144: The Joy of a Healthy Church

to the Ruled Church Podcast. This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased.

He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?

You see that one in Pechote, Mexico? Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres, down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

The church is not a democracy, it's a monarchy. Christ is king. You can't be

Christian without a local church. You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the

Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible -believing church, and spend your life serving

Jesus in a local, visible congregation. Well, it's a beautifully frigid

December day. Yes? I mean, no.

Literally sweating on the last Saturday of December. December 27th, 2025.

Welcome, gonna love this part, to the Rural Church Podcast. I am your host,

Alan Nelson, one of the pastors at Providence Baptist Church in Perryville, Arkansas.

With me today is no stranger to the Rural Church Podcast. How many times have you been on? I think this is maybe my fourth time.

I think my third or fourth time. Third or fourth time. Well, you're basically, should call it the

Madewell Church Podcast. Veteran. A veteran on the Rural Church Podcast. Grateful to have

Gunner with us. Gunner is, what is a bio of Gunner? Gunner is, has been married to his lovely wife,

Elizabeth, for... 10 years. 10 years. 10 and a half years.

Whew. He is the father of six children. The last one yet to be named.

I don't know. Go ahead and say it, go ahead. I think we're naming him Benjamin. We'll find out. We'll see if my wife lets me.

You've heard it here first. Benjamin Madewell, due when? Due middle of March.

Middle of March, 2026. And your oldest is gonna be 10 this summer.

Yes. And then so you'll have a 10 all the way down to newborn in 2026.

The Lord has been good to you, brother. Yeah, for sure. So what about this great

French press coffee we're drinking right now? This is, well, they didn't ask me to advertise, but I recently got the

Stanley French press for Christmas. My wife got it. And for some reason, the coffee just tastes better.

It's the same hot water and coffee, but if you do it in a French press, it just tastes better. French press is the way to go.

The only bad thing is like in the time that it takes to make French press, you could -

Made seven pots of coffee. Okay, before we get started, I need to ask you about this book

I got from our friend, Josh Bush, The Church Impotent, The Feminization of Christianity.

I haven't read it. What do you think? The cover looks good. Like what does impotent mean? Like without power.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I would agree that some of the churches are feminized, yeah.

I knew you'd like that title. Especially with the women pastors. Yeah, absolutely. Are they even a church?

With the women pastors? Yeah. No, they just a building. Well, what would you say, this is a test for you and also a test for my teaching.

What would you say are the three marks of a church? Not a true church, or sorry, not a healthy church per se, but just an actual true church.

Historically, there've been three marks given. What are they? Preach the gospel. Okay, the gospel is rightly preached.

What is the gospel? The gospel is the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ in a nutshell.

But it is our hope of eternal life after this life if we take hold of Jesus Christ and what he's done for us by faith, by his righteous life, his death on the cross, his resurrection, and then our justification by what

Jesus has done for us. Yeah, amen, and received by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.

Good, so the gospel is rightly preached. Second? Is the observation of the ordinances which are the

Lord's Supper and baptism. Okay, so what about our

Presbyterian brothers? I would, well, they're observing the ordinances, but they just have a misunderstanding.

They're observing the ordinances, particularly the Lord's Supper correctly, those who do credo communion, that is communion based on professional faith, but they are not observing the ordinance of baptism like we would.

Correctly. Correctly, like we would say, but they do not see it as an ordinance that brings about regeneration, okay?

All right, yeah, all right. Well, I mean, I was gonna insert something there. Baptists see,

Reformed Baptists do see the ordinance of baptism as salvific in this sense, if you're talking about sanctification, you're talking about a means of grace in our sanctification, but it's not in justification and not in regeneration, but God does bless his people through the ordinance of baptism.

We understand that it is an outward symbol of an inward reality, but it also is a true means of grace where God blesses his people through it, sanctifies us.

So anyway, okay, and then thirdly. Thirdly is the right administration of church discipline.

So now we kind of, so when we talked about Presbyterians, now we come into like our fellow

Baptist churches and we think, well, there's not a lot of them doing church discipline, so what should we think about that?

