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Yeah, I think you're right. You can't say that there is enough Scripture to say that any organized denomination is absolutely heresy or demands it. Either way, I don't think there's enough scriptural reference pointing to that.
There is a lot of scriptural reference pointing to the need that every church be autonomous, every local church.
Welcome to The Wrap Report with your host Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.
Welcome to another edition of The Wrap Report. I am your host, Andrew Rapoport, the Executive Director of Striving for Eternity and the Christian podcast community, of which this podcast is a proud member of the 50-plus vetted.
Podcasts.
This podcast is about providing biblical interpretations and applications for the Christian life. Today we are going to be joined again by Wade Lentz. He is a pastor, but he is on the Patriot Pastors podcast and part of the Christian podcast community.
We are going to continue our study of looking at the church, looking at the doctrinal statement of Striving for Eternity. The goal of this is several goals. One is to help you understand when you read a doctrinal statement, there's a lot more behind it than what's stated there.
As we've gone through this, we have seen there's been a lot of things that are not stated in there by stating something. We try to be really concise in doctrinal statements. If you want to follow along, go to strivingforeternity .org.
Strivingforeternity .org. You click on the About section up top. Click on what we believe. Scroll down to where you see Church. Expand that section and you will see this part. We're going to start with the paragraph we're going to do today.
It starts with the local church is autonomous. So that will be what we're going to cover today. Wade, I will admit, you know, right after we get done recording, I did last week, we record, we talked about the fact that I am known, unfortunately, for getting things stuck in my head and I stay consistent with it.
And as soon as the show was over, you were like, hey, because I called you Wade throughout the episode until the end when I mentioned your co-host Harold. And then twice, you're like, hey, twice at the end of the show, you called me Harold.
You might want to edit that out. And I forgot to edit that out when I was doing the editing. And when I listened to it, when it went live, I went, you know what, it's actually kind of fitting because in the show I said that I do these things and I stay consistent with it when that happens.
So there you go. Perfect example of it.
Like I told you, I've been called worse, but not much worse than that. Yeah.
What does Harold think about that?
I haven't told him yet.
Well, for folks who didn't pick up last week's, I will remind you that you could go back and if you want to get the whole series, if you followed that, what I showed you on strivingforturning .org under the about section and what we believe at the bottom of that is a area where you can see what we believe podcast series and you would be able to get the full series there starting from episode one.
If you want to get the whole thing, which I do recommend you do. And if you do that, you get last week's, which is now up there. So it's really good to just get these in the whole series in context, so it'd be good to do.
I will ask just Wade really quick if you wouldn't mind introducing yourself to folks who may not have been here for last week.
Yes, my name is Wade Lentz and I'm a pastor at Beryl Baptist Church in Bologna, Arkansas, Central Arkansas, and I have been their pastor for almost 11 years. Next month it will be 11 years. I've been married for 27 years and have four boys that range in age from 21 down to nine years old.
So I stay pretty busy.
So you've been at this parenting thing for a while. For a while, yes. And that town is one of the biggest towns in Arkansas, right? I mean you got like millions of.
People, no? Yeah, not close. It's more like hundreds of thousands, hundreds of thousands. No, no. If you count all the cows and the sheep and the goats, yes.
My daughter went to Cedarville University and I know from when I was on you know, in a secular school, we used to get locals that would come onto campus and there was always issues of between locals and some of the girls and things like that.
So I remember when my daughter went to Cedarville, I asked, hey, you have issues with like locals coming onto campus? And the guy laughs at me and says, sir, we're in the farm country here in Cedarville.
The only thing that's wandering on the campus is a cow or two. He's like, your daughter is going to be fine. I went, okay. That's funny. Yeah. So if you wouldn't mind reading this paragraph that we got before us and we can start breaking this up and looking at it.
I sure will. It says the local.
Church is autonomous, free from any external authority or control with the rights of self government and freedom from the interference of any hierarchy of individuals or organizations. It is scriptural for true churches to cooperate with each other for the presentation and propagation of the faith.
Each local church, however, through its elders and their interpretation and application of scripture should be the sole judge of the measure and method of its cooperation. The elders should determine all other matters of membership, policy, discipline, benevolence, and government as well.
And it lists several scripture references.
Now we are starting off on this one with something that many who are listening are going to just immediately go, wait, I disagree. That's okay. This is our doctrinal statement, right? So there we have within Christianity, something we know as denominations.
I don't even know, wait, are you, are you part of a denomination?
Your church? Not an organized denomination. We are a Baptist church, but not a part of the Southern Baptist Convention or any organized denomination such as that. Okay, and that's,.
And see that the, even the, because as Baptists, Baptists typically, the Baptist history is to be non-denominational. So when you mention the Southern Baptists, even the Southern Baptist Convention isn't really a denomination the way people think it is.
It's, it's really a loose affiliation. Yeah, it's a convention of churches. Correct. So it's not that, so the SBC, Southern Baptist Convention, doesn't have any authority over the individual Baptist churches that are part of them.
