poor practices and questionable theology endorsed by the mainstream. So, about half way through the program I was angry over his dismissal, exhausted from work and study, overcoming a battle with the chicken pox, and sickened by yet another sex scandal in the church. I was ready to leave school, ministry, church, and the whole wilderness experience. But God would not let me go. His hand had guided me there and kept me in His care. He provided honest work, some good professors, and some colleagues who are my best friends to this day. The job He gave me helped me get jobs for many of my needy seminary friends. God grounded me theologically. He helped me to overcome a speech impediment I had carried all my life, an intense fear of public speaking that caused me to lose my breath when reading or talking in front of people. By my final year, I was chosen the best preacher in my class and received the honor of delivering a sermon in chapel. Knowledge and confidence I had, wisdom I lacked. My heart longed to return home, to the people I knew and loved, and seek out a church to serve as a pastor among them. Like the Gadarene demoniac who had a saving encounter with Jesus Christ, I wanted to go back home and tell of the wonderful things God has done. But my professors and pastors convinced me going home was not an option. They quoted the Scripture about a prophet being without honor, but God had called me to be a pastor, not a prophet. Taking their advice, I walked through the first door that opened to me in a little church not too far from the seminary. I consider it my internship, because I only stayed for one year. No sooner than I had arrived, I realized I had made a big mistake. The little church had billed itself as a fast-growing fellowship of excitement, a common mantra among churches of that era. The growth was a mirage, as the large number of bus ministry style baptisms they conducted over the past few years resulted in few, if any, real disciples. The excitement they craved came from a combination of upbeat music and bad doctrine. Mail started coming in addressed to former pastors from the so-called “word of faith” and “health and wealth” movement that had been burgeoning in the church. One of the old deacons in the church rebuked me for spending my morning hours in study and prayer, and told me if I was a real man of God I would not have to study but just get in the pulpit, let the Bible fall open wherever it may, and start preachin’. When I sought to implement church discipline to a member who was given to drunkenness and hitting his wife, I became the bad guy instead of him. When I wouldn’t have a television-style healing service for a wayward member with a bad back, I was a worse guy. Modern church growth techniques had not worked for them, and the church would not work with me. My faith fell flat on the floor of the church. Maybe Dad was right. In the transition from these missteps to planting my feet in a pastorate closer to home, I realized where I have been for four years. I had wandered through the wilderness. I thought at times God had abandoned me, but He was never closer. He taught me some invaluable lessons, some I took to heart and some I would have to learn again. But through it all, the Lord became nearer and dearer to me, and the church that made faith hard became a prize and a treasure. In the wilderness I learned my faith is thwarted by the sin of impatience. As a matter of fact, I think impatience is the mother of most other sin and stress. When we don’t wait for God to clearly guide, when we don’t wait for the finances to come and go deeply into debt, when we don’t wait to have sex after marriage, when we don’t wait upon the Lord, we lack good sense and lose strength. I should have taken more time to pray about seminary, get our finances in order, and seek God’s will concerning a church to serve. All of our decisions should be consistent with Scripture, and I have always tried to ensure that. But they should also be made after much prayer and perfect peace. Stay where you are, unless the Lord is clearly leading you elsewhere. And, as the great theologian Yogi Berra said, “When there’s a fork in the road, take it,” but make sure you can see the Lord on the right path. He’s on the other path, too, He’s just invisible it may take a while before you clearly see Him again. In the wilderness I learned that the church destroys people’s faith with cheap evangelism, hyped up excitement, and upside-down theology. Once again I had been exposed to a philosophy of evangelism that offered quick fixes and false promises. Just because someone hears a three-minute presentation of the gospel, repeats some prayer, and signs some card does not necessary make them a Christian. In that first church, I caught a glimpse of the modern church’s emphasis on excitement, which I have never found to be a valid spiritual gift. Loud music with hands waving in the air is great for concerts and football games, but I am not sure they are a sign of holy worship or spiritual maturity. Most of all, any theology that makes God into a cab driver waiting for us to call, or a genie in a bottle who grants wishes, or a voter whose vote was canceled out by Satan leaving us with the deciding vote, is bad theology. But once people are bitten with those bugs, a biblical cure is hard to swallow. In the wilderness, when feelings were fuzzy and decisions were difficult to come by, I gained an unfailing trust in the Bible, the word of God. When you wander in the wilderness, God gives you a map. Read it. Trust it. I do credit the church at this point for pointing me to high view of Scripture. Even my uneducated pastor and inconsistent seminary got this one right. They revered and honored the Bible and presented it to me as God-inspired, absolute truth. When I doubted my salvation, the Bible affirmed the way and overcame my fears. When I doubted my calling, the Bible confirmed my commitment and call to preach. When I had any moral questions at all, the Bible was clear on the path to holiness. When I became a pastor, on the Bible I stood, even though there were some in the church who