To show that I can do bad football analogies as well as anyone, I have been wondering lately what would happen if advocates of multisite churches applied their thinking to football.

From what we’re told about multisites and online churches…

1. We get just as much out of watching a video screen as being there in person
2. Participating in person wouldn’t really change the experience anyway
3. The leader is just as happy seeing me as an off-site statistic than seeing my face and hearing my voice
4. The leader doesn’t need to really know me, nor I him

If that logic is good enough for worship, shouldn’t it be good enough for football, which we’re told isn’t nearly as important?

1. Watching on TV is just as exciting as being there
2. Cheering from my couch affects the team just as positively as the folks who are cheering at the stadium
3. The coach and quarterback know that I’m with them when they review the Nielsen ratings the next day
4. The coach and QB would prefer that I never interact with them in real life

Besides #4, no-one believes that this is the case. Going to a game is such a different experience than watching on TV that we’ll pay lots of money for the opportunity to do it. It’s not surprising, therefore, that we so often find Perry Noble on the sidelines at Clemson football games, and his leaders in the stands (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

These guys obviously don’t believe that watching at home is as good as being there.

Except when it comes to church.

Talk to any engaged 20-something Christian these days, and you’ll likely find that they can rattle off a list of their favorite podcast preachers. For some, a quick scan of their iPod will probably tell you more about their doctrinal commitments than their local church membership. The relatively recent phenomenon of being able to carry your favorite preacher with you as you’re on the go changes the way we listen to the preached Word of God.

The sermon you hear on your iPod is significantly inferior to the preaching you hear at your local church on Sunday morning. Here’s why:

1. The preacher doesn’t know you. Although preaching is not the only aspect of shepherding, ideally preaching and shepherding should go together. A preacher feeds his flock the Word of God, though always presenting it in a way that’s meaningful for that particular congregation. To your pastor, you’re a known family member sitting around the (metaphorical) table; to your podcast preacher, you’re a hit, an anonymous number.
2. You can choose your sermons. Podcasts are perfect for people with itching ears (that’s all of us). Each sermon is labeled and invites us to download or delete it. When I go to my local church on Sunday, I usually don’t know the details of the pastor’s sermon. He commits to preach the Word of God as it’s written, and I commit to listen, test and obey the preached Word as I hear it. Dodging difficult messages is harder when you don’t see them coming.
3. You can listen while distracted. When you listen to a preacher while driving down the interstate eating your lunch, you’re probably not going to be able to concentrate quite as well as if you were sitting in church. The very value of podcasting is that we can take our preachers with us, so the assumption is that we’ll be multitasking when we listen. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with multitasking, but it’s not worship.
4. You can listen without your Bible. Although this is possible to do in church, the on-the-go multitasking quality of podcast audiences makes this much more likely. Having a Bible on hand as we listen lets us see as well as hear the Word; it also lets us quickly check the context of a verse and engage in on-the-fly testing of the preacher’s message.
5. You’re alone. In church I am both encouraged and challenged by the fact that I see my Christian family worshipping with me. Fellowship with God is accompanied by fellowship with his family. Although podcasting and Internet participation carry with them the idea of a virtual community, it’s still only virtual. I know there may be thousands of other believers sharing the podcast with me, but I don’t know who they are. Neither will they know me.
6. He’s always preaching to someone else. When we listen to a podcast preacher, it’s almost always someone else’s preacher. When the preacher challenges his congregation, it’s always someone else who’s being challenged, not me. Not only am I anonymous and unaccountable, the preacher isn’t even expecting me to be accountable.
7. It’s usually out of context. Sermons are an integral part of church worship, which usually includes other elements like singing, prayer, confession, communion and giving. To take the sermon out of that context deprives it of the participation and preparation that is a valuable part of the in-church sermon.

I’m not saying that we need to delete all of our podcast subscriptions. There are obviously exceptions to all the points I’ve just made.

Clearly, there is value in hearing the Word of God preached well by anyone, but our primary source of spiritual sustenance, beyond our own Bible study and prayer, should come through membership in a local church with a preacher that faithfully preaches God’s Word.

Everything else is gravy. Tasty, but not filling.

(Full disclosure. My own podcast list, in order of most listened to, is Sinclair Furguson, Alistair Begg, and RC Sproul.)

NewSpring preacher, Brad Cooper, summarizes his latest sermon on worship like this:

Worship should matter to us because WE BECOME WHAT WE WORSHIP! So right now as you read these very words you are evolving into your object of Worship. There’s only 2 kinds of Worship objects in this world: GOD & BAD – So who are you becoming?

Are we really evolving into God?

The idea appears in the statement four times, so it doesn’t seem to be accidental.

Some picture!

