Pop Church Circus | Theocast

Hi, this is John, and today on Theocast, we have a discussion around the insanity of the modern church as it relates to the pastor and congregants, and how often church feels more like an exhausting circus, moving from one big program to the next.

And then we're going to spend some time talking about what is biblical Christianity, what is the responsibility of a church pastor and a church congregant.

We hope you find this conversation edifying, and we definitely pray that you find rest.

We'll talk to you soon. A simple and easy way for you to help support Theocast each month is by shopping at Amazon through the

Amazon Smile program. When you make a purchase through Amazon Smile, a portion of the proceeds will be donated to our ministry.

To learn how to sign up, just go to theocast .org slash give. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ.

This conversation is about the Christian life from a Reformed and pastoral perspective. We have three pastors all hyped up on love, affection for each other, and caffeine around the -

And coconut water. Coconut water around the microphones this morning. We have Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina.

Jimmy Buehler, everybody a round of applause out of the microphone today. Pastor of Christ Community Church in Willmar, Minnesota, and I'm John Moffitt, I'm the pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Sticky, Tennessee.

It is quite sticky. We're going to hear from Jimmy in a minute. Before we do, Justin, brother, what are we giving away, why are we giving it away, and who are we giving it to?

A lot of questions, man, I feel pretty burdened. We are giving away one of our books, one of the things that the three of us wrote together.

It is our little book on faith versus faithfulness, a primer on rest, at least as it is titled up to this point.

It's a little book that we wrote essentially on confessional theology and what it looks like to rest in Christ.

We are giving it away through, I guess, somewhat random processes today. I basically listened to John and Jimmy throw a bunch of numbers around.

I was just sipping my coconut water, completely uninvolved, and somehow, someway we came up with one of our members to give this book away to, none other than Dave Fortin.

Dave Fortin, Dave, we will be getting this book to you. If you haven't heard anything from us, I think you need to shoot us a little message with your address or something like that.

We'll shoot you an email. We'll get the book to you. Like I said, we will shoot you an email. That's exactly what we said. You can tell that I am intimately involved in the book giveaway process.

That's right. Yeah, so we'll email you, Dave, and get that book to you happily, man. If you're listening to this podcast, it releases on a

Wednesday morning, and you're thinking, I would love a hard copy of Faith vs. Faithfulness. We are here for you.

If you go to any of our social media handles, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, you will find instructions on how you could enter yourself into the fray to possibly win a copy of Faith vs.

Faithfulness. So we leave that to you. We trust you can read the instructions and do what is necessary. Before we throw it over,

I want to give a nice shout out to Jen, who has volunteered to take over the shipment of our books.

And so without Jen Smith's help, yes. Thank you, Jen. I am obviously quite clueless as to how all this happens, and sometimes

I receive messages from people about book giveaways, and I sort of try to kindly respond and be like,

I'm going to pass this along because I have no idea what to do with this. So Jen, thank you for handling it.

We just pray, and then they just show up at the right place. They just materialize. They do. It's pretty remarkable. If God wants it there, it's going to get there.

That's right. Only do it. Yep. That's right. Yeah. They just suck it. So, all right.

Now that we've done that, we are going to talk about something else today. And Jimmy, why don't you set it up for the listener, man?

Yeah. Okay. So here's my joke to begin. Are you ready? John just rolled his eyes at me. John does that a lot.

He does. And the way you guys describe me, it's mean. He is.

He's just a... Anyway. So what do Britney Spears, elephants, and John Calvin have in common?

Seriously. Wow. Waiting for the punchline on that one. The punchline is...

There's an idea for a graphic. I have no idea. But today, what we are going to talk about is pop church circus.

Pop church circus. And I think the person that we are aiming to speak to today, maybe you are that church member or that church attender where you feel like you show up to church on Sundays and you're looking around and you're seeing all of these things happen around you.

Different people volunteering. And have you ever had the thought of...

Everybody seems to be very busy and very involved and very much part of the movement.

But I actually have no idea what's going on. Or I have no idea what all of this is for.

And it can be really disorienting, particularly here in the West, here in the

United States. And the reason why we kind of title this the pop church circus, if you've ever been to a circus, you walk in and it's like a thousand and one different things are fighting for your attention.

