Fistfights In The Church

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ. Based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the apostle

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Paul said, but we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

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In short, if you like smooth, watered down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

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By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her

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King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Ebendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. Welcome, Mr.

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Esteban de Cooley. No ponga esa cara triste. What does that mean?

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It means don't have a sad face. Oh, okay, I'm sorry. Well, I have my headphones on and I have my reading glasses on.

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I pretty much can't read without these reading glasses anymore. By the time this show airs,

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I will be your age, Steve. Allí delante vas a ver mismo.

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You're the oldest elder at Bethlehem Bible Church. Did you know that? It's true. Why aren't you the wisest if you're the oldest?

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Well, today on No Compromise Radio ministry, we thought we'd just celebrate with 24 and a half minutes of just silence.

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It'll be a silent prayer and you can just do whatever you want. We'll just pay the station to broadcast that and it'll be kind of a labyrinth in your mind of silence.

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That'll be good for my chakra. My chakra. Who's that lady,

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Ramtha? Remember the Ramtha? That was the lady that channeled that creature and I'm trying to remember the lady's name.

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She channeled, it was a Shirley MacLaine avatar thing. I don't know, but it's scary. You know, all that kind of spiritist stuff, pretty frightening to me.

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I'm just gonna open the door to the satanic realm and see what happens. Sounds good. Okay.

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All right, we have some warning signs, Steve. Warning signs. Warning, warning. Like storm warning? Nuclear alert.

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Storm warning, this is actually from the briefing. I don't know if our listeners know that once a month we get our briefing papers and that's probably why we're getting more gray because we have a lot of stress here at the radio station, especially with these briefings we get.

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At the radio station, is that what we call this? Well, actually now we're up and running.

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We can take calls from authors. We can do wretched radio here and we can turn up your theological acumen button for Steve.

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I mean, we're getting ready to do live call -in shows. Survey said. Well, the radio station originally wanted us to do that, but when

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I would take calls for Tom Krause's Engaging Your Mundo, it just didn't seem to work out so well.

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So I don't really prefer taking calls. I remember you get these wacky people who would call. Do you prefer pepperoni or sausage?

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Wanting to talk about the Red Sox or something? I can't do it. So here's our briefing. The briefing comes directly from Christianity Today magazine.

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And so all the time we talk about Christianity Today, this is not an ad to go buy it because who needs to buy it when you can hear

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Tuesday guys take on it, this spin. What do we call it? Christianity astray.

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Because this is, you know, almost everything in the magazine is what is wrong with Christianity, broadly speaking.

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Steve, my spirit is bearing witness to your spirit regarding that. It's a high five. But they do have some things, occasional good article, an occasional provocative point, and certainly good jumping off points for No Compromise Radio, especially on a

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Tuesday. All right, warning signs. This is under the briefing. Christianity Today, 2012,

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May, I think. Is it May? Yes, it is. All right, May, 2012. Two main predictors of future church conflict are recent church fights and shrinking congregations.

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See, I think the first one, sorry to interrupt, but it's redundant. Let's see, how do you know you're going to have future conflict?

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Because you just had a church fight, duh. Well, maybe we'd like to have a fight about this first point here, future.

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We're having fights now. We'll probably have fights since they're not resolved. That's just dumb. Better call in Ken Sand and the

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Peacemakers or whatever for conflict resolution. Warning sign that you're going to fight with your brother. Well, you've had previous fights with your brother.

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You are fighting right now. He's got you in a headlock. He's giving you some kind of nose punch.

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Yeah, that's a pretty good indication there's going to be retribution. Okay, the next warning sign, the second main predictor, though, is shrinking congregations.

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Now, sometimes shrinking congregations are actually a good thing. Tell us when, Steve, a shrinking congregation would be good.

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A shrinking congregation would be good, well, I can think of a few scenarios, but the most likely one is when you are proclaiming the truth and there are unbelievers in there and they just want to leave.

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They don't want to hear what the truth is. Okay, that's a really good point. Most people in America, and especially in evangelical churches, they're pragmatists.

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And so here's how they think. We get a brand new pastor and giving goes up, attendance goes up.