Some perspective:

He spreads out the northern skies over empty space; he suspends the earth over nothing…

The pillars of the heavens quake, aghast at his rebuke…

And these are but the outer fringe of his works; how faint the whisper we hear of him! Who then can understand the thunder of his power?

Some God.

First, note the new signature. On a few occasions now, readers have mixed up James Duncan and myself.  While this is much more damaging to his reputation than to mine, a little clarity never hurt.

Now, I’d like to open a discussion about mega-churches. Let me make it clear that I have never heard James Duncan speak against mega-churches. These views are mine and mine alone.  He is certainly capable of agreeing or disagreeing with any of these thoughts, as are each of you.  I will attempt to put forward a scriptural view of what Church is, and how it should look. However, admitting that some of this is grey area, I am open to correction.

Two straw-men that must be burnt before we can engage in any authentic discussion on this matter:

1. There is no concrete cut-off number where a church has become too large.  It would be impossible to pinpoint such a number. Thus, forcing me to do so would effectively change the point of this discussion and kill any other argument that I may be able to make.
2. To insinuate that large attendance of a particular church is necessary for the sake of thousands of salvations, is to completely misunderstand the nature of salvation, the purpose of church, and the power of the Almighty God. If God can save souls at a certain mega-church, he can also do so at a small rural congregation, or even in some open field in China where there is no established church of any size in sight.

For the sake of this discussion, we’ll use Hartford Institute’s definition for a mega-church, which it gives in it’s simplest terms as a Protestant congregation of two thousand or more regular attenders. Again, don’t get caught up in a specific number, but it will help if we all work from the same definition.

With all this in mind, I will now try to answer:

What is Wrong With a Mega-Church?

• It usurps the shepherd/sheep relationship that a pastor is to have with his congregation. We’ve seen here where some pastors have been down-right scornful with members of their flock who would hope for their pastor to care about them specifically. True, one man cannot faithfully minister to 10,000 people, but a pastor’s heart should be to care for his sheep. Here’s what Andy Stanley said in a 2006 interview with Leadership Journal: “Should we stop talking about pastors as “shepherds”?
  

  Absolutely. That word needs to go away. Jesus talked about shepherds because there was one over there in a pasture he could point to. But to bring in that imagery today and say, “Pastor, you’re the shepherd of the flock,” no. I’ve never seen a flock. I’ve never spent five minutes with a shepherd. It was culturally relevant in the time of Jesus, but it’s not culturally relevant any more.

  Nothing works in our culture with that model except this sense of the gentle, pastoral care. Obviously that is a face of church ministry, but that’s not leadership.

  I think most of us understand that you can’t just throw out biblical terms because they are problematic to our methodology, but that’s exactly what Stanley has done, as have hundreds of other “pastors” who see him as a mentor. We must change our methodology to fit scripture, even if that means not packing thousands of seats with people you have no intention of ministering to. It only makes sense that a pastor should not be over a congregation that is too large for him to meet their needs. Of course, some of this physical work is delegated to deacons, but if a pastor is to be held accountable for all the sheep entrusted to him, he needs to have a relationship with them. Some pastors may be able to faithfully attend to 1000 or more members. Some may only be able to care for 20 or 30, but if a person is going to church and not being ministered to, they are actually just attending a performance.

• It fuels the cult-of-personality, celebrity pastor driven congregation. The majority of these mega-churches are headed by charismatic, purpose-driven leaders. These guys are very driven towards their goals. I would assume that most of these guys could be just as successful running any business as they have been in running a church. That leads me to ask, is this why thousands of people are showing up on Sunday morning? I don’t recall Paul, when giving instructions to the churches he planted, asking, “Who among you has the most charismatic personalty? Who is the most fashionably dressed? Who has the most clever wit?”. No, the things he looked for in church leaders (listed in 1 Timothy 3:1-7 ) all dealt with character and righteousness.
• It raises questions about the motivation for a pastor to have such a church. As in, why do you need 12,000 people in your church, 11, 500 of whom you will never have any contact whatsoever? Are you the only minister in your town capable of delivering the Gospel? Isn’t it possible that a large majority of these peoples could be more effective elsewhere, where there attendance will be much more noticeable? Is it a pride issue? Does it make you feel powerful to know their are thousands of souls hanging on your every word? One could assume that a congregation of 12,000 probably pays better than a congregation of 500. Is that an issue?
• It makes it impossible for all attendees to be involved in worship in any meaningful way. The real worship will have to be performed by those on stage, while thousands of others watch from the seats. 1 Corinthians 14:26 paints a picture of all members being vitally involved in a worship service. This is completely impossible at a mega-church. The ministry is then left to the professionals, while the normal people sit and watch.  This is also in contrast with Ephesians 5:19. I could also argue that this is against the Priesthood of Believers described in 1 Peter 2:9.

