Episode 8: How Involved Should the Local Church be in Major Life Decisions?

The Rural Church Podcast, 2 .0. Just a couple of pastors discussing life, ministry, theology, and the gospel from a local church perspective.

Eddie, what's it time for? The Rural Church Podcast. The Rural Church Podcast, episode 8.

I'm Allen Nelson, your co -host, pastor of Perryville Second Baptist Church in the metropolis of Perryville, Arkansas.

With me is my friend and brother in the Lord, co -laborer in the gospel, Eddie Ragsdale. Say hello,

Eddie. Hello, everybody. Eddie's the pastor at First Baptist Church of Marshall, Arkansas, which is bigger than Perryville.

No, it's not. Surely it's not. How big is Perryville? Like 1 ,491 people or something.

Oh, you've got us beat. You've got us beat. It's like 1 ,300 people in Marshall. Okay. Well, we're not going to copy everybody who's talking about the state of theology, but if you haven't read or if you haven't seen the recent reports, it comes out every two years.

If you haven't read the recent reports of the Ligonier and Lifeway study on the state of theology, you should.

We are going to talk about it, but we're going to do a little bit different take, I think, Eddie. I want to start out with this lead -in.

One of the survey, it's not a question, it's a statement, and you have to say whether you agree or disagree.

One of the statements on the survey said this, every Christian has an obligation to join a local church.

Then participants had to put whether they agreed or disagreed with that. Do you know how many disagreed with that?

Oh, by the way, it's a survey of evangelicals, professing evangelicals. Right.

I did not even know that they asked that or made that statement, but I'm going to say that two -thirds said that you did not have an obligation.

Well, it's better than that, so 54%. 54 % agreed with it?

Disagreed. 54 % said a

Christian does not have an obligation to join a local church. Wow.

These are evangelical, professing evangelicals, and so that's going to be our lead -in today.

We want to talk about the local church and where we're going to start. Sometimes our listeners may not know this.

We're like Michael Scott when he said that he starts a sentence and he doesn't know where it's going to end. Sometimes we start an episode, and we don't know where it's going to end, but this is going to be our launching point today.

That is, what role does the local church play?

What role ought it to play in major life decisions? I'm thinking along these lines.

You got to take a job in another state. You want to send your children to college or university.

You are retiring, and you're going to move off to this or that place.

How important is the local church in these decisions?

I mean this on a number of different things, Eddie. I want to talk about how much should the elders be involved in decisions like this?

How much should your local church family be involved in decisions like this?

Then that's on one side of it. Then on the other side of it is, if you could go to a really great place, but there's no healthy local church, what should you do about that?

These are the things I want to start about. Do we need to address this anymore? Every Christian has an obligation to join church.

54 % disagreed. Let's just say this, and you can add anything you want to.

That's obvious. It should be 100%. Every Christian has an obligation to be part of a local church.

Now I know somebody is going to come up with some sort of weird thing where a missionary goes to this island.

He preaches the gospel. This person gets converted. Then the missionary gets killed off. Now you got this one

Christian on this island, and he's not part of a local church. See? Someone is going to talk about, yeah, well, my grandma was a faithful Christian, but now she's in the nursing home, and she's not part of a local church.

I would really want to push back on the grandma analogy. For example, our church, we have some genuine shut -ins.

We have some people that they are not weekly in our fellowship right now because of genuine health issues.

They cannot be. They are still a part of our local church. We still love them. We're praying for them.

We're seeking to care for them. I would even want to push back on that, that the person in the nursing home is not a part of the local church.

They may be genuinely providentially hindered from the gathering, but we still care for them and love them and want to serve them as their local church.

It's similar to the one time we had a man that had to serve in the military overseas.

He was on a tour of duty for a year, and we still prayed for him, and we sent care packages and those sorts of things.

Anyway, I'm just saying people want to come to the extremes, but as a general and vast 99 .9

% of situations, yes, Christians are obligated to be a part of the local church, to join a local church.

By the way, not just visit a local church, but to be a member. The question now as we're thinking about this is, how important though really is the local church?

When you begin talking about, and we could come up with other examples more than I just gave, but when you begin to talk about major life decisions, how important is the local church in these decisions?

Well, I think one of the ways that we ought to think about this is, what is going to be at the center of the culture of your life and your family life?

What is going to be at the center of that? And of course, Christians would say, well, Christ should be at the center.

