What Makes or Breaks a Church | Sermon 10/13/2024

Good morning. How are you? Good. Awesome. I think I'm ready to go. Well, forgive me for my rustiness. I haven't preached. Last time I preached on a Sunday was actually at this church. So you're going to have to give me a little...

I can't talk. No, it's really good to be here. I love you guys. I'm so honored to be able to come and share the word with you. We're so happy with what's going on here at Apology of Utah. It's a special thing.

It's an unusually special thing. We get to see God blessing the church. And it's really built upon the leadership. It's built upon you. The church is the people. Takes a village when it comes to a successful or a healthy church.

But we're just so pleased to be here. So I just wanted to send you our greetings from Apology of Mesa and all the elders. We love you guys, and we're thankful for you. So I'm going to get into this. I kind of felt like I wanted to go a bunch of different directions, but I really just want to be an encouragement to you.

Like I had said, there's a really good thing going here, and we want to keep it going for as long as possible. I was driving. I think I was driving to work a couple of weeks ago, and I hadn't thought about it a lot just because time goes by so fast.

But I was thinking about kind of my life and that I've been in 26 years of consecutive leadership ever since God saved me when I was 18 years old. And after I got saved, I was saved in this Pentecostal church.

It was just, you know, sweet people, kind of crazy, just a little bit wacky. They can get like that. But after two weeks, they had me teaching as an 18-year-old new convert, and that is what you do not want to do.

Thank God we didn't have phones and that stuff was recorded back then because wow. But yeah, I guess, you know, through the years of ministry, I've been in really happy and effective and flourishing churches, and I've been in some dying and ineffective, unhealthy churches.

I've seen, you know, throughout the years, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the crazy, because I think some of the craziest things you can see is kind of in a church environment. I remember one time we were having this small little revival at our church, this Pentecostal church, and the pastor was really getting into it, and a woman had come into the church, and he couldn't keep himself from getting emotional.

So he was going throughout a sermon, and he was crying, and every time that he would kind of start to cry, this lady would say, cry, baby, cry, just as loud as she could do it. And we at first said, okay, maybe this will be the one time she does that.

And so he continues on with his sermon, and then he begins to be emotional, and we hear it again, cry, baby. So after about the fourth time, nobody was doing anything. I'm this 21-year-old associate pastor.

Then I say, hey, you're gonna, you gotta go. This is completely disrupting the service. So she was getting kind of mad. I think we, myself and another deacon, walked her out into the foyer, and she had kind of, you know, there's always the double doors, and she had gone to the front door.

And I said, hey, we love you, but you can't be disrupting the service. And she kind of just looked at me really weird, and then she put her hands down next to her side, and she did the bowl thing, you know, where the bowl gets ready to charge.

So she did the bowl thing, and I'm there, and she just charges full speed trying to get through me, through the double doors, into the service. So all I did was just kind of brace myself, and she hit me and hit the floor, and that was that.

But I could go into a lot of other crazy stories when it comes to being a part of the Pentecostal church. But, you know, I think what I want to do, what I want to accomplish in the short amount of time is just to talk about what makes or breaks a church.

You know, what can we do as God's people and leaders to contribute to the overall healthiness or the health of a church, or what can we do to contribute to the downgrade or the digression of the church?

But I wanted to kind of lay a little bit of a foundation before I get into just like three main areas that I think that we can focus on when it comes to what we can practice and do as God's people that is absolutely going to be good for the church, because that's what we, we got to understand that we the people, when it comes to the church, we make or break the church, right?

We really do. But to kind of lay the foundation, I have a question for the kids, and so maybe I can get an answer from one of the kids out there. What is the church? And you parents can help the kids if you would like, but what is the church?

What is it? That's it. That's it. Good job, buddy. That's exactly what the church is. The church is God's people. A lot of people think the church is just some place that you go to, right? It's just the four walls of a building.

But we know the church is God's, is God's people. It's the ecclesia, it's the called out ones. First Peter 2 9 says, but you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation of people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

So God's church is not a building, but it's a precious people who God is building for his glory, right? What do you think, and you can answer if you, you would like, but what do you think makes a successful church?

What makes a successful church? Now, I think a lot of people have different opinions on that, you know, when it comes to a healthy or successful church. I think we look in like the broader American evangelical context, and it could be a lot of people, a lot of money, a lot of real estate.

