Targeted Ministries

The Question of Targeted Ministries in the Local Church

Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of Scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the Saints. Before we dig into our topic, we humbly ask you to rate, review, and share the.

Podcast. Thank you. I'm Dylan Hamilton and with me are Michael Deere and Kretzky. We are happy to read another question that we've had sent in recently dealing with the local church and ministry, specifically ministries for different subsets that you might find in the church.

The question reads, should church ministries or communities within the church be provided to certain subsets within the body, i .e. singles, married with kids, minorities, etc. as though they are services offered?

Could you speak to the attitudes that demand such from churches as a requirement for either joining or for leaving your church?

Family-Integrated Church Life and Flexible Ministry Structures

Michael, you want to start us off? Sure. This, I think, is fairly common amongst a lot of churches. If you were to visit maybe a family integrated church or go to a house church or a smaller church, this would probably be absent.

There are many churches who, they gather together as one group and very often they'll have Lord's Supper every week, they'll have a meal, fellowship meal together every week, they'll spend time together afterwards.

In Bible study, they probably don't have a nursery, they probably don't have a cry room. That's great. I think that's awesome. I think that there's a lot to be said good about that model. I would say that the model that goes to the other side, the other pendulum, and says we need to have a hypersensitivity to all these various little groups that they all need their own little space, is the product of probably a couple of things.

One of those would be the influence of the market-driven church, the church growth movement, the obvious salesmanship that you have to have in order to attract a lot of people. The most large churches, the ones that have the the biggest following, will have a lot of focused ministries for these various groups.

In a sense, you're trying to find a way with so many people in one church to help each person that comes there feel like they're being cared for, loved, helped, discipled, and so on. Hey, I'm not going to argue against that, but I think we need to think about whether this is a good, healthy, biblical model.

Now, I mean, our church, we have inherited some traditional Sunday school logistics, models, and so on, that slowly over time have begun to soften and so, I'm personally very, I'm fine taking a very slow roll at this particular challenge, but I don't think it's necessary at all for there to be age-graded Sunday school classes and then divide up the men and the women have their own Sunday school classes and all those things.

I understand that there are some good things that have been done through that structure and that folks who have been ministered to through that structure and have invested their lives in the church, serving by teaching in that structure, have a connection to it and that they would feel probably fairly disoriented if it all went away.

And again, I am a big proponent of small or smaller churches that have a long history of establishment. There's so much good that the Lord does as he builds his church and he washes his bribe with the water of his word and that's a whole different metaphor than he busts it up and melts it down in fire and makes something out the next day.

These things take time. So, over the years, we've been softening the structure that we have here to where we have fewer Sunday school classes, more integrated Sunday school classes. Age groups become less of an issue.

Gender-specific classes have become far less numerous. I think we only have one left now. There used to be a mandatory children's church. All the children had to, you know, they were all kicked out of there.

I mean, in the bulletin, it said all children aged whatever to 12 are dismissed from the church service. And this was like halfway, you know, sing a couple of songs and you are now dismissed. The previous pastor here, who was here for 30 years, kicked all the babies out of the auditorium, you know, no distractions, you know.

I don't find a lot of biblical merit for any of that. I think that, and so what we've been doing here is kind of trying to emphasize to parents, look, if you want to be a part of your child's Sunday school or anything that we're doing with your children, anything, like the Wednesday night children's program.

And of course, that's like four years old to fourth grade. They're all in there like together. So I mean, that's, that's.

Not hyper age. I experienced that Wednesday night. You did? It was, it was.

Something. Yeah. And one year I, I was in charge of that program one whole year. It was me and the youth and all the kids, you know, and it was, it was fun. But parents are always encouraged to be wherever their kids are, no matter what it is, you know, moms, you want to be in the nursery with your kids?

Go. You want to be in the Sunday school? Go. I mean, we're not telling you that you have to be separate from your kids in anything. You want to keep your kids with you? Please do. That's awesome. We are, this is, we're just trying to be helpful here.

We're not trying to insist on hard and fast divisions. Now, that being said, we still have those specifics. We do have some age graded, you know, nursery to elementary, you know, on to the youth. I think some good can be done through that, but I don't think it's necessary for a healthy church.