I’m going to stop here for now. If there is sufficient discussion, I may do a series on this, but this should be plenty to get us started.

Someone asked us in a comment yesterday why PP doesn’t just oppose every pastor. The answer, obviously, is that there are many, many pastors doing fine work and preaching God’s word faithfully and intelligently. Besides my own pastor, one of my favorite preachers is Sinclair Furguson of First Presbyterian Church in Columbia. While every sermon he preaches is very good, I’ve linked to a couple that I’ve listened to recently that are simply magnificent. (The links are to the podcast section on iTunes, though you can stream them from the church’s website.) If you have a spare 40 minutes, you won’t do much better than to listen to either one of these.

Jesus: Maveling and Moved

A Grace that Saves Suffices

Here’s what I find so attractive and refreshing:

1. It respects the power of the Word. Furguson doesn’t promise to rock our world, yet he does so simply by preaching simply.
2. It shows the benefit of going deep. Furguson knows the Bible, and it shows in the observations and insights he passes on to his congregation.
3. It engages the whole person. I love the way Furguson invites you to think with him about the Scripture, and then he moves beyond logic and touches the soul and the heart as well. Don’t tell anyone, but the conclusions of these sermons made me a little teary eyed.
4. It shows the benefit of sane thinking. A good pastor need not be out of his mind. Furguson uses careful thinking and logic to reveal profound insights that are not obvious at first reading.
5. It reaches the whole family. Notice at the beginning how children are encouraged to read the Word and follow the sermon. There aren’t any bouncers at the doors of this church.
6. The focus is on Jesus. These sermons are a careful study of Jesus and his grace. The first one, Marveling and Moved, invites you to sit and watch the Savior for as long as you possibly can. Furguson, through the Gospel, paints a picture of a loving Savior from whom you would never want to avert your eyes.
7. It is expository exaltation. When you hear the Word of God preached well, how can you not worship? As Piper said,
   

   Preaching does not come after worship in the order of the service. Preaching is worship. The preacher worships—exults—over the word, trying his best to draw you into a worshipful response by the power of the Holy Spirit.

8. It feeds the sheep. These sermons are excellent examples of how we can eat the Word. Learning anew of Jesus’ grace is life changing. Although these sermons don’t start out promising to solve some felt need, their life application is at once profound and practical.
9. It witnesses to the lost. After listening to the Word of God being proclaimed so clearly to the saints, how would you not want to know Jesus as your Savior? Furguson shows that good preaching to Christians is inherently evangelistic.
10. The accent is just right. Reformed theology and Scottish accents just work so well together (sorry, pastor).

Brad Cooper offered this curious observation over the weekend:

Worship is the ONLY activity of the HUMAN SOUL…. YOU ARE INCREDIBLE WORSHIPERS!

What?

Worship should be the most important activity of the human soul, but you’re stealing a whole lot of bases if you assure yourself and your followers that you’ve got the whole endeavor sown up.

Job (Job 7:11) and David (Psalm 6:3) had bitter and anguished souls that required God’s restoration (Psalm 23:3). In fact, in Psalm 43 it is the very fact that David’s soul is downcast that turns him to worship.

Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me?

Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God. (Psalm 43:11)

In Psalm 103 David tells his soul to worship God.

Praise the Lord, O my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name.

Praise the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.

Was God just wasting his breath when he commanded us to love him with all our soul in Deuteronomy 6:5?

I could go on, but there’s no way that worship is the only activity of the human soul. Cooper presents a pantheistic version of worship. Pantheism says God is everything, which really means that God is nothing. Cooper says that worship is everything, which means that worship is nothing. If my bad attitudes, depressions, doubts and rebellions are worship, God is nothing either.

Cooper’s tweet apparently came from last week’s sermon on worship where he repeatedly taught that “it’s not about the quality of our worship, it’s about the quality of our worship object.” The implication is that we all worship something, so good worship happens when we worship the right thing.

Not so.

It’s like saying, “It’s not about the quality of your marriage, it’s about the quality of your spouse.” If you believed that, what misery and neglect would you have license to inflict on your fine spouse? How we treat our spouse is a central contributor to the quality of our marriage.

If we’re top-notch (incredible was Cooper’s term) worshipers and all we need to do is find God, why does God put so much emphasis on doing it correctly? If Cooper’s teaching were true, we can ignore the second (no images), third (no vain use of his name), and fourth (worship on the Sabbath) commandments. We also can do away with the whole tribe of Levi, whose purpose is was to ensure that God was worshipped correctly. If we don’t need the Levites, we can delete Leviticus as well.