Well, that's right, but how is that going to practically work out in our lives?

And I think it works out in that we fashion our whole life around the things of God, especially the church, the gathering of the people that we ought to be most invested in.

And I think we even see that everyone does this. Everyone does this, and we see it because you hear people say things like, well, we've got a great rodeo family, or a great football family, or a great softball family, or a great hunting family, or a great work family.

And what they're saying is, we spend so much time with these people.

We really fashion our lives around this part of our culture as a family and as individuals that we call all these other people our family.

And I'm saying, I am saying, your local church should be ahead of everything else.

Yeah, that's a great point. There is something, and maybe you need to stop the podcast and take assessment of this.

There is something in your family right now that is basically at the top that is driving what your family does.

And the reality is for a lot of people, I'm talking about a lot of people in evangelical circles, the local church is important.

It's an important thing on the weekends, as long as there's not anything else. Now, if I got family in, or if I decide to take a trip, or if my children have a ball game, then the local church takes a back seat.

And even, let me say this, it's not frequency, because let's say you could make it to 90 % of local church gatherings, but there still could be something else that is really at the driver's seat of your family's culture.

You know what I'm saying? Because we're talking about not just going on Sundays, which that's obviously important.

It's the Lord's day. It's the Lord's day. You should be part of that. But even our church, y 'all have

Wednesday nights, don't you? We do. We have Wednesday nights. We have Sunday nights. We have Sunday school.

I hold our Sunday morning main gathering really tight.

Sunday school, maybe a little looser, and Sunday night, and Sunday school, maybe a little bit looser. All those things are happening on the

Lord's day. But Wednesday nights, I hold fairly loosely. You don't have to be a faithful Christian.

You don't have to come on Wednesday nights. But I will say this, and this is getting to this podcast. For a lot of people, if you're not coming on Wednesday nights because you're working, okay, that's why.

If you're not coming to Wednesday nights because you're always just choosing to do other things, that tends to be more problematic, and it scratches the surface on what is the culture driving your family.

All this so far, Eddie, we really haven't answered the question, but we're really getting at, like you said, preliminary how we should think about the local church.

Because for some people to say, should you think about the local church in sending your kids to college?

That doesn't even cross their, they're like, what? No, I should think about the best college, and the most affordable college, and then we'll think about the local church.

Right, yeah, and I think I've thought about this a lot, even in terms of, say young men even going into ministry, and this was 20 years ago.

I feel so old, but even when I was in college, one of the most concerning things then, and I think the fruit of that is the kind of low view of the local church that we see now, is so many of the guys who were ministerial students, if they did not have a ministry position at a church, then they didn't go to church.

They didn't go, and it was like, you guys, you want to train for ministry, but you don't even want to gather with the church and be a part of a church when you're not going.

But why I mention that is, you know, today, if a young man came to me, and he was like, you know,

I believe the Lord's called me to ministry. I want to train. I want to study. Before I told him, hey, you need to find a good seminary, although I do think you should go to a good seminary,

I would say, first, you need to find a church. You need to find the church where some pastors, elders, like we talked about last week, that you want to sit under their ministry, a church that you want to pour your life into and be edified and educated by, and then say what seminary opportunities around that church are available, because the church should be at the center of the way that that future pastor is trained.

Well, if that's true for the elders, why wouldn't that be true for all of the members?

So you need to find a church, and then what educational opportunities can

I do where that church is? What other ways can I structure my life around gathering with that local church?

Yeah, let's tee some things out, hands -on, nuts and bolts practically. Let's talk about the college situation first, and each one of these situations might be different.

Little Susie's about to graduate. She's going off to college. How involved should the local church be?

I have some ideas, but I'm going to ask you a question. First, there should be some involvement.

Yes, Susie should be on the prayer list, or however your church does it, and your church ought to be praying for that, so there should be some involvement there, but how involved should, say, the leadership of the church be in that decision?

Understand, I'm not trying to make a case that the leadership of the church should make that decision.

Obviously, I'm not trying to say that. That's within the family realm. We understand different jurisdictions, and we understand that that is within the family realm, but I'm just wondering how involved do you think the leadership of the church should be in, let's say that the church leadership should be involved, if nothing else, in educating and really giving guidance, not just to picking the right school to go to, but in really encouraging

Susie to find a church, and even to help Susie to find a church, not only to attend but to join.