Well, there's two types of church discipline. There is what's called corrective church discipline, which is if we have a brother caught in sin, we try to correct it and we try to pray for him and we try to do the things that Matthew 18 talks about to bring him to repentance.

And then what we have is, what's the other? Formative church discipline, which should be happening all the time.

Accountability, teaching, edification, encouragement, exhorting, all these things that are happening within the life of the church.

So if you say a church is not doing church discipline, you should be very careful because actually, most more than likely, they're doing formative church discipline, but maybe not to the point of where you're at with corrective church discipline, but they may be moving in that direction, but are not doing it maybe what you think.

Does that make sense? Yeah, does there come a point where a church that refuses to do corrective church discipline ceases to be a church?

Yeah, if you take the revealed word of God and you blatantly disregard it, that's when you have to say, well, the

Lord has removed the lampstand, so to speak. You refuse to be a church, really.

You see what God has given you, you see what the Lord says about a true church and you don't wanna be it, so.

Removed the lampstand, where does that language come from? Well, it comes from the scripture. It comes from being a light, a city on a hill, and one that would shine light in the darkness, and that language would mean that you're not a light anymore.

Yeah, so just to affirm what he's saying, it comes directly from Revelation and is exactly what

Jesus warns the churches, so one of the scariest things

I think that can be, even in Revelation, brother, talk about some places call themselves the people of God, but they're synagogues of Satan, and the scariest thing that can happen is that people can be assembled, regularly assembled, but not a church.

We wanna be careful about these marks. I mean, these are in the sense of, they're meant to use as like a checkup.

What am I trying to say? A litmus test. Yeah, yeah, like they're not meant to use as like a club to beat people over the head, like are you really, so we're not meant to use it to beat the

Presbyterians, but well, you're not even a true church. I would argue that they are a true church, the conservative

Presbyterians, those who hold to a different understanding of baptism than I do. I would argue they're a true church.

However, even though we do have a very, very important disagreement that I think matters over the mode and type in candidates in baptism.

In the same similar way, I wanna be gracious to some of our Baptist brethren who are like you said, you handled that so well.

There may be on the road to recovering corrective church discipline, but they're not there yet, not where we wanna see them yet, but they still are an actual church.

Nevertheless, there is a real, there is a reality in churches today, even conservative, if you will, at least politically conservative, places that are gathering, but they're not true churches.

What do you think about that? Well, there's something like that around here. Give me a list.

No, I'm just joking. Well, here's the problem is what

I just talked about, a church that sees the revealed will of God, but they refuse to do what

God has said. Let's take for instance, church membership, which is a form of church discipline.

You have to have membership in order to do church discipline. So a church that refuses to do membership is refusing to do what

God has said is orderly and good and right and what he wants his church to do.

Well, you have a church like that and they just continue to meet. Well, what they're doing is they're just, they're just going into debauchery.

And foolishness and idolatry and really stubbornness and being stiff necked.

I'm not gonna do what the Lord says that I should do. I'm gonna do it my way.

I'm gonna make church into what I want it to be. What was the first church you joined, Apollo? I think, yeah, the very first church.

The second church you joined, we don't have to name it, but it was in Kentucky. I wanna ask you a question about it. What was that membership process like?

That membership process was you would meet, I forgot one of the elders names that we met with.

It was paper. You filled it out before you met with somebody. And I believe it took,

I believe it took multiple meetings. I don't think it took months, but I think it took multiple meetings to be a part of that church.

They wanted to know how you were saved, what you believe about the church, salvation, the

Lord Jesus, all these things. And then based on your meeting and what you said, you would be added to the church by a vote.

Yeah, I think that, well, that's good. That's healthy. So you don't have a lot of experience.

I do have experience in seeing it both ways. And that is literally walk an aisle during the so -called invitation at the end and join right then and not even know whether, hardly know the person or some people do know some things about, well,

I know where that person is every Saturday night. They're out there getting drunk, but you still, you vote them in. And when you handle membership like that,

I talked about that recently in a sermon, when you handle membership like that, well, then eventually the church is full of goats and not sheep.

And eventually the sheep are starved. They wind up going somewhere else or some hold on to the very end, but eventually it's no longer a church.