Cooper is presenting a recipe for completely ignoring God. Worship requires discipline and obedience. As we’ve been discussing recently, it’s not just whatever we want it to be. It’s also not something we do all the time. We can cease to worship God, or worship him poorly, without necessarily worshipping something or someone else.

The object of our worship is indeed important, but so is the quality of our worship. Just ask Uzzah. He was a minder of the ark of the covenant who reached out to steady it when one of the oxen that was carrying it to the temple in Jerusalem had stumbled. He was certainly worshipping God with all his might, but he was doing it incorrectly, and God struck him dead for it. (2 Samuel 6:5-8)

Not only does it matter how we worship, but Cooper’s second statement is rendered meaningless by the first. If we worship all the time, what makes us so incredible? My goldfish swims all the time, but you would mock me if I told you that it was an incredible swimmer because of it. It’s an average swimmer, and sometimes it even stops swimming to rest. If it jumped out of the bowl to answer my phone, it would be an incredible swimmer.

Only God can give the verdict that we’re incredible worshippers, not a church leader who thinks everything we do is worship.

One more thing. An incredible worshipper would not ever wish to be known as incredible. Real worshippers just want to show how incredible the worshipped is.

In a recent discussion about what you lose if you try to reproduce church worship online, a commentator posted the following response:

what does it matter? as long as people are being reached for Christ and the doctrine is sound, who cares if online worship replaces physical in-house worship for some? think of it this way, say you live in florida and really like this church in seattle. if you’re able to attend the seattle church online and be ministered to, what’s wrong with the methods used in online worship?

One comment, three questions. Let’s give this a shot.

1. What does it matter? If the primary purpose of our lives is to recruit new converts, it doesn’t matter. If the primary purpose of our lives is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, it really does matter.
2. Who cares? God.
3. What’s wrong? It’s wrong because it inverts the purpose of worship and makes it all about us. Although worship does benefit us, its primary purpose is to benefit (glorify, bring joy to) God. Although he needs nothing from us, he instituted worship as the most appropriate way for us to regularly commune with him. As the Westminster divines discovered,
   

   The acceptable way of worshipping the true God is instituted by Himself, and so limited by His own revealed will, that He may not be worshipped according to the imaginations and devices of men.

   God’s Word has so much more to say about how we worship than it does about evangelism. Just because we’re trying to attract the unsaved doesn’t mean that we get to override God’s acceptable methods of worship.

If we are to ignore and abandon proper worship just because people are being reached, why include worship in our services at all? The commentator does acknowledge that doctrine is important, though I don’t know why. If evangelism trumps the worship of God, why should doctrine matter either? Actually, if a church’s doctrine suggests that the worship of God can be jettisoned for evangelism, it’s not sound doctrine in the first place.

Recently, we’ve seen Perry Noble mock parents for being concerned about worship, and this comment is in a similar vein. Why be so uptight about worship when people are going to hell?

Why? Because worship is the whole point. Evangelism is the gateway to worship. When God saves us, he regenerates our heart and makes it capable of performing its most important function of worshipping and glorifying God. Instead, the Turnstile Church treats evangelism as a gateway to evangelism. That will work for a while, but at some point the newly recruited recruiters will ask why is it so important to be saved? If it’s just so that you can be a volunteer to help sign up more volunteers, you’re cheapening the faith by running the church the same way as a multilevel marketing scheme. When the primary value and purpose of a marketing operation is in recruiting rather than in enjoying the product itself, loyalty to the product and process is going to be tenuous and temporary.

God-directed worship gives us an answer to the question of why salvation is so important. God, by his grace, adopts us into his family, making communion with him possible and necessary. God desires our worship, and he wants us to worship in ways that he has directed. It’s appropriate to honor him by paying a great deal of attention to what those directions are.

Although it’s not its purpose, worship can be an evangelistic tool. When the unsaved see how we are able to enjoy God’s presence, a jealousy to be a part of that may suggest that the Holy Spirit is drawing that person to salvation, because we know that our natural condition is to rebel and hide from God. So, rather than considering God-directed worship as an optional extra, we should place it front and center and show the world that it is why and how we rejoice in our salvation.

This clip is the subject of some discussion in the Nice Perspective post. R.C. Sproul explains what’s wrong with the seeker sensitive movement.

The first 3:20 is the best, but it’s all worth a look.

On his blog, Nick Charalambous has been engaging the question of whether church and worship can be conducted online. He has many thoughtful posts about the issue, but this section from one in January sums up the question nicely:

Could you not have a physical campus-less church and still be the church as Christ intended it?…

Is the disciple-making machinery of church the worship service or the community the worship service creates?