Sometimes we associate those material or external things with church success, but that doesn't always entail that a church is successful. But I think to be balanced, lots of people can be a tremendous blessing.

We want a lot of people in the church, because as you faithfully evangelize, as we look all throughout the book of Acts, God will add to the church, sovereignly saving people. And so we want a lot of people.

And who doesn't want to have a lot of money? If you start to love and worship and bow down to the altar of money, it could be a problem, but money is a very good thing. God created money, and money is what we need to do stuff and to keep the lights on and the rent paid.

So money can be a blessing. A lot of buildings, sure. All of those things can be blessings, but they're not necessarily like a primary marker of what a successful church is. And we look at, you know, all throughout our nation and the world, and there's really men who hide themselves within churches, and they're charlatans, and they're hucksters, and they're false teachers, and they've got all sorts of money, right?

They're flying around in jets, they've got entourage and people worshiping them and buying their books, but their churches aren't successful at all. We would say that those type of church environments are a church of the tares and not necessarily a church of the wheat, right?

So all that stuff doesn't necessarily mean God is blessing, but I think when it comes to the health or the successfulness of a church, I think the primary marker is that the successfulness of a church is directly proportional to the spiritual maturity or the maturation of God's people, right?

We are successful as a church and as a church leadership and as elders insofar as you, our flock, are maturing and growing and thriving and being cared for by us, your pastors. Colossians 128 says this, Paul says this, he says, Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ.

So genuine, authentic shepherds should want that. It's not about popularity. It's not about notoriety. It's not necessarily about us. It shouldn't be about us. We should be men who lay down our lives sacrificially every day so that the people that God has gifted to us thrive and mature.

That's really what it's all about. A successful church is one in which God's people are spiritually progressing and being cared for by God's pastors. How do we cultivate or create successful churches or healthy churches?

I think that, again, you can come at this from a lot of different directions, but kind of like a focal point in your mind this morning, a successful church is having an all-hands-on-deck mentality.

So each family or individual has decided, this is where I am. This is where God has brought me, and I'm going to be a contributing member to the mission of the church. I'm all in kind of a thing. This is where I'm going to love the people.

I'm going to create peace within the church, and I'm going to exercise all of the gifts that God has given me or move in all the gifts and talents that God has given me for the benefit of the church. That's really, I guess you could say, a primary reason why churches are so healthy and actually successful.

Ephesians 4, 15 through 16 says, rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head into Christ, from whom the whole body joined and held together by every joint which it is equipped.

This is important. When each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself in love, not necessarily grow bigger. I mean, that's a great blessing, right? But it's talking about the health of the body, that the body would grow into healthiness, not necessarily largeness, right?

A church in which the people have collectively decided to commit themselves to the mission of the church is becoming increasingly healthy and increasingly effective. That's what happens, again, when we commit to it.

And I think as you look throughout, I guess, you know, as you evaluate the church, generally, and this is not a hard and fast rule, but churches kind of fall into or consist of a population of people that fall into two different categories.

So one segment, and this could be really true in any church, but not necessarily, but one segment of the church, it really values anonymity and disconnectedness from the body. And because of that, there's a low level of commitment within that population.

So, you know, and unfortunately, that's not necessarily the fault of the people coming into churches, because we kind of set it up that way, right? We funnel people in, there's like a focal point on one guy, and there's, don't really want commitment at all, we just want you to come in so that we can get as many people in and out of as many services as we possibly can.

Again, we don't want to hate on that too much, that's not necessarily bad, but there is this type of church structure that's not about the growth of the people, it's just the addition of the people so that we can feel successful as a church.

As I was preparing myself to become a pastor, I was mentored by a man who had thousands of people at his church, and he said, well, what do you want to do? And I said, well, I think what I want to do is disciple the people that God sends me.

And he said, it was just so surprising, I can see his face, like it was sitting right here today. He said, why would you want to do that? And that like floored me. I said, well, isn't that the basis of what we are to do as pastors, is we're there to help the people, to grow the people, to teach the people, to feed, that's what shepherds do, they feed and lead and love the people unto growth and spiritual maturation.

He said, no, it's just about collecting, collecting the people. You just want to collect and do as much as you can. You need to hit home run sermons every single Sunday. And then I was like, whoa, I better discontinue this relationship with you because everything that I just heard come out of your mouth was not biblical.

