Church

Noise. Noise. Noise.

A couple of weeks ago, on a weeknight, at about 3:00 in the morning, something happened to the power lines behind our house and our electricity went out. I would not have known until the next morning had my wife not woken me up and told me. Strangely enough, what woke her up was the silence.

As I got up and fumbled around looking for my phone so I could turn on the flashlight app, I too was almost startled by the silence. Not only were the usual noise-makers in our house (appliances, AC unit, etc.) not making their usual racket, but due to the fact that it was the middle of the night, there was practically no sound coming from outside the house either. The sounds of the city would be asleep for at least a few more hours.

After I discerned that the cause of the electrical disruption was not something in my house nor was it something I could address, and after giving the utility company a call, I sat down and just listened for few minutes. The silence was almost startling. It was unsettling. It was almost alien.

I realized in that moment how conditioned I had become come to constant noise. I almost didn’t know how to mentally process the absence of it. Silence forces your mind to fill the void left by incessant sound. It made me realize that noise is a lazy man’s best friend. Instead of having to put our minds to work, too often we put our minds at ease by simply funneling incessant noise into our ears. 

As I sat in silence and thought about these things, I realized that there is a spiritual impact to noise. Noise can keep us from focusing on God, from sensing His Spirit, from hearing Him, from hearing others, from discerning nuances, from exercising wisdom, from listening well to others, from thinking for ourselves. On and on I kept thinking. The silence was now allowing my thoughts to grow louder and fuller.

And so Scripture began to come to mind. Scripture that reinforces the need for us to reduce the noise in our lives. Scripture like…

"The LORD will fight for you, and you have only to be silent." Exodus 14:14

"But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me." Psalm 131:2

"Better is a handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and a striving after wind." Ecclesiastes 4:6

"But the LORD is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him." Habakkuk 2:20

I then thought of how we are in such a noisy season right now. Modernity has created a cacophony of physical sounds that run throughout the day, but the culture and cultural moment we find ourselves in has also created myriad psychological, intellectual, and emotional noises.

It seems the pandemic has created immunology experts out of nearly everyone and, therefore, everyone feels the need to shout their newly acquired wisdom at everyone else. Social unrest apparently means that nearly everyone has make sure everyone else knows how virtuous they are through tweeting or posting the latest echo-chamber article with, of course, the appropriate virtue-signaling hashtag. And, in the age of noise, to properly debate your political view, including ecclesiastical and theological views, you must debase your political opponent.

Noise. Noise. Noise.

No wonder we feel far from God. We don’t know how to stop the noise: "Be still and know that I am God." Psalm 46:10

Maybe it's time to pursue silence. This can be done literally through a silence and solitude retreat. That is simply scheduling time to get away and spend time alone with God in quietness. Or, maybe, there are more practical ways right in front of us. Like not turning on talk radio, or even music, when we get in the car. Not flipping on our favorite cable news the moment we get home. Not checking social media when we grab our phone. Or, here’s a novel idea, not grabbing the phone at all.

As leaders in God's Church, if we want to have ears to hear what God wants from us, if we are to have ears to hear the true needs of our neighbors, then we must have ears that are not overrun with noise. And things are only going to get noisier in 2020. The enemy will most definitely keep it noisy.


Resource of the Week

Silence can actually be a spiritual discipline. In my mind, the best book on Spiritual Disciplines is Donald Whitney's Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian LifeChapter 10 of the book teaches on silence and solitude as a spiritual discipline. Now more than ever we need help maintaining the practices that will allow us to walk humbly with our God. 

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The Essentials of Church Require Gathering

What Acts 2:42 has to say about the importance of gathering together

Lord willing, the COVID-19 crisis that has gripped our country and our world will be winding down soon. Over the past few months, I've heard it said over and over that there will be a new normal for churches moving forward. I've even heard some say that in-person gatherings may be a thing of the past as people choose digital church attendance either for their safety or as a matter of convenience. 

While I am sure there are some facets of how we do church that must and will change, I am not convinced that the gathering of the saints on the Lord's Day is one of them. Theologically we are not bound to a geographical location to worship God. That was Jesus' point when he spoke the Samaritan woman and said:

“...the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father... But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him” (John 4:22-24)

Can someone worship God while not gathered in a specific location with other believers? Yes. Should that be the norm? No. The new normal cannot be an un-gathered church. I am not saying that buildings are needed. What I am saying is that gathering together is.
 
I believe the core, essential elements of a New Testament church demand gathering in person. For months now we've heard about essential businesses and essential services. We need to ask, what are the essentials of the church and what do those essentials demand?
 
Many people have written on the essentials or elements of a healthy church. From Rick Warren's five purposes of the church to Mark Dever's nine marks of a healthy church, there is plenty already written to help us. I simply want to focus on one verse that Luke gives us to encapsulate what the early church did and see how the four essentials found in that verse should encourage us to gather together, face-to-face, in a location. That one verse is Acts 2:42:

And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.

So, what essentials of the church do we see in this one verse?

  1. Teaching the Word of God was essential. The devotion they had to the Apostles’ teaching is the equivalent of devotion to God's Word in our day. What we have in our Bibles, the apostolic teaching of Jesus Christ, who is the focus of all of Scripture. The Word must be taught and preached with passion, precision, and power. This needs to happen primarily in a gathered setting. Preaching and teaching are not one-way communication, but rather should be an intimate and interactive experience where the shepherd lovingly feeds and exhorts his flock. If in-person teaching were not essential to the church, then Paul would not have appointed elders and trained pastors. Instead, he would have limited his ministry to letter writing.

  2. Devotion to one another was essential. The word "fellowship" (koinonia in Greek) makes its first New Testament appearance in this text. It meant much more than getting together or eating together. It meant being devoted to one another. It encompasses all the 56 "one-another" passages in the New Testament. It is not something we can do in isolation. As a matter of fact, a couple of the "one anothers" are found in Colossians 3:16 where we are exhorted to teach and admonish one another through the singing of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. We cannot do that if we are scattered. We must gather regularly in order to do life together and thereby live out the "one-anothers".

  3. Observing the ordinances was essential. There is some debate as to whether or not the "breaking of bread" here is referring to the Lord's Supper or just other meals they had together. For a few reasons I can't go into now, I believe it is the former. The whole imagery and gravity of the Lord's Supper is not something that can be done in isolation or over a screen. A funny meme was created a few months back called "The Upper Zoom" where it showed Jesus having his last meal with the disciples over video-conferencing. It was obviously meant to be funny, and it was, but it highlighted the foolishness of thinking we can observe the Lord's Supper in isolation from one another. The other ordinance, baptism, of course, cannot be done remotely. We must gather in order to be devoted to the ordinances.

  4. Finally, prayer was essential. Of course, prayer can be done by oneself, or over the phone, or in a Zoom call; prayer is not limited to a geographical location. But we are called to pray together and the most effective and powerful way to do that is to do it in each other's presence. The Bible speaks of laying hands on one another while blessing or praying for one another. We can not do that at a distance. And the Body of Christ is called to corporately lift prayers to our Father which implies that we are doing that in agreement with one another and obviously in the presence of one another. 

The early church gathered. They gathered in small groups (house to house) and they gathered in large groups (Solomon's Portico). They understood that the failure to gather would be against God's will and God's design for the church (Hebrews 10:35). 
 
The truth is that we were designed for face-to-face communication and fellowship with our brothers and sisters in Christ