I think you can have healthy church without it. I think you can have a healthy church with, with it, but I don't think it's healthy if you insist upon it and go, go deep into those divisions, if you understand my, my approach there.

So that being said, you know, the question says should, right? So the question is, should church ministries slash communities within the church be provided? You don't have to. That's my answer to the should.

Is this, is this mandatory? I take the should to be, is this mandatory? And I'm saying it's not. And I think that there, I think that there needs to be, whenever do you have any kind of structures within the church that are not necessarily mandated by the Bible and you just have them there because you're trying to, you know, organize yourselves to do something good, but it's not necessarily, you know, the biblical model, those should be held very loosely, those structures.

Yeah. That, that should not become sacred in any level and we should be ready to change if we need to. Yeah. Given enough time. So we're not, you know, giving everybody whiplash.

Right. I, I, I thought of Titus. So when you're, when we're talking about like Sunday school class, typically you think of a teacher with kids, you know, in the class or an adult teaching a group of people.

If you've done gender segregated, you've got a man teaching other men and women teach other women. And Titus where it talks about older men teaching younger men. Yes. And it's plural there. Older men, plural, teaching the younger men, older women, plural, teaching younger women.

And when you talked about the structures, there's, you know, some churches not have that structure set up in their church, but there are some structures that, that God has set up. So like the family, that's a natural structure that's already there.

And the commands there to women, when it says older women teach younger women, it tells them to teach them certain things that are kind of homebound where you already have a structure for that. And if you're having women over or young ladies over, that seems to be more of a, I'm teaching them through the life that we're living.

I'm doing these things. Come join me. I'll teach you how to, how I do these types of things. Rather than let's sit down in a classroom and talk about, I don't know, baking or talk like this is how I discipline because my kids are all around me.

You're going to see it modeled because it's just through the process of life that, that I'm teaching you these things.

Yeah. Most of the, most of that we see, it looks more organic than contrived. And like, so I'm thinking of like the singles one in my mind. How organic is it for the singles to like group up together and then move themselves off as a separate ministry in the church instead of like, like Titus says, older women teach the younger women.

Well, if you've got a majority of younger women all together, a majority of younger men all together, we need some older men around too. So it's, it's going to organically not just be filled with singles, right?

Like if it's done right, it's not going to organically be filled with that one specific group in my mind.

Yeah. And you're right to identify, to recognize the, the, the relational structure of the family. Obviously, what would a father be teaching his son, but you know, how to be sober, reverent, temperate, sound in faith and loving patience, you know, what else would a mother be teaching her daughter?

Except, you know, being reverent in behavior, not slanderous, not giving too much wine to also, you know, need to love your husband and love the children that God gives you. And, but given Titus's context, right?

He, Paul is encouraging him in the church planting mission on Crete and the Cretans were Cretans. And so they needed a lot of help. And so there needed to be some ongoing teaching and training in, in how to be human, how to live in the image of God.

This is how, this is what it looks like to live in the image of God. You, you need to be instructed in this. Here's how a man should be a man. Here's how a woman should be a woman. You're lacking in this and you need this in your life.

How does that happen? Well, in the current American church context, we're going to have a mini series, we're going to have a conference, we're going to have a Sunday school class, we're going to have a small group on this rather than it being something more organic, this is where what Titus is describing is vine growing.

He's not really describing the trellis on which the vine grows. Now you can, you can teach this by using a class. There was a Saturday, every quarter at the church I went to when I was in college, one Saturday morning, every quarter, they brought in somebody to teach all the men about being a man and they fed us breakfast.

So that worked and I learned a lot. I was greatly helped in thinking about what is it going to be like to be a husband? What is it going to be like to be a father? And I learned lessons in those settings that have helped me to this day.

So I'm not against the structure so long as we recognize what is needed is this relationship. And then again, the focus, the women are teaching what? Something that particularly pertains to their primary domain, right?

That would make sense. What happens if they don't teach that to people who haven't never learned it? What happens? Well, what happens is the word of God gets blasphemed. Verse five says, the older women are to be teaching the younger women to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands.

Why? That the word of God may not be blasphemed.

In Titus two.

Yeah. Yeah.

So we do see in Titus two, there is specific focus on the younger men. There's some specific focus on the younger women, but this is more about developing those discipling relationships. Again, you could use some structure for that, but this is about developing those discipling relationships about their particular discipleship needs.

