Tuesday, 06 January 2009
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GROWTH VERSUS DOCTRINE PART ONE
The Garner Citizen is publishing an article of mine entitled "Growth Versus Doctrine." I wrote it specifically for them, and it has not appeared on this blog or any other publication. Today, they ran the first of two parts, and I have included it for you below. Look next week for part two.
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Years ago, I was part of a church where doctrine or theological consistency was not valued. This community of believers did value a top notch worship service with fantastic music and the bulletin was full of activities and programs for all ages, but by the leadership’s own admission, pursuing doctrine was low on their to do list. They didn’t present programs and worship expertise as competing values with doctrine; they just didn’t see theological pursuit as important as the other aspects of their ministry. Attending a church with that hierarchy of values (or lack thereof) provided me with some interesting insights as to what happens when a group of believers don’t continually pursue doctrine and theological depth.
First of all, you can attract a crowd. So many folks are drawn to shiny buildings, professional level music, and a YMCA competing level of activities. It seems that cars just naturally turn in the parking lot. If you asked a visitor why they were checking out the church, most of them gave the response of, “I just wanted to see what was going on here.” I learned you can definitely build a congregation when each Sunday looks like the grand opening of a Best Buy.
The second thing I noticed was that each Sunday’s sermon provided a different theological viewpoint. The five fundamentals were present (Saved by Faith not Works, the inerrancy of the Bible, the Doctrine of the Trinity, Jesus was both fully God and fully man, and the literal Return of Christ). But beyond that, there was very little consistency. When they wanted to motivate the folks to do something, they emphasized free will, and when times were bad, they would say, “everything happens for a reason” not seeing the competing theologies of free will and sovereignty at play. They would offer a full cleansing of sin for any non-believer but treated the believer like God wouldn’t forgive them if they kept on sinning. You could hold any leadership position in the church if your scandalous sins were prior to faith in Christ, but you had no chance in h-e-double hockey sticks if you committed scandalous sins post conversion. There just seemed to be more grace for the convert than there was for the professing believer. “Saved by grace; preserved by legalism,” was the most consistent theological position.
The amazing thing was that no one seemed to notice or care about the apparent contradictions. In fact, no one noticed to such an extent that people just kept turning right into the parking lot.
Since buildings, professional music, and programs are not competing values with doctrine (you can have both), is it possible for a church that values doctrine and the pursuit of theological wisdom to grow or even attract a crowd? Well, there are the pop examples in our culture of churches that proclaim doctrine as a distinguishing value and are rather large (John MacArthur, Mark Driscoll, Tim Keller). Those men, representing 3 different doctrinal systems, have made it clear that their pursuit of doctrine fuels their growth. But how is that possible?
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