It's just, it's a clown show. And I'm not saying that to be pejorative, but that's what happened. Like, why do you have situations where it's like, well, we need to do these things in the church.

We need to have more feeling good sermons. Maybe we could introduce some more fun and let's do movies.

And like, why is all that coming to church is because you no longer have churches that are actually churches or those that are still churches are very, very anemic, very, very sick.

They're on life support. If the candlestick has not yet been removed. You see many churches, so -called churches that see the historic maybe way and traditional way.

And I would say not every way like this is good, but let's say this reformed

Baptist way of how churches should be and how the scripture says the church should be. They see that model and they are disgusted by it.

They don't want it because they believe it's outdated. It doesn't give them the effects that they want.

It doesn't bring the people like they want. It pushes too many away and it's not inclusive.

And so they don't, places, the buildings that say they are a church, they don't wanna do that.

They just wanna do what they wanna do. I got a personal question for you right now. Are you drinking that coffee black?

Yes. Okay. All right. In the spirit of Christmas. So I'm gonna use it as an analogy because Gunner, we give him a hard time, likes a little cream in his coffee.

But there is something about drinking coffee black that builds the taste.

Now, some of you guys out there aren't coffee drinkers. I get it. But I was similar to Gunner, but I was still a child.

But no. Thank you. I'm just joking.

I was similar to Gunner when I started drinking coffee. I want a lot, I want cream and sugar in it. But then

I realized, well, I can't keep doing that. That's not very healthy, but it doesn't taste good black. But the more I drink it, like I enjoy black coffee.

And also this French press, it's good. I could, it tastes good. But the analogy is maybe it's a bit of an acquired taste.

And it's very, very similar when it comes to church and a church with reform worship, a church with seriousness about the gospel and scripture reading.

Pursue impurity. Pursue impurity. Like if you're used to just the candy, if you're used to like every time

I go to church, I need to have some sort of heightened emotional experience.

I need to have a come to the altars moment. I need to feel something rushing through my veins.

Well, you've been indoctrinated in our pragmatic world to live on that spiritual high when it's not even a high at all.

It's akin to you eating a bunch of sour patch for supper and saying, oh yeah,

I feel good. And then someone saying, okay, eat this steak. And you're like, no, no, I don't want the steak. I want the sour patch.

Okay, well, what's the sour patch gonna do? It's gonna give you diabetes and it's gonna rot your teeth out.

Does that analogy make sense or no? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it does. So the whole idea is that we live in kind of a spiritual anemic age, if you will.

It's not actually, it's interesting. There's not a whole lot of, especially where we live, not a whole lot of atheism, not a whole lot of rejection of spirituality, but there is a big, a lot of wrong views of spirituality.

Nominal Christianity. Nominal Christianity. Yeah. You get people say they're Christians, but they're really not.

And they worship themselves. I think maybe

I sound, I'm just catching myself. I think I sound a little bit rude, but it's really sad because we go into the streets and we go into the neighborhoods and we talk to people and we're giving

Christ to the people. How are they gonna receive Christ if they've already got him?

Because everyone's a Christian. Where do you go to church? Well, I haven't been in church in a while, but I gotta start going.

Well, okay, do you know the gospel? Yeah, it's the Bible. Well, the Bible's not the gospel. So everyone's a

Christian, but nobody knows Christ. That's the problem with our, I can say,

I don't know every town, I don't know every place, but I know my town. And I know that's one of the problems here.

Yeah, that's good. The idea of saying that you're

Christian and not even understanding what the gospel is.

And then when you actually hear the gospel, talk about this for a second. When you actually hear the gospel, like we're out there preaching or whatever, like it's actually offensive.

Like you're actually upset that someone else would tell other people they need to repent.

Talk about that for a second. Yeah, so the gospel that many have heard is actually not a gospel, but what they believe is the gospel is trust

Jesus. He loves you. If you do these things,

God knows your heart. It's okay. You ain't gotta go to church, be the church.

All these different things. What they realize is when they come in contact with the real gospel is they've actually never heard the real gospel before.

They've heard a gospel of someone's own making. And that, the sad part about it is is they've heard a gospel maybe their entire lives, but that gospel doesn't save.