tried to knock me off. Finally and perhaps most importantly, in the wilderness I learned that God is absolutely sovereign. I sin and make mistakes, the church discourages and disappoints, but God has a plan that no one can stop. I rushed off to the wrong seminary, but God unmistakably wanted me there to meet certain people and learn specific lessons. The church that took me in as a rookie pastor seemed to do everything wrong, which forced me to think and pray about doing things right. In the wilderness I came to understand the frailties in my own life and the sovereignty of God over our lives. The Bible is quite plain on this subject, as indicated in the verses that lead this chapter. Even in the wilderness we are walking in the plain sight of the sovereignty of God. He does what pleases and glorifies Him. He factors even our mistakes into His perfect plan to bless us and make us a blessing. His will is done, in Heaven and on earth. An old preacher who came to our church during my college years said, “God can do whatever He wants, whenever He wants, and involve whomever He wants.” He can, He does, and He will. This is sovereignty and this is our God. I got mixed signals in seminary and didn’t stay long in that first little church. By the end of my year there I had taken them through the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John and the ninth chapter of the book of Romans, which is when the light really came on for me. I’m not sure they got it, but the bedrock doctrine of the sovereignty of God got burned into my soul. The wilderness experience wound up providing me with a foundation I desperately needed. It was built with the word of God and finished with the sovereignty of God. Little did I know at the time that the next two churches I served would try to crack this foundation, along with my life and ministry, wide open. Copyright © 2016 Lake Hamilton Baptist Church, All rights reserved. Check out the weekly happenings at Lake Hamilton Baptist Church in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
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DON’T LET THE CHURCH DESTROY YOUR FAITH
Let Your Faith Build Up the Church by Chuck DeVane, Pastor Lake Hamilton Baptist Church Hot Springs, Arkansas ____________ CHAPTER THREE: SHE LOVES ME, SHE LOVES ME NOT The book of Acts records the spread of the gospel, the salvation of many souls, and the planting of churches throughout the world. Though I had listened to the gospel throughout my young life, I never really heard it until I walked into a little country church in the midst of my sophomore year of college. There was no pressure to walk some aisle or pray some prayer, just warm singing, honest prayers, and plain preaching that included the biblical mandates to repent and believe: “I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable, and teaching you in public and from house to house, testifying both to Jews and to Greeks of repentance toward God and of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 20:20-21, ESV). My mother, God rest her soul, had recently joined this congregation. She dropped out of church years before, and only attended this one for a little while. But this was the critical event God used to get me under the sound of the gospel, this time preached by a good and godly pastor. In his sermons on that fateful Sunday and the following Lord’s Day, taken from the Gospel of Luke, I understood for the first time the good news of who Jesus is and what He has done to accomplish salvation. Through talking with him, not in a fleeting moment at the end of a service but carefully in his office filled with books, I understood the proper responses to the gospel are repentance and faith. Then, on that second Sunday evening in my little college apartment, I truly repented, fully believed, and was born again into the kingdom of God. The only way I could articulate this experience to my family and friends was to tell them that I was going to live the rest of my life for Jesus Christ. Repentance was evident, since I turned away from a lifestyle of partying and promiscuity to joyfully obey the word of God. Faith, hope, and love were abundant in my life and relationships. I prayed, not for what I wanted, but to discern what God wanted for me. I began a life-long pattern of reading the Bible every day, and the pastor gave some books written by a couple of dead guys named C.S. Lewis and C.H. Spurgeon. An eternal flame was ignited in my soul, but the church would almost snuff it out, true to my father’s warning. I admired this pastor very much and I knew that my new life in Christ must also be spent in the church, the bride of Christ, for this body is more important to God that any other on earth. I could have greatly benefited from being discipled by this pastor in this church, but soon the deacons turned against the pastor in a pattern I would see repeated ad infinitum. I’ll save the discussion of how the church destroys faith by destroying good pastors for another chapter. Nevertheless, my mother and others dropped out of church in the process, never to return. But I could not, for I loved the Lord so much that I understood I must love His church, too, even though I learned from the outset this would be hard. I searched for another church and soon crossed paths with another pastor. That’s when things went from bad to worse. Recounting the story is very painful, so once again I will withhold names and tweak the story in order to protect the guilty and innocent. “Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood. I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them” (Acts 20:28-30, ESV). My first Christian friends consisted of a small group of college kids who were earnestly seeking the Lord. My radical conversion had influenced my girlfriend, roommates, and their girlfriends to join in, and all of us were brand new to the Christian life. We welcomed others into our circle, and one of the girls in the group knew a fellow college student who was also a pastor. He was a little older, married, had a couple of kids. We trusted him, visited his church, and a girl