Exactly. But they offer some help when, and you have other groups I know of, there's a, I forget what FIRE stands for, Something Independent Reformed Evangelicals. I just forget what the, Fellowship of Independent, I think I'm getting it right if I'm not, don't shoot me, but I think it's Fellowship of Independent Reformed Evangelicals.
I've heard of that.
So that's something where you have people who are, it's a loose affiliation. There's no authority but as I'm working with a church discipline situation within one of those churches, it's, I'm reaching out to other FIRE pastors to help with it.
And so that is something where you can have coordination together, working together for the furthering of the gospel.
Right.
And so that's something that we're going to get into. So I'm making the statement that my belief is to be non-denominational. Striving for Eternity's belief would be non-denominational. I am not saying, if you're in a Presbyterian church where there's a denomination, I'm not saying that that structure is, shall we say, unbiblical for you.
I just don't see it in Scripture. Do I see a benefit to denominations? Yes. And I think that's where some of these things like the Southern Baptist Convention, they try to balance that out. There's an advantage to pooling resources together to be able to get insurance, for example, or, you know, like insurance can be very costly for a church, but if you have 10 ,000 churches all paying for insurance through one organization, you can save that money.
So there's things like that. There's protections legally. You know, if, Wade, if the government decided to come down and come after you and sue your church, you probably wouldn't have many funds to be able to, you know, hire lawyers to protect against the federal government's lawsuit, but the Southern Baptist Convention could, right?
So there are benefits to that, and so what I'm saying in this, when we put this out here, we're saying the local church is autonomous, free from any external authority or control, with the right to self-govern and freedom from interference of any hierarchical or individual or organization.
That's a mouthful. I get that. Essentially what it says is that I believe when I look at scripture that the scriptures teach that each church is run by the pastors of that church, and that would be a view that I would hold to.
I get that if you're in a non-nation, you don't hold to it. Totally get it, and that's fine. I'm stating what we believe. So I just, I guess I'm just trying to focus on that because I know that a lot of people will get upset if they're denominational and if they're hearing me say that I don't believe in that, right?
I'm saying I don't believe in it. I'm not saying what you have to believe. This is different than, you know, if I was to say you have to believe this. This is what Christianity believes. I think the structure of the leadership of a church or any outside organizations, such a denomination, I would put in a tertiary issue.
So we have primary issues. These are beliefs, things I'm going to die for. Jesus is God. We have secondary issues, things that we could debate over whether you believe the gifts continue or not. It's not a salvation.
I'm not going to split, you know, I'm not going to separate fellowship over it. Some things I might separate, like, you know, it depends on the secondary issues. It might get close enough, but the tertiary issues are things like this where we don't break fellowship.
It's not really a big deal, and mostly because I don't think that there's enough scripture, Wade may agree or disagree with me on this, I don't think there's enough scripture to support denominations or non-denomination.
I think that we have to infer it. There's nothing really there that we could see. Now the verse that I put in the doctrinal statement is Titus 1 .5, which reads, for this reason I left you in Crete, that you would set in order what remains and appoint elders in every city as I directed you.
So what we see here is that Paul is kind of saying, hey, I left you in Crete so you can run the church. He doesn't have the authority to tell him how to run the church anymore, because he's left that church, and now Titus is there.
We didn't talk beforehand, so I don't know your position, but I see you're non-denominational, so you may agree, but this is something that there is lots of discussion on.
Mm-hmm. Absolutely.
What are your thoughts when it comes to denominations or non-denominational?
Yeah, I think you're right. You can't say that there is enough scripture to say that any organized denomination is absolutely heresy or demands it either way. I don't think there's enough scriptural reference pointing to that.
There is a lot of scriptural reference pointing to the need that every church be autonomous, every local church. I think you and I would agree that organized denominations that have a hierarchical type of hold on churches, we would say, yes, that is unbiblical.
For instance, local church can't dictate who their pastor is going to be. That is chosen for them. They cannot choose church governance. That's chosen for them. I think there's a lot of scripture to say that that's an overreach.
You don't find that in scripture. Yes, Paul told Titus, and even in the book of Acts, is another reference that you mentioned in the statement of faith. They went, and Paul and Titus, in every city appointing elders.
Well, why did they appoint elders? Well, elders are overseers, pastors. It's emphasizing the local church's need for self-governance. Of course, these elders and pastors would be responsible for the spiritual oversight and the governance of their own congregation.
Church autonomy, I believe, reflects the biblical model where each local congregation operates independently, free from external authority or control. You and I would definitely.
Agree on that. I mentioned the benefits of a denomination. Maybe I should explain some of the negatives of it, because you just mentioned some. You mentioned the fact that you can have a denomination that chooses the pastor.