Whether it's the ski ball machine or the bearded lady or the conjoined twins or whatever it might be.

There's just a thousand things that you can look at and give your attention to. And it's almost too much.

It's almost too overwhelming. And I'll just speak from personal experience in the different churches that I've been involved in.

It always seemed like there was a new initiative or a new movement and corresponding matching t -shirts to go along with it.

And so eventually what can happen, and I think actually what we're seeing, particularly in our generation, the post -boomer,

I think that would be Gen Z, millennial, is you see a lot of deconversion stories or ex -vangelicals is a lot of times what they call themselves, where essentially they're running away from this kind of circus.

And so what we want to do today is just kind of talk about and hopefully bring hope and rest to that kind of person.

What do we do in that kind of situation? But maybe before we get there, would one of you just kind of want to step in and kind of flesh this idea out a little bit more?

Yeah, Jimmy, I'm happy to jump in for a second here and put it maybe in my own words. I think there are all kinds of expectations heaped upon people in the church, and that would include pastors and congregants.

And then there are a lot of unhelpful notions in the popular church of what pastoral ministry looks like.

And there are also a lot of unhelpful notions about what being a church attender or a church member looks like in the popular church.

Because it's all just like this fire hose coming at them. And like you said, I love the analogy of there's all these different things going on, and there's a

T -shirt for every program, and there's a T -shirt for every new thing that we're doing and every initiative, and it all can just be exhausting.

And we talk all the time on this podcast about the rest that is ours in Christ. And so I think one of the goals of today's conversation is to liberate people who are exhausted by the popular church.

And whether you're a pastor, like whether you're paid to do vocational ministry, whether you're a lay elder perhaps and you're helping pastor the church in that regard, or whether you're a member of a church or an attender of a church somewhere, our hope for today is that you walk away from this podcast with some simple handles and takeaways.

Like, man, the Christian life is unfathomably deep, but at the same time, it's actually quite simple.

And so I can give myself to these few things, and I'm going to be absolutely inside the

Word of God, and I'm probably going to be a little bit, I don't know, more rested, and I'm probably going to be more effective in the things that I'm doing.

That's sort of where I'm coming from in having this conversation. John, do you have thoughts that you want to add to that before we maybe get into the content itself?

Sometimes what's helpful when you are wrestling with, that doesn't seem right or that seems wrong, that seems off, and then you can sit down with someone and you just touch it to see what happens, and then they completely regurgitate back to you, yeah, this, this, this, this, and this.

It helps you just calm down and go, okay, I'm not crazy. I'm not the only one who goes, that is a circus and I don't want anything to do with it.

That is definitely the conversation we want to have with you. If you're looking at modern church and what seems to be popular, like if you just drop a pin in any church, in any city, and look at what the mega churches are doing, the big churches, what's popular, what's moving, and even most church plants, it does feel like a circus.

It feels as if the culture drives whatever works, and that's the pressure we all fall under.

The way I describe it, it feels superficial. It feels as if no one can have problems, and whatever is the most important thing going on in the culture is the most important thing going on in the church.

Brief interjection, and you feel like there's no way that any ordinary church can pull this off, because it's this incredible machine that's been built, and it requires millions of dollars a year, and how in the world could we, just as ordinary

Christians and ordinary people, ever do this thing? I would just kind of pipe in here and say, this is kind of a plague,

I would say, in our modern culture in the church scene. John, you said the haunting words, which is, whatever works.

Our measurements and metrics and definitions of what a successful church is have just become so far away from what

I think Scripture teaches, and frankly, we're coming from a reform perspective, what a lot of the reformed confessions teach.

That's kind of what we want to get into a little bit. Everything just kind of seems like the rat race, where,

I don't know about you guys, but in our life, our life is just tremendously busy.

We have little kids, and we're not even, I know some people are listening, and they have kids that are perhaps in sports or in different activities.

We're just getting into that, and I just know how easy it can become when you're part of a church, and it seems like any day that ends in Y, you are either at the church building, or you're doing some sort of church -related activity.