in our group babysat his kids and worked for him that summer in his church’s youth camp. Let me make a sordid story succinct. This wolf used his spiritual authority to seduce the girl into a sexual relationship. As new Christians, we had committed to a life of holiness that included abstinence from sex. When our young friend became pregnant, the adultery was uncovered. All of us were devastated and our newfound faith on the brink of destruction. After the truth came out, the pastor tried to pick her up in the middle of the night and get her to run away with him. I learned later that this man remained in the ministry and was promoted several times by his particular denomination. I’d rather not say what happened to the girl, but needless to say she was scarred for life. Our little fellowship busted up, and most of them never got involved with pastors or churches again. Scandalized, confused, but still desiring to follow Christ as a faithful member of the church, I went back to the church I had joined at age thirteen. Much to my surprise, I was still on the membership roll, even though I had not attended in over seven years. My girlfriend joined the church and was baptized, while I was counseled again not to doubt my salvation as a teenager but just rededicate my life to Jesus. Jaded but committed, we stayed on the back row for a while, but we were still in the church. As we became active over the next few years, the church showed us a lot of love. Some had been praying for me during my rebellious high school and college years. I got reconnected with some old friends who were believers and we became close friends. A dear man who owned a fish market became a great mentor and opened up some of my earliest teaching opportunities. He taught me to love the word of God, the church of God, and the pastors of the church. The church had gone through a few pastors beyond the one who resembled Elmer Gantry. Soon after I came into the church for real, a brand new pastor arrived. I was quite disappointed at first, since frankly he did not appear to be very bright, and I though our church deserved better. I would learn later that he got his degrees in the mail and plagiarized his sermons. Yet, he had a long ministry and was well taken care of by the church, and even became a high ranking official in our denomination. I did not see the major problem in his ministry until years after I left the church. My mentor and I would often talk about how something we missing in our church, but we just couldn’t put our finger on it. We loved God, we loved one another, but instead of loving other people we mostly judged them for not following Jesus in the same way we were taught. Still, people were being added to the church little by little, and some men, including myself, were being called to go into full-time ministry. When my call came, the pastor advised against seminary, but I was determined to go. A pastor from another church told me that if I were called to be a heart surgeon, I’d have to go to medical school, and God had called me to deal with souls. So, off to seminary in a yellow moving van we went. My family and I left that church in tears. After all, the church is people, and we loved them and they loved us, for a while, until I rejected their brand of religious fundamentalism. Time and two seminaries taught me to study the Bible much better and more deeply than I learned from my home church. I realize now that from the time I joined that church until the time I left for seminary I changed from telling people about Jesus to chastising them for smoking and drinking. I threw away a golden collection of records, quit going to dinners or parties that served alcohol, and otherwise separated myself from sinners. Between the shock of adultery and the slow burn of legalism, the church had robbed me of much of my joy in the Lord. Most of this folly I blame on the pastor. The sermons he read from the pulpit were fair, but he too often departed from his notes and chased self-righteous rabbits. A relative I invited to Christ and church for years finally visited on Easter Sunday and heard a robust, forty-five minute sermon on the evils of rock and roll music. It would take a long time to recapture the freedom and fervor I felt in my first days as an open-minded, open-hearted Christian. I finally recovered and realized the people in my church tradition were not the only ones going to Heaven; there wasn’t a demon behind every bush and secular song, television show, and movie theater; you can be friends and have dinner with lost people; there are things to learn from the infidels who belong to different denominations; women can work and do just about everything a man can do, only better; and, Jesus and Paul did not actually preach from the KJV, nor did they employ a piano and organ in worship and sing all the verses, twice, of “Just As I Am” at the close of every service. “And now I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified” (Acts 20:32). From all of these ways in which the church loved me and loved me not, the God who works all things together for good taught me some important lessons. Even those in the church who tried to weaken my faith actually provoked me to find principles to make it stronger. I’d like to share some of them with you. God is infinitely better than His church, but we still need them both. The church stunted and stimulated my growth as a child of God, but I needed trials to truly grow. I must admit those early days of college Christianity, before I met the wolf and the legalist, were some of the most enjoyable and Bible-centered times of my life. I can understand the temptation to go it alone with Jesus, without the church. But following Christ without the body of Christ is like trying to be a player without a team, a soldier without an army, a brother without a family. We need God in Christ more than anything, but we need one another in the church more than everything else in this present world. Find the best one you can, then strive to make it better. God is worthy of unlimited and unconditional trust, not church leaders. I’ve seen churches run off