Like it or not, some Presbyterian churches, the denomination will choose a pastor. Sometimes they rotate them around. I knew of one Presbyterian church where they really liked the pastor, and he moved to the area, really liked the area, and didn't want to leave the area.
And so when the denomination decided to move him out, he decided to leave the denomination and stay in the area. And then what ended up happening was all the people said, let's start a church. So the denomination put someone new in, but they lost two-thirds, three-quarters of the church to the guy that they enjoyed, they wanted to shepherd them.
But I know of a case that what sounds good, what could be a positive benefit can also be a negative in the sense that for some churches, they can't afford a building, for many churches, church plants.
And so a denomination comes in, Southern Baptists do this, others do this, Lutherans do it, and they will come in and buy the building because they have the resources. But who owns the building? The denomination does.
So there was a church that I spoke at, a Lutheran church up in New York City, when their denomination went and accepted homosexuality, they said, that's it, we're done with you, we're leaving. And the response they got from the Lutheran denomination was, well, we're taking your building.
It's our building. So either you stay with us, or we're taking the building. And in New York City, I mean, that building was like $8 million building.
Wow.
But the thing is, is that they had that... The reason the building was affordable back then is because it was bought many, many years ago, but it was actually bought not by the Lutherans. It was a different church that became a Lutheran church.
And so they had the deed to the building. So in their case, they were able to leave that denomination and find a better Lutheran denomination. But I've seen that with Southern Baptists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, where you have the denomination will hold it over them.
And that's what this statement's really focusing on, is that the authority of the local church should be the local church. The model, and if anyone, if you listen to the series I did on this podcast called What Is a Pastor, that went through and I explained the problems I think we have with the hiring of pastors by hiring someone from outside the church.
Very few people get the privilege of pastoring the church, their home church. It's something where, I mean, I know of two men that have only been a member of one church their entire life, and they're the preaching pastor of the church.
Hmm. That's rare, but that's the biblical model.
And so if you think about the first century way of doing it, we look at this and the fact is that this is saying that the local church should hire their pastor, their pastors should run the church, and everything should be local.
Yes. Yeah, it's very interesting. You talked about the Lutherans and that particular church in New York City. This was new to me when the United Methodist Church just recently, as a denomination, chose to allow homosexuals and transgenders to pastor churches and all of that.
Of course, that sent waves throughout the United Methodist Church. I did not know that, like the Lutherans you talked about, the United Methodist denomination actually owns the church buildings. Yes. So all these churches around here, these small country churches around here, who they just could not go with that denominational decision that is now pushed on their little local church.
They said, well, we just want to pull out. And the United Methodist said, OK, you can do that, but we're going to take over the church and any money that's in the church is ours. Now, that is crooked and that is horrible.
And we would absolutely say there is no biblical or scriptural references to back that up whatsoever, and that is an abuse of denominational.
Power. Yeah, and that's why you see some of these denominations, that they keep the members because people are like, well, we're going to disagree with them, but we just can't leave them. I mean, I would think that they can't take the money in the bank unless that was set up, and I would hope that no one would do that, but buildings are expensive.
So the idea though, and I just want folks to understand as we discuss the church, the idea, at least we have at Striving for Eternity, is that the local church is where the authority is. So you can't really have some external, we don't believe, that you should have some external organization that can come in and make demands on the church unless the church submits that.
I'm working with a church where it's two churches, and so what I've asked is that if I'm going to act as a mediator between the two, that both churches involved will submit to what I and the group that is put together to investigate and get the facts, to what we say.
Because otherwise, it becomes just, well, then there's no sense in us coming in, spending all the time to investigate who's right or what happened here, because then it's just, there's no, okay, we say this and then nothing happens.
So there has to be, in that case, they would have to submit to the accountability, right? So one side said yes, the other side said no. So probably won't happen, right? Because you need to have that. Now, that's on a very rare case.
We had that once in my first church where the church we came from, there was a big split over the issue of divorce. The pastor at the time had a position, no divorce for any reason, not even prior to salvation.
And so a bunch of people who had been divorced prior to salvation, some that got divorced as Christians, people who wanted, who had got, say, divorced before salvation but wanted to get remarried, they had issues with it.
They didn't handle it well. And my pastor, and I wasn't, I was a deacon at the time, not a pastor, so my pastor and the two other pastors of my church went there between the two sides, and that church gave over the authority to this three-person panel to submit to.
Now, that is something you can do. But that's a choice of who? The local church. So even that is the idea that the local church is giving that authority for a short time.
Yes, right. And I think it's key, too, to remember that every church, every pastor has to submit themselves under the headship of Jesus Christ, who is the head of the church.
Exactly.
It is not a denominational board. It is not some type of outside denominational organization that has authority to dictate certain doctrines or disciplines within the church. The church belongs to Christ.
Colossians 1 .18 says, and he, Christ, is the head of the body, the church, and each local church answers directly to Christ as the head, not to any external human authority. Bottom line.