Yeah, so you're gonna hear this tomorrow in the sermon, but in Acts 520, after the apostles are rescued from prison, the angel says, go back to the temple and tell all the people all the words of this life, all the words.

And I think some people don't understand the fullness of the gospel. So they say, well,

I've told them John 3 .16, that's the gospel. Well, John 3 .16 is a beautiful verse. We should love the verse.

We should share that verse. But if that's all you're sharing, you're not actually sharing the gospel. There's nothing in John 3 .16

about the resurrection. There's nothing in John 3 .16 about the propitiatory sacrifice that Christ's wrath is a propitiation, or sorry, that Christ's sacrifice is a propitiation.

There is the word about faith there, but it's not whoever believes. So the faith is there, but we don't explain that.

So what I'm just saying is, we often give a truncated gospel. And so sometimes when people hear the fullness of the gospel and that it demands total allegiance, and it also results in a life that is,

I talked to a man the other day, I was like, well, I told him, I didn't think he was a Christian. And of course he was upset about that, but it's like, there's things

I could point out, but it's not pointing out about like this or that sin. It's about, you don't have a life that even cares about the church because the gospel produces a life that loves his church.

And that's where we wanna get to in the episode with you, although we've talked a lot already, but really in this last part of the episode, what

I really want to hone in on was something you said to me the other day. So we're going through that book. Is it

Worship and Song? Yeah, Worship and Song. Worship and Song by Scott Anial. Yep, from Free Grace Press.

And so it's been good. It's been helpful discussions we've had. But one of the things you said is that you feel,

I'll let you talk about it, but if I'm remembering right, something along you feel sadness, a brokenness, your heart's sad, something along those lines, first, how so many people don't even experience what life is like in a true church.

So flesh that out. Well, the last,

I think we've been at this church for maybe eight years. Eight years, yeah, 2017, over eight years.

Eight years. And it has not always been where we are today. And the reason that I said that the other day is because I was thinking back on the first five years of the church here and how different it was.

When you were here, for your first five years. Yeah, when my first five years. If you take my eight years, the first five years is different than the last three that I'm here now.

And the reason that it's so different is because I believe in the first five years, we were trying to be a healthy church.

There were some things that we did not do, but in the last three years, we have become a healthy church.

Not the most, the perfect church, but I believe a healthy church. Yeah, I don't mind saying like, we've got some things that we're not where we wanna be.

We don't have deacons. That's a goal that we have for 2026. Hope to be preaching about that soon.

Hopefully by the time this comes out, I'll have already preached a message or two about deacons. We wanna grow in areas.

We wanna be more faithful in attendance and giving and all these things. So we're not a perfect church.

And we are a healthy church, but we're not as healthy as we could be. So we wanna continue to grow.

Okay, that's good. And I think I would say the first five years you were here, there was a trajectory moving in that.

That's what I'm saying. We wanted to be. But once we hit the events of 2022, that trajectory accelerated in a beautiful way.

Once we hit events that were like, okay, this is where the Bible says, and we're not doing it.

This is what we need to do. Then things started really just shaking.

But the Lord worked through that through his providence, through his, I think it's,

I'm comfortable saying the word pruning. He worked in our church to make us a healthy church.

And that's all because of God. But what I said was, my original statement was, I know the joy of a healthy, true church.

And it makes me sad that others don't even understand what a true church is and they've never experienced one.

So what I mean by that is not, even though we're going through the book and worship and song, not just the music.

I believe our church has great singing. I believe our church has doctrinally rich music, but not just that.

I believe our church is ordered well. I believe our pastors are involved in the lives of the saints.

I believe our members are generous and hospitable. I believe there's true unity.

I believe there's joy in our church. I believe our church loves the gospel, loves preaching, loves true worship, loves orderliness, loves the church in its evangelism, loves mission.

All these things that I think our church loves and is a part of, I have never, and I am sorry to say,

I've never been involved in until the last three years where we're at now in our church.

And it makes me sad that there's so many out there. It's not that they have been a part of a healthy church, but they don't want it.

They've never even experienced it. And the joy that it's brought to my life and my spiritual walk with the

Lord, my love and my commitment and my unity with the saints here at this church has never been stronger because of the healthy church that we're in.