good pastors, bad pastors fleece good churches, and everything in between. Too often we can be like Simon Peter in the water. When his eyes were on Jesus, he was fine; when he looked at the water, he sunk. When we keep our eyes on the Lord, and realize we are serving Him by serving in the church, we do well; when we focus on some of the people, especially bad leaders, we can really get sunk. Deacons ran off the first good pastor I ever knew. The first pastor we ever let into our circle of personal friendship betrayed us to the core. The pastor who presided over my early years and call into the ministry had serious fundamentalist flaws. But God will never forsake His people, so trust in God, stay in the church, and find the best pastors you can. Sexual purity may be the most important, least dealt with issue in the body of Christ. Holy and honorable relationships in marriage and ministry are priceless in value. Consequently, few things destroy the faith of church members like sex scandals. In my first decade of faith I had to deal with that predator pastor, a fellow seminarian who propositioned my wife, a seminary church pastor who ran off with another woman, a pastor who was having sex with a girl in the youth group, and those were just people I knew. Add to that all of the national attention given to the Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart scandals. God created sex and marriage to mirror the gospel and the church, but too many professing Christians, even trusted leaders, have selfishly used sex to destroy people’s faith. Love is better than legalism, and God’s word must trump extra-biblical teaching. My first pastor used to always encourage us to not take his word, but search the Scriptures. Touché, I did, and eventually grew out of some of the unbiblical things he taught. I hope people who listen to me preach will do the same thing, search the Scriptures to see whether or not these things are so. Our churches and our own Christian lives will run aground if we do not reform and always reform them according to the word of God. There will always be some differences in interpretations, doctrines, and practices even among sincere believers. But we must cease to be unnecessarily divisive and prohibitive. I’m weary of the battles over the meaning of modest apparel, hair length, musical tastes, and drinking wine. Like Martin Luther, we should say, “My conscience is captive to the word of God;” then, like Cole Porter, we should sing “Live and Let Live.” And finally, the church did not destroy my faith because God’s grace is greater than all our sin. I confronted that predator pastor and told him I forgave him for the sin which scandalized my first group of beloved Christians. I asked my home church pastor to forgive me for the way in which I had criticized him to others. As far as I know, I have forgiven those in the church who have hurt me, and I have begged forgiveness from those I knew I hurt. By forgiving and being forgiven, we imperfect people can keep a foothold in God’s imperfect church, where grace should be the first and last word. Copyright © 2016 Lake Hamilton Baptist Church, All rights reserved. Check out the weekly happenings at Lake Hamilton Baptist Church in Hot Springs, Arkansas. DON’T LET THE CHURCH DESTROY YOUR FAITH
Let Your Faith Build Up the Church by Chuck DeVane, Pastor Lake Hamilton Baptist Church Hot Springs, Arkansas ____________ CHAPTER TWO: THE GANTRIFICATION OF THE GOSPEL Elmer Gantry is a work of fiction created by author Sinclair Lewis and portrayed on the silver screen by the great actor Burt Lancaster. Though the novel was published in the 1920’s and the film was released in the 1960’s, I did not meet Elmer myself until I watched the movie in the 1990’s. I recognized him immediately. Though Gantry is a character of imagination, he is also an amalgamation of a number of actual persons and means through which the church can destroy your faith. He and some of the other characters in the story are the poster children of ineffectual revivalism, superficial evangelism, and blatant hypocrisy. I have met them many times in the church, including the first church I ever joined. I mentioned in the first chapter how silence almost destroyed my faith before I ever found it. It is true that after my grandmother died when I was ten, no one in my family talked to me about Jesus nor encouraged me to attend church services for the next ten years. But another family butted in. I’m glad they did and I wish they hadn’t. The first church I joined was an assembly line of buildings, buses, and baptisms. The pastor was a big, charismatic fellow. He had a big handshake, big hair, big teeth, and he sure could holler and sweat. What he lacked in education, he made up for in ambition. He had the church paint his only sermon on buses, “Hell’s Hot, Heaven’s Sweet, and Jesus Saves,” and sent out an army of so-called soul-winners. I was picked up one summer by the buses and one of the families of this church. By the end of those dog days, not wanting to find out how hot Hell really is, I was cooled by the waters of baptism. If you’ve ever seen the scene where Delmar and Pete are baptized in O Brother, Where Art Thou, that was me at age thirteen, wet and dumber than a bag of hammers. That year I was one of over a hundred people baptized by this relatively small church. That’s probably as much dunking in a year as Michael Jordan in his prime. I still didn’t know anything about repentance, the gospel, or the Christian life, but I sure had a peaceful, easy feeling once the pressure was off. The pressure was something created by the pastor that you could palpably feel at the end of every service in this church. He would stand in the front, the people would sing about Jesus wringing His hands and waiting for you to come forward, and by God he’d stand there and they’d sing until someone did. The only way to escape the heat of Hell was to slide down the aisle during this so-called invitation, take the sweaty preacher by the hand, and ask Jesus into your heart. I fought the good fight for a couple of months until I just couldn’t take the pressure