Adult Sunday School Going Public Chapter 10

Let's open our time together in a word of prayer. Father, we are so thankful,

Lord, for your mercies, which are in you every morning. Lord, we thank you for the gift of life and breath that you've bestowed on us.

We pray, God, that we would make good use of this gift, even today, as we gather in the

Lord's day to receive instruction for our spiritual health and well -being. We ask,

Lord, that you'd impart to us this morning a measure of your Spirit to lead us on level ground, to guide and enlighten our minds, so that we may receive your truth as was promised by the

Lord Jesus Christ, that the Spirit of God would lead us into all truth. We pray, God, that as we go about this material today, coming almost to a conclusion, that we wouldn't just internalize this in terms of pure knowledge, which puffs up, but,

Lord, that this would stir our hearts to a level of obedience and care and concern for your word, which is truth.

And we pray these things in Jesus' name, amen. All right. Oh, beloved, we've been going through this book several months now.

We're almost at the end of it. We've got about two more chapters left. And so, just kind of, I almost feel like we, like if you don't know the premise, and you haven't come to a pretty firm grasp of the premise, then we've probably done something wrong in this study.

But the premise, again, is fairly simple. And it touches on the importance of the two ordinances that the

Lord Jesus Christ gave the church, namely baptism and the Lord's Supper. And the premise is simple.

What makes someone a Christian? And what makes someone a member of a church? Okay. Well, we know the first answer is kind of easy.

Everyone mostly agrees on the first, which is what makes a Christian a

Christian is faith, repentance, and belief in the Lord Jesus Christ, right? So that regenerative work of the

Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit comes and dwells in the person, that person is now a Christian, okay?

Well, what makes that Christian now a member of a church? It's, what's the sign?

Baptism. You know, again, there's a formality to church membership.

And just like there's a formality to marriage. Now, the objections are typical.

I was just talking to, he's kind of a new friend of mine. He's not a believer. His name is

Jay. And Jay has a beautiful girlfriend, and they've been dating for like five years.

And so I asked him, I said, Jay, when are you gonna get married? I just had this conversation with him on Friday. I said,

Jay, when are you gonna get married? And he says, man, I'm not, I don't wanna get married.

Men have no incentive to get married today, in today's world. You know, I love her, I take care of her. As long as that relationship is there, you know, she doesn't have to worry.

And it's almost like the argument people make for non -baptism in church membership, right?

It's, man, you know, I don't really need it. It's not really necessary. I don't really need to commit myself to someone or something.

You know, it's just all formalities anyways. And that's probably how the guy thinks.

But how do you think, you know, and I can't speak for her, but how do you imagine the woman might feel? You think she feels the same way that he does?

Probably not, right? Because what does a woman look for? Security, that's right.

What were you saying, sister? Yeah, commitment, security, right? And that's what women are typically looking for in a relationship.

You know what the Lord Jesus wants of his people? Commitment and security, you know?

And so when we think about church membership and we say, well, why do we have to be baptized? Why do we have to go through this process and all these things?

You know, it kind of, from a worldly perspective, how people treat dating and marriage, it may seem as a just cumbersome, maybe legalistic process, but you know, you told that to your girlfriend you've been dating for five years that you're not interested in marriage, right?

It speaks more to your lack of commitment, your lack of discipline, your lack of foresight than anything else.

And so here we come to this conclusion in chapter 10, which is where we're at. In chapter nine, we were answering some of the objections.

In chapter 10, we're gonna turn the tables on some of those objections and look at, you know, essentially objections that the other side who advocate for open membership would have to answer.

And so again, in this book, we've been introduced to the concept of like open membership, closed membership. Can we define those terms real quick?

Open membership means? Yeah, so like, you know, basically it's like, it's a buffet table, you know?

So long as you pay the bare minimum, you get all the benefits of the buffet table. So it means you can be baptized, not baptized, paedo -baptized, credo -baptized, you can, you know, those things are not important.

And essentially, this is kind of the model we had at our previous church at Crossroads in Wisconsin. And I was not an advocate for it by any stretch of the imagination.

As a matter of fact, I think that's what led to kind of the downfall of that ministry and that church is having such a loose view of church membership and not having a well -defined theology and ecclesiology.

So the open church membership is basically, you know, hey, you, there is no defined membership process.

You are a member if you wanna be. And there's a very, what's called low barrier of entry, right, so there's not a lot of things that would hinder you from being a member.

Sort of like my first church I went to when I, after I got saved, I was 16 years old when I got saved and then when

I was about 17 years old, I started asking questions about membership and baptism. So I got baptized at 17 years old and I wanted, and they don't, they didn't have the same view where, okay, you're baptized and then you're a member.

So I was baptized and then I became a member several months afterwards after going through like membership process.

But my youth pastor at the time, I told him, hey, I wanna be a member of the church. And he says, great, you're a member.

And I said, that's it. And so, and at the time I thought, well, how cool is that, you know? It's just, you know, it's so open, it's so free.

It's almost like very liberal and it's like, you know, it kind of feels nice to a degree where if I just wanna be,

I can be. But again, that presents some challenges and dangers that will be addressed in this coming chapter.