I just had a conversation yesterday with a guy who just started attending our church, Jimmy, to your point, and he was just asking me about life and the rhythms of our congregation.

I let him know that we unashamedly prioritize Sunday and then just time together in terms of just kicking it and getting to know each other and being in one another's lives, but we intentionally don't actually fill up everybody's calendar with church activities because we don't think that that's the best way to try to arrange our lives together.

That may be a different podcast for a different day, but I think that observation is good. Didn't mean to interrupt you, bro. No, that's okay.

Like I was saying, I think it's very easy to become so busy and so oriented around activity in church that the actual, and I mean to use the cliche phrase, the actual being the body of Christ to one another just actually never happens.

Right. We've kind of programatized it to death. Anyway, I think in having this conversation, we might take two different groups of people, one at the time, just for the next little bit and see where this goes.

We'll speak first to pastors, to people who are in leadership in the church and have been set aside to do that work, and then we'll talk more specifically to congregants, which would be the vast majority of people we trust listening to the podcast.

When it comes to being a pastor, the three guys sitting here behind these microphones are in vocational ministry, and we all have planted churches.

In particular, I think in the church planting sphere, some of this circus of the popular church is, if anything, more obvious and more in your face.

All the pressures and the expectations that are placed upon guys who are going to plant churches and be pastors can be off the charts overwhelming.

Guys can feel like, oh my gosh, I'm going to be a pastor. What in the world do I give my time to? There's a million things

I could do, which is true. Especially if you're in a situation like you,

Jimmy, where it's not your full -time job, you've got very limited bandwidth. What do you need to give your time to?

We're going to talk about just a very few things that we would see in the Scripture that the Reformed confessions would also bear witness to.

I'm just going to go ahead and lay them out, and we can talk about them one at a time. You are fulfilling your job description as a pastor if you give attention to the following things.

It's not a long list. 1. Preach the Word of Christ and administer the sacraments. 2.

Oversee the church. By that we mean not run it like an organization, but oversee it doctrinally and guide it in that sense.

3. Love your people, which would include meeting with them and shepherding them.

Or as Jesus said, tend the flock. 4.

Invest in other people who can also be pastors. Because the best way to pastor the church is to see the pastoral ministry multiplied in that regard.

So it's pretty simple. Preach the Word and administer the sacraments. Oversee the church. Love your people.

Tend the flock. 5. Invest in other people who can lead. If you're doing that, you're going to be doing well.

There are a million other things you could give your time and attention to. If you've got the bandwidth for it, knock yourself out.

But if you're thinking, I don't have that kind of capacity, pay attention to these few things and you will be doing a faithful job as a pastor of the church where you are.

Thoughts about that, guys? I went to a Preaching Magazine conference here in Nashville. I walked through the exhibit hall and was engaging, trying to hold my nose for most of the time.

What I saw was that I could get a doctorate and degrees in leadership. I could get it in church organizational structure.

What I didn't see were helps for pastors on how to shepherd, how to counsel, how to care, how to deal with loss, how to deal with suffering.

It was really geared towards if you want to take your ministry to the next level and kind of reach that moment of pinnacle, like 500 or 1 ,000 people.

These are what the successful pastors are doing. This is how they're preaching.

They're doing leadership training. They're focusing on basically how to communicate in a style where it's more effective, communicating your mission, communicating your objectives.

It was exhausting. I lasted one day. I was supposed to be there three. I lasted one day.

I'm tired listening to it. I didn't go back, to which then the two series of sermons

I did hear about were about racial reconciliation and how I was a white pastor. It was my fault that racism was in the

United States. I was like, all right, well, this isn't what I came for. But what we feel, what

I feel as a pastor, and I'm in the buckle of the Bible belt. Christianity was invented in Nashville.

It's the hub of it. Good to know. It may very well be where the New Jerusalem comes in.

I was thinking Jerusalem, but Nashville's close. I was in a coffee shop yesterday with one of the guys

I planted a church with, Patrick Crandall. I literally looked around the room and there were four other pastors meeting with staff or church members in there.

I was obviously the most underdressed of all of them. I didn't shop apparently wherever they shop, and I definitely didn't have my hair cut wherever they got their hair cut.