But that's the way it is in large part in the greater even American evangelical church. It's a very performance based model. And what we have done in that type of model is we adopt success standards from the world, and we incorporate them into the church when our success standards should not flow from worldly standards, but from biblical standards, right?

And really the sad reality when it comes to churches set up like this, who foster anonymity or disconnectedness or a low level of commitment. When it comes to that, the people don't grow. They just don't.

So there's been large studies on this from mega church pastors that actually went in to see if the people that were coming in and out, all these thousands of people were coming, being conformed to the image of Christ or growing, and it wasn't happening.

And they were like, we got to change. But the fanfare and the money coming in, it's just too alluring. And a lot of these churches just went right back to that model of that model of a kind of church government.

But we can know that disconnection or anonymity, as that goes up in the life of the Christian and the commitment level goes down, that will equal no spiritual maturity. And that equals contributing really to the unhealthiness of the church.

So I'll say it again, if you want to be disconnected or remain anonymous, not a part of the church, as that goes up, your commitment will simultaneously go down. You will not grow when the church will begin to digress.

But thankfully, there's also another segment of the population of any church. And that's a segment of the population that values connectedness and commitment. So they're resolved to commit to the church, to be a part of that church with a full heart.

So it's like, I'm here, I'm fully invested with my time, with my particular gifts, with the resources that God has given me. And I'm just going to do my best to bless the church with all that I am. Connectedness and commitment, that goes up in the life of a Christian, and the lack of commitment goes down.

That will equal spiritual maturity or spiritual progression. And that contributes to the health and the success of a church. So connectedness and committedness is absolutely essential if we want to foster and maintain a healthy church, especially here.

And God describes His church as a flock in a family, in a body. You think about those descriptions, and it's all related to connectedness. You know, when we're family members, we should be connected one with another.

Of course, a body, Paul goes into 1 Corinthians chapter 12 and talks about that we are the body of Christ, that we all are different body parts. But you think that, of course, if we're parts of a body, that's a high level connectedness.

You really can't have a body without the parts being connected one to another. It's a flock, a family, in a body. That's who the church is called to be. So it really gives no room for disconnectedness.

Does that make sense? It really gives no room for lack of commitment because we fail to be the church that God has called us to be, and we fail to really move forward. I think when it comes to, you know, if you're thinking about it yourself, when it comes to evaluating our lives and saying, okay, I really want to be this fully invested part of the church, we really have to look at the way that we value things.

Because I'll just tell you this, what we truly value is what we put our heart and mind and soul into. What we truly value is what we spend our time on, we spend our resources on. And so we have to think about that.

We spend our resources on what we think is valuable. And I think the church is valuable for multiple reasons, but we kind of have to go through that thought process before we have this type of all-in mentality.

1 Timothy 3 .15 says, if I delay, you may know—he says, if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar in the buttress of the truth.

And the word pillar or buttress, it just means the support of truth. The church is so incredibly valuable because we have the words of the living God. And in any good, godly, authentic church, every single Sunday, all throughout the week, right, the truth is flowing in and flowing out into the world.

That's why it's extremely valuable. But you think about it, like I just said, we as Christians, we think about the descriptions of the church, we have no life or no function or no purpose outside of our church body.

And that kind of correlates with what the Apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12 when he calls the church a body. And you imagine taking your arm, cutting it off and throwing it away from yourself, that arm dies, right?

It has to have connection to the for that arm to have life and that arm to have purpose. So the church is so, the local church, our church, is so powerful in one that the truth flows out, but we have no purpose as Christians without it.

We shrivel up, we die, and we fail to really fulfill all that God would have for us individually and corporately. And when I was 19, you know, God had saved me. I didn't grow up in a Christian environment or anything like that.

Just saved me radically. I didn't have any type of Christian influence. I just started kind of feeling like I needed to read my Bible. And then through that, and then my buddy was inviting me to church.

And I finally went to that weird Pentecostal church. But in the midst of it, God saved me. And, you know, I was thinking, okay, God, I think, yeah, I'm all in here. Jesus, you're my Lord, you're my Savior.

What do you want for me? And so I was thinking about my life's path and all the different plans that I could make for myself. And I came upon this verse, kind of these series of verses, this Bible study of this thought process that really changed or altered the course of my life, even up to this day.