And it's only because of what God has done and his grace in our church. And many have never seen that.

Many have never even been in a church service where that is going on. The scripture is clear that he wants unity in his church and he wants order and all those things.

And that's good and that's right. And I think that's why there's so much joy in a healthy church is because when you do what

God says to do, you don't try to make up what you want. You don't try to just have worship on your own terms.

You just do what the word says. It's beautiful. It's cohesive. It's pleasant.

All those things are happening when you just do what the book says. And I think really the reason why many churches don't experience that is because they're not doing what the book says.

Yeah, I saw a few responses to that. First, I wanna say it's easy, but it's difficult.

And what do I mean by that? Well, it's easy. It's really not confusing. When you open up the scriptures and you begin to say, okay, these are the things we wanna do.

We wanna have a church in line with the word of God. And for us, we feel like a faithful articulation of the scriptures is the

Second Lent of Baptist Confession. And we say, okay, these are brothers in the past who have agreed with us to last 400 years.

So what do we need to do? Well, it's really not difficult in the terms. It's not difficult in terms of figuring out what we need to do.

The difficulty is taking that to the present culture on sugar.

I give an example, like with your children. If all we give our children every night, candy, candy, candy, candy, candy.

And then all of a sudden, we're just gonna say, you know what, we've been doing some research. Apparently, giving them candy every night is not good for them.

We're gonna be good parents now. And we're not gonna give them candy anymore. Well, is that easy or hard?

Well, it's easy in terms of, yeah, this is the right thing to do. But it's hard in terms of what?

It's hard to get them to get off the candy. I mean, they're gonna throw a fit. I mean, it's a little bit different dynamic, but they're gonna throw a fit.

Well, this can happen sometimes. And so, I encourage patience and prudence when it comes to bringing changes, of course.

But it's worth it. And the other thing I was gonna say is like, I love how you say like, so many people,

I believe they're genuine believers, but they don't know what they don't know. And so I give you an example in my own life. The first time

I really saw this was in 2010. And in 2010, Stephanie and I got to go to a conference at Christ Church in New Albany, Mississippi.

And at that church, Pastor John Snyder, one of the elders there, and Richard Owen Roberts had come and done a conference.

But we stayed with the family at that church. And it was like, first of all, that was weird.

It was like, we're gonna go and these people are gonna be hospitalized. Like, we don't even know them. And they're gonna be hospitable.

And then just the conversations with them and the way the church sang and the way the church interacted, it was like,

I'm seeing something that has a semblance of what's going on in other churches I've been part of, but it's different.

And the thing about it is, I remember, probably Stephanie would admit this too, but I remember the first reaction was, what do you think?

I want this. No, it wasn't. This is weird. My first reaction was.

Oh, I gotta get out of here. Yeah, my first reaction was, this is a little different. This is a little weird.

It felt weird. Why? Because they took all the creamer out of my coffee. Right? Ooh, that's deep.

Yeah, you like that? I know you like that. So they took all the creamer out of my coffee, man. They took away the sour patch.

And I was like, my taste buds were like, well, this is a little strange. But after being there for a few days and working through things, and then of course now, 15 years later,

I'm like, no, it wasn't. That wasn't strange. It's beautiful. And it's only strange because of the remaining worldliness and carnality that I must mortify in my own heart.

And so, we have had people actually tell us, we have had people, I've had multiple people, even dear friends who have visited our church who've said about a couple elements of our service, that's weird.

Now, I don't wanna be intentionally weird, but I'm okay with our, like, you step into Providence Baptist Church each

Lord's Day, you're stepping into a different environment. You're stepping out of this godless pagan world that we've had to be subjected to the whole week.

And here we are gathering together at the heavenly Jerusalem.

We've come to Mount Zion, Hebrews 12. And it ought to feel a little different. There ought to be a little bit of whiplash because when you live in this world that we live in, we are inundated with ungodliness.

And then we gather before the throne, as it were, and we are entering into a completely different world.

Does any of that make sense? Yeah. Yes, it does. Good, good.

Yes, good job. Good word. Yeah, I, the hard part, this is the easy part, is to see the scriptures.