And so you can have some focus on that. That's fine. And that would be, that would be a good thing. But like you were saying, if you were just going to isolate people away from folks that are not like them, I mean, but that goes back to, that goes back to the purpose-driven church, the church growth movement from Rick Warren, Donald McGavern.

That was, that was Donald McGavern's initial strategy. Being a missionary kid from India, he did a study on the different mission stations in India that grew and the ones that did not, the ones that did not grow and have great numbers were those that said to the Indians and their caste system, you ought to basically deny this caste system and treat one another in a different way and be able to come to church together and learn to love one another in Christ.

Okay. So that, you know, so in this city or in this village or wherever the caste system was in place, and the mission stations that went against the caste system did not grow. But the ones that said, our mission station is only for this particular level of the caste people.

You know, so whatever it is, we're going to be going, we're going to reach out to the high priestly Brahman class. Oh no, we're going to go for the military class. Oh no, no, no. We're going to go for the merchant class.

And they would just keep it all within that. And they would have a specific groups for them. Those missions grew. And so Donald McGovern got the idea. It's like, Oh, well, whatever works is blessed of God.

So what we need to do is we need to remove any kind of barriers for anyone to come to Christ. And one of those barriers is like showing up to someplace where people are different than you and you don't like that.

So we're going to remove that. And so he brought those philosophies over to the States, Pacific Northwest, and began, and, and, and California and so on. And through kind of a networking with a variety of folks, including some within some very influential people that have had a big impact on the fast food industry and so on and so forth.

I mean, we're talking about economics, we're talking about marketing. They figured out the best way to do church is this, make it easy, remove all barriers, whatever you feel comfortable with. That's what we're going to give you so that there's no barriers for you to come to Jesus.

And it seems like the metaphor that comes to mind from Titus for me is in the beginning, the thing that he's warning Titus about is those who will upset whole households. And when you have them bring this methodology to the States after it, having worked in India, that seems like it would upset the entire household of faith, or it would at least if you're going to like kind of group people off as though they're separate churches within a church.

Yeah. That body's not going to grow as a family together. Like you may see numbers come in, but you're not going to see people unite as, as a family and a body.

I think some of it is, is because it's very myopic. It's not. So each one is segregated. So when you're in the youth, the youth are youth and they like these things. So we'll do those things, but it's not preparing them for the next stage of life necessarily.

It's just talking about the things that pertain to youth. Then they age out and move into the next thing, but they weren't prepared for it. So then these are things that this age group, Oh, you're single now.

We're going to talk about single things now, versus a more holistic, you're in church or you're in Sunday school with multiple generations in different walks of life. The questions that come up, you're going through the Bible, just going through it, sometimes topically, usually expositionally, and you're just dealing with what's there.

And conversation will arise out of that, but you're with people that are in different places. So if you're thinking, if you're forward thinking and you're like, I'm, I'm a youth or I'm single, but I'd like to be married.

You've got married people around you to talk to about that. Instead of consulting single people about being married or it just seems very segregated and doesn't necessarily prepare you for it.

It's an inorganic segregation, right? Like everywhere else that you go during the week with your family, your kids are going on a hike with you. They're going to the park with you. And then all of a sudden we get to church, but they're not in church with you.

Right. Like that's just, that's, that seems strange to me. All like you go shopping with them for, for groceries. Right. And that's like,.

When you rise up, when you go, but when you go to church,.

It doesn't make sense.

Well, and in, in some sense, part of that was that families were uncomfortable together. So for, for the family whose children are in, away from their parents for the majority of the, of their time, okay, they're off in school or they're off doing their, their sports or their activities and so on.

And the whole experience might be, you know, the basic family time that they get is probably just whenever mom and dad are driving them somewhere in the car. That's about all the family time they're going to get.

And they, one of the things is they're uncomfortable being together. Like that's, that's not. So when they, when they would come, when you come to church and they're, and they're all together in doing something that is foreign, it's easier for mom and dad to do what they've done all week long, drop the kids off to the experts who do the kid things that they like.

And then we're going to go do our thing. Right. And, and that was kind of that, that model was attractive. Like I don't want to bring my kids to a church. They don't want to be it. Right. If my kids are grumping about being here, I don't want to, I don't want to bring them here.