anymore. The man whose family I attended with tried to help me before one of the services. He was a good man at heart, and shared with me what he had learned in the church. He told me I was a sinner, and I could not disagree, even though I didn’t feel too bad about it. He said if I would repeat a prayer, Jesus would come into my heart. My heart was filled with sadness over my parent’s divorce, anxiety over being a teenager, and grief over being an Atlanta sports fan, so I figured my heart wouldn’t be any worse the wear if Jesus came in. So, I took their advice, the good man and the sweaty preacher. I walked the aisle and prayed the prayer on a Wednesday evening, and without any further instruction was baptized the following Sunday morning. I remained in the church for a few more months, mostly to enjoy fellowship with teenage girls, then dropped out when the family that brought me moved away. The good man who made the good faith effort to bring me to Christ eventually became a pastor himself, and I think he tried to be a good one. I ran into him thirty years after that fateful summer, and yes, the church had just about destroyed his faith, too. My faith at the time, like the church I joined, was completely superficial. I did not repent, for my propensity to sin only grew more sophisticated. I did not believe, because I did not know exactly what to believe in, nor had I enough time to see someone genuinely model what it means to believe. I was just a dunked drop-out, like millions more in the world’s largest Protestant denomination to which I became a mere statistic. Over the next several years, other friends and even strangers would occasionally approach me with the gospel. They would try to explain repentance, seem to model a genuine faith, but they were offering me something I felt I did not need. I had already been inoculated. The church I had joined at thirteen told me I was saved because I walked the aisle and prayed the prayer and was baptized. They wrote the date down for me and told me to never doubt it. “Once saved always saved,” they said, completely ignorant of the more sound doctrine of the perseverance of the saints. Though I soon quit attending worship, never read the Bible, only prayed when I wanted something, and developed the sexual morals of a pack of dogs, I was a Christian, dammit, so leave me alone. Once again, if I had died during those early years, I fear I would have found out the real temperature of Hell. I would have only myself and my sin to blame. But the church, at least the kind of church I’ve described, sure did not help. As a matter of fact they hurt, a lot of people. For the second time in my life, the church had tried to destroy my faith, before I ever found it, this time by giving me a counterfeit copy. This “Gantrification” of the church seemed to be the rule, not the exception, in my denomination and other evangelical circles in the twentieth century. At the beginning of the century, none of our churches would have employed such a worship order closed by some so-called invitation system. By the end of the century, you were considered a heretic if you did not. It is almost as if they took a page from Elmer Gantry and ran with it. Worship services turned into tent revivals. Uneducated clergy bullied from pulpits and bullied people, especially young people, into making “decisions.” Evangelism was reduced to a five-minute sales pitch that had to be closed at the end. Discipleship didn’t exist. I got sucked into this vacuum before I ever became a Christian, and it almost kept me from coming to Christ. Even after my real conversion and into my early years as a pastor, this model was reinforced and difficult to break. The system of making decisions rather than disciples had become institutionalized and was principally responsible for the large number of inactive, unregenerate members in our churches. As a pastor, I found these people to be the hardest to reach, since they, too, had been inoculated with the “Gantrified” gospel. Even their relatives who attended regularly became disgruntled and offended when the real gospel was preached, for if it was true, their children’s conversions were not. As the years progressed some principles dawned on me that need to be recaptured in order to keep the church from destroying people’s faith. The church needs to have a wholesale return to public worship as a sacred experience between God and His people, not some evangelistic crusade or seeker-sensitive service for lost people. We must insist on higher standards for pastors and preachers in our churches. Furthermore, we must abolish these quickie evangelistic methods and pressure tactics and simply trust in the word of God and the Spirit of God to seek conversions. From my first encounter with church until through my first seminary experience, it was pointed out to me that the focal point of any worship service was the “invitation,” the end of the service when people walked the aisle to get saved. Pastors and churches were ranked by counting the number of people who came forward. The songs could spout heresy and the sermon could be from the Book of Mormon, but if someone “made a decision for Christ” it was a good service. Contrarily, you could follow the regulative principle to a tee and have no one “join the church” that day and be a complete failure in the eyes of your peers. I was once even fired by a church (yes, another church that tried to destroy my faith which I will talk about in another chapter), even thought we had experienced four years of good development and growth, principally because I refused to offer such a pressure-packed invitation at the end of our services. Heaven help us. Worship should be a touch of Heaven experienced on earth through the interaction of God and His people. Prayers, songs, and offerings should be given by God’s people to God. Pastors should preach God’s word to God’s people to equip them to better love and serve God, one another, and others. The regular observance of Holy Communion or the Lord’s Supper and the happy occasions for baptism should picture the gospel in such a way that Christians can