And that's the point right there, what you just said. That's the point, because the idea, the model we see in Scripture is the local church who knows the people, knows the issues, that they should deal with things.
Now, were there times that they submitted? Yes, Acts chapter 15. We see two sides disagreeing, they come to James in Jerusalem, they have a council, and everyone submits to the council. Now, some will say, see, that's a denomination.
Well, we saw that council that occurred once, right? So, I would think that can happen for temporary things. That's just the position that we take at Striving Fraternity. Have we had people at Striving Fraternity who are part of denominations?
Maybe. Maybe volunteers, or I don't think, I don't know if any of our speakers, maybe. Maybe the Southern Baptist, but they don't have the, but that's not one that has the external authority. So, we are saying, and even if you're part of a denomination, these are just things to think about, think through.
There's pluses and minuses to each of them, pros and cons, however you want to look at it, and I think that, like, how the Southern Baptists, and a loose affiliation, a fellowship like that, I think that works.
It can work, yes. Yeah. Yeah, it can work. It depends on where they, you know, because, well, you bring up, right, the Southern Baptist Convention has become very political, it's because of all that money they raise, and now they start taking that money and doing things where people are like, no, that's not good, and they start going liberal, and yet, so you don't, people don't want to be associated.
With it, and so a bunch of churches have left there. Our church was established in 1889, and this year we're celebrating 135 years of ministry. For 125 years of our church's existence, it was a Southern Baptist church up until 10 years ago, but due to so much what I felt like as liberalism, and due to so many decisions that the SBC was making, I felt like we could no longer, in good conscience, continue to support the SBC.
The churches that they were starting were churches that I would never recommend our church members to attend. They were just, if you, I don't know how familiar you are with the North American Mission Board and all that, but it's just horrible.
There's no accountability. They say that they are accountable to the local church, but they're not, and when the local church tries to hold them accountable, they say, well, we don't have to divulge that information, so for all those reasons and much, much more, we pulled out of the SBC.
Now, I tell people, we did not leave the SBC. The SBC left us, and many churches like ours, and that was a sad departure because I was raised in the SBC, pastored many years in the SBC, and for us to pull out, it was a difficult time, but the Lord has blessed that.
Yeah, and there is also, realistically, and you're bringing it up, is the emotional tie to the SBC, and there's a lot of churches that, I know a pastor wanted to pull out of the SBC, but he's like, just emotionally, I got people that are not going to accept it.
They're going to, they'll leave the church over that, and that shouldn't be, like, we shouldn't be leaving a church over that, unless it's like, hey, we're going to a liberal denomination, but the issue that we have is that these things should be run within the church.
That's the idea we're trying to convey. Now, the next part that we have here is, really, we've kind of mentioned, I say here, it is scriptural for true churches to incorporate with each other for the presentation and propagation of the faith.
Now, this is a little bit of biblical separation within the church. We don't want to work with, I'm not going to work with the Catholic church to end abortion. So, if I go to an abortion mill, and I'm outside, and there's the Catholics, and they want to pray and do their rosary, and I go there, and they want to team up on something together because they see me there, well, when I'm at that place preaching the gospel to the people inside to save their child, not abort their child, so they understand what they're actually doing is killing a human being, I'm also there for the Catholics who are doing the rosary for them to know they need to get saved as well.
Absolutely.
Okay? So, we have to pick and choose. Now, what defines a true church? Well, if you heard the first sentence, you're going to know the answer. The local church is going to decide what that local church thinks is the true church, right?
There's some churches that think if you don't use the King James Bible, you're not a true church. I wouldn't hold to that position. I could work with a church that uses the King James. I could work with a church that uses the New American Standard.
But if they can't, well, what defines a true church for them is the King James Bible. I don't think you can support that biblically, but they think they can maybe, you know. But the idea here is it's within the local church to work with others.
This is where the fellowships help. I'm going to be recording Apologetics live tonight, and one of the questions that came in that we were asked that I may end up answering is, you know, doctrine divides, so should we ignore doctrine?
And the answer is no, because just as it divides, it also unifies. And so, we have to recognize that as well. So, we should work with other churches of like faith and practice. Absolutely. Yeah, and I think in a lot of.
Churches today, they do not want to cooperate with other local churches because they're too busy competing with one another, right? They see the other Baptist church down the road as, oh, wow, they have more people than we do, and if we work together with them on some type of mission project or some type of benevolence project, then we may get other prospects to join that church instead of our church.
But it's very important. The reason why we can cooperate one with another as far as local churches is because we're on the same team, right? We have the same head. That is Jesus Christ, and we should look at one another as sister churches.
And so, it's sad that so many churches have this competitive spirit against one another, and that keeps them from working together, which is really sad. We see so many scripture references, such as in Philippians, where Paul praises the Philippian church for their fellowship in the gospel from the first day until now, he tells them.
And you mentioned in Acts chapter 15, we see an example of churches working together to address certain doctrinal disputes. So, you have it ingrained in scripture where it is good to do that, but in today's American churches, we have this mindset.