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Good pastor. Good boy, God is blessing that church. And the blessings people think are only numbers, attendance, and they might say, yes, church maturation and stuff like that.

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But I remember when I got to Bethlehem Bible Church, I'm pretty sure that right from the get -go, there were plenty of people that didn't like me, didn't like my theology, didn't like my methodology, didn't like my philosophy.

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And then it turned up to be they didn't like me. So the problem was for those people, when

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I got here, the church started to grow. There started becoming more people here, not becoming more people, there started more people started to attend, and then the giving went up too.

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Special things were happening. There'd be love gifts sent in the mail. I remember we got a $28 ,000 check one time from some lady who died, we didn't even know about.

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See, God is blessing that ministry. We better back off a mic because God is blessing the ministry.

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Now, since it's a Politically Correct Tuesday here. Always politically correct.

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Yes, always in that order. Sometimes God does bless His word through church attendance that increases and through giving that goes up.

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That's a way that He can bless His word, right? Absolutely. And so what we're doing today is we're talking about shrinking congregations.

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And just because your congregation shrinks, it doesn't mean things are happening in a bad way.

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Steve, are there other scenarios where shrinking congregations do not betray the fact that the pastor's sloughing off or something?

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Well, sure. I mean, you could have, I mean, let's see, you could, well, a bunch of people could die.

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It's so true. You have an older congregation, and I have a friend who's in the pastorate, and he told me how many funerals he did per year.

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And Steve, the church numbers -wise was smaller than megachurch Bethlehem Bible Church.

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And he did more funerals. Why? Well, it wasn't because of some catastrophe or 9 -11 or something, a bomb in the church building.

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It was because he had an older congregation. So pastor's preaching away, and a lot of people are dying.

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Could be people going off on missions. You could be raising up pastors and missionaries and stuff like that.

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Sending them off to seminary and equipping them and discharging them. So just because your church shrinks doesn't mean things are going poorly.

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But I will say this. If you're preaching the word and you think you've been faithful to the word, you're discipling men behind the scenes as a pastor, you're trying to do the one another's, you're encouraging other people to serve, and your church is shrinking,

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I do think the pastor should ask himself the question, am I contributing to the shrinkage?

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Right. Yeah, I mean, are there things that I'm doing or not doing? Are there things that I'm saying or not saying?

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There's definitely a self -introspection that should take place in that event. You know what happens,

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Steve? We have young, zealous men coming out of seminary who think they are the avatar of Charles Spurgeon, and they're gonna say to themselves, you know what,

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I'm going to preach for 90 minutes, and I'm gonna preach all, like John MacArthur preaches now, and except he didn't preach that way when he first got to Grace Church because the church now has grown, and they just drive the congregation into the ground thinking they are someone who they aren't, and then they blame the church, a bunch of weak people, a bunch of faithless people, a bunch of unregenerate people, and the problem is the pastor needs to get off his deriding 90 -minute sermons.

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Yeah, that's so false. I don't know how anybody could really think that because I happen to know that I am the avatar of Charles Spurgeon.

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And interestingly, Spurgeon said pretty much if you can't get your sermon out in 45 minutes, you can't get your point across, well, then you can't get it across.

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Yeah, I mean, anybody who wants to go for 90 minutes or something like that is kidding themselves.

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I mean, it's one thing, and I've listened to some MacArthur sermons that were 75 minutes, you know, the

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Shepherd's Conference or stuff like that, and you go, really, that was 75 minutes? That was great. But it is a rare man who can carry a particular passage that long without it just getting tedious.

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All right, so speaking of tedious, I'll continue. Outstanding. Today on No Compromise Radio, we're looking at warning signs of your church having future conflict.

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So one was shrinkage. Two, your sermons last between 11 and 20 minutes.

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Isn't that interesting? Churches, it says, that have, with that homiletical length, were about twice as likely as others to have a conflict leading to a church leader leaving.

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Also, conflict leading to a church meeting is less likely with longer sermons.

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Why is that? Well, I'll tell you - Riddle me this, Tuesday guy. I'll tell you what my take on it is, because if you're preaching between 11 and 20 minutes, the odds are that you're really not teaching the

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Bible. You don't really have enough time, generally speaking, to introduce a passage, to explain a passage, and to really kind of make sense of it in a way that will help people.