commemorate and celebrate. Non-Christians should not be pampered nor picked on in any way, but simply welcomed and loved. When lost people see God’s people experiencing God through word and sacrament, God’s Spirit can bring them to repentance and faith, without any other kind of pressure from us. This is the way it should be. Pastors have the responsibility to make it so. But most pastors are simply not equipped. The “Gantryesque” figure that I met in my first church had absolutely no theological education or training before becoming a pastor. He eventually drifted off into the laughing revival movement, no joke. When I returned to that church years later, the new pastor had no education, either, and virtually no books in his office. I found out later that he was plagiarizing all of his sermons. These men were not heretics, per se, and in spite of their ignorance there were some good things and genuine conversions which occurred in the church. They were simply part of a generation that put feelings over facts, personality over substance, personal affirmation over corporate accountability, and excitement over spirituality. They were inspired by Charles Finney, who had a legal, not a theological background. They admired evangelists like Billy Sunday, a baseball player turned buffoon preacher, simply because he knew how to draw a crowd. They allowed the fictional Gantry, who in the novel was totally disqualified for ministry yet became a megachurch pastor, become the model in too many churches. We wouldn’t dare see a doctor who had not passed medical school, couldn’t be represented by a lawyer who had not passed the bar, but we will let any yahoo pass for a pastor who claims some subjective call to preach, if he has enough charisma and guile. I’m not trying to be erudite in regard to Bible college and seminary graduates. Many men, especially in ages past, became great pastors without formal theological education, but not without serious study, mentorship, accountability, and training overseen by their elders. We must demand no less from our pastors today. What about evangelism, invitations, and the fulfillment of the Great Commission? Soul winning is absolutely important. The church must bear the responsibility, indeed. But, as pointed out in chapter one, Christians must take personal responsibility to share Christ with others — family, friends, colleagues, and oftentimes strangers — then bring them into the church. The church must equip them to do so, following the most excellent example of Jesus Christ. And we must do it without pressure, pedantic programs, and preying on children who are too young to understand life and death, virginity and the virgin birth, and the holistic concepts of repentance and faith. Consider an evangelistic encounter between the Lord Jesus Christ and a certain scribe found in Scripture. After discussing the word of God and the way of salvation, the scribe responded with interest to some of Jesus’ teaching. Then, much to the chagrin of today’s churchmen and contrary to the close-the-deal method of modern evangelism, this is what happened: And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God” (Mark 12:34, ESV). Jesus would have flunked most modern evangelism classes. Even though the Lord had shared the word of God with this scribe, even though Jesus clearly modeled what it meant to be a child of God, even though His mission in life was to bring people to Himself, and even though this scribe seemed eager to enter into Christ’s concept of the kingdom of God, Jesus did not strike up the choir, stand in front of the folks, and invite this scribe to pray some sinner’s prayer and ask Him to come into his heart. Jesus simply shared Himself, shared the word of God, walked away, and left the man to wrestle with the word and Spirit of God. You cannot find a single, simplistic, cookie-cutter approach to sharing the gospel in the Gospels. Jesus, the supreme evangelist, approached different people in different ways. He never asked a person to walk forward and pray a prayer. “Follow Me,” is the essence of His complete and all-consuming invitation to repent and believe. We would do well to do it Jesus’ way today: model the gospel, make the gospel very plain and totally demanding, then allow people to make decisions for themselves, not with our prodding but by the power of the word and Spirit of God. I wish the pastor and family that first brought me into church membership had been more patient and wise. I wish they hadn’t tried for force the gospel down my throat. In doing so, they almost destroyed my faith before I ever really found it. In spite of our ignorance and even through it, God is sovereign and gracious. Some of the Scriptures the good man shared with me, and perhaps a few from my grandmother, lodged themselves in the back of my mind. Bits and pieces of the hymns and sermons I had heard in church during those childhood and adolescence were incubated in my heart and fanned to flame during my college years. After two decades of the church nearly destroying my faith with silence and silliness, the day came when I walked into a church where saving faith was served up plain. Elmer Gantry was no where in sight. Copyright © 2016 Lake Hamilton Baptist Church, All rights reserved. Check out the weekly happenings at Lake Hamilton Baptist Church in Hot Springs, Arkansas. DON’T LET THE CHURCH DESTROY YOUR FAITH