And it started with Proverbs 19, 21. It says, many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand. So I, as a young man, what do you want with my life? Where should I go?

Where should I invest? What should I do? As, you know, one of your sons. And it's not necessarily about all the plans that I could make. It's understanding that the purpose of God will prevail. That I just don't want to spin my wheels and invest in something that's not going to have any type of impact, right?

Then I went to Job 42, 2, and it says, I know that you can do all things that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. So his plans and his purpose will stand, prevail, and it can't be thwarted, as Pastor Waite had said earlier, and that's to stop from being accomplished.

So my thinking in all of this went from, okay, this is not about you, Lord, telling me about my specific plan. This is not necessarily about me saying, Lord, what's your will for my life? It's, no, it's God, what is your will?

What are you doing? What are you accomplishing in the earth? And I want to do that. I want to support that because my individual plans really don't matter too much. And then after that, Matthew 16, 18, after kind of going through that process, Matthew 16, 18 was this blinding light after really understanding and coming into the knowledge of God's sovereign will and the power of his purpose, that nothing can stop it, that what he has already decreed and what he ordains will happen, and nobody can slow it down.

Nobody can stop that from being accomplished. Matthew 16, 18, Jesus says this, I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. So what is God doing in the world today?

He's building his church. Why is the church so incomprehensibly valuable? Because that is what God is doing. He's doing it for his glory. He's building his people. So as a 19-year-old, I said, well, this is it.

I know what my path is, and it's simply to serve the church, to be helpful in the church, to exercise whatever gifts God has given me to bless the church. Because I can know, and we can know as we understand this, that if I invest my time and give to the church and continually pour out my life to the church and stick with the church when it's very painful, which it is, stick with the church when you go through conflict or when you are hurt by church members, which happens, that if I can just move forward and love the church, then all of that effort, all of the pain, all of the focus that I put in the church, all the sacrifice will not be in vain.

It'll not only have earthly results, but eternal results. If I value the church like Jesus values his church, then I should have no problem fully committing all of my heart and all of my focus and all of my resources into the health and the advancement of the church.

And so I think that I wanted to just build that foundation this morning for you because we really have to come to the, I guess, come to the understanding of the value of who we are as Christ's bride and Christ's body before we will be a fully functioning, committed member of that body.

And so for the remainder of the sermon, there's lots of things that we can talk about when it comes to, you know, things that we can do, things that we shouldn't do inside of the church to make or break the church or to create a healthy church environment, but I just wanted to focus on three pretty big deals or pretty big issues that we can look at and do as Christians, which will absolutely facilitate this healthy church that we all want.

And number one, it's resolved to be rooted in the church, rootedness in the body of Christ, rootedness as God's people is absolutely essential. And I'll just tell you, as you go about your Christian life, you will be, I'll put it this way, the enemy and everybody else around you will want to uproot you out of the church because if we can get God's people uprooted out of the church, well, then the church will increasingly become unhealthy and that individual Christian will become unhealthy.

John 15, 8, Jesus says some powerful words here all throughout that chapter of John 15, but he says, by this my father is glorified that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. So Jesus says in just a short amount of words there, he says God is glorified, which we know that God's highest priority is his glory.

That if God had a day planner, which we don't use anymore, or maybe things that he does every day, which just glorify myself, glorify myself, he has created all things for his glory. And so Jesus says God is glorified and you prove to be my disciples.

The authenticity of your Christianity is your fruit bearing. It's about bearing fruit. And I think we can know that we have no capacity whatsoever as Christians to bear any type of fruit if we are not rooted, right?

No fruit, or sorry, no root, no fruit. We just read this verse right here, Psalm 1, 1 through 3, it says, blessed is the man who walks in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord and on his law he meditates day and night.

He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season, and its leaf does not wither, in all that he does he prospers. So the blessed man is not a man who's walking or standing or sitting where he shouldn't be, but he's firmly planted where he should be.

Rootedness all throughout the scriptures, and we can go through so many different areas or directions when it comes to just looking through the scriptures, but rootedness equals the blessed life, the life that we all want to live.

And if we are not rooted individually, and we're not rooted corporately, then we can rest assured that we're not going to yield the fruit that comes from being rooted. I think one of the biggest reasons, I would say, maybe the biggest reasons that God has blessed Apology of Church Mason, Apology of Church Utah, is because of the men and women that he has brought us.

