Horton- “Quick and easy” has beaten “tried and tested.”

Image result for church membership leeman

Much of evangelicalism has been forged in a piety that pits a personal relationship with Jesus against the visible church and its public ministry. In part, that’s because evangelicals have wanted to avoid nominal commitment and formalism, which are good things to avoid. But in the process, we have tended—especially since the nineteenth century’s Second Great Awakening—to criticize formal church offices and the ordinary means of grace in favor of charismatic leaders and extraordinary movements. “Quick and easy” has beaten “tried and tested.” Rapid growth in numbers has counted more than slow growth in grace. Pragmatic results, not formal structures, have been viewed as keys to success. Along the way, many of us were raised with the evangelistic appeal, “I’m not asking you to join a church, but to accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior.”

It’s not surprising that, after successive movements of this kind, “getting saved” would have little to do with joining a church. And now there are even evangelical movements that drop church membership out of the picture entirely. They say to just show up … or not. One evangelical leader celebrates the dawn of the “Revolutionaries” who have somehow decided that being the church means not joining a church. Instead, these revolutionaries find their own spiritual resources on the Internet and in informal gatherings.

Then along comes Jonathan Leeman, not only reminding us of those many passages that we had pushed aside, but also having the audacity to say things like, “Christ does not call us to join a church, but to submit to a church.” The church is not simply another voluntary society, like the Boy Scouts or the Sierra Club. It’s an embassy of Christ’s kingdom. And kings do not offer suggestions, sell products, or provide resources that people can take or leave.

Horton, M. (2012). Foreword. In Church Membership: How the World Knows Who Represents Jesus (pp. 14–15). Wheaton, IL: Crossway.

Comments

Berkoff: "The law was not substituted for the promise; neither was faith supplanted by works. "

The giving of the law did not effect a fundamental change in the religion of Israel, but merely introduced a change in its external form. The law was not substituted for the promise; neither was faith supplanted by works. Many of the Israelites, indeed, looked upon the law in a purely legalistic spirit and sought to base their claim to salvation on a scrupulous fulfillment of it as a body of external precepts. But in the case of those who understood its real nature, who felt the inwardness and spirituality of the law, it served to deepen the sense of sin and to sharpen the conviction that salvation could be expected only from the grace of God . L. Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans publishing co., 1938), 498–499.

John Stott on the "old man" and the "body ruled by sin" in Rom 6 v 6

There are, in fact, two quite distinct ways in which the New Testament speaks of crucifixion in relation to holiness. The first is our death to sin through identification with Christ; the second is our death to self through imitation of Christ. On the one hand, we have been crucified with Christ. But on the other we have crucified (decisively repudiated) our sinful nature with all its desires, so that every day we renew this attitude by taking up our cross and following Christ to crucifixion. The first is a legal death, a death to the penalty of sin; the second is a moral death, a death to the power of sin. The first belongs to the past, and is unique and unrepeatable; the second belongs to the present, and is repeatable, even continuous. I died to sin (in Christ) once; I die to self (like Christ) daily. It is with the first of these two deaths that Romans 6 is chiefly concerned, although the first is with a view to the second, and the second cannot take place w...

F.F. Bruce: ...know their father's will...

The NT does not contain a detailed code of rules for the Christian. Codes of rules, as Paul explains elsewhere, are suited to the period of immaturity when the children of God are still under guardians; but children who have come to years of responsibility know their father’s will without having to be provided with a long list of “Do’s” and “Don’t’s.” What the NT does provide is those basic principles of Christian living which may be applied to varying situations of life as they arise. So, after answering the Corinthian Christians’ question about the eating of food that has been offered to idols, Paul sums up his advice in the words: “whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31). Phrases current in worship, like “to the glory of God” or (as here) “in the name of the Lord Jesus,” were given a practical relevance by being applied to the concerns of ordinary life. Bruce, F. F. (1984). The Epistles to the Colossians, to Philemon, and to the...

Search This Blog