Any thoughts or questions so far on chapter 10 if you've gotten a chance to read over it? Besides the open membership thing was just about, he really believes that infant baptism is where it's at and that's, you know, a thing from God.

He's gonna be upset if there are all these children that haven't been baptized. I mean, he really takes it all the way to the end.

But a lot of times, it's just something that happened to them and they can feel kind of awkward about getting re -baptized because they've been following God, so it's not, it's that particular error, you know, they kind of just overlook because it just, you know.

Yeah, there are some challenges theologically, right, that people are gonna run into. Now, I think a question that may come up is can a paedo -baptist join a

Baptist church? The answer is yes if they get baptized and they can hold a personal position that differs from us, you know, and still be in fellowship over the great majority of the faith, they just would not be allowed to obviously, you know, teach publicly that position.

But, you know, you could hold positions that are contrary on the lower end of the spectrum, right?

Okay, let's look at some of these objections. Seven arguments against open membership. The first one is that open membership builds on error.

Now, again, this is a pretty direct shot at paedo -baptism in a sense, right?

It was kind of the position of this church for a long time, up until recently, actually, as well, where you could, you know, if you were baptized, you know, as an infant and then went through confirmation, all these things, we would permit you into membership.

And, you know, we would just say that the administration of the baptism was wrong, but, you know, we changed that position to adhere more closely to the

Bible. And so, open membership builds on a couple errors, not just a theological error, but also a practical error.

Open membership tries to solve a practicality issue, which is, again, high, low entry, barrier of entry, right?

And so, in the world today, we've really moved away from high barrier of entries in regard to, let's say, social programs, right?

So if you have a, if you wanna get on welfare, 10, 20 years ago, it was pretty hard to get on welfare, right, you'd have to, like, really, like, go through a lot of hoops, you had to prove, because you're taking taxpayer money and you're using it, and so it was not an easy thing to get welfare 10, 20 years ago.

What the social, you know, climate has done is that it has shifted that, where now, man, it's real easy to get welfare, it's really easy.

And because they think that, okay, well, if you are poor, you're less likely to bother with some of the, you know, hoops that you have to jump through in order to qualify for welfare, and so that would be, you know, so they traded a high barrier for a low barrier entry.

The same is true for voting rights in the United States, right, so you hear the debate politically between voter

ID, no voter ID, right? And the argument for no voter ID, like in California, where everyone gets mailed ballots,

I've got people who, I know people who are, don't have a legal status here in California, and they get mail -in ballots, it's crazy.

And so the philosophy behind that thinking is, well, voting is a right, and we have to lower the barrier of entry for every voter so that everyone can vote.

Well, we know they do that because they wanna favor a particular party, and they also think that there's a racial component to it, right?

So if you had voter ID laws, they think it would proportionately, you know, favor whites over blacks or Hispanics, because apparently

Hispanics and blacks can't get an ID, right, and so it's kind of the bigotry of low expectations, and so again, the society is moving towards low barrier of entry in almost every field, okay?

In our political realm, in the social realm. If you just look at kind of, you know, there was a controversy with Harvard recently,

I'm not sure if you saw that, you know, the president of Harvard was not willing to condemn anti -Semitism, for instance.

And the reasoning, well, and she was a black woman who probably really shouldn't have had that position in the first place.

She doesn't have anything really crazy academically that would have led her to have that job in the first place.

So this was likely a diversity hire in the first place, and again, 20, 30, 40 years ago, in order to become the president of Harvard, you probably had to be like among the top 1 % of people in academia, and now, just based upon, you know, your racial makeup, maybe you are part of a minority group, that puts you automatically straight to the top.

So again, these are low barrier of entries. Should we, as a church, should we, as a people of God, embrace that low barrier model?

No, because what, how is that working in the world? It's going great, isn't it?

The world is just doing great with all these low barrier entry models in our places of academia, in our places of politics, in our places of social welfare, voting.

It really is damaging society. Again, people think that open liberalism is the answer to our woes, but the more we've liberalized, the more problems we've actually developed.

And instead of moving toward a more cohesive society, we are becoming more divisive than ever, and partly is because of this low barrier of entry to a lot of things.

Obviously, when the United States Constitution was first written, only male property owners had the right to vote, and it's because they had the responsibilities, and they were the ones who were gonna get drafted.

They were the ones who had to pay taxes on the properties. They were the ones who were the productive class. And so, as we've opened and liberalized,

I'm not saying I'm for or against any of these things, but it's just a fact of the matter that as we've opened and liberalized things, things have gotten worse and worse to some degree.

And in some areas, we've gotten better. In other areas, we've digressed greatly. And so, when we look at the church, we should not consider a liberal open, and I'm not using the term liberal in a political sense.

I'm using the term liberal in the sense of of the meaning of the word being open. We shouldn't embrace a liberal view on church membership, which denigrates the sanctity and the responsibility of the church member, which is, again, why voting rights have changed drastically in America, is because we don't see this as a sacred civic duty where you have an investment in it.

Now, it's just open for everyone. And so, the same, if applied to the church, will be disastrous for the church.