I just chuckled. I don't really care. I know most of these guys' churches, and I've been to their websites.

I unfortunately have been in conversations with them. I look at the pressures that they live underneath to try and keep up with what's happening.

I was talking with a Presbyterian pastor that's a very good friend of mine in Columbia. He described modern

Christianity in this way that most Christians jump from one church to the next because there is no connection.

It's kind of like, this one now offers this, or this offers this, or this sermon series here. I love the word circus because a circus kind of shows up.

It blows in, it blows up, it blows out to the next city, and it does its song and dance.

You either increase the song and dance, you either make the attractiveness better, or you're going to lose your congregants to the next big thing.

I have congregants rolling into my church saying, I am exhausted by the circus of Christianity.

I know for a fact there are pastors who are exhausted by this system. They get chewed up, spit out, and they leave ministry because they can't keep up with guys that are exploding churches of 400, 500, 1 ,000, 2 ,000, 5 ,000.

It's just a machine that just chews people up to death. There is something that very much happens in the church in the

States, which is the pastor becomes either the CEO or the spiritual guru that has wisdom on almost every area of life.

Whether it's parenting, or marriage, or finances, or work, or whatever it may be, your pastor has all of the answers on how to do these things and do them well, and to create results, and to create metrics, and so on and so forth.

My wife and I have been married for 11 years, so we're not rookies per se. At the same time, there is a profound sense of a lot of areas that I just don't know.

I would not go write a book on marriage right now, because there are just so many areas that we don't have figured out.

Actually, you could, Jimmy, just to interject, everything you shouldn't do. That's right. We all could write that book.

If you want the book of mistakes, I can tell you that, but I don't have any solutions.

The same thing with parenting. I still go to older members of our church that have raised teenagers that are still walking with the

Lord. I'm like, how do you do this? My kids are driving me nuts right now.

The joke about parenting is just talk to the couple that has a one -year -old and it's their only child, and they'll tell you everything you need to know.

But this is often the expectation that is laden on pastors. Sometimes that can go one of two ways.

One, the pastor gets a ginormously huge head because they all of a sudden believe that they are the expert on everything.

Then they become the celebrity. Or two, what John has mentioned, they end up burning out because they become the answer guy.

If you need to know anything about life, they will know it.

I think what JP mentioned earlier, what is it that a pastor is supposed to do?

This is what we see in the book of Acts. The elder, the shepherds, they give themselves to prayer and ministry of the

Word. Frankly, I would say there is probably a really good chance, a high percentage.

I would say in the 90s, that your pastor does not have time for those things because of all of the other expectations that have been thrust upon him.

Concerning being the spiritual guru or the life coach that many people want him to be. Can I just add to the weight of what

Jimmy is saying? I read this list in an installation service I did on Sunday. I just want to read it to you here.

Here are the various hats that people expect pastors to wear. Preacher, counselor, leader, financial planner, designer, project manager, entrepreneur, videographer.

The list still goes on. Supervisor, volunteer, coordinator, theologian, receptionist, greeter, webmaster, community activist, writer, recruiter, life coach, shipping department coordinator, strategist, social mediaite, dreamer, student, disciplinarian, teacher, social activist, events specialist, chaplain,

CEO, COO, CMO, CFO, operations manager, janitor, salesman, and communications specialist.

That's just the name of a few. Which is, people think

I'm crazy. We're being facetious in some ways, but it's not. It's not, but it's so crazy when you look at some contexts.

My favorite thing too is, we only work one day a week, right? That's true. I do.

The thing that's interesting is, a lot of that stuff that you just read, John, the vast majority of it, and Jimmy, using your language of the pastor being a

CEO and a guru, none of that's in the scripture at all. It's not.

I would go so far as to say, if I was really going to talk about the most important thing that pastors do,

I think we would all probably liberate ourselves a little bit if we were content for every aspect of our ministry to fail, save the preaching of Christ.

But then, I think there are other things that we need to be doing. As I'm thinking about my own job, giving people

Christ in the service every Sunday is paramount. In the Word, in the table, and in baptism.

That's critical. But then, beyond that, the other thing that happens twice a month at our church is our pastors meet together to pray for our people and to discuss matters of oversight of the church.