If the technology is here, or coming soon, where sophisticated worship services can be experienced in all their intensity anywhere in HD, the real work ahead for the church is learning how to guide and manage community, the kind of authentic community that, in Acts, added to its number daily and changed the history of the world.

I think a lot is going to boil down to questions about what’s the role of the weekly service in daily worship? And how important will it be to have a weekly physical gathering spot that belongs uniquely to a specific community of believers?

In other words, does worship need a common physical foundation as has traditionally been found in the church sanctuary? My answer to that question is yes. Without a weekly gathering spot we lose the sensuality of worship that God built into it.

Worship is inherently physical. It can’t be fully experienced by clicking a button or watching a screen. Let’s look at ways that worship engages our five physical senses.

1. Hearing. In one sense, this is the easiest sense for the online church to satisfy. We hear God’s Word read and taught by preachers. We hear prayer. We hear the worship band and worship leader. Worship can also include the absence of hearing, as found in moments of silence and reflection. One weakness of online worship, however, is that we can’t hear each other. If I do sing along, no one hears my joyful participation, or perhaps notes my lack of participation.
2. Sight. Again, another one that is served fairly well by a computer or television screen. We can see the leader. We can see Scripture texts and various artful symbols of God and his works. As with hearing, online worship, for now, doesn’t have the capability to let me see the people I am worshipping with, people who are made in God’s image. Young believers can learn and be encouraged by the behavior of older or more mature saints. The simple ability to see multiple generations of a family worship together communicates profound truths about the body of Christ that is lost if all we see is the preacher and the band.
3. Touch. God’s people don’t just assemble, they rumble. Right hands of fellowship are extended. Holy kisses are exchanged. Feet are washed, oils are poured out. We touch each other, but we also touch the sacraments of the Lord’s Supper when we break the bread and hold the cup. Baptism also requires touch.
4. Taste. The bread and wine of communion obviously engage this sense. The New Testament church often extended their fellowship into meals. Interestingly, one of the first things we’ll do in Heaven is feast, so good food is a small taste of Heaven. In a more spiritual sense, God tells us to taste and see that he is good (Psalm 34:8).
5. Smell. This is listed last because it’s one sense that we don’t engage nearly as much in contemporary worship as the other four. In Old Testament times, however, worship would have had very strong odors with the sweet smells of incense mixed with the more pungent smells of animal and crop sacrifices. To some extent, we do add some pleasant odor to worship with flowers and personal deodorants and fragrances, which some are more likely to wear on Sunday than most other days. Even though we don’t have as many obvious physical fragrances, Ephesians 5:1-2 and Philippians 4:18 tells us that our worship, including giving, is a fragrant offering to him.

When God condemns idolatry, he often does it by pointing out how sense-less the idols were. From Psalm 115:6-8:

They have ears, but cannot hear,
noses, but they cannot smell;

they have hands, but cannot feel,
feet, but they cannot walk;

nor can they utter a sound with their throats.

Those who make them will be like them,
and so will all who trust in them.

Our God, on the other hand, is a sense-able God who asks to be worshiped in a sensual way.

When we try to worship through a computer screen, we have to first take leave of our senses.

One of the most personally threatening aspects of NewSpring’s ministry (and a very good reason why I would not be a member) is the way that leaders casually tear down parental authority. As some of you know, I first noticed it with their Parents Are Clueless marketing campaign, but Noble was at it again last weekend. Although I don’t usually watch his sermons, I watched for a couple of minutes after his scoreboard bit and saw this remarkable threat to the parents in his church.

Earlier in the service, it appears that quite a few teenagers who had returned from the church’s week-long youth camp had gone to the front of the auditorium, just near the stage, and had jumped up and down with their arms in the air while the band performed the songs.

Some of you parents, this is going to bother you, and you’re like, “That’s my kid down there, and my kid’s got their arms raised, and they’re jumping!”…

And some of you are like, “I’m going to have to go home and tell my teenager to calm down.”

And the reason you’re intimidated is because your teenager probably loves Jesus more than you. But if you’re a parent and that bothers you, …do you know how many parents in America would kill to have your problem? Like your biggest problem is your kid is passionately worshipping Jesus?

Ohhhhh!

You know, you could calm them down, and God could give you what you want, and that could be his judgment.

I would be very careful.

Let me ask some careful questions.

1. Is jumping really a good way to measure love? On the basis of a few minutes of jumping up and down, Noble tells parents that their kids love Jesus more than they. Who would have a better handle on that, do you think? A parent who lives with them all week, or a pastor who sees them as anonymous (bobbing) faces in a crowd? It’s safe to say that the kids know how to act at a concert better than their parents, but it’s foolish to be making judgments about spiritual maturity on such a basis.
2. Why is he usurping someone else’s authority? God tells parents, much more than he tells pastors, to bring up their children in the knowledge of the Lord. Look at the great command in Deuteronomy 6:6-7:
   

   These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.