And so, that error that open membership builds on, it's not just a theological error, it's an ecclesiastical error as well, in that it will bring in more wolves, more individuals who are not truly regenerated, and the more you muddy the waters of church and of church membership, the more disastrous the result.

And so, if you wonder why American Christianity seems to be apostatizing more and more, look at some of the high churches, the

Anglican Church, for instance, the Methodist Church, even now, within theologically conservative churches like the

Southern Baptist Convention, you see more and more leaders and churches deviating from the historical faith, right?

Back in the 1950s, for instance, you had this movement within, really starting in the 30s and 40s, but you had this movement within modern

Congregationalism, or not Congregationalism, but Congregationalist, the denomination, and then also

Anglican and Methodism. You had the academia, the professors at the institutions and seminaries of these denominations, they really began to embrace what was called a critical view of Scripture, and as they embraced a critical view of Scripture, they began to apostatize and move away from the authority of Scripture, and you had people like bishops, anyone ever heard of the name

Bishop Sponge? Sponge? Sponge? He was a, I believe,

Anglican minister and theologian who became quite popular in the 1970s, 80s, 90s, and he died maybe 10 years ago, and he began to teach things like hell didn't exist, that homosexuality was acceptable, that all these things were really liberalizing away from the orthodox view of Christianity, and his view became mainstream within modern -day

Anglicanism, so he also began to embrace a more open view of church membership and communion and baptism, and all these things, of course, followed, and so why

I bring this up is because the more a church liberalizes, the more that the institutions liberalize, you're headed on a course to apostasy as a church or as a denomination, so again, a low view of church membership will have disastrous results, and partly it's because, look at Bishop Sponge, for instance, within the

Anglican church, when you become a minister, you have to basically take an oath, and similarly, if you're an officer of the

United States, you have to take an oath to the Constitution. Anglican ministers have to take an oath to the

Scriptures and to the doctrine of the church, and part of that confession that an

Anglican minister has to verbalize at his confirmation, at his ordination, is that he has to protect the faith, and clearly, he did not take that oath seriously, because he became a great defector of the faith, and so covenants matter, church membership matters, these issues matter, so the more we deviate from them, the more disastrous they'll be.

The second thing that is brought up here in page 196 is open membership requires churches to accommodate not just error, but willful inconsistency, and what way is that true from the open membership model?

How are they just not embracing error, but how are they inconsistent? How are they inconsistent?

They're actually accepting two different views of baptism, one which we don't even consider baptism, which is paedo -baptism, and then the credo -baptism, which

I hope we can leave. I mean, if somebody came in and said, I refuse to be baptized, we would not, but if somebody who has what we consider to have not been baptized, because they're paedo -baptist, we allow that, then it's the same thing.

Yeah, really what it comes down to is like, if paedo -baptism is, there's a line here

I want to read, if paedo -baptism is biblical, then he is commanded by God to have his children baptized, yet even if he has the boldness to ask, the church will refuse, right?

So if you have a, it's always best to go where you will have theological consistency.

One of the schools I had considered going to when I was in seminary was a school called

SUM, School of Urban Ministries, and this is a seminary in Chicago, and I really liked the school,

I loved the people there, but this was a charismatic Pentecostal university, and the dean of students was vehemently anti -Calvinist, and I was a

Calvinist, I've always, since I've been saved, I've been a Calvinist. And so, he made it very clear, hey, you're great, you're fine to attend if you're a

Calvinist, but just know we're gonna vehemently teach against it. And I said, well, that helped me make my decision that this is probably not the school for me, because it'll just be inconsistent with my values, it'll be inconsistent with my theological convictions, and it's usually best to go where you're gonna have some consistency in your convictions.

And so, whether right and wrong, it's always better for a person to be consistent than inconsistent.

And so again, can a person be a Paedo -Baptist and be part of a Baptist church? Absolutely. It's gonna be awkward for them, though, right?

It's gonna be, it's never fun to be in a place where you're at odds with the vast majority of your brethren on an important theological issue.

And hopefully, in that case, that person could be one to, you know, by the biblical argument, for Credo -Baptism.

But again, you know, an open membership allows that inconsistency to be even greater, because if at least there's a membership standard and process, then that person's gonna make that decision kind of like I did for school, right?

And looking at all the options and saying, okay, well, this probably isn't the best school for me. Even though I really appreciate these guys,

I really love what they're doing in the city of Chicago, these are all great things that I'd love to be a part of, but, you know, overall, our values don't align.

And so that made the decision for me not to join that school. And similarly, if there is a membership process in a church, it helps people come to those decision points, versus an open church membership where, you know, everything is just kind of appeased, and there is no process, and you can, you know, and really, what happens when there's no standard is there's no, when there's no standard, basically anything goes, right?

So, oh, it doesn't matter if I hold onto this conviction or that conviction. It actually minimizes convictions.

It minimizes the importance of having convictions. And so, again, open church requires churches to accommodate not just error, but willful inconsistencies.

And that's a dangerous thing. You don't want to develop a culture of inconsistency in the life of the church. The third thing that's brought up here is open church or open membership privileges the individual conscience over the authority of the local church.

Can anyone parse that one out for me a little bit? What do you think is meant by that statement? That's actually, this is probably, like, the best argument against open membership.