In those times, those are the most essential things that I do. Therefore, they should receive a lot of my attention and energy as a pastor.

Then, other things that occur are important, like the meetings with people. John and I were just talking about it.

Meeting with congregants, because he and I are both full -time pastors. I had three meetings with individuals yesterday.

I've got one today. I think John's the same. You give yourself to that, where you meet with your people and you talk with them about their lives.

You often just listen to them talk and offer what you can. But you're not a guru. You can't answer every question.

You're mainly just listening and pointing them to Christ and encouraging them in Him. I think the task is weighty.

It's thrilling. But the main things that we need to do are actually few. It's a relatively simple job description in that regard.

It's beyond our capacity. We need the sufficiency of the Lord. Amen to that. We don't do ourselves a service when we overcomplicate this.

We make the list a million items long. I was talking with a dear saint.

He's a pastor in Texas. He was describing to me some of the pressures he's been feeling as a church planner.

All the things that are expected of him. One of the words he used was an entrepreneur. If you don't have an entrepreneurial spirit, then you're not going to be a successful church planner.

I just say that is nowhere in the requirements of a pastor.

I'm sorry, of a pastor or church planter. I love that the illustration used is shepherd.

Jesus literally says to Peter, who, by the way, is not a very successful human being at the moment he is hearing these things.

He has denied Jesus. He's hiding in a room. He's not your primo example of the leader that you want leading the flock of God.

What does Jesus do? He loves him. He gives him mercy and grace and forgiveness. Then he says to him, feed my sheep.

Tend my sheep. Shepherds are designed to do two things. Feed, care for, and protect the congregation.

When a pastor starts to feel the weight of he needs to be a public speaker, he needs to be this, he needs to be that.

His attention throughout the week is drawn away from the very moment that he should be present, which is administrating the word and then caring for those receiving the word.

When I think about what pastors spend their time doing, how is this related to the one thing you've been called to do?

They become administrators. They become communication specialists. You said influencers.

We're not influencers. Pastors don't have to have a public persona to do their job effectively.

They don't need to have a massive podcast or a YouTube channel or whatever else you want to put out there. That's right.

Not only that, can I just interject here? Just because a pastor is popular and has a big following doesn't mean he has more, what he says is more influential.

I'm going to just be a little cranky right now and say I get exhausted being compared to what other famous pastors have said.

I don't care what they say. They're not in my context. They're not in my city, and they're not in my church, and therefore what they say has no authority.

Period. All right. I'm done. The celebrity pastor notion is just absurd. I've said this to people, and they look at me like I'm nuts.

When they listen to their favorite celebrity preacher, I tell them, well, you know that he has no authority in your life, right?

That's right. Because he's not your pastor. He might say some good things that are helpful, but he bears no authority to call you out on things because he's not your pastor.

The other thing that I was going to say is there is often a weight placed on pastors that they were never meant to bear.

Those are the things that you listed off. I'll never forget what one of my mentors said to me one time, and it kind of haunts me to this day, even as I think about the various things that our church does, where he said, and this,

I think, can help us transition as we look at congregants as well, is your church can be very busy and productive, and yet the hand of God can still be against you.

I remember that hitting me in the chest like a sledgehammer, because at that point,

I was leading a ministry that was quote -unquote successful, but we were very busy and we were doing things.

But I think our metrics and measures of success were just so far out of whack. I realize that not everybody listening to this is a pastor, but I think also as congregants as well, some of the things that can happen is congregants, as we've mentioned before, can be part of a church.

Let's just describe the typical standard fare of what a typical congregant might experience in church today.

The expectation is this. You attend church on Sunday morning, where perhaps you volunteer in some way, whether that's teaching

Sunday school, volunteering in the nursery, maybe you're an usher or maybe you're a deacon, or maybe you're a cleanup crew or setup crew or whatever it might be.

And then Monday night, you have some sort of church meeting where you have to discuss some matter of the church.

Tuesday night, you have your community group or your home fellowship group or your small group. Wednesday night, you have the kids or youth programming that you volunteer in that you have to show up.

Thursday night, you have to do your own family things. And then Friday night, you have a worship night that you have to attend and be part of.