We can't work together with the church down the road because it's going to—we might lose some of our members to that church, and so forth. Have you noticed.
That as well? Well, even more so is the point you first mentioned, not so much we might help that church grow and prospects to go to that church. I find that when I first started out with Striving Fraternity, and we used to try to do these conferences to basically get people to come in for a conference, train them to evangelize, take them out on the streets, I could not get churches to come together because they were—it wasn't they were afraid that church would be bigger and prospects would go there, they were afraid my people will go there.
And part of this, this goes back to something you said, and I actually was thinking you were going to say it, but Christ is the head of the church.
It's not our church, pastors. We are the stewards, we are the—those—we're still sheep. I used to have a pastor, he goes, he'd always say to me, Andrew, that's why they're sheep and we're the shepherds, and then one day I just was like, you know, don't forget, we're sheep too.
He did not like that, and so Christ is the head of the church, and if Christ wants to grow the church down the street and not our church, well, God has given us who he wants us to shepherd, and it's not someone else's responsibility to shepherd them, it's ours, and we shouldn't worry about the people that are going to some other church, but there is this territorialism within the local churches, and that's why some churches will work with churches far away.
You know, I was just out in Arizona and I spoke at a church for one of the other podcasters in the Christian podcast community, Dominic Grimaldi. He's in Arizona, and so I was coming in to speak at his church.
Well, he happens to have another church that is like faith and practice in the area by a friend of mine, Gabe Hughes, and so he said, hey, look, why don't we do, you know, Dominic was going to have me preach, and he says, hey, would you be open to doing a Sunday night so we can get both churches together?
And I'm like, sure. You know, here Dominic opens his buildings because they've got a bigger building so that the, you know, Gabe's church, which has a homeschool co-op, can meet. Well, that is working together, and they're not worried, oh, you know, we're going to lose people to that other church.
They're working together where they can, and they know they're their own congregations. Yes. You know, Jeff Johnson in Conway, Arkansas,.
Just right down the road from me, Pastor Jeff Johnson, Grace Bible Church, he was going to be hosting a social justice conference back in 2021. Tom Askell was going to speak, Votie Baucom, Dr. Owen Strand, many of the guys that you would recognize and know.
Well, Jeff at the time at Grace Bible Church, they had a very small sanctuary, and so he called me up and said, hey, by the way, would you and your church be willing to host this conference, just allow us to use the building?
And I said, man, absolutely. And so that happened. They were able to come, and they were able to use our facility, and that's a good example of cooperating together. Correct. For the sake of the gospel.
And I really wish there was more of that.
Well, I think part of this is, and this is a totally off topic, but thanks for the rabbit trail, Wade. I like to rabbit hunt. The thing is is that there's a big difference between ministry and platform building, and many, many men are platform building.
They're not doing ministry. They are doing...I'll give a clear example. You know, Mark Driscoll. There, I did it. I just named names. Now everyone's going to be upset with me. Mark Driscoll has a history, and you could go listen to the podcast on the rise and fall of Mars Church, and they go through all this.
People on the inside that know, but you also see it in how he does things. He does things, he plans things for effect, and it's to get the attention. You know, he does things to shock people, but you know, he'll stand up and pretend he's all offended at some guy that, you know, took his shirt off at a church, but he's mentioning it's a Jezebel Spirit Orb to promote his book that came out the next day on the Jezebel Spirit, right?
So it's planned stuff. That is platform building. You know, he came to Shepherd's Conference when they did the Strange Fire Conference, and they didn't want him handing out his books. He was handing out a book to everybody.
Uninvited, he came, and security wasn't going to allow him to do it. So what Driscoll does is say, well, look, I brought these books, you have them. They're like, well, we're just going to throw them out.
He goes, no, no, no, I want you to have them. It's my gift to you, and there's a video recording of that, but then he goes on Twitter as they're taking the books and saying, oh, my books have been confiscated by them, right?
And so that's a clear lie, but it's for platform. It's to build the platform. That's not ministry, and it's one of the reasons I've never wanted to be a big ministry. I prefer being small, not really known, because I never want that temptation of we have to grow and keep growing and keep the money coming in, right?
That's the issue. So thanks for the rabbit trail, you know? Yeah, I think the reason that you probably go on rabbit trails, it's not because you like rabbit hunting. I don't think, I believe, I could be wrong.
I believe the real reason is, you know, it is almost six o 'clock in the evening, my time when we're recording. You've been up for a while, and my guess is, you know, I do a nice cold plunge, and that keeps me wide awake and alert.
I think the problem is you just didn't, you run out of coffee, man. That's it. You just, you need a good cup of coffee. That is the reason you do on rabbit trails, because your mind is just not as quick.
I would say jump into a, you know, bath of 50 degree water. It'll wake you up better than a cup of coffee, but since most people are like, that's nuts, what you should do, Wade, is go to strivingforeturning .org slash coffee, get a cup of good Squirrelly Joe's coffee, nice hand-roasted.