   In other words, parents are to teach God’s statutes to their children always and everywhere. (Note: whether jumping up and down is proper is not the issue here. The issue is who has the most authority to teach children how to worship God.)

3. Who risks the most judgment here? Perry Noble just took on the mantle of a prophet and pronounced God’s judgment on God’s people. The parents were merely obeying Ephesians 6:4.
4. Is how we worship so inconsequential? Noble mocks parents for thinking that how their children worship is worth worrying about. If God is most important in our lives, shouldn’t how we relate to him be the most important thing in our lives? If there’s a problem in how we relate to him, shouldn’t that be the most important problem in our lives?
5. Doesn’t this sow the seeds of spiritual rebellion? If a parent decided to risk God’s judgment and tried to teach his or her children about spiritual maturity, why would these kids listen? Their pastor has told them that they love Jesus more than their parents, and that their parents are out of God’s will in instructing them. “I don’t need to listen to you; you don’t really love Jesus!”
6. How does this conform to Malachi 4:6?
   

   He will restore the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, so that I will not come and smite the land with a curse.

A few days ago Perry Noble was wondering about whether he should wear a grope-your-wife T-shirt, and today Brad Cooper wants to know what you think about this:

Is it normal that when Fuse* cranks up the worship, I want to tear my shirt off like the Hulk and just lose my mind!???!

Trying to be helpful again here, Brad, but no, I don’t think so.

Perhaps this is why some denominations make their pastors wear robes or dog collars–to keep their minister’s shirts on and covered up.

In my recent posts on the physical center of the Christian worship, a few commentators challenged the idea that the Christian church should assemble on Sundays. I promised them that I’d explain why, so here it is:

1. The Sabbath is as physical and natural as night and day. The origins of the Sabbath come from the seven-day cycle God established in the first week of creation, not from the Ten Commandments. God worked for six days and rested for one. Work six, rest one is built into the essence of creation, just as the cycles of night and day and winter and summer are. Although we should worship with our whole lives and pray without ceasing, there is a special day in seven created for us to focus on worship. In other words, we can’t just celebrate the Sabbath whenever we feel like it, just as we can’t turn night into day just because we want to get more work done.
2. The Sabbath provides us rest and worship. The creation account and Commandments tell us that the purpose of the Sabbath is to rest (for ourselves and our servants) and to worship. Neither purpose is made obsolete by the New Testament.
3. The Sabbath is a gift, not a law. A few earlier commentators have asked me to show where the New Testament “requires” observance of the Sabbath. Why are we looking for a law? The Sabbath can’t be understood without understanding grace; it is God’s special gift to us. If I tell my son that he has to be back from playing with his friends in time for dinner, I don’t expect him to ask me where in the family rule book it insists that we eat dinner. Because he’s a member of my family, I am delighted to offer him dinner, but he needs to be at home when we eat so we can enjoy it as a family. Similarly, God gives believers the Sabbath as our spiritual sustenance. To ask for specific rules dictate why and when we should benefit from it misses the whole point.
4. Jesus didn’t abolish the Sabbath, he embodies it. Some argue that because Jesus fulfills the Sabbath, it’s no longer on the books. Jesus describes himself as the Lord of the Sabbath, which is a designation he would be unlikely to use for something that had passed away. Exodus 31:16 tells us that God gave the Sabbath to his people for generations to come. The analogy is imperfect, but when we refer to the President of the United States, we don’t assume that the president has replaced the country. Instead, we see the president as a personal representative of the country. Jesus not only embodies the Sabbath, he is an essential part of it. The two central elements of the day can only be found through him. He is the source of our rest and the only reason we can worship. Rather than abolishing the Sabbath, Jesus was necessary to preserve the Sabbath.
5. The Sabbath publicly celebrates Jesus. Paul instructs the church or assemble an an orderly fashion. Although churches were sometimes assembled in believers’ homes, church worship was not a willy-nilly whenever and wherever proposition. The question, then, is when did the early church leaders decide was the best time to exploit the Sabbath and worship God. The early church re-calibrated the six-plus-one sequence from Genesis 1 and moved the day of rest and worship to the first day of the week, which became known as the Lord’s Day. In 1 Corinthians 16:1-2 Paul assumed that the most convenient time for the church to collect money was on the first day of the week, presumably because everyone had gathered then. John received his revelation on the Lord’s Day (Revelation 1:10), and the term’s usage assumes that his readers would know what day that was. When we enjoy God’s Sabbath on Sunday, we proclaim Christ’s resurrection just as surely as we do on Easter. The great thing is that we only have to wait seven days to do it again, not a whole year.