And then Saturday morning, there's a serve day. And then eventually, before you realize it, you're actually not really living in the community in which you live.

You just keep driving 20 minutes to the church building and doing church -related activities. So you have no time to interact with your spouse.

You have no time to interact with your own kids. And then eventually, you realize, I am so exhausted.

My marriage is on the rocks. My kids don't want to go to church anymore because all we're doing is church -related functions and activities.

And so, guys, is this realistic? Is this sustainable? What do we do? Short answer, no.

We do realize that the vast majority of people listening to this are probably not in pastoral ministry. The comments about pastors, though, we hope are helpful to the congregant in thinking about what you should look for in a person who's going to be your pastor.

So kind of hang on to those things and set realistic expectations in your own mind and heart for your pastors, for your shepherds.

But yeah, Jimmy, I mean, you lay it out well. I think a lot of people are flat -out exhausted by the demands that the church puts on them and the rigor of just church life and all the events and things.

And, I mean, there are, I trust, good debates that can be had about what's valuable and what isn't.

But let me just start with this. The only thing that's essential in the life of any congregation is the Sunday morning gathering.

Anything outside of the Sunday morning gathering is a wisdom call. And I think we would just do everybody a service if we could just talk like that out of the gate because a lot of times,

I think, people think that there is an absolute, there are all of these various other things going on in the church calendar and in the life of the congregation.

I'm going to go ahead and lay out a few things that I think are the most simple and basic things that congregants should concern themselves with.

And this list is even shorter than the list that we had for pastors. So if you are a person who attends a church, you're a

Christian and you want to be involved in a church somewhere, three things. One, join a church.

Become a member of a church. That sounds crazy to some, but join.

Two, show up. Your primary ministry in your local church is to show up to service on Sunday.

Three, love the brethren. Love the saints. And that's it. Join, show up, love each other.

And then volunteer for nursery. That could be a subset. Yeah. I mean, a subset of loving one another, we realize has a lot of implications biblically.

But yeah, but it's just like, let that be your motivator, let that be your guide. And I don't know which one we want to take on first.

I have a number of thoughts about each of these. Church membership. Do we want to start there,

Jimmy? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I have some words on that. Now, I know that church membership is kind of all over the board probably for our listeners.

For some people, it doesn't mean anything. For some people, dare

I say it almost means too much. Like it's a primary doctrine. Yeah. Well, and I would say there are areas that maybe the church has authority in somebody's life that they don't need to have authority.

But that's, I mean, again, a whole different podcast. But I would say for the most people, nine out of ten, the average listener, what church membership might mean and then maybe someday you can become a leader of some sort, some ministry, or you can become an elder or whatever it might be.

Or you can play in the band. Yeah, right. You can play in the band. Because who doesn't want to do that?

Who doesn't want to do that, right? And so skinny jeans not included. So anyway,

I think membership can be underthought and it can be overthought. And at least my own ideas are

I do think church membership is biblical, right? There's always been an in and out of God's people. But what

I've communicated, what I communicated to our people when we were kind of starting this church is church membership.

One, becoming a member at a church communicates to that body, to that pastor,

I am here and I am one of you and I belong here and I am committed to this place.

And two, I think it gives you the best avenues to love and encourage the saints, right?

To quote unquote, carry out the imperatives of the one and others that we find in the

New Testament. And so I think those are the important things, right? Super quick.

I mean, church membership is about defining who we are. Exactly. Yeah, so what we are doing is we are submitting to the same doctrine, to the same pastors and we know who we are so that we can love one another and watch over each other.

Yeah, and we submit, we submit ourselves to the discipline of the church in both a positive and a negative sense because discipline isn't always negative.

the most often occurring discipline, the most frequent kind of discipline is formative. Right. It's not corrective.

It's not punitive. And part of that discipline is just weekly sitting under the preaching of the word and the care of the elders.

John, jump in, man. Well, I think what's, I think what's hard when you've never been in a biblical church that actually administrates

God's word the way it was designed from its inception and you're a part of what I would, you know, we're using this for a circus.

You don't, you don't have affections towards circuses. You know, it's like, you go, you enjoy, you leave.