Right. That's a real issue for a lot of people when they're trying to figure out what church to go to. I want to bring, I don't want to bring my kids to some place where they're going to feel uncomfortable or out of sorts or not around other people that make them feel comfortable.

And if they're going to be griping and grousing about it, then we're not going to do it. And that's a big deal. That's one of the main, main reasons why, one of the main deciding factors for what church you go to, which, and the other one is music.

In the Purpose Driven Church, Rick Warren wrote, said the, the, the scale of how many people that you can reach to me based on what kind of music you have. Right. So that mean that that was the main thing.

But when you read the scriptures, so when you think about the Paul writing letters to the church at Colossae, we wrote a letter to the church at Colossae, wrote a letter to the church at Ephesus. And we think about how these letters were circulated amongst the churches.

Jesus through the apostle John sent seven letters to the churches in Asia Minor along a very common postal route. And all of their mail got read by everybody else to the churches of Asia Minor. Right.

Hey, Laodicea. Hey, Ephesus. Hey, Thyatira. But everybody else got to hear what Jesus said to the other churches. And so this is, this is a very basic observation in which we see that not only were the Old Testament prophets reading former prophets to the current people, but also in the New Testament, everyone's reading each other's mail.

And the gospels are getting circulated. And you know, what Luke wrote for Theophilus was also read throughout all the churches. Paul mentions in Colossae and in Corinthians, a brother who was with him, whose gospel was received amongst all the churches.

I think that's probably Luke's gospel that he wrote. It's being spread throughout all the churches. So all of these scriptures are being read. Why is that important? Because as it's being read to the people there who are being addressed, wives, husbands, fathers, by extension, we mean, you know, obviously parents, the children, slaves, slaves, slave owners.

So all of them were being, and this was what made up the classic, what we call namas, the, the household where you got to word economy from. And all of them were there. Now in other places, in their culture, they would not all be in the same place.

That would be, that would be odd to have father mother with their children and their slaves that they own all out together doing something that was, that was not something that was done, but it was expected that they were all there in the church.

And so all of them were addressed. The men and the women, the husbands and the wives, the parents and the children, the masters and the slaves, all being specifically dealt with, exhorted, instructed.

And what you read about in Colossians three and in Ephesians five and six, before we get to the specificities of how the doctrine of God and the gospel of Christ apply to them and how they should be thinking about their lives, before we get to those specific applications, they've already heard this massive, these massive ideas about Christ, his cross, his resurrection, the meaning of the spirit.

All of them need that. And then there's specific application to them.

Unity in Christ, Diversity in the Congregation, and the Image of God

What a privilege, like what a change. Like you said, it's expected meaning that the people writing the gospels knew that things had changed. They said, when I write this, all of these people are going to be around listening.

What a privilege that unlike class systems or other places where things are segregated, Christ brings everyone together. And then in our wisdom, we're trying to segregate things out again versus everyone comes together and hears this and is unified in Christ.

Yeah. There's,.

There's a lot of these things within the scripture and within life that reflect the wisdom of the triune God who was one and yet plural in his Godhead, one God, three persons, one God. And so there's not, there's not a, in some sort of dichotomy between the one and the many, not, not in Christian theology.

There was for the Greek philosophers and there still is in philosophy to this day. But what we see in, what we see in the scriptures is that God is able to bring a unity, but also still dealing with specificity.

So for example, at Pentecost, you have all of these tribes, tongues and nations represented. And what is, what is, notice how the miracle works. The miracle is not that God makes all of these folks listening to the apostles suddenly understand Aramaic.

Okay. That wasn't the miracle. The miracle is that all of these disciples who spoke really good Aramaic and had some facility with some Greek and Hebrew too, but that everybody there at Pentecost heard the gospel preached to them in their own heart language and the dialects that they learned back home.

That's the direction the miracle went. What is that saying to us? God loves the tribes. God loves the tongues. God loves all these different types of people and he's showing his love to them by sending the gospel to them in their dialect, in their language.

So you don't have to learn the King's English in order to be saved as some 1611 onlyists have been known to claim. We must teach them the King's English, otherwise they won't know the gospel.

That sounds Islamic to me. Like you've got to read it in the original language.