It privileges the individual conscience over the authority of the local church. Think about that and the implications.

How important is the conscience? It's important, right?

What is the proper place of the Christian conscience? Is it above authority of Scripture or below the authority of Scripture?

It's below, right? So, in the hierarchy of authority, you have, obviously, the Lord Jesus Christ, head of His church.

He's given us His word, the Bible. That's the authority for the church. And then, the church derives authority from the

Bible. So, you have Christ, Scripture, by the church.

And then, you have the conscience of the believer, right?

And so, the conscience of the believer is, in a sense, can be an authority. We know this because Paul argues such when he says, some of your consciences are troubled by the eating of certain foods.

Some of your consciences are troubled by the observing of certain festivals, by circumcision, all these things, right?

And so, not that it is the final authority, but Paul says that anything that's not done out of conviction is sin, right?

So, if it doesn't sit well with your conscience, you're sinning against your conscience, and that's not a good place to be, right?

And so, the conscience matters, right? It is important, but in the hierarchy of authority, it is subservient to Christ, Scripture, and the church, right?

Yes, Emmanuel. Church, those are ecumenical councils that are derived from the church, right?

And so, that's where I would put the creeds. Is that above our conscience? Yes, yes.

And the reason I would say yes to that, for instance, the Nicene Creed, the Apostle's Creed, the

Athanasian's Creed, those creeds are the standard bearer of Orthodox Christianity that were derived from Scripture, but as the church came together in these great ecumenical councils, in the first eight centuries of the church, the church had seven ecumenical councils, and ecumenical just means that all the churches came together, and we hashed some of these issues out, right?

So, the Nicene being kind of recognized among the first of these ecumenical councils, and there's a lot of conspiracy theories surrounding it because of Constantine and all these things, and this is where the

Bible was written and stuff, and all just nonsense. But what was the Nicene Creed in response to?

The Aryan controversy, there was a bishop called Arius. Actually, he wasn't a bishop, he was actually just a pastor, and the pastor and the bishop of that area was of Alexandria, and so he was making an argument that Jesus was divine, he was like God, but he wasn't of the same substance as the

Father. So, he was similar in substance, but not same substance.

So, the debate arose within the church, and so Constantine newly crowned

Christianity as the religion of the state, and so he's like, all right, we can't have these quarrels, break up the new major religion of the state, so you guys need to hash this out, figure it out, and whatever you believe, great.

Constantine himself didn't have a lot of, had no say in the outcome, and he was quite ambivalent to it all.

He couldn't, he didn't get it. He's like, this is so stupid. He's like, this is so dumb, who cares? You worship

Jesus either way. You know, he really took this attitude. Matter of fact, he was baptized by Arius' disciples, and so he didn't take, he didn't really see the value of this whole debate.

So, he really didn't contribute anything other than telling these people to figure it out. And so, the authority of the church came into play there because all the leaders of the church, all the bishops came together, and they made this, they came to this conclusion that Jesus was of the same substance as the

Father, right? So, that has weight and authority. Why? Because one, it was based upon scripture, and two, it was because the church came together and adopted this view.

I would put our confession among those things, right? So, we are a confessional 689 church. We didn't just come up with that in a vacuum.

This was done by great deliberation, by great minds coming together and hashing these things out. And so, creeds and confessions have authority, but it is the church.

So, that's where I would put it. It is church authority because the church came together and said, we adopt these things, and we hold these things to be true, right?

Is that gonna help with that? Okay, yeah, long -winded answer, sorry. I get on tangents.

Tangents, you get into what about church discipline? I mean, that's below that because when you join a church, you're being willing to submit to that authority, which is always, you know.

Yeah, and again, when it comes to what's at stake here is like baptism, right?

So, our view of baptism comes at play. I think I shared with you guys several weeks or months ago,

I have a friend of mine who's just really religiously confused. He was a

Jehovah's Witness, loved the Jehovah's Witnesses, and now he just kind of believes in some really weird stuff, and he doesn't really hold to a church.

And so, but he felt the conviction that he needed to be re -baptized, not as a Jehovah's Witness. And so, but he didn't want to be baptized by any church or any denomination because he didn't want to be affiliated with anybody.

So, he literally went on Craigslist and like put a listing saying 50 bucks for anyone who would baptize me.

And so, some random guy who's not even a Christian, you know, said, okay, sure, I'll do it. This is weird, but 50 bucks is 50 bucks, and he baptized him for 50 bucks.

And in that sense, man, it's just weird. But it was fascinating because it just shows such a disdain for the authority of Scripture and the authority of the church.

And so, his individual conscience, was it right or wrong? Wrong, right?

So, the conscience in itself is not the greatest of metrics for, you know, telling us what is right or wrong.

People's consciences are based usually upon their level of understanding. So, if you have a low level of understanding of Scripture, you're gonna have a low level of accountability in terms of your conscience.

And so, you have to appeal to a greater authority. And so, open membership privileges the individual conscience because it says, basically, yeah,

I get this is a command in Scripture, but it's not that big of a deal to me. And I had a guy at our previous church as well, spoken about him often where, you know, he was even a youth pastor at a point, and he had been a

Christian for 20 years, never been baptized, never been baptized. And the answer was, no one ever made a big deal about it.