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I mean, the reason people, Christians, come to church is they want to be edified by the word. They want to be instructed in the word.

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They want to be awestruck by God. And so that's a pretty tall order for 11 to 20 minutes.

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I mean, some of your intros are 20, 25 minutes, so... Steve, what this is telling me here, as I look at this with my beige -colored glasses, is that liberal churches have more problems than evangelical churches.

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I'm not saying evangelical churches don't have problems, but you'll find more problems in liberal churches.

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Why? Because they don't submit to the word, because they're full of unregenerate people, because a lot of them are congregational polity, and it's whoever's got the most money and the most power and the most clout and the loudest voice.

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And so evangelical churches, not many do 11 to 20 -minute sermons. Well, what do you think the centerpiece of an 11 to 20 -minute sermon, what do you think the centerpiece of the service is?

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I'll tell you what it's not. It's not the preaching, unless you have a half -hour service, which, again,

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I would say that if you've got 11 to 20 -minute sermons, basically what you have is a lot of people, and there may be some

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Christians there, but you have a lot of people who are just doing their religious duty and want to get home from the NFL. Mainline churches,

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Methodist, Episcopalian, Lutheran, et cetera, even churches that are outside of the Protestant Reformation like Roman Catholic churches, they have these watered -down things because something else is more important.

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So if I get my grace with the wafer and the cup, then give me my grace. I just need a little pick -me -up, a little it's good to be good and nice to be nice.

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Steve, I've preached at a few liberal churches in India, and the lady pastor there said to me, she was not the pastor, but she was the leader, she said to me, 20 minutes max.

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And I was told by Chris Williams, why don't you go in there and preach the gospel? Everything about it's bad, but go preach the gospel.

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I said, okay. So whenever I get told by a liberal church that I have 20 minutes for the sermon, I always say the exact same thing.

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Because if they tell me 20 and I say, you know, I'm going to preach 50, I don't think that's fair. I don't think that's right or just.

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So I tell them the same thing. Okay, 20 minutes it is, but if I can keep their attention, do you think

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I can go a little longer? And everyone has said to me, okay. And so in my mind, when

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I see people at 20 minutes, it seems like they're paying attention. And so then I go about 28 minutes.

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Because it's really hard to develop a sermon in 11 minutes, because don't we have to say, there's a need for you to listen.

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This is the reason why this is important. Here's the problem. Here's the solution. Something has to be put together like that.

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And what are we going to do? Talk with Evelyn Woodhead speed talking deals? And they're up.

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Remember those old commercials on TV where they'd have that fast talking guy? Yeah. You get in twice as much information.

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Because you have to jam it all in there. We can listen faster than he can talk. So it's a good deal. If you have a

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Bible teaching pastor, when you give him a raise at the end of the year of 5%, you should tell him he can preach 5 % longer.

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And then if you give him 100 % raise. Well, there you have it. Number, let's see, number three, which says two here, but we're really going to say number three.

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Your church has almost no men. Why is that a problem? Well, first of all, with no offense to women,

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I happen to like women, but what you would find in a church dominated by women is that they're, first of all, going to be more emotionally driven.

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But secondly, it says something about the atmosphere of the church when you've basically driven all the men out.

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In other words, it's a place where men don't want to be. Why? Because probably they find it almost offensive to be there because it's so oppressive and female emotional, let's talk about our needs kind of thing.

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And they're like, I got better things to do. I could be watching football, taking care of the yard, doing whatever. Anything is more important than being in a church.

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It says here, if 90 % or more of your regular attendees are women, remarkably 7 % of churches fit this description.

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There's a one in five chance you had a fight that led to a leader leaving. And so I think,

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Steve, what you're trying to say here is with ladies and men, our strengths can become our worst enemies, our worst weaknesses.

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And so with ladies, I think about my kids. In the middle of the night, if they have a stomach ache and they're thrown up or they're sick, they don't come to my side of the bed.

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Why? Because I may be tempted just to say, knock it off, clean yourself off and go back to bed, get going.