You don't get a membership to it. Yeah, it's where, it's where I spend a lot of money and I'm really tired and my kids become cranky.

That's right. Right, but they're entertained. But they're entertained. And we did something as a family and, I mean, to be fair, not all churches are that way, but we, we don't understand.

I'm just going to still, so I was listening to J .D. Koch on his podcast Stand Firm and he made a statement that the church, the

American Evangelical Church has failed because it has not categoized, categoized its congregants correctly.

So we don't understand theological concepts like ecclesiology, the purpose of the church, the purpose of preaching, the purpose of the local body.

We don't understand those things. So when someone hears church membership. What the corporate gathering is for. Right. Church membership could be,

I had a conversation with a guy about this in Texas. Church membership could be, it's a sales lead in.

Oh, you go to the same mega church I do. Oh, great. And now they have a connection. Church membership becomes where I associate my identity.

It is not, it is not where I see the extension of myself. Like I, I want our church members to go, oh, this is family.

I literally have people who've been in my church now for nine months and they said, I'm more close in nine months to the people in this congregation than I am my own church.

I'm sorry, my own blood relatives. And which first of all, sounds biblical because that's exactly how

Jesus described those of us who are connected to him in his body. But church membership becomes that identity where you say,

I am going to be one held responsible for the love and care of the other members in this congregation because literally the

New Testament says when you function properly, you build yourself up. Consider how to build one another up and love so you're not hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.

Consider how to sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs to one another. Carry you one another burdens. Being a member in a local congregation isn't where you give money and serve in the nursery.

It's where you live life for the sake of spiritual health and protection. It's a whole other way of thinking.

Like a lot of times people are like, I'm a member here because this is where I go. And biblically speaking, can you argue that membership, the word, is in the

New Testament? Of course it's not in the scripture. No, it's not. But the concept of family and body, which is much stronger, it's almost like maybe we need to get rid of membership and say, what body are you a part of?

How are you connected? What church membership is is the commonly agreed upon principle that is very old that Christians have said this is the best way for us to practice what the

New Testament outlines in terms of our relationships to each other is to be members here.

We make up this body of Christ in this location. So that we're able to love each other, do these things for each other, submit to this leadership, and so that church discipline can be practiced.

Membership is necessary. That's how the saints have always thought about it. So kind of on the opposite spectrum of this,

I think one of the things that we see today in churches is where do people tend to flock?

Where do people tend to go? People tend to go where there's exciting initiative and movement.

We're like chronically attracted to that. We're chronically attracted to things that are exciting.

And I might offend a lot of people here, and that's fine because I'm not on the podcast as much as you guys are. So you guys can deal with it later.

We'll clean up the mess, Jimmy. Thank you. I appreciate that. I'll put my Twitter on mute. I would say if you are part of a body where your church is always coming up with the next initiative or the next movement, that is a massive red flag for me.

Why? Because I would say what they're communicating, and right here it comes, what they're communicating is that the word is not enough to do what it says that it does.

Agree. And so when people come to our church, we are very open with the fact that we don't offer programs, but we offer a mindset shift.

And the mindset shift is over the course of your life, we invite you to sit with us under prayer ministry of the word.

And we trust that God's word is going to shape and save and do what it says that it does.

And we are not looking for the immediate flashy results or the next big thing or movement, but rather we are trusting that God is going to use his ordinary means to do extraordinary things within our lives.

And so, what's our initiative? Well, our initiative is what

Jesus commanded his apostles to do, which is make disciples of all nations by baptizing them in the name of the

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, teaching them all that I've commanded you to do. And so, we realized that it's like, man, well, that teaching everything that Jesus said, well, that's going to take a long time.

No, it's true. And so, we're going to have to do that over the course of life, which is why you're not, you're not like, like last week, my sermon was on Romans 12, 9 through 21, where Paul just basically lists a bunch of common sense things where he says, let love be genuine, abhor what is evil, cling to what is good.

And what I told our people is something that I read in Michael Horton's book, Ordinary, the quote that he says is, everybody wants to do big things for Jesus, but nobody wants to do the dishes.

No, it's true. I mean, everybody wants to do, like, the building the wells in Africa or raising money for sex trafficking, which is fine.