That's what they do. The hard part is, this is another hard part, I would say, is when you feel like you're the only one that wants it.

And you got people around that don't want it. I'll give you, for instance, in Exodus 32, when

Aaron is with the people that God has brought out of Egypt, Moses is on the mountain. Well, Moses is gone for a little bit.

God has given them what to do, the commandments. And the people, they are waiting.

They don't know what to do. And the first thing they do is, Aaron, guess what?

Let's get our rings together. Let's get our gold. Let's melt it. Let's make an image. Well, what

Aaron should have done is say, no, no, that's not what God has said to do. It's hard when you've got so many people either not wanting to get on board or they're trying to do what's ungodly and unscriptural.

And you have to bring them back. Like, no, no, we don't wanna do that.

There's nobody's gonna come if we do that. But this is what God has said. But the preaching is too long.

This is what God has said. Well, if we don't show at least one video, it's not gonna be a true service.

No, that's not what God said. And so I think the hard part is sticking to the scripture, sticking to your gun, so to speak, and just trusting the

Lord to be faithful. You know, I think another, I can say this as a pastor, and I can say this in front of you because you've seen me fail.

You've seen me succeed. You've seen me succeed. So anyone listening, like, this is not me bragging.

This is me just saying this is where I'm at. And God, it took a long time for God to bring me into this. But I can speak as a pastor, and I know that some pastors are out there, maybe you're listening to this, and I'm gonna tell you one of the issues that your church is having is that you're not all the way bought in.

You still have your segmented life. So you have your ministry career life, as it were, and then you have your family and your friends, and you're being faithful to do certain things as far as preaching.

And you're not an ungodly pastor. Your life is in line with the scriptures.

But in terms of, like, buying all in into the church, you're keeping too much separation.

And I get it because we hear these kind of conferences and all the time, it's like, you know, God first, then your family, then the ministry.

And I get that, and I agree with that. It's not wrong to have those categories in our mind.

But the problem is if we let those categories, if there's too much gap in between our lives and the church in the sense that, like, the church is just this business part of my life.

This church is just this extra part of my life. And it's not all in, like, I'm here.

This is where God's called me, and I'm here. Now, I don't think that you have to stay at a church your whole life always as a pastor.

But I would say, as this is a general rule, the idea of pastors bouncing around every couple of years is not godly, and it is to the detriment of the pastor and to the church.

So we've created this model where the church is this distinct thing, and we're not bought all in.

Does that make sense? Am I coming across communicating? Yeah. I mean, I can't speak from a pastor's point of view.

I can speak from a member's point of view that I know that when you have a pastor,

I'll speak like it's in a home. If you have a wife that wants the children to be godly and know the gospel, but the husband's not leading the way, more times than not, she'll not say anything because the husband isn't being proactive.

Well, if you have maybe the people of God that maybe see the Bible and what it says, but the pastor isn't leading the way, they won't kind of be proactive in that way.

So I can say that it's a good thing, not trying to boast you up, but I can say it's a good thing that our pastors want to be healthy.

Our pastors want a healthy church. And so if the church isn't doing it, maybe that's an indictment partly on the pastors.

Not entirely, but I can say that I think that's, there's an illustration,

I think, in marriage and in the scriptures that their pastors are the ones that are leading the way. The elders are the one who's setting the pace and setting the tone.

We can't treat the church like a career. It's a calling. And again, sometimes

God calls pastors and members away from the church. Providentially, we've experienced that. We've seen members -

And it hurts, it's hard. It's difficult. And so I'm not saying like, because this is our third church.

Now the first church that I pastored, it ended difficulty over the doctrine of grace.

The second church was moving from there to here, which we just felt that God was calling us back to our hometown. So I understand and I've experienced that God calls us away from churches sometimes and that does happen.

But I'm just saying this idea, I think more often than not should be longevity and I'm gonna be here and I'm willing to go and count the cost.

I said this a few years ago that I really don't wanna listen to pastoral advice from someone who hasn't at least been at his church 10 years.

And the reason I said that is because, you know, you got a lot of guys that have been at many churches, four, five, six, seven, eight years, but I'm not that 10 is a magic number and I'm not just saying that because I've been here 10 years coming up in June, but I'm just saying like,

I wanna listen to guys who've stuck it out because it's kind of like a marriage. Like, do you wanna listen to marriage advice to the guy who's been married six weeks?

Yeah, they don't know nothing. Yeah, you know? And even sometimes the guy's been married five years or 10 years or even 15 years.

And I'm not saying that each one of those - What about 20 years? Yeah, I'm not saying that each one of those can't give advice, they can, but there's something, you know?

So anyway, I kind of went off grid there, but the point that I was trying to make to overall to bring us back is

I really think it's gonna start with a pastor being all in. And then like you said, it's hard if you feel alone, like we were blessed here.

We didn't just have you and Liz. There were a couple, two other families that are still here that were bought in too, but it was a little bit, just because of health situations in those families, it was a little bit different.

But those were hard, you know? But we were just resolved, you know? Like, hey, you know what? This is how it's gonna be.

And then God brought some other families, you know? You think about the

Goodmans and Connell getting baptized in 2019, and it just slowly kind of building and over the years, and God's been faithful.

But this episode is not about, yay, Providence, although praise God for what he's done here.

Really, the episode is about the beauty and the joy of life in a true church, true church life.

And I saw a guy say the other day - Not just a church hour. Yeah, yeah. I saw a guy the other day, he said he didn't like the phrase do life together because it put too much of a burden on people.

And I understood the point that he's trying to make. I understood. He's like, you know, you've got young kids, like your family.

My family has a few young kids left. There's other families in our church with young kids. It's hard to do things together.

I'll just say this. I'll interject. If I didn't have the church, it would be much harder with my wife and six children by ourselves.

Like, do life together is a burden. I don't, I know, I'm sorry. I don't know what they mean.

That doing life together with the church is immensely helpful. And if I did not, the church, here's the difference between a man who sees the church as a burden and the man who, you know, has a healthy view of the church is the man who has a healthy view of the church is the church is his life, not just tacked on.

Yeah. It's not just like, I go to church. The church is my entire life. These people that are, so I think of a church, this is what

I think the biblical and I think the confessional way we should view a church. You join together in covenant.

You're bonded together by the blood of Christ and you're walking together by the Holy Spirit. This is, this encompasses all of my life.

This is not just when I go see each other one hour on a Sunday morning and then, you know, maybe

Sunday night or maybe Wednesday because most churches just meet Sunday morning and I'll say,

I'm not, you know, saying those churches are bad. I think there is something to say about meeting more than one time on a

Sunday morning. I understand with membership and how many members you got. I understand all that. But what

I can say is, oh, the church is a burden.

You have not experienced the beauty of a true healthy church. That statement right there is perfect for the talk that we're having.

You haven't experienced a healthy and true church. Yeah, if I could defend that, like I would say like, there is a danger in churches trying to program life together.

You don't, yeah, exactly. Yeah, so it's like on Monday night we got the kids and on Tuesday night we got the women and on Thursday night we got the men and on Friday night we got the senior adult and it's like, that can feel exhausting.

So we're not talking about over -programming your calendar but we are, and now it's easier for us to,

I'll say that we've got 18 families and so sometimes smaller is easy, more organic but this idea of just like, hey, let's just be out together.

Let's do things, like things that we're gonna do anyway, why don't we just do them together? We're gonna eat anyway, let's eat together.

We're gonna go shopping for our wives anyway. Let's go, you know, we just recently got, let's just do that. We like one another.

We like to be with one another and I think that there's part of that that needs to be cultivated, amen, and there's part of that that God's got to do.

So you can't, on one hand you can't program it, on the other hand you can't just, it's not saying don't do anything.

Yeah, there does need to be cultivation. Love one another, honor one another, seek to be hospitable as the scripture says but I would say this, like, you know, maybe you're listening and you kind of have an idea because of who's maybe been on this podcast about our church but I'm just telling you our church is so mixed.

We have old people, we have young people, we have little children, we have people who are widowed in our church, we have people who have grandchildren in our church.

I mean, like, we have people with health needs, we have people that have big bank accounts and really low bank accounts.