Let Your Faith Build a Beautiful Church by Chuck DeVane ____________ INTRODUCTION “Don’t let the church destroy your faith.” It seemed like an odd thing for a father to say to his son, especially in the Bible Belt. But my father said this to me on three distinct occasions. The first time was when I joined a church at the age of thirteen, albeit superficially for only a few months. Seven years later I was genuinely converted and Dad warned me about the church again. The last time he made that statement was when he was flabbergasted over my leaving a promising career in business to enter seminary and become a pastor. At none of those junctures did Dad’s words make good sense to me. I loved the church and the church loved me. Church provided the people and the place where I received faith, practiced faith, and grew in the faith. How could the church destroy my faith? Looking back after years of following Christ, most of them as a pastor, I now understand my father’s warnings all too well. I can see how the church tried to destroy my faith before I ever found it, how the church tried to shipwreck my faith at every turn, and even to this day how the church hides real faith by putting it under a basket. By the grace of God, my faith remains. It is older and wiser, buffeted by the frauds and blessed by the faithful, both of whom can be found in the membership of the church. I have not and I will not let the church destroy my faith. Instead, I am going to redouble my efforts to allow true faith to rebuild the church. In the ensuing chapters you will read about how the church tried to destroy my faith, as her members attacked me with the sins of silence, manipulation, sensationalism, sexual immorality, liberalism, fundamentalism, and every other wrench the devil has thrown into the machinery of the church. I will be critical but not personal. Many names will be changed or withheld to protect the guilty. Each story will spring from a biblical text which exposes the way a church can destroy faith, then show the way in which we can use our faith to build up the church. Unfortunately, Dad was right. But there is hope for the church, the body of Christ, the family of God, the most important entity on earth. Don’t let the church destroy your faith; rather, let your faith build a beautiful church. ____________ CHAPTER ONE: THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS My grandmother was the first person to bring me to church. Mom was the hero of my childhood, the one person on the planet in which I found no flaw, and who seemed to find none in me. I admired the way she combined her strict Christian beliefs with overwhelming kindness, a true iron hand in a velvet glove. She taught me to love the people of the little white church we attended every Sunday. After services, we would usually pick up some Kentucky Fried Chicken on the way home. I loved church and chicken, which is the reason my grandmother prophesied that I would become a preacher. I remember loving the whole church experience. I can still hear the harmonic singing of the hymns, the serious sermons from the Bible, and the fellowship with friends playing tag in the grassy parking lot. Sundays were great, and Mom made my first impression of the church a very good one. Then, Mom died. Even though she had never smoked a cigarette in her life, she worked in an office where everyone else smoked. After a brave and brutal battle with lung cancer, my grandmother was taken from us right before my tenth Christmas. To this day I can still feel the chill in the air and the sadness in my heart. I’m older now than she was when she died, and for ever since then I have observed total silence whenever I pass by her cemetery. Her death changed everything. Mom was the spiritual and moral lynchpin of our family. Without her, my grandfather quickly married again and became a totally different, undisciplined person. My parents’ marriage quickly descended into divorce. After she passed away, I did not darken the door of a church, except for one brief episode, for over a decade. Her death should have been an occasion to drive all of us to church, the Bible, and the gospel of Jesus Christ. My grandfather was a church member. My father was a church member. My mother was a church member. Many of our neighbors and friends were church members. But no one said a word or lifted a finger to take this church-loving, chicken-loving little boy to the house of God. The silence of the lambs ensued for the next ten years. Like most people between the ages of ten and twenty, these were the most formative years of my life, and I spent them without a word of true faith from a true church. I later learned how the church had damaged the faith of my family members, so that they had little or none to offer me. Pop, my grandfather, was bitter. No one accepted his new wife and nothing could replace his old one. My parents were confused. My dad became disillusioned with church as a teenager after observing two deacons engage in a fistfight after a business meeting, then he became disillusioned with God for allowing his mother to die such an agonizing death. My mother was reared on pentecostal emotionalism, faith dictated by feelings, and after Mom died she didn’t seem to feel like being a devoted wife, mother, or church member, anymore. So there I stood, age ten, facing death for the first time. Church should be the people and place where death can be faced with reverence, hope, even joy, because of the promise of eternal life. But no one took me to church or talked to me about sin, death, forgiveness, and the Lord Jesus Christ. The church members in my family simply went silent. Perhaps this is a good time to say how much I love my grandparents and parents, all of whom have now passed away. I am not mad at them, I do not blame them for any ills in my life, and they are not primarily responsible for my lack of faith as a teenager, I am. Besides, our sovereign God had a plan for my life that overcame their silence and my sin. When I did receive faith as a young adult, my parents played important roles. My father was the smartest man I ever knew. He taught me to be thoughtful, well-read, and have a healthy skepticism about things. My mother’s brief re-entry back into the church during my college years provided a conduit for my salvation, and while I don’t know where her head was sometimes, her heart was always in the right place. But there is a truth here that hurts. Too many parents today, parents who are members of churches and ambassadors of Christ, preach everything to their children but the gospel. They promote school and sports and fortune and fame to their children, but fail to set an example and say the words that will lead their children to become followers of Christ. They keep their kids from church on Sunday to pursue sleep and recreation. They set poor