I get the beans sent to me, because yes, I actually do have the coffee, but I don't need it to stay awake. It's cold plunge will take care of staying awake, but I just love the coffee. So, nice family-run business, Christian family-run, I should say.
So, all of the beans are roasted there and freshly picked so that they roast them and put them in those bags so that you can get a wonderful cup of coffee. So, you could be alert, Wade, and not doing all these rabbit trails, because if you don't get that coffee, I mean, we're going to end up needing to send you to MyPillow to get a pillow and get a good sleep then.
So, if you do that, I'm just going to say, use the promo code SFE when you go to mypillow .com, use promo code SFE to get your discount. And I went over to my pastor's son's place this week, and he's like, he said, you know, your podcast cost me a lot of money.
I'm like, what? Because he was listening to his dad on the podcast where he was on last week on my Apologetics Live podcast. He's like, your podcast cost me a lot of money. I'm like, how did my podcast cost you money?
And he pulls out a MyPillow. And I was like, okay, now I understand that was you who bought it. Okay. So, if you want to get yourself a good cup of coffee, go to strikingfraternity .org slash coffee. Always go there when you reorder so that they know we sent you.
And if you're a first-time buyer from there, just use the promo code SFE to get 20 off. If you're going to go to MyPillow, go to mypillow .com, use promo code SFE to get your discount there. Let's not do rabbit trails, sir, and get back to the doctrine.
So, finishing up, this says this, each local church, however, so, however, referring back to the fact that we should work together, however, through the elders and their interpretation and application of scripture should be the sole judge and measure and method of its cooperation.
Now, this one passage or sentence kind of bothers some people because they think, well, why is it the pastor should have? Now, is there pastoral abuse in churches, Wade? What do you think?
Absolutely, there is.
Yeah.
Yes.
And unfortunately for you and I as Baptists, because of our non-denominational stance, it is typically non-denominational Baptists, the independent Baptists, that end up dealing with more church abuse.
So, again, you want a benefit, maybe, of some denomination. Do other denominations have it? Yeah, they can, but the whole purpose of the denomination is so the church could go to someone to come in and have authority over the pastor if he's out of the line, but an independent church can't do that.
So, if you have an abusive pastor, this becomes a problem.
And this goes back to the podcast I did on what is a pastor about the qualifications of a pastor, because all of those qualifications are about his character. And yet, what do we do? We hire pastors based on popularity and how well they preach.
We don't give enough time to know their character.
That's right.
That's why it should be done within the church where you know the character. And so, if you know the character, now, I will say, just in case anyone's thinking, if you're in the audience going, oh, yeah, Andrew, well, you've been a pastor of a couple churches.
Did you get hired from outside? No, I didn't. In every church that I pastored, I was in that body before I became the preaching pastor. So, they knew my character, and that is why they hired me. And so, as we look at that, that is something we have to recognize, that this goes back to the character issue.
Okay? The pastor has to be able to be confronted as well. Now, with this, the issue that we see here, though, is the local church authority should be the pastors. The pastors should be qualified. If the pastors are qualified, what we have is men who are qualified and equipped to interpret Scripture rightly.
That is the judge of the measure and the method of cooperation with these other churches. So, there is a doctrinal statement that's going to bring the unity of the church. We all agree this is the way.
So, the pastor has to submit to that as well. I just heard of a church, unfortunately, this week where the pastor was lying to the other elders, to the congregation. All of the elders and two-thirds of the church left.
It went from like 450 people to like 60, and the guy who's left, the preaching pastor, basically ripped up the Constitution, rewrote the Constitution, and from what I was told, I'm saying that I'm recognizing this is hearsay, but from what I was told, he wrote a brand new one that has no more elder rule but the single elder rule.
Now, if that's true, that's a real problem.
Right?
So, they have to submit to the doctrinal statement, and in fact, just so you realize, when you have bylaws for a church, that is the law. If you were to, we don't sue Christians, but if you were to take someone to court, and this is why I encourage pastors to put a statement in their bylaws that explains specifically how church discipline works, we discussed that last episode, but the reason I do that is because having that in there, and I knew of a church when I was in seminary that they did church discipline, someone left the church, they sued the church, and the church had in there a detailed steps of church discipline.
That's all the law looked at. The courts looked at the bylaws and said they're following their bylaws. If a pastor is just ripping up the Constitution on his own, and the Constitution said, and the bylaws say, you need the team of elders, or you need so much from the congregation, and he didn't do that, then that church is now breaking the law.
Okay, they're violating Romans 13, and they don't think of it that way, but that's what is happening. So, it's the pastors who are going to do the interpretation, but we're being specific right here in saying to define that cooperation, which we said, if the pastors are saying, hey, we believe King James, only churches that preach from King James, that's what the pastors say of what they're going to do with the fellowshipping.