And those things are not bad things. But at the end of the day, it's like, if we're chronically plagued by the next initiative, eventually, we're going to become exhausted and burned out by those things.

Yeah. So, we only have a few minutes left on the regular portion of the podcast today. And I'm going to land the plane with this one.

I have said, I can't even count how many times to people who have come to CBC, because it is so different than what they have ever experienced.

And this is especially true for people who are really zealous and they want to love Christ, serve Him, and be useful.

And I, more or less, tell people, calm down and just show up to church on Sunday. And they look at you like, you have lost your ever loving mind.

Like, there has to be something else that I need to do. And in our church context,

I know this is the case for you guys too. If you just faithfully show up to church, and Jimmy, like, we were talking before we hit record, not once a month, but you're there, like, most every

Sunday. Like, you just show up. Feeling good some Sundays, feeling terrible on others, you just come.

Everything else kind of flows out of that. And that corporate reality drives everything else in your

Christian life, but it also is the way that relationships get deepened. It facilitates all of that stuff.

This is how coffees and lunches get planned. But more than anything else, if you just continue to show up on Sunday, you're going to partake of the ordinary means of grace, which is huge.

But then also, inevitably, you're going to be asked to do various things in the church because it becomes clear that you're going to be effective in doing them.

And over the long haul, you just showing up on Sunday will result in you being all kinds of fruitful and effective. And you will feel as though you didn't even try to make it happen because it just happened.

Like that's how the Lord does that. The ordinary means of grace is really quickly, like you made the comment earlier and I refrained from saying something about podcast preachers and stuff and how they're not your pastors and all.

I think we would really, the American church has to wrap its mind around this, that preaching only occurs when the church is gathered.

I know. You can listen to a podcast, a sermon, from a great preacher who you have learned a lot from and it be beneficial and that at the same time is not preaching.

It is not a means of grace in that sense. Because the preaching of the word happens when a man stands in the presence of God's people and God uses that man to preach the word of Christ and we corporately sit under that word.

That is a different thing than listening to a sermon in your earbuds. And I think so many people in the

States would be helped to just understand that context and that message that I need to be present for the preaching of the word and the administration of the

Lord's table and for prayer and song in the context of the gathered church because the Lord uses it.

That's right. Can I just interject Justin and say the same men, elders, who administrate the word to you should be the same men that tend to you.

Yes. Should be the same men that confront you when you're trapped in sin. Should be the same men that pray for you when you're discouraged.

Yes. Church is not the sermon on Sunday. That's, you know, and I have more to say about that in the

SR. And we'll do it. We'll do it in SR. So I guess I'm the one that brings it over. Yeah. I think you are,

John. Do it. I mean, by all means, take us there, dude. I know, man. It's been a whirlwind of a day already.

So, well, it's exciting. I do, there's two things I want to talk about. There's more than church just on Sunday.

I want to talk also, there are what I would say phases of leaving pietism. And I want to talk to our

SR members about this, where there is the exhausted by Christianity. I'm about to leave that. You find rest in confessional theology, the sufficiency of Jesus.

You're there for a while, and then you move over into the last phase, which is where you get to then lead other people to rest in Christ.

And what does that look like in a local church? Because that happens not on Sunday, that happens throughout the week.

So we're going to talk about the three different phases, where you might be, and how to help your pastors and churches in administrating

God's Word and tending for the sheep. So where we're going is what's called Semper Ephraim Manda. We started another podcast, and it's really kind of to continue on the conversations that we're having, but do it on a much deeper, more intimate level.

I would say often the filters come off. I am definitely holding back. I've got some thoughts that I want to keep for over there.

This is family time. Please, if you want to learn more about it, you can go to theocast .org, we have a private podcast feed, we have an app where we do lots of interaction with people.

We're working on starting up local and online groups. You can participate in all of that. You want to learn more about that, come join us over there.

For those of you that are not joining us for Semper Ephraim Manda, we'll see you next week. Oh, and just to let you guys know, if you're wondering,

Jimmy is going to be back with us soon. He's starting school. He's going to get that up and rolling, and then we'll get him back in here as one of our regular contributors.