If she's going to be in college for four years, then she really probably needs to join a church there, and if her plan is, well,

I'm coming back to Perryville, or I'm coming back to Marshall, well, then you can rejoin here when you come back.

We'd love to have you come back, but I think so often, I mean, I just want to be very open and honest about this.

I know even in our own church, as we work through our membership roles, and as we're trying to have meaningful membership at Marshall First Baptist, and the

Lord's been very gracious with us over the last few years, we've made some, we've really moved in some positive areas on that.

However, one of the big things is we have so many people who joined the church when they were teenagers or children, and then they moved away, and they're still on the church role because, and honestly, they may even be going to church somewhere, but no one ever told them, hey, when you move away, you need to join a church there, and it's in our covenant, it's in our constitution, it's written that way, but no one ever told them, hey, in our church covenant, you agree that if you ever separate yourself from our church, that you will join another church where you can live out the spirit and the ideals of this covenant, and so many of them, and I'm saying our church, we need to do a better job of that because over the years, we've seen many who have grown up in this church, and then they've moved away.

Yeah, I think that's good. I think what you said first is good. There should be this, the elders and pastors, however you refer to that office, they should be teaching on these things, and then

I also think this, in a healthy situation, and this is just going to blow some people's minds, but in a healthy situation, the parents of the church should approach the leadership of the church, the elders or pastors, and say, hey, this is what we're thinking about.

Do you guys have any advice or counsel? But we don't even think in those categories.

We think, well, Susie wants to be a vet. I'm going to look at the best veterinarian school, and obviously, that's going to be the

Lord's will, and that's the direction we're going to go, and I want the church and the leadership to pray, but they don't really have any kind of say.

They can't speak into this, but I'm saying God has appointed godly men to shepherd your soul, and you ought to desire their counsel.

You may disagree, and it's not necessarily, this is not going to be like an authoritative issue per se, but you ought to at least hear what they have to say, and then on the other side,

I want to say this. If that's, so that's a perfect scenario. You go, and you go to the elders, and you say, hey, this is what we're doing.

Can you give us some counsel? What you think about this, and do you know churches in these areas, and can you call, and can you kind of figure out what these churches in these areas, here's some churches we're looking at.

Can you let us know what you think? You know, that's in a really healthy scenario, but if the parents don't approach the pastors,

I really think the pastors, in humility, ought to approach the parents and say like, hey, you know,

I know, I see Susie's going to this. Have you thought about these things? Have you thought about the church, and how can

I help you, and how can I pray, and I'd love to contact some of these churches, and you know, I think it's,

I'm not trying to put more weight on a pastor. There's enough already, but I think in a situation like that, it's helpful if, and if your church is too big, hopefully you have a plurality of elders that can take on this shoulder, like we talked about, a shoulder of this responsibility, like we talked about last week, but the point

I'm just trying to say is like, this should not be weird to us. This should not be weird to Christian culture, and let me say this.

I'm not talking about BCM. I'm not talking about, does that college have a good

BCM? If there's a good BCM, but there's not a good local church, well, a couple things there.

One, is there really a good BCM? Okay, because how is there a good BCM without a good local church?

And two, when I say BCM, by the way, I'm saying Baptist Collegiate Ministry. It's a SBC thing.

If there is a, and so there might be other programs. I know other like BMA and other things have their own.

The point is those things are not the church, and they cannot replace the church. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Even like I was talking about earlier with my fellow ministerial students when

I was in college, so many of them wanted to count the, we were at a

Christian college, a Baptist college, and so there was mandatory weekly chapel, and so many of them wanted to say, well, we go to chapel.

Yes, but chapel is not the gathering of a local church. It wasn't even on the Lord's Day, and so it was like, that's not, you should go to chapel because it's mandatory at the college, and chapels,

I felt like they were helpful, but they were not the local church. Amen. Well, then we can transition.

We could talk about other scenarios, but there's also the scenario of I'm going to take a job.

I'm going to take a job in another city. How do I know if this is the Lord's will or not?

I'm praying about it. Again, this is a category that's not in people's minds, but you should involve those in the church.

Pray for me, but also you should involve the leadership of the church. We do not see church membership as covenantal as what it ought to be.

We just say it's covenantal, but it's kind of like, I mean, if I got to leave,

I got to leave. Whatever. See you. I got to go. We don't see leaving a church, and this could be a whole other podcast, but we don't see leaving a church as a big deal, or even it might not be right to leave a church.