And so, yeah, that's, and to me, that obviously, there's a responsibility that he had of, you know, ignorance there.

But it also was an indictment against all the churches that he had been part of, and that have held essentially an open membership model, and the lack of discipleship that that produces, right?

Yes. Yeah, great question.

Right. Eschatology and stuff, right? Yeah, so this is because of a discussion of the major and the minors.

It also, there's a practicality to it, right? So, when you go through the membership process here at our church, you go through 689, and we teach through it, and a person doesn't necessarily have to agree with every jot and tittle in the 689.

You don't need to, right? It's not, it's not, it's not, it's, obviously, you need to agree with the importance, right? It's like, if you deny the

Trinity, heaven, hell, the resurrection, then, okay, we're talking about major doctrines that you've deviated, not just from our confession, but you've deviated from Scripture, right?

So, again, the hierarchy of importance, the Lord Jesus Christ, head of the church, Scripture, which is his word, and then, the authority of the church, and then, of course, the individual conscience.

So, the, you can have a disagreement with something like eschatology, like not agree that the

Pope is the Antichrist. The Pope is the Antichrist, by the way, all right? So, and in our constitution for our church here,

I think we have a very, I think we're inconsistent, because we have kind of a loose basis of our theology, where we say that we, essentially, loosely hold on to, or, you know,

I forget what the loose language is, Dale probably knows, we hold on to, tentatively, to the 1689 and to, like, another confession, and with the caveats of this one being, like, the

Antichrist being the Pope and other things, whereas, you know, again, like, yeah, I think you either wholeheartedly embrace something, or you don't, and if you don't, then why even appeal to it?

Why appeal to it? I think that's an inconsistency, and so, I think that the 1689 should be our standard barrier in terms of doctrine.

That doesn't mean that you have to wholeheartedly grieve everything that's in there, for instance, like the eschatology part, and the reason why, for instance, when you look at the ecumenical councils of the church, the ecumenical councils of the church usually hold on to big theological issues in common, but then it leaves certain things purposefully ambiguous.

So, for instance, all the creeds agree, Jesus is God, Jesus is truly man, the

Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are one, you know, there is heaven and hell, there is a resurrection of the dead, and Jesus is coming back.

All the details in between, though, of how Jesus is coming back, and when the judgment is, and all those things are left blank, ambiguous.

Why? Because there's a lot of details there that people may have a different understanding of.

And so, I would like to look at our confession in a similar manner. Our confession differs from the creeds, in that our confession is far more in -depth, right?

So, you know, the ecumenical councils came up with these creeds, which are maybe a paragraph, two paragraphs at most, versus us, that we have like, you know, 40 chapters of teaching.

And so, that's where, you know, there's a difference, obviously, but I think, again, having a consistency,

I would say we should have a standard bearer, and on the issues that truly matter in those doctrinal statements of faith, that's where we need to be in agreement on.

And there is error for people in their individual understanding and consciences to deviate in certain points.

But, and how we determine that would be major, minor, and also the overall spirit of that individual in not promoting something that is purposely against the church's position, right?

And so, you might have someone who really disagrees with, again, just the easy one,

Pope being the Antichrist, and that's fine, yeah, like, yeah, you can have that view.

I mean, you're wrong, but you can have that view. And, but if you start teaching against it vehemently, that's where a problem would probably come in.

And not necessarily with that statement, because, again, in our Constitution, we do put that caveat, which I think, you know, hinders us from truly embracing that.

But, but yeah, like, baptism being an example. If you had a paedo -baptist conviction, you could still join the church, but if you started to teach against the position of the church, then you'd be at odds with the church, and then, you know, that's where, you know, issues would arise, correct, correct.

Or have been baptized by a, you know, by a true church, yeah.

Does that help? Yeah, that's a great, yeah, great discussion there on that.

So the next one is open membership, page 200. Either creates unbiblical distinctions among a church's members, or requires a church to pare down its convictions.

Now, again, the question of conviction comes in. Conviction and conscience are very closely linked together.

And so, if you have a conviction, that, you know, your conscience, if you go against your convictions, is going to be wounded.

And so, open membership either creates unbiblical distinctions among church members.

What does that mean? How does that happen? Because if you have open membership, you inevitably have people who are baptized and not baptized, right?

So in a sense, you are now creating a two -tier membership within this open membership model, right?

You have the baptized Christians and the unbaptized Christians. You have the paedo -baptist Christians, and you have the credo -baptist

Christians. And you create this distinction that just isn't helpful or biblical, right?

And so, again, there's an inconsistency that's underlining this open membership model.

And again, it requires the church to pare down its convictions. This is how I felt in my last church, where I had pretty strong convictions about baptism and church membership, but the church leadership just weren't having it.

And part of it was, again, an appeal to practicality. And, you know, the first thing that I remember when

I had kind of an argument with one of my elders, and I said, why can't we be consistent on this?

And he says, well, this family is a leader, are leaders in the church.

The wife does Sunday school, and the husband does the worship in the morning, and they're not members, and they don't wanna become members, and so if we push this, then we'll lose them.