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I mean, I would probably get up. Knock it off. Stop throwing up. Did you throw up on the floor or in the toilet?

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But my wife, God has designed ladies to be nurturers and gentle and open and affirming and loving.

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And so we are different people. So the problem is, like in 1 Timothy 2, not just a creation order for Bible teachers, but women are more easily deceived.

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And so what happened, I think, with Eve was her openness and her nurturing atmosphere had made it harder for her to say no to someone like Satan.

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And so it's harder for ladies to say no to false doctrine. It's harder for ladies to do that because they are by nature doing something that is hard for me to do.

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I wish I could be more loving like my wife. So if your church has hardly any men, then it won't have the men to have the backbone to stand up and say, we're not going to fight.

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We're not going to fire the pastor over this. We're going to do the right thing no matter what we feel or think. Number four.

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Steve, this is going to get controversial. I'm pretty much going to turn the mic over to you now so you can die on the vine.

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All I can say is it's about time. Warning signs, predictors of future church conflict. If you'd like to have church conflict, then it's coming down the pike when you're number four, your pastor is a woman.

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You know, it almost feeds back into number two because if you've got, or number three, sorry, if you've got a female pastor,

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I think the odds are that you're going to have fewer men in the congregation. Why? Totally, let's do a no compromise moment for a second.

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I don't know what man or what man of God could sit and listen to a woman pastor.

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I have zero respect for you. I watch these people listen to Joyce Meyer and I don't listen.

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I just, if I'm turning through the channels at a hotel sometime twice a year and there are men sitting there listening to Joyce Meyer, I absolutely have zero respect for you.

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If you're a man and you go to a church where there's a woman pastor, would you please grow up if you're a man?

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Well, I mean, it is a direct violation of 1 Timothy 2 and I think it speaks volumes about a church that they would put a woman in that position because they obviously don't take the

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Bible seriously and a place that does not take the Bible seriously is not a place for a man of God to be.

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If you can take 1 Timothy 2, Wayne Grudem said, that is, I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over men in the local church service and turn it into,

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I do allow a woman to exercise and teach, then you can make the Bible say anything you want. And first comes love, then comes marriage.

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First comes the women in the church. Second comes gay people in the church who are unrepentant and then in the pulpit.

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I thought you were gonna say, first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage or whatever.

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I had to amend that. I had to redact that for my own purposes. So your woman is a pastor.

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Your pastor is a woman. Your woman is a pastor. You've got real problems in your home. Your woman is a pastor.

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Then I absolutely have zero respect for you because you have a woman as your pastor, a pastor as a woman.

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If your woman is a pastor, then you really think, Steve, that you're going to exercise

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Matthew 18 and Titus chapter three, dealing with sin in the church and bringing one or two more for the witnesses, then telling it to the church and then excommunicating.

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Nobody but a man of God is going to be able to stand up and go through church discipline. Yeah, how can you?

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I mean, when you've already decided that your hermeneutic is love and therefore you're gonna put women in charge, you know, your hermeneutic is gonna be love when it's

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Matthew 18. You're just gonna skip it. Well, you know, Jesus said that, but did he really mean that for today?

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You know, was that cultural, Steve? There are occasions, especially in Santa Cruz, that I'll say to the kids, get a load of that, and I'll point over to someone just secretly.

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And usually that person is a transvestite or a transgendered person. And the children's faces are what your face just showed.

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I wish I could capture this. It is one of revulsion. It is one of that is not natural. That is not normal.

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That is not created order. Something's wrong when a man tries to act like a woman or a woman tries to act like a man.

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I don't care how much testosterone you put in your system and what kind of surgeries you have.

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It's not natural. And it's not natural for a woman to be a pastor. And so frankly, Steve, I'm glad that these churches that have women pastors are imploding and exploding from the inside out.

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And so the more times we could shut down the doors of those whitewashed sepulchers, the better. Preach it.

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All right, no compromise radio. Number five, your pastor is young.

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Why is that, Steve? If your pastor is under 30, there's a 29 % chance it lost a pastor to conflict in the last two years, three and a half times the average.

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Well, you know, there are obviously exceptions to that. John MacArthur took over Grace Community Church. He was under 30.