spiritual, moral, and sexual examples during their children’s most formative years. They make the church a low priority, or no priority at all. The best means of evangelism presented in the Bible is proper child-rearing, and in this arena too many church members are destroying the faith of their children before they ever have a chance to find it. What would have become of my soul if I had died between the ages of ten and twenty? The church, as represented by my family, was silent. I made no genuine profession of faith in Christ. I was not a legitimate member of any church. I found all my pleasure in worldly pursuits, following the encouragement and example of my parents. Unless the mythical age of accountability is the same as the legal drinking age, I would have been destroyed, and rightly so, by a righteous God. My blood would have been on my own head, but it would have also stained the hands of those who should have loved me enough to share Christ with me, in word and in deed. Here is a haunting verse in Holy Scripture: “But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, so that the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any one of them, that person is taken away in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at the watchman's hand” (Ezekiel 33:6, ESV). The application for New Testament Christians is obvious, especially in regard to our own family, friends, and community. For too long the church has destroyed the faith of others, or at least kept them from coming to faith, by not heeding these words in the word of God. Now it is time for us to take them seriously, and begin letting our faith rebuild Christ’s church. If you are a church member but never invite or bring family or friends to church, because you seldom if ever attend public worship yourself, you are probably not a Christian. If you never speak of the gospel and the word of God to others, because you do not savor and meditate upon the gospel and the Bible yourself, you are probably as lost as a ball in high weeds. Jesus said it this way, “So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 10:32-33, ESV). Silence is denial, and silence is deadly for lost church members and to those they might otherwise influence with the gospel. If you are a church member but never invite or bring family or friends to church, because you are unhappy or otherwise ashamed of your church, find another church! My Dad stormed out of church after witnessing two deacons literally fight over a business matter. I would have left, too, but the right thing to do would have been to seek out a better church. Those deacons have blood on their hands, but my father could have, too, for letting me grow up without the gospel of Jesus Christ or taking me to church. It cannot be blamed totally on some bad church, for a good one can be found if you seriously seek one. If you have genuine faith you can find a genuine church to which you will be glad to bring family and friends. If you are a church member but never invite or bring family or friends to church, because church is your own personal time with God, then repent of this selfishness and start inviting people to join you for Bible study and worship in your church. I’ve known more than a few church members who attended regularly without their spouse, or sent their children to church while they stayed home, all under the guise of wanting some time for themselves. Heavens to hypocrisy, faith is supposed to be a corporate relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ, not merely a personal one. There are one-hundred-sixty-eight hours in a week. Surely you can steal an hour or two away for yourself without inadvertently throwing up a roadblock to faith. Finally, if you are a church member but never invite or bring family or friends to church, because you are too timid yourself or otherwise unconcerned about them, consider another scenario. What if your family and friends were living in a certain neighborhood about which you had received a credible report that a terrorist was going to set off a bomb? I am sure you would warn them and do everything else you could to get them to a safe place. The word of God gives credible evidence, corroborated by science, that these bodies we are living in are ticking time bombs. Furthermore, the Bible reveals that some of us are going to be alive when the world as we know it comes to an end. Most people do not know when they are going to die and no one knows when the world is going to end. But, these things will happen, and those of us who believe have a supreme responsibility to warn others, especially those in our own circle of family and friends. The safest place to bring them into shelter from the storm should be the church. I know this is not always the case, which is why I’m writing this book. I know the church destroyed my father’s faith, and he had none to pass on to me. I know the church perverted my mother’s faith, which is why she could offer no coherent witness during my childhood. I know the church, true to my father’s warning, has almost destroyed my faith at times. But I have dedicated my life to the perfect Christ, and His imperfect church, and am determined to make the latter more like the former. If you are one of God’s sheep, do not be silent. It could destroy someone’s faith before they ever have a chance to find it. And now that I’ve written about the importance of church members sharing their faith, in the next chapter I would like to ask some of them to please stop. Copyright © 2016 Lake Hamilton Baptist Church, All rights reserved. Check out the weekly happenings at Lake Hamilton Baptist Church in Hot Springs, Arkansas. |
AuthorDr. Charles F. "Chuck" DeVane, Jr., is the Pastor of Lake Hamilton Baptist Church in Hot Springs, Arkansas. His weekly sermon article, "The Gospel Truth," has been published in newspapers in Arkansas and Georgia. Dr. DeVane is a graduate of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and has served in the pastorate for over 20 years. Contact Pastor Chuck at PastorChuck@lakehamiltonbaptistchurch.org
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