It's my favorite thing about the church, just the people, right? We have high caliber, incredible people that God has brought us to lead and to serve, and specifically he's brought us incredible deacons that come alongside of us and serve, like some of the best men that I've ever met in my life are the deacons that serve not only in Mesa, but here.

And I was talking to one of our deacons, Brian Simpson, we were counting the offering the other day, and he had said it kind of in like in a nonchalant, maybe passing way, but he told me, he says, I've been married to my wife for 27 years.

I've been in the same home for 26 years. I've been doing the same job for 18 years. And I looked at his life, this family is a family that we really look up to, and they're so blessed because of his staying power, right?

He said, you know what? I am going to stay put. I'm going to stay in the same job, stay in the same house. I'm going to stay in the same marriage, of course. And from that comes blessing. So with rootedness comes individual and corporate blessing.

Really, you could say the degree of health in a church is directly proportional to the rootedness of her members. Say it a different way, maybe the healthy church is comprised of stable members because they have decided to plant themselves where the Lord has led them.

And I think to be balanced, I really want to be balanced, there are legitimate reasons why you have to uproot and you got to leave. Absolutely. Right? So your family is your highest ministry. Your family is your highest priority.

And we can be rightly motivated to uproot and move our family. It's maybe a better job or a financial opportunity that you have to, you know, pull up stakes and go because of that. We can understand that.

Maybe it's to go buy land and you want to expand and you want to build and you want to plan for the future. You actually want to be post mill, right? That's a good reason to go. A better overall environment.

Yeah, we can get that health reason. Sometimes our family members have debilitating health issues and you got to jump ship or move across the nation to provide for them. Your theological convictions can change.

I know that was the case for me, especially being in that Pentecostal church. And then I come into theology, I was listening to some characters and then I started listening to guys like John MacArthur and R .C. Sproul.

And man, once you know, I could no longer sit in that environment, we had to go. So we can totally understand that your theological convictions can evolve and mature, which should happen. And that can be a good reason to go.

And also, maybe from the negative, you can't get a job. And we've experienced that for people who've come to Apologia Mesa wanting to come and be a part of the church and they just can't make it. And you got to go where the work is.

You got to also go because your church is unhealthy. The church is demonstrably unhealthy in a sense, and the leadership will not address it. They won't fix the glaring issues that are causing the overall unhealthiness of the church.

That's a good reason to go as well. Church leadership goes bad, and we do. We can. And that's a big reason to leave the church. Pastors disqualify themselves. We had a prominent pastor just do that. It's painful.

It's a good reason to go. They're not pursuing their character qualifications. You look for 1 Timothy 3, most of the qualifications for an elder are character qualifications, and these guys are no longer doing that.

Pastors fail to protect and feed and lead the church. Pastors can become very self-enamored, and that can thrive in the greater American evangelical church because we celebritize spiritual leaders when we absolutely should not do that.

Flattery is one of the worst things that you can ever do to anybody, but especially a man that stands up in front of a crowd of people, and you begin to flatter and celebritize and praise and worship.

Don't ever do that because that is not beneficial for you. That's not beneficial for him. I can understand being thankful for a spiritual leader who is really equipped and handles the Word of God well and has been transformative for you in the way that he leads and that he handles God's Word, but we should be very careful not to flatter.

Pastors can become very narcissistic or enamored with themselves and make the ministries about themselves. I worked for a very narcissistic leader, and I was an associate pastor, and that was very, very painful to go through, but it was good for me, even though I had to go through that and it was so educational because I was so naive at that point of being a younger pastor that I didn't see that.

I didn't see through that. I really didn't understand that. I thought that was kind of what we needed to do, but it was good, again, for me to go through that so I can understand this is not what it's all about.

Pastors can use their own flock for their own self-promotion and selfish gain. They desire to be served and not to serve their flock, so there's all sorts of reasons why you should uproot positive and negative, but what I want to get to is the principle is rootedness.

It's wherever I go. God, if I'm here to be in Apology of Utah for 50 years, yes, Lord, but if you need to move me, I completely understand that, but no matter what, I'm going to have that principle of rootedness here.