I won't go to a church that says they'll work with the Catholics, but if that's what the pastors are, they have their reasons for doing it, I'm going to say, well, fine, that's a local church decision.
But we do see that there is an authority within the church, we just don't want it to be abused. And unfortunately, Wade, you and I are in churches that, you know, independent churches that are more likely to have that happen.
Right, right. I've seen that firsthand many times.
You know, I remember being at a small conference, I mean small because this is back many years ago when they were starting up this thing called the Master's Fellowship with the church at John MacArthur's church out there in Grace Community Church, and so there were maybe 50 of us that were part of it back then, and so we had met, John MacArthur came out, Steve Lawson came out, they both had preached, but it was a lot more informal.
It wasn't really a preaching, it was a lot more discussion. John had said, he recognized that as independents that there's the problems with, as he said, independent dispensational churches. He didn't use the term Baptist because I don't think they would say they're Baptist, they're Baptistic, right?
But he's pointing out there is a lot of things that are hurting by being independent, and one of the things he brought up is the abuse that can happen from pastors. So though the doctrinal statement we're looking at isn't being specific to that here, I want to address that, because this is being really specific in the sense to say that this authority and this sole judge of measure and method is for the cooperation that was the sentence before, okay?
It doesn't mean the pastor has the right to say everything that happens in your life, right? If you go back on Apologetics Live, if you go on strivingforeturning .org, you can search for Dangerous Doctrines, and there's an article that goes through an Apologetics Live series we did, and in that series we evaluated a church that someone called a cult, and I was saying, let's not use that word unless it's really true, and in that series though, we ended up realizing it was a cult because there were things where the pastor said to a single woman, well, since you don't have a father, I'm your spiritual father, and he set up a bank account where her paycheck was directly deposited into his bank account, and he would give her an allowance of money, and so she wanted to get some new furniture for her house, and he decided she didn't need that.
That was a poor stewardship of her money, so he wouldn't give her money. Now, that kept her in the church for many years because she had to give up all her savings to leave, and eventually she left and just gave up the money, but that is abuse, and that I wouldn't be saying is a right thing, so when we're saying this though, that they're the sole judge, it is in that cooperation with other churches.
Have I beaten that to death enough, Wade? No, I think.
You made your point. I am curious, do you believe that the church votes on anything, or do you believe in, like, sure enough, elder rule, or do you believe in, like, an elder-led church-confirmed?
So, I do not see a strong argument, really, either way in Scripture to the point where I can see either of their being. So, for example, I do believe for deacons, what I see in Scripture is that the congregation chooses the deacons, but the pastors choose pastors.
So, the way I've done it in the church is where I've been, the church will select names for deacons, and the pastors will, so they give the names, and then it's confirmed by pastors, where the pastors will select a name for the other pastors, and then the congregation would then confirm that.
Correct. And so, that would be the position. Now, I'm kind of more of a practical side on this. So, when you have smaller churches, I believe with smaller churches, the smaller churches should be congregational-led if they're a spiritually mature congregation, right?
Because that's the problem with that. I have no problem with, if you have one man as the pastor, he's the only pastor, then I would say have other people. So, I planted a church. How do we do it? What we did, I was the only pastor.
I was the preaching pastor. So, what I did was I got two other men that I said, okay, they're going to be acting as pastors, they're not going to be pastors, we're going to give a couple of years for people to evaluate them, and then whether to see whether they're going to be pastors or not.
But what I did was I would have once a month all of the men, any of the men of the church could meet for a men's meeting, and we would discuss the issues of the church. Why did I do that? Because I think as a single pastor, I shouldn't be making the decisions by myself.
So, the advantage of doing that is it also is training up future pastors and deacons, but I'm also getting the input of the congregation, or at least the men. Why only the men? Because I believe within the church only men should have authority and rule, and so we did that separation.
Could I have included the women on that? Maybe. That was a discussion we had. We felt that it should be the men, and so that's how we did it. But what that did was that got me an idea of where the congregation was when we made a decision.
We got all the discussion done there, which was the nice thing in a small church is you're not dealing with some of the problems that way because it's being discussed together, right? And then, again, I didn't want to be the only one deciding, so then the three men would meet to vote on things, and so I would, you know, I'm not dogmatic on it.
I know there's many that are, but you know, I've seen, look, unfortunately I've seen a lot of guys, I don't know what it is with Master's Seminary, there's a lot of it that comes out of there where you get these guys that are trained on elder rule, elder rule, and I'd see these guys that come out and the first thing, they get to a church and the first thing they want to do is install elders, elder rule in a congregational-led church, and I know three that I've talked to and I'm like, slow up.
It's okay if the church wants them, but train them, teach them. That's what we did in two of the churches I was in, is we took a congregation, but we taught through it for two years before we brought in lay pastors and paid pastors and made them, making the elder-led where they make the decisions.