Sometimes it is right to leave a church, but other times it might not be right, and anytime you're going to leave a church,

I don't care what the reason is. Anytime you're going to leave a church, you should involve the leadership of the church and let them know what's going on, but particularly you're going to make a decision like this.

Involve your elders. Involve the pastors and say, hey, this is what we're thinking. Can you give any counsel or godly wisdom in this?

It may be that you should not take a job in another city because there is no healthy church for you to be involved in.

What I'm saying is it may not be, you say, well, but I get a raise, but that may not necessarily be the

Lord's will, and you need, I can't counsel you on that. I don't know you, but you need, but your pastors can.

Yeah, and that scenario of someone moving to another city,

I think so often we think, well, I want to move here. I'll move there, and then we'll find a church, and I think you really should look at what churches are there even before you make the move, before you make the decision, and then let's assume that you do make the move, that it is the right thing for you to make the move.

Well, the church that you're going to go to might really affect where you buy a home when you move because we live in these rural areas, and I live pretty far from my church, but honestly, when you move to that new place, it really may affect because the best church may not be right in that city, and you may actually need to make the decision to buy a home close to the best church and commute a little further to your job, and I know that's so backwards.

People think, well, no, shouldn't I buy a home near my work, and we can commute to church? Well, probably it would be better the other way around because really, in a lot of ways, by where you choose to have your home is where you're choosing, in most cases, to root your life.

That's so good, and it goes back to what you said earlier about what is the culture driving your family. I'll give you an analogy, and this brother might, or not analogy, a real story.

This brother may be listening, and if he is, I should give a shout out to John, but I kind of just give a basic.

John moved from California, and he moved to a town about an hour from me, and he moved there, and he couldn't find a church, and he winds up emailing our church, and we have some discussion, and he's come a couple times and even expressed desire to join, and it's like you can move to a place even in the

Bible Belt, and you can be sure like, oh, I'll find a church. I'll find a church, and it may not be so, and then let me add this.

With technology and such today, you actually can research churches pretty well.

You can listen to their sermons. Here's the deal. This is radical. You can call their pastors.

You can talk to them. I've had Eddie in the last, and let me give a shout out real quick to Founders.

The Founders, is your church on the church search? I don't think so.

Okay. It should be. Let me just tell you something that's happened with me. This summer, we have a couple coming to visit us this weekend.

We've had the man and his wife. I told you it lives an hour away. We've had a family that's passed through visiting from Texas.

We've had a brother that's visited from Little Rock and has actually made a donation to GBTS, Grace Bible Theological Seminary, all traced back to finding our church on Founders.

Oh, wow. Pretty amazing, but I've had two families email me and ask me questions about our church and about what

I believe and about some of the things we do. For some people, that might seem radical, but this is just what

Christians do because we care about the church. We understand for me to move from location

A to location B, a huge part of my life, the thing that's dictating my very week is the local church and my involvement with the brothers and sisters in the church and my involvement with the ministries of the church.

To me, I'm almost on the other side in the sense of I can't imagine just moving somewhere and not having a plan.

The church has to dictate where you're going to live. I understand there are scenarios.

We could come up with a thousand qualifications, but this is why your pastors ought to be involved in helping you think through this and pray through this, but the local church, your life ought to revolve around the local church and the local church being added onto your life when it's available.

Tom Hanks Right. I think also we need to realize this gets into the idea of when should you leave a local church.

I've had a few discussions lately with different people, and I'm always saying if you get to the point where you've got to leave your local church for whatever reason, there's doctrinal problems there or whatever may be the case.

One, you don't want to become a person who's just regularly moving from church to church. If you do need to leave your local church, it needs to be this next move is

I'm staying, right? I'm going to be very purposeful about making sure that where we covenant next, we're covenanting to stay no matter what happens, really.

Then I think also what we need to say is that you need to have somewhere that you're going, not just somewhere that you're leaving.

I think so often with the way things happen in churches is people get upset in one church, so they're always going somewhere else, but it's really about the place they're leaving, not the place they're going.

They end up just hopping around from church to church to church instead of saying, I really believe the

Lord has called me to this particular local church, and I'm going there. I want to share one other thing because I don't want to be a hypocrite because I do think that it's better to live near your local church.

Now, I live 40 minutes. My house to our church is 40 minutes, and I'll say this.