I'm staying, and I'm going to serve, and I'm fully committed. We got to also understand, especially as apologians, we're rare in our evangelism. There's a whole bunch of people at Apology of Mesa. They've got churches that they attend to in the morning, and they come to our church at the night because we meet in the afternoon, and they do it because they have no evangelistic outlet or ministry within the church.

We love them, and they come, but when you're a church like ours, and you consistently impact the culture with the gospel, you're going to get the enemy's attention, and the enemy is going to attack, and I have never been so attacked or experienced so much attack as a pastor or as a church ever since I came to be a pastor at Apology of Mesa six years ago.

So what happens is the attack comes in, and I'm going to get into this a little bit more, and it's painful, and it's harmful, and the sheep can leave because what they do is they look at the attack. They look at what's going on.

They immediately associate that with a problem within the church, so we can make assumptions as God's people, and we leave, and we uproot, you know, not based upon good information just because of what we feel like is happening.

So hopefully that came out clearly, but because of who we are and what we do, attack will come in, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's not necessarily a reason to leave, so I would say don't let righteous conflict or assumptions uproot you, and, you know, along with that, there's going to be trends and fads.

Grass is greener on the other side scenarios, very difficult hardships that you will go through within your life as a Christian and a part of the church. Don't let that uproot you if it's not a legitimate reason to uproot you.

Rootedness really is how we cultivate and maintain a healthy church, so be rooted, be committed. Don't go unless you need to, and tied to that, number two is we have to handle conflict biblically. If we're going to be a part, again, of this healthy church, successful church, we have to understand how to navigate conflict, because how we handle conflict individually and corporately within a church can be very life-giving to a church, but it can also be incredibly destructive and incredibly painful for not only the leaders, but everybody else.

Conflict is going to happen. I mean, wherever you go and whatever you do, if you're a part of a community of people, you're going to get into it with somebody or at least going to be attached to some kind of conflict that may not be your own.

I mean, look, Adam and Eve, what was one of the first things that Adam said when sin entered into creation is, you know, it was the woman that you gave me. Blame-shifting, right? He's going at his wife for what had happened.

It's going to happen, and again, conflict is going to happen when you're evangelistic. So what happens when we started to do our bills of abolition, that's when the enemy really just opened up on us, and we knew it was going to happen.

We're like, okay, you know, we started in abortion now, and the whole effort was to get churches on board and, you know, resourced and equipped to go to the abortion clinics and save babies, and then we said, okay, now we want to be legislative, and now we want to start introducing these bills of abolition to try to outlaw abortion and, you know, equal protection for the baby in the womb, and when we did that, wow, wow.

It has been a ride that never, that has never stopped, and what we have seen is that we can kind of handle, and I know the pastors, Pastor Andrew and Pastor Wade can understand, we can kind of handle, you know, attacks from the outside, ridicule and critique, and that stuff kind of runs off the back of the duck kind of a thing, but it's hard when it's internal conflict, and the enemy will do his most devastating work within the church, destructive work within the church, as he sends agents of Satan within the church that seem great, but they're there to hurt, they're there to tear down, they are there to cause turmoil, and as a church that faithfully, you know, commits to church discipline and deals with sin the way that we need to deal with it, people, man, people don't like that.

So a lot of the pain, a lot of the struggle, a lot of the conflict that we go through is because we've had to bring people in front of the church very reluctantly. We are not trigger happy to go through church discipline.

We want to err, and I think we do on the side of grace and calling people to repentance when their sins are exposed, but there comes a time, unfortunately, when you have to come before the church, and then you have to present this issue before the church because this individual or individuals have just dug their heels in, and they don't want to repent, and that's after we as the pastors have messaged and called and said, please repent, please don't make us do this because this is horrible.

It's just the worst thing about being a pastor, but what we've seen is that, you know, we've had to do that, and we bring it before the church, and that doesn't go well with a person that doesn't want to repent, and so what they will do in light of that is they will begin to slander, build factions, so strive, so discord, and ultimately seek to remove the sheep from the sheepfold, and this, I mean, it happens so, I guess you can say pattern-like.

Every time we have to go through it, we can just see it coming. It's like somebody sins that's exposed to us. We pour out our heart asking them to repent, turn from their sin. They won't do it. We bring it before the church, and then what they do is they go to other members of the church, and they begin to talk, and they begin to accuse and slander all for the purpose of disrupting the flock to get them out of the sheepfold.