Okay, well, that's stuff that churches deal with. So what do you do there, right? Here's an important, influential family, and they have a conviction that they're, because they had a bad experience in the previous church, and they were members, and they don't wanna be members anymore.

So what do you do there? How do you bridge that gap? Yes, Emmanuel.

So what would you do if you were the pastor? What's that?

You gotta go. You gotta go? Oof, that's not really loving of you. You are so divisive, pastor.

Yeah, it's tough, yeah.

There you go, that's right, that's right. You teach on it. Yes. This is a real situation.

Yeah, yeah, I had to go through this. This is stuff I had to go through, yeah. You can always trust

Dale to be the one to. Yeah. And now he's a pastor, yes.

So in the church, in the development of that situation, I was woefully outnumbered.

I had to come into a context where, again, church membership was not a thing.

Sturgeon Bay, where I lived, is a weird town. It's just weird. It is extremely cliquey, and the whole place feels like a country club, right?

And if you are born at least two, three generations in Door County, then you're one of them.

But if you're not, you'll never be one of them, right? And so you're always, one of the first things that they ask you when you move to this town is for your last name.

And I just thought, okay, that's kind of weird. People don't really focus a lot on last names nowadays. But the reason they do is because they wanna see if you're like one of the eight to 12 names that everyone knows, right?

Like the Lautenbachs, or the Owens, or all these names that are kind of entrenched in that little town.

And if you're not part of it, then you're an outsider. And our church at that time was kind of a church of outsiders.

Everyone was super sensitive to some of these things, and so kind of a response to that clickiness was that we wanna be an open and inclusive church, right?

And the appeal to that was that, well, if you're an outsider, we're a church of outsiders in that sense.

So people who are typically not welcomed in this very clicky town, you're welcomed here. So that's the context

I was walking into. Now, I walk into this church context. Church had already been in existence several years before I became the pastor, and they didn't have a well -defined ecclesiology, meaning that they didn't have a well, they were essentially an open church membership model.

They didn't know that they had that. These are not things that they had intentionally built upon. But they were doing what they thought worked best for them.

So practicality over scripture. And then, so once I get there and I look at, they give me the list of people who are members and people who are attenders, people who are regulars, and people who are kind of inactive.

And I said, okay, so here are people who are actual members, so there is a membership process.

And then here's who aren't members. And it was a shocking list, because I was like, wait, this person's on the worship team, this person is

Sunday school, this person does this, this person does that, and they're not members? Like, how does that work?

And so when I got confronted with this, I said, I wanna change this. Let's get these folks to be members.

They said, well, that'll never work, and we're just gonna lose them. And so I was outvoted in pushing this.

And it wasn't until almost two years in where I could at least hold membership classes, right?

And the irony of this is that those people, that family, great family, never became members of that church until there was a mutiny.

And essentially what happened on my way out, the church wasn't happy with the way

I was being treated on my way out. And they responded by trying to essentially regain control of the church.

The church was elder -ruled, meaning that even if you were a member, there was no voting, there was no, you had no way of having a say in the direction of the church.

And so the way I was brought in was, I had preached a Sunday, and then the church, we had like a kind of a potluck where everyone got to interview me kind of thing.

And then I went to the pastor's house afterwards that Sunday, and the elder came over, and he says, we'd like to give you the job.

And I said, the church didn't even vote? Or did they vote after I left?

Or how'd that go? I was like, no, we think you're the guy, and we're just gonna give it to you. And I was like, oh, this is gonna be trouble.

From the get -go, I knew that wasn't gonna work. And so when I came in as a pastor, the previous month, we had about $8 ,000 in giving.

The month that I come in, it plummeted to 4 ,000. And it was because people didn't get to have, it's not that they didn't like me, but they didn't have a say in the process.

And so what did they do? They voted with their pockets. They voted with their money. Even though there was no vote, they voted in other means.

And so it took me about a year and a half to really build a reputation and a rapport of the church where they now appreciated, loved me, trusted me, because the way

I was brought in wasn't great. And so the way they brought me in put me at a disadvantage.

And again, that's a bad church model right there. And so the church didn't agree with how the church was governed.

It was not a congregational system as we have today here at our church, which is a really, the basis of this book is what is biblical church membership?

And part of biblical church membership matters because the government of the church matters. If you don't have a congregational system, then what authority does the individual member have?

You are called to be priests, a kingdom of priests. You have priestly duties, responsibilities, roles.

How do you exercise those keys of the kingdom? It can only be done within a congregational system. So this is a biblical, it's not just a kind of a democratic system that was invented by the

Puritans. This is the biblical model for church ecclesiology.

And so that church ended up dissolving, or not dissolving, but splitting, and the people who were not members became members so that they could vote the leadership out, right?

And now they started their own church, and now they're members of that church. So now they see the importance of church membership.

Last time I was there in December in Wisconsin, the family and I went over there, and I preached on the importance of church membership.

So things that I couldn't do while I was a pastor there, I'm now able to help them with, and see them grow in that, which is fantastic.

So again, these are the real -world issues that come up with church membership.

Churches split over this. Relationships are broken over this. It's really an important thing.

So the fifth thing is open membership. Overreaches. It tries to resolve a tension that's beyond our power to resolve.