You can make that work. It is so much harder. Our family really has no life in the town that we live.

We live in Shirley. That's where I'm from. You don't live in Shirley proper, but yeah.

I live, yeah, but we don't. People will say, what's going on in Shirley? We don't know.

We don't know. My kids are in a homeschool co -op in a local church in Conway, and they go to music school in Conway, and everything else we do is in Searcy County.

It's here in Marshall. We go way out of our way to be involved in what's happening in Marshall and Searcy County.

I just want to say, it's not that it can't be done, but you are going to put a burden on yourself because you're going to have to be intentional about being involved in the life of your church the further away you are from your church.

You're in a situation, and so I'm not saying this to you. I would say there's other people who are in situations.

They just can't. They can't do this, but some people listening, you might be in a situation. If you would actually pray about it and actually make an effort, you could move.

Some people can't do that, and I understand, but some people, it doesn't even cross their mind.

We're just saying the local church, God has not created Lone Ranger Christianity, and it's hard for us because we're in the

Bible Belt, and there's just churches everywhere. We don't even imagine what the scenario is like, but the reality is

God has made you not to hop from church to church. God has made you to be edified and plugged in and to be a vibrant, active, participating member of a local church, and so there's so much more we talk about.

Maybe we need to do a podcast on when it's time to leave a church, but a lot of times people leave churches for bad reasons.

Stay. Absolutely. Be plugged in. Make an effort to do the changes, to see the changes that you want to, but the point that we're making is your life ought to be revolving around the local church, and if it's not, repent and figure out what it is that needs to change.

The last example I said was retiring, but I really think that there's nothing new

I can think of that we would add to that, but when you think about retiring, maybe even you're thinking about moving back closer to your kids, and you're like, yeah,

I want to move back closer to my kids. We're like, is there a viable church there?

Are your kids believers? Even higher than moving back and being close to your family is you need to be involved and plugged in, even in your later years, with a healthy local church.

I don't know if we've beat this drum hard enough and loud enough, but that's what we're saying. The local church is what your life ought to be revolving around instead of sports, instead of career, instead of whatever else may be happening.

The local church needs to be the priority. Right, right. Yeah, and I think so often we find so much of our identity in our profession or in our culture.

So, you know, I grew up, cowboy stuff, western culture, and so, so many people coming out of that, they find their identity in that, or they find their identity in I'm a, you know, whatever trade or profession that they're in, but if we really find our identity in Christ, then the greatest expression of our individual identity is in our relationship with Christ's body, the local church that we're a part of.

Yeah, and just to be clear, we're not talking about extracurricular Bible studies. That's great. You're going to a

Bible study with a women's Bible study in your community. Okay, great, or you're involved in a

BCM ministry. Okay, great, or you're some sort of, you know, para -church organization, family life, or I don't know.

I can't think off the top of my head. Okay, great, but that's not what we're talking about. Well, and if those are functioning rightly, they should serve the local churches.

Amen, that's right. The ecclesiastical body, the missions organization, the ministry hub in the

New Testament is the local church, and there's not another. There's nothing else. That's right.

I'm not saying these other things are bad or wrong, right? There's a lot of good tools, you know, a lot of good help, but if these things take away from or are running counter to the local church, their unbiblical need to be dismissed, because the local church is the priority.

We're closing in on being done. What concluding thoughts do you have?

Yeah, just to kind of conclude, there are ministries that our church is a part of here in Marshall, and what we might call para -church ministries, recovery ministry, things like that, and listen, those ministries are here to help serve the local church.

They're not here to just serve those populations, and the local church doesn't matter.

They are here because as local churches, we want to reach different populations and needs in our community, but it is still the local church that is to be doing that work of ministry, that work of proclaiming the gospel, that work of seeing lives transformed and God glorified.

God hasn't promised to build any para -church ministry. He hasn't promised to build any program.

He hasn't promised to build any of those things, but in Matthew 16, Jesus does say,

I will build my church. Amen. That's a good word, brother.

Go to church. I said, don't just be the church, go to church.

You actually can't be the church without going to church. That's right. Just saying sorry, not sorry. So go to church, be involved in the church, involve the church and the elders of the church in your major life decisions, and even your minor life decisions, and revolve your life around the life of the local church.

Thank you for joining us in episode eight of the Rural Church Podcast. Catch us next week.