It's a sure way to make sure that your specific flavor of religion dies because somebody eventually that, that language dies and you're going to die with it.

And so what we see also is a contrast between the synagogue and the church. In the synagogue, the men would gather in one room and the women would gather in another room and they would listen from the open door or sometimes they built it two story and there was kind of a circle balcony around and the women would be upstairs and the men would be downstairs.

If you were a certain age, you couldn't be in the room with the men. And if you were a Gentile, you weren't circumcised. If you're a God fearer, you could be around listening in from the door, so on and so forth.

But for some synagogues, you could even be in there if you weren't circumcised. But they didn't say you couldn't listen. You could listen in. But everybody was segregated. It was very old covenant. How very synagogue-ish some of our churches look.

That's not the expectation in the New Testament about how they gathered, what they did when they came together, how they ate together, fellowship together, heard the word together, prayed together and so forth.

And they did that. The Cretans learned to do that on Crete. Macedonians learned to do that in Philippi and Thessalonica and in Athens and Corinth. They learned to do that where they were at. And they came together and said, let's worship together.

They learned to do that in Troas. They were a little crowded. Eudicius fed off the window, but you know, what were they doing? They were gathering in an apartment. It was the only place they had to meet.

But everybody was there. It was kind of stuffy, but everybody was there. And that's why when the question is should, should, no. And anyone contending that that has to be the case is perhaps seeing like in order to have an effective ministry to these people whom I have a particular interest in.

And I think that really we ought to be very, especially kind to this group of people. We need to have special things only for them so they will feel comfortable and not threatened. We'll give them a safe space, bring them in and show that we truly do love them.

Whereas other people may not. And again, I'm not questioning the sincerity. However, I'm questioning whether there's wisdom there because the way in which the love of God is on display through Christians is one in which Jesus specifically states in Matthew chapter five, there ain't no big deal if you love people just like you.

So he says in Matthew five, it's like, Oh, you love others that are just like you. Big deal. The kind of love that we're called to is loving people who aren't exactly matched up to us. Okay. Now it's like by this, all men will know that you're my disciples, but the love that you have for one another, we got a lot to learn about that.

So yeah, am I, what am I doing trying to love people who are 40 years older than I am trying to love people that are, you know, 40 years younger than I am. I have a three year old in my house. He's very strange sometimes.

To love people in a different economic status than I am, a different station, somebody with a different rank, to love somebody who is of a different way, different level of experience and so on, education, so on.

How do I love these people? There's no end to this list. You know, they list subsets within the body, singles, married with kids, minorities and so on. I think the attitudes that would demand, they say, could you speak to the part?

Expectations, Consumerism, and the Church Growth Movement

Yeah. Could you speak to the attitudes that demand such from churches as a requirement for either joining or leaving a church? Well, I would say that sometimes those attitudes are simply expectations because that's what they have met everywhere else.

And if they come to a church where that's absent, it is such a shock that they sense that something must be wrong. And people are concerned that they show up to visit churches or they try to participate in church and they try to see if anything feels off.

Why? Because they don't want to be part of a bad church. And so what they recognize as good and healthy may not be good and healthy, but that's what they think is good and healthy. So if it's missing, if it jars them, they're like, ugh, you know, there's something wrong with that church.

And then they're out. You know, again, I'm, I think that they're trying to make a good decision in the main. Some people will get a taste of other churches. Oh, they have special stuff for this, this, this, and this.

My church doesn't do that for me.

Yeah. Like an expectation to be served rather than to serve. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think that there can be a selfishness. There can be a, like you were saying, short sightedness, a focus upon the self that leads to, well, if you're not going to have, you know, this, then we're out.

You know, when we stopped doing vacation Bible school around here, it ruffled some feathers. We don't take kids to church camp, right? We, we stopped doing some traditional things because one, we can't do them well and not because people aren't talented around here.

They are, but what it costs in terms of energy and ability and time and so on simply to do the thing that we've always done makes no sense whatsoever. Right. Not worth it. Not worth it.

Well, I think some of that is like, like you said, depending on certain assumptions that go into it. So if you grow up and you send your children away to the experts and that's what you know, they're doing the kids thing, they're working with them.

You walk into a church, okay, I need to find a church that knows how to do those things to properly care for my child. In their minds, that's their role is I'm going to best help my child by finding a church that can cater to them or that can teach them in ways that will reach them.