I’m sure there’ll be objections and other observations in the comments, but let me try to replicate a quick Q&A here.

• Are you saying that we must observe the Sabbath? No, because Paul tells us in Colosians 2:16 that we are not to observe the Sabbath simply because it is the Sabbath. Our salvation is not found in works of observing Sabbaths and holy days. I’m saying that the Sabbath is a part of God’s grace to everyone. As an element of common grace, he gives all men rest, which is a point I made in the cultural argument for a Sunday Sabbath. It’s also part of God’s special grace to believers that we are privileged and able to worship him on a special day that he reserved for us. The Sabbath is best understood as a gift, not a law.
• Can we celebrate the Sabbath on Wednesday like Rick Warren does? I don’t think so. The reason is that the Sabbath offers two privileges: rest and worship. Although Warren’s Wednesday services are opportunities to worship, it’s unlikely that it really functions as a day of rest for most of the congregation because our culture treats Wednesday as a work day, even in Southern California. Worship becomes something that is tacked on to the end of the day, rather than being the main point of the day, as Sunday worship is, or should be. It’s interesting that although Warren says his Wednesday services are his church’s real Sabbath, they don’t get the attention that a rest/worship day would enable. To quote an observation from my test-marketing post,
  

  In his long-term goals, [Warren] dreams of having 15,000 members, though only 5,000 attending midweek (p. 363). This isn’t reality; it’s his dream. The Christian service is really just an optional extra.

• Can we celebrate the Sabbath on Saturday like Piper does? This is an improvement over Warren’s plan because Saturday worshippers are more likely to be able to combine rest with their worship. The weakness is that it misses the resurrection proclamation and celebration of Lord’s Day (Sunday) worship.
• Aren’t you relying on church tradition rather than the Bible? A little, but no more than anyone who uses a Greek lexicon to study the New Testament. Although the New Testament does not specifically say the church worshipped on Sunday, we can look at how the term Lord’s Day was interpreted by contemporaries of Paul and John. We see that they understood it to be Sunday. I don’t think that looking at how contemporaries understood a term is much different than consulting the works of Greek scholars to see how various NT words were understood in their time (something I did, for example, in the scatology post).

This is an issue that’s been brewing in the comments to the Turnstile Church post, and it also matters when we start to think about the effectiveness of doing church online.

My basic position is that even though the church is not a building, it is usually found in a building. The fact that Christians function as a church only when they regularly meet in a building makes it a reasonable shorthand for people to refer to that building as the church.

1. The universal Church is organized into particular geographical churches. Although Paul’s advice applies universally to all churches, his epistles were addressed to city churches with particular problems and characteristics. We see a similar distinction in the seven churches of Revelation. These were specific churches with their own personalities and faith trajectories.
2. Church government requires face-to-face assembly. Paul’s instructions to Timothy about church welfare requires that church leaders have a high degree of familiarity with the people under their care (1 Timothy 5). Elders are told to correct a wayward brother first privately, but then, as a final resort, publicly (Matthew 18:17). The assumption is that the public announcement is about a person that the other members of the church know.
3. Christian worship requires physicality only found in a church. In worship we are to sing together. God blesses us through the laying on of hands. The sacraments require physical presence for their proper administration. We extend the right hand of fellowship and greet each other with a kiss. There are other examples that might be worth the attention of a future post.
4. Christian worship has a time and space dimension. Although eternal himself, God created a system of worship that was tied to a calendar through holy days, especially the Sabbath. Similarly, although omnipresent himself, God created a system of worship that was contained within at least four walls. Although we can worship God anywhere and at all times, he has clearly shown us that our highest form of worship is within sabbath (time) assemblies (space) of other believers.

Hebrews 10:25 recommends church attendance with these words:

Not forsaking our own assembling together, as the custom of some is, but exhorting one another; and so much the more, as ye see the day drawing nigh.

As I once pointed out here, the Greek word translated as assembling is episynagoge. It means that Christians are to physically assemble together in one place. The root is synagogue, which itself means a physical gathering point, usually a building.

Yes, church also can refer to all Christians, living and dead, but it most commonly references distinct gatherings of believers who meet each other face to face for regular, physical worship of God. I assume that is our starting point, against which we’ll later assess efforts to redefine the church in ways that take it out of those chronological and physical constraints.

(This post is a followup to this one about the purpose of church.)

A few months ago while watching Brad Cooper’s effing Bible video, I saw the basic difference between the way he and I approach church.

To set the scene, Cooper is welcoming his congregation to a newly built (bamf) facility on the NewSpring campus. He has a very important point he wants his people to understand, so we get this illuminating piece of dialog.