Some churches I know have, hey, the elders make all the decisions, but the church votes on the budget. There's different ways that some churches do it. So, some churches, everything's the pastors, and even when I say that, there's no church where the congregation votes on everything because you're not going to, oh, hey, you know, so-and-so's got a counseling, needs counseling, let's vote on it.
But even within congregational-led, there's certain things, the authority they give to the pastors to make decisions on their own. There are some churches where a congregation has absolutely no say, and then there's those in the middle.
It's a more practical thing. It depends. If I had a church where I had 13 godly men, I have no problem being elder-led. There's enough men that one person doesn't dominate.
Sure, yeah, I agree 100 with what you said. Because you need, every pastor needs to be held accountable, and if a pastor has total freedom over everything within the church, it is very likely that that freedom is going to go to his head, and he is going to make decisions that are not in the best interest of that local church.
And so, having accountability is key for sure,.
So I would agree with you on that. Especially if the guy's coming from outside the church because he's going to keep a hold on this because it's his livelihood on the line, right? He's got to keep control of that, and that's usually what disqualifies these guys.
So, as strong as we are with the previous sentence about the fact that the pastors are the sole judge, I want you to know specific wording, and this is, again, these are doctrinal statements for a reason.
The precision. Because the next sentence says the elders should determine all other matters of membership, policy, discipline, benevolence, and government as well. Now, you see, all of a sudden, it's softened with a should, not must, right?
Elder-led would say must if they're making all decisions, but notice where the other is, they're the sole judge. Well, that is when it comes to cooperation with other churches of like faith. This is now everything else, and it's saying, well, and consistent with everything that Wade and I have been saying, the pastors should have the say, but should because there's times that the pastors are human too and could be in sin, as Wade had mentioned.
So, that becomes something that needs to be reviewed, right, and needs to have some accountability. So, where are you at with.
Your church? You have elder-led? We have a plurality of elders, but we are an elder-led church that takes matters, especially the bigger matters, to the church for confirmation, and so, I would see that the congregational vote as just that, as a confirmation, not as something that they agree with or disagree with as far as their opinion is concerned.
So, if we want to buy three acres of land, the congregation should be looking at, okay, is what our pastor's asking us biblical? If it's biblical, then we need to vote for that, or whatever the case is.
I believe the congregation should hold each pastor accountable by the Word of God, okay, and it's not by their opinion, which so many churches, vote no on things because I just don't want that, or I don't think that's the right thing.
Well, what does the Bible say? And allow that pastor to shepherd and make sure that what he's asking of you, whatever that is, is biblical, and if it's biblical, then I believe that they are duty-bound in their local church to vote for that and to confirm that.
Jonathan. So, if you would see it, so if the church, if the pastor's made a decision, you give it to the congregation, that's not a vote. So, the pastor's already made the decision, and this is just for the pastor to say, look, if 80 percent say, no, we shouldn't do that, maybe we as pastors should rethink it, but if the vote's 80 percent against, it's still the pastor's vote.
Is that?
Greg. Well, no. It's still, I mean, if it's 80 percent against, then yeah, obviously, yeah, something is amiss, and probably we would not do that. Jonathan.
Well, yeah, but I'm saying it's not the congregational's vote that makes a difference. It's not like, okay, well, X percent of the vote says this, so it passes. You're saying the elders are passing it, but you're giving it to the congregation to see if they confirm it, if they agree with it, and if a majority doesn't, even if it's 25 percent, maybe not a majority, the pastors go, let's maybe rethink this.
Greg.
Right. Yes, exactly. Yeah, and so I pastored some very small rural country churches where really the pastor didn't have a lot of authority at all. The authority lied more with the deacons and the local, the church votes, and whatever the deacon said, that's what the church would do, and so the pastor didn't have a lot of authority whatsoever, and so a lot of times, especially in country rural churches, you don't get a lot accomplished for the kingdom because it's all about their opinion as to any matter whatsoever, which is really sad.
Jonathan I agree. Well, with that, this, that is going to wrap up another episode of The Wrap Report. I know that, Wade, you're talking about cooperation. The whole reason I'm having you and the other people on as my co-hosts is to give them a chance to promote their podcast, because we're not in competition at the Christian Podcast Community, so before we go out, why don't you let folks know a little bit about your podcast, what you've got in store on your podcast?
We have a podcast called the Patriot Pastors Podcast, and it's hosted by myself, Wade Lentz, and another pastor, a friend of mine who also lives in Arkansas. His name is Harold Smith, and we talk about all sorts of issues that are related to politics and governments, to elections, to church issues, as we are both small town pastors, and so we cover a lot of different topics.
We have about 90 or so episodes that you can listen to, and all sorts of different subjects. I would encourage you to listen to us, and we're certain that you can find some episodes somewhere that can be edifying to you and encouragement to you as a believer in Jesus Christ.
And with that, folks, we'll be back next week to finish up another part of this doctrinal statement on the church, and with that, that's a wrap.
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