This is a pretty easy one. There is a tension there, right? Again, we recognize that here in our church, that people, because of the closed membership nature of our church, and our closed communion, then people feel sometimes uncomfortable, right?

When we do communion, for instance, right? Because it doesn't, as soon as someone is excluded, it feels weird, right?

I've been in churches where I refrain from communion because of their standard, because I'm not a member there, and they have an even more closed communion than we do, and I respect it, but even just being there in a pew while everyone's partaking, you feel weird.

It doesn't feel great, right? It feels like you're missing out on something, and no one wants to feel like you're missing out, right?

There's a word for that the young people use, FOMO, right? Fear of missing out, okay?

And so, yeah, there's a tension there, but that tension isn't meant to be resolved by changing the standard, right?

That tension is resolved by becoming a member, right? That's how you solve the tension.

It's not by changing the standard, right? And so, again, open membership overreaches by going beyond the scriptures.

Any questions on that? Six, open membership arbitrarily privileges the

Lord's supper over baptism. So, what inevitably happens, obviously, is when you have open membership, and people are baptized, not baptized, baptized as infants, baptized as adults, they all get a share in the communion, right?

And so, a lot of churches, a lot of evangelical churches have open communions, meaning that if you attend, it is up to the individual to decide whether or not to participate, right?

Why is that dangerous? Why is that not wise? Why is that unbiblical? Yes, once again?

Anyone else? Argument against open communion? What is communion in terms of, so you have baptism, which is the initial oath, and what is communion?

What is it? The renewing of the oath, right? So, if you go into communion not being baptized, you're not accomplishing anything.

Okay. It's like celebrating a, what are those called?

It's like trying to renew your vows when you're married, but not having been married. It doesn't make sense, it doesn't work.

You lose the significance and the spiritual presence of the communion, because that initial oath, sign, wasn't taken to begin with.

And so, baptism is the initial oath sign of the covenant, and Lord's Supper is the renewing of that oath, covenant.

And so, it completely, so open membership favors the Lord's Supper over baptism, and without understanding the theological implications and casualties that happen when you do so, right?

And you actually dishonor the Lord's table by doing that, and you do bring a level of judgment upon yourselves for doing so.

Does that make sense? Yeah. So again, baptism is the initial oath sign, and Lord's Supper is the renewing oath sign of the new covenant.

And so, yeah, one has to precede the other, and it has to be done biblically in order for it to be of value, right?

So that's the danger of open membership, is it arbitrarily favors the Lord's Supper over baptism, and it dishonors the

Lord's Supper. Seven, open membership effectively makes baptism optional.

Boy, is that true. Again, people have a wrong view of baptism in evangelicalism.

I almost, I respect paedobaptists in the sense that they understand the mandatory nature of baptism, which is why they baptize babies, because they know it's requirement, it is necessary, versus a lot of people who are creedobaptists now view baptism as a solely optional thing.

And they always point to, like I had this, again, my co -elder at our previous church, man, you know, he would argue, you know, against baptism by saying, well, the thief on the cross, the thief on the cross, the thief on the cross, and it's like, okay,

I get it, but the thief on the cross couldn't come down the cross to get baptized, right? So you're talking about something that's totally circumstantial, totally different, really an anomaly, in a sense.

And you're making that the standard, right? And that's just theologically ignorant and laziness.

The thief on the cross does not invalidate the need for baptism, A, because Christ had not yet accomplished his sacrificial work establishing the new covenant in his blood.

Therefore, you know, the man on the cross, the thief on the cross, was still under the old covenant system.

So people don't recognize that, people don't realize that. You know, when Jesus says to him, truly

I say to you, you will be with me in paradise, where do you think they went? Huh?

They went to Hades, they didn't go to heaven. You know how we know they didn't go to heaven? It's because Jesus did not ascend to the heavens until 40 days after the resurrection, okay?

The ascension to heaven, okay? No one has ascended to heaven, but he who descended from heaven, the son of man, right?

So Christ, when he told the man that you'll be with me in paradise, he wasn't talking about heaven, he was talking about Hades, which

I would make that distinction. Not everyone would make that distinction, but I would.

And so this man was not part of the new covenant, you know, arrangement.

So he was saved, he was probably the last person saved under the old covenant system. And so trying to use that as the standard of the new covenant is pretty dishonest, it's pretty dishonest.

And so, yeah, it makes baptism optional by lowering the barrier of entry to church membership.

And so, again, that leads to a whole host of theological and practical issues that erode the foundation of any church and denomination.

Once you open the floodgates and you lower the barrier of entry, the pagans will come in and it's only a matter of time before you're all pagans, right?

So, say again?

So my conviction is that everyone who died prior to the new covenant age went to Hades, right?

So Hades in the Greek, Sheol in the Hebrew, same place. We know that this is where King David was in Acts 2.

Acts 2 tells us that King David did not ascend to heaven. It says that he died and his body is still amongst us.

When there's a reference to the grave or to a tomb, it's usually also, it's a dual meaning, it's not just a grave, it's also what that grave represents, spiritual

Hades, spiritual Sheol. And so David had not ascended to heaven. That's Peter's argument in Acts chapter two.