So I think with some people that can be, I don't want to deal with it. And then with others, it's, I don't know how to deal with it. I have not done that. I've not been fulfilling that role. It's been fulfilled by other people.

So I need to find a place that can continue to do that. And so that's what they're looking for in order to, to keep that going.

Even though in Titus the, it says the work in that situation should be done on you and not on your child.

Necessarily.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and even what you were saying with the camps and things like that, depending on the structure of your family, if it's, I've sent my children away to school, I'll send them away to this camp.

But if you have a family that has been keeping the children home and in the church says, we're going to do this separate thing, that's not a structure of the family. It's not necessarily a structure of the church.

It's an extra thing added on to your already your family routines of things that you're already doing. It seems foreign and it puts a burden on those families to do those things, which they wouldn't naturally be doing anyways.

Titus 2, Family Discipleship, and the Limits of Programmatic Ministry

Yeah. I think there's, there's something to be said for the way that a church is structured and what it encourages in terms of how families expect to grow and function. There is, there is some sort of interaction there.

And I would say that like you were saying, it could go both ways. Whereas here's a family that does everything together. When they come to church, a church that says, all of you have to be separate, that's disorienting.

And so also on the other side, I'm not, I'm not questioning the, the, the desire or the motives of parents who feel like I'm not connecting with my, my kids very well. I really want them to know and appreciate biblical truth.

And I think it would be a good thing to bring them to somebody who could do that well, who I would be able to trust and have at least a, you know, a basically good relationship with. And so I'm not, you know, I'm not against that, but you have to begin to think, you know, what is, as Paul Washer said, you know, there are, there is such a thing as a youth leaders and God calls them parents, you know?

And that's very true. I mean, God gave the parents to the children, the children to the parents so that they would raise them up in the fear and damnation of the Lord. That's primarily the parent's job.

So anything that we do as a church, Sunday school, the Wednesday night truth and grace program tag, anything we do here regarding some sort of special focus on, on children or whatever, it's only in terms of, Hey, we're just here to be a supplement.

We're here to be a, a little bit of help. We want to do whatever we can to reinforce what you're doing at home. If you're interested in learning how to do more at home and bring more, a more robust focus and family, family worship, family discipleship, we want to encourage you in that, equip you for that, support you in that because this is no replacement for the, the, the, the, the good that can happen in family life.

And now we were talking about the, you know, the age graded stuff and kids and so on, because that's what is most close to home. Yeah. That's our context. To our context. That's what now speaking more broadly, a lot of folks may look at a church and say, well, unless you have spaces, just, you know, an awful word.

I wish we would stop using, but unless you have spaces for these various groups of people whom we have all been informed that they're not being loved well, unless the church has spaces for all these oppressed peoples, then the church isn't being very loving.

And we're just nowhere close to what Jesus said in terms of gospel. Okay. So someone's been discipled that way. They've been given that framework to work in. And so I remember we had someone visit from the East coast from the deep left, you know, and they, they came and they visited and they looked around.

And one of their comments that they made in Sunday school was, you know, this church isn't very diverse, right? Because she'd been trained to look for skin color.

How dare you? We have every type and form of 60 year old man in this church.

And, and I was like, as, as a pastor, you know, I'm thinking about how different everybody is and how, you know, without the grace of God and the bailing wire of Christian grace, you know, we never going to love each other.

I'm thinking of how different all these families are and their backgrounds, their economic statuses, the kinds of work they do, the kinds of convictions that they have. And I'm thinking, Oh my goodness, you have no idea, you know, because she had been trained to look at skin color.

That's all, you know, like that has so little to do with, with, with what we're dealing with. So you have, you know, you can't, you can't possibly even see how it is that people are loving one another.

And to your point though, I mean, I think there is, we, we see the differences between all of us, but if we go out into different contexts of different people, groups, and cultures, I mean, you do feel that the major differences between one group of people and another, and there is like, even though we're in different lines of work, we have different, we're at different phases of life.

There's still loads of similarity in our church that I see, even though, you know, there's different convictions here and there. So like, I think the, the, the real issue is for them, it's that it needs to be flattened and from people group to people group, rather than just a, an accepting of that people groups are different, right?