Cooper: I want you right now to tell the person beside you, “This building was not built for you.” So you say, “What do you mean by that, Brad? Who was this building built for?”

Seminary student who hadn’t read the script: Jesus!

Cooper (in yes-but-really-no mode): Yeah, absolutely. But why would Jesus give us a tool like this?

He explains that because anyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved, that it’s really for the unsaved friends of the people there, who need to be invited so that they’ll be able to call on the name of the Lord in Cooper’s church. Cooper then lays down the law:

Do you want me to tell you what is failure? Let me tell you what is failure if you believe what we just read. Failure is you showing up by yourself next week.

Look at me in the face! You don’t believe the Word of God if you show up by yourself next week!

Although Cooper grudgingly agrees with Ms. Seminary that it should be for Jesus, his real LOOK AT ME IN THE FACE point is that it is built for unbelievers who have not yet visited the church. Who’s more important here? God, believers or unbelievers. Certainly it’s unbelievers. Existing believers are told that they essentially are faithless if they also don’t agree with Cooper’s hyperventilating pleas to turn the church inside out to get the unsaved there.

Cooper is not alone. The $700 man, Steven Furtick, flat out told the believers in his church that his church wasn’t for them.

We preach so that people can come to faith in Christ, and we want them to get in a small group and serve so that other people can come to Christ.

If you know Jesus–I am sorry to break it to you–this church is not for you.

“Yeah, but I just gave my life to Christ last week at Elevation.”

Last week was the last week that Elevation Church existed for you. You’re in the army now. We do one thing; we preach Jesus so that people far from God can know Jesus, and then we train them up so that others can know Jesus.

It’s called kingdom multiplication. It’s what Elevation Church is all about, and over 500 people have given their lives to Jesus for the first time in this church in the last five months. That’s over 100 per month.

If that doesn’t get you excited, and you need the “doctrines of grace” as defined by John Calvin to excite you, you’re in the wrong church. Let me get a phone book; there are 720 churches in Charlotte. I’m sure we can find you one where you can stuff your face until you’re so obese spiritually that you can’t even move.

Watch the video to witness the profound anger here.

Perry Noble shares Furtick’s distaste for churches who cater to God and believers. In fact, Noble’s vision of the church is so backwards and distorted that he sees expressions of worship as insulting profanity.

We have a purpose…and it’s not to be a country club with a steeple on top that gives our community the middle finger and tells them to go to hell because reaching them would make us uncomfortable!

The architectural purpose of the church steeple was to exalt God by pointing skyward, and to invite people to worship by being an unmistakable local landmark. As one Kentucky steeple maker said,

A steeple points one to the heavens, symbol of the dwelling place of Christ. Through city streets, across the valleys and lakes, through the countryside far and wide, the steeple declares Christ.

Where most of us see Christ, is it a complete surprise that Noble sees a middle finger? Actually, it seems that he sees a lot of Christianity this way.

Every week people show up at their stained glass fortressed and give their community the middle finger and tell them to go to hell.

I never see it prescribed in Scripture than when a church reaches a “comfortable” size–usually around 120 people–that the community should be given the middle finger and told to go to hell because additional people might mess up the holy huddle!

Noble equates the discipleship and equipping of believers as middle fingeresque.

Like it or not–Jesus didn’t go to a bookstore, get a theology book by a dead white guy, get a group of guys together that were just like Him and give the world the middle finger because He was obsessed with “going deep!”

If I meet one more group of guys who think they are becoming more like Jesus because they are theological superior to people (which, by the way, is PRIDE!) but do not know a lost person by name or refuse to exercise their spiritual gift…and yet claim to be godly…I am going to punch them in the throat!

I suppose Noble’s fist trumps devout middle fingers.

In one of his middle-finger diatribes, Noble lays out his own description of his church, which you can find here. It is all about reaching unbelievers, but you’ll have to look hard to find mention of the worship of God (church purpose #1) or the assembly of believers (church purpose #2).

Noble, Furtick, Cooper, Lamb, Warren and many, many others are trying to redefine church by making it primarily about nonbelievers. If you ask them, they’ll give a perfunctory answer that church is really for God, as Cooper’s seminary guest forced him to do, but their actions and emphasis tell us that it’s mainly about nonbelievers. Cooper and Furtick specifically told their audience that they were more interested in people outside the family of God.

Getting people in the doors is much more important than offering them anything once they walk in. Make them feel bad, conscript them into the army, and get more people in the doors.

Several terms have been used to describe these new churches: emergent, emerging, etc. It’s all very confusing, so I offer a new term: The Turnstile Church.

Definition: Churches that attract people for the purpose of attracting more people for the purpose attracting more people for the purpose…

Feed my sheep? Not so much.