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We like to use him as the exception. We like to, 29 years old in 1969, John MacArthur. But he almost got booted.

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Yeah, he came close, came into the elders meeting. He said, you know, it's great to have friends like you. They said, if you think we're your friends, you got something else coming.

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And they tried to give him the heave -a -roo, but. The heave -a -roo. Well, if your pastor is young, there can be conflict because there is a tendency of people.

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And all of us have this tendency. We don't seem to esteem young people as we ought to.

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Therefore, Paul says to Timothy, let no one look down on your youth or despise your youth. If you're a man of God and you're called, then you should lead.

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But sometimes 30 -year -old men in the pulpit aren't very mature. They haven't had a lot of life experience.

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And so it's hard for a CEO of a big company at 60 years old to submit to a 30 -year -old kid who basically knows nothing except Greek vowels.

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That's right. Okay, moving on to number six. Number six, your congregants are old. What does that have to do with anything?

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I don't know, let's read it. All right, go ahead. If 79 or 75 to 89 % of your church is over 60, you're three times more likely than average to have conflict with a leader, to have had conflict with a leader leaving.

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No adults under 35, you're even more likely. Well, I wish this would be a survey with evangelical churches and then mainline churches, but this is just all put together in one

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Christianity Today pile. Smorgasbord. Yeah, and so what happens with older people?

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Well, they're probably more set in their ways, do you think? Less apt to change? Yeah, and what this is, this would reflect some kind of conflict or prior conflict where, for whatever reason, the younger people of the church bolted.

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Maybe the people were all focused on music and the old people said, you got to get rid of that electric guitar and stop them slamming drums.

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And they did, and the young people left to go to the church of what's happening now.

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Ooh, that's a very trendy church. I think they're meeting in a movie theater right now. And their worship is really good.

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Dress casually. Because God doesn't care what you look like. We welcome everyone. Yeah, we're all,

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I was going to say all consuming. When I drive by the Unitarian Universalist Church for Unity, I say to myself, their sign says all welcome, and I want to say, just like in the public square, everyone's welcome except bigoted, homophobic, evangelical

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Christians. You're not welcome. Not tolerant of that. Well, you know, where everyone else is welcome, hell.

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Anybody can. Yeah, all welcome. Yeah, come on in, come as you are. A slight majority are poor, number seven.

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Now see this one here, I didn't really go for this one so much, but it is here in our briefing. And so gray hair and all, we have to go over it.

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If 56 to 74 % of your church earns less than 25K, update your resume.

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Half of such churches lost leaders and members to conflict, but breathe easy if everyone is poor.

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Over 75 % fights are less likely and pastors almost always stay. I think this is just dopey.

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And you know, the only thing I can come to, the only thought I really have on this one is somehow it might have to do with the pastor's pay.

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You know, if people start getting envious of the pastors, or if the pastor's just like, I have to live at poverty level to serve you guys, you know, then that might be an issue.

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Right, I think that's very insightful and wise. And when I look at this whole poor issue, and our church is going to have more fights if we're poor,

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I don't know, this just strikes me, Steve, as evangelical, I mean, Christianity Today, trying to slip in this whole poverty line deal.

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Well, but you know, they do note that if over 75%, if they're poor, then fights are less likely.

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So in other words, you know, it's only within this range of 56 to 74. So do you do a survey of your church and figure out what percentage are poor and then go, uh -oh,

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I'm in trouble, or I need to recruit more poor people, or fewer poor people, or...

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I think I'm going to guess that this is a very small sample, but I really think the issue here is, and people do get hung up on what the pastor gets paid.

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I think there are probably church conflicts about that. Yeah, if the pastor gets paid more than I do, then he makes too much.

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If he gets paid less than I do, then that's just about right. Got to keep them humble. You don't mean you, Mike Ebendroff, you mean the church congregants.

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Yes, our Jill congregant, too. Oh, that's very politically correct of you. If your pastor does preach the word,

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I would say you should encourage him, love him, affirm him, esteem him. And pay him.

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And pay him. This is No Compromise Radio. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Ebendroff is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible -teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God's word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.

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Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston.

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You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.