I mean, we have a mix of everyone in our church but the thing that keeps us together and the thing that makes our church beautiful is,

I will say this, it's not emotion and it's not the things that many churches try to get to have, you know, the bond and have this camaraderie.

What bonds us is truth and what bonds us is the gospel and I think that's the only thing.

All these other things are good. You have to have the right doctrines and you have to have right theology and you have to have the view of the church right but I'll just tell you this, if you don't have the true gospel and if you're not bonded together by the truth then the unity and the health of the church will never happen.

Yeah. I think I used this analogy the other day or I have used this analogy before, maybe even on the church, maybe even on this podcast but it's a dumb analogy but suppose there is an island out in the

Pacific and the only food source on this island, get ready, is a

McDonald's. That's all there is. That's all you can eat and so you go to that, the life expectancy of these people is like 38, you know, all they eat all the time is

McDonald's. Just go with me, man, with the analogy. You show up to the island and you ask the people, are you guys healthy?

Well, what are they gonna say? Yeah. Yeah, we're pretty healthy. We think so, yeah.

Well, why are they gonna say that? Because that's all they know. They have, that's their experience and maybe they've lived in a chain of islands and each island, it only has

McDonald's so they've moved from island to island and they've only seen people that have, with the same experiences as them and so everything to them, this is normal.

This is what it looks like and that analogy, I believe, is very applicable to many churches.

Like, are you a healthy church? Well, yeah, well, I mean, we could be better, but yeah, yeah, yeah, we're healthy but going back to what we've been talking about, they haven't seen, they haven't tasted.

They, and I think that goes back to your statement in our conversation, like, we should not look down our noses.

It should break our hearts. Like, you don't even fully understand. You don't know what you don't know, how beautiful the church is and how life together in the church is a beautiful, biblical reality.

It's God's intent for his people and we have to strive after these things.

I don't know, maybe we're kind of going around and around and the episode's going kind of long. Anything else you feel like you just wanna get off your chest or say?

I would, a couple things, sorry. One is maybe if you're listening and you maybe have the

Lord's pricking you that you're not involved in the church as much as you ought and maybe all these things that we're talking about, about eating at each other's houses, about doing life together, about joy and about the unity we have and we laugh at our church and we cry together at our church and we can pray with one another at our church.

That's one of the most beautiful things that our church couldn't do before is we could openly pray for one another.

And you're like, I don't know any of that stuff. Well, I can tell you this, you could start tomorrow morning and you can commit yourself to the church and you can just listen to what

God has said all the way from the beginning that He's been about a people, that He's been about a covenant people.

Even in Exodus, He says, I'm gonna have a people and I'm gonna have a covenant people.

God's always been about His people and if you don't experience what a true healthy church is, commit yourself to the body of Christ, commit yourself to that covenant people.

It's a beautiful thing and it's God's intention for your life, not to be alone and not to be a part of an unhealthy church, but to be a part of a healthy church and His wise plan.

And then I'll say another thing, if you've treated the church maybe like a check box that you just do these things and you're like,

I'm at church every Sunday and I'm doing all the church has to do and you feel like there's no actually love for the church, repent, repent and believe what

God has said about His bride and you can't love the King, you can't love the husband without His bride.

And so repent, turn from that foolishness and that sin, and commit yourself to loving the bride and by extension, loving the husband, loving the

King. Amen. Thank you, brother. This subject comes up a lot on this podcast.

I hope it's kind of the heart of the podcast, the Rural Church Podcast. We're not just about rural churches, although I kind of feel rural churches are sometimes underrepresented in podcast world, but we're just about true and healthy churches and we believe in the mission of Christ and we believe in the advancement of the gospel, which inevitably results in local churches and we long to see local churches healthy.

The church is worthy, she's worthy of fighting for. Jesus bled for her,

Acts 20, 28. God obtained her by the shedding of His own blood. So she is worth our efforts and our prayers and our commitments and even being uncomfortable.

Let's live our lives for the glory of Christ and see that born out in and through local, visible, healthy churches.

G? I don't know how to close the podcast. Okay. Thank you for joining us this week on the

Rural Church Podcast. We'll catch you guys next week. If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what

God's doing. This is His work. If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the poimos, the masterpiece of God.