And then he says that Christ is the only one who has ascended. This is after the ascension.

And so he who was the first Christ was the resurrection. So Ephesians chapter three and four seem to indicate that at the ascension,

Jesus brought with him a host of captives, right? And so borrowing from the language of Psalm 68 where the king rides victoriously over his enemies and he leaves the captives that were under bondage from the opposing system, from the opposing kingdom, and he frees them, demonstrating that Christ has freed the

Old Testament saints from the bonds of Sheol and they're now with him, which is why Paul can say he who is absent from the body is to be present with the

Lord, and so that a person, when they die, they immediately go into the presence of the Lord.

Revelation chapter six gives us this vision where there's, the souls that were martyred for Jesus are in now, they're now in the presence of God and they're crying out until we will, sovereign

Lord, holy and just, will you not avenge us? And so there seems to be a shift in the

New Testament where people, when they die, they no longer go to Sheol, except if they're wicked, they go to Sheol, but the people who are believers, they go straight into the presence of the

Lord and it seems to be a new thing. This wasn't the expectation in the

Old Covenant, namely because all the prophets and kings said that they would die and go to Sheol.

Jonah, when he's in the belly of the fish, he prays to be concealed in Sheol. Job prays to go to Sheol.

Everyone has this expectation of dying and going to Sheol and it seems completely distinct and different from heaven.

And so I would say that Jesus, when he ascended, he brought with him a host of captives, being the

Old Testament saints, and led them to glory. This is actually kind of the early view of the church.

The early church viewed this favorably. Some of the, some of the reformed, in reformed history and the

Puritans did not have that same view, but what seems to be the predominant view in the early

Christian church is the view that I'm advocating for. Does that make sense? Yeah, so paradise in the

Old Testament is Sheol. So there's two compartments and Jesus teaches this in Luke 16, where he says that there's two people, both die, one is wicked, one is good, the rich man

Lazarus, and one wakes up in torment, he's in Hades. The other one wakes up and he's in Abraham's bosom, paradise, and he says there's a great chasm fixed between them.

And so think like the Grand Canyon, one side is terrible, one side is lovely. And they can communicate back and forth because one says, you know, they're yelling over this chasm, but they can't go to the other side, right?

And so, you know, I would say that, you know, Sheol, you know, had a component for the wicked and for the righteous, and they were waiting there for the

Lord Jesus Christ, which is probably why 1 Peter 3 says that when Jesus died, he went in the spirit and he preached to those who were in prison.

Where? Hades, Sheol, because that's where the Bible says he descended, he descended into Hades. It's what our creeds say as well, that he descended into hell, the word hell there being the

Greek word for Hades. And so he descended into Hades, this is the realm of the dead, he preached to the spirits that were in prison, he led those who were captive up with him.

And so that's how I view the, you know, kind of the underworld of the Old Testament and the

New Testament. And so that's where I would see a change. Now, people who die today in their sins still go to Hades, which is a place of torment, but it's not hell.

Because according to Revelation, hell is the lake of fire, and it says death in Hades will be tossed into the lake of fire.

So Hades and hell can't be the same thing. Okay, so they're distinct, they're distinct places. Yet there's a commonality in that, you know, both are unpleasant.

But hell, it's like, I would say like, Hades is like the county jail and hell is the state penitentiary, right?

It is a temporary place of judgment, a holding place of judgment for the wicked. And we know that there is a judgment after death.

So it's appointed for man to die once and then the judgment, Hebrews 9, 27, but it also speaks of a final judgment in which people's eternal destinies will be determined.

That would be pretty redundant if people immediately go into hell, the lake of fire, Gehenna, upon death.

So that would be my understanding. Okay, any last thoughts or questions on this?

Yeah, yeah.

They still don't believe. Oh, they still believe that there's soul sleep.

They still believe in soul sleep. So they don't believe that there's a conscious afterlife unless you're one of the 144 ,000.

And so when a Jehovah Witness dies, they believe that they're in Sheol, in the grave, but the grave isn't a spiritual realm.

It's a place of non -existence, right? And so to them, Sheol is, they quote

Ecclesiastes 9, 5, that says that there is no work, nor revising, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in Sheol, the place to which you are to go, right?

And so they say that it's a place of inactivity. So you are not conscious there in Sheol. The Bible doesn't teach that.

The Bible teaches that Sheol is a conscious place of existence. So that would be the distinction between a Jehovah Witness and the

Christian view of Sheol, is that we believe that it is a conscious place of existence, it is a spiritual plane of existence, and that, yeah, that's where we would draw that distinction with Jehovah's Witnesses.

Make sense? All right, we can talk more about this afterwards if you like. So here we are at the conclusion of this chapter.

So next week, we're going to finish up chapter 11, and we're basically done with the book. We might spend two more classes on it, and then we're done.

So let's pray. Father, again, we thank you for your goodness, your mercy.

We pray, Father, that you would help us come to a closer understanding, and agreement on these issues.

As we've seen in this lesson, there are churches that truly deviate from this, and churches that split over these issues.

And Father, we just pray that we would come to a place of peace and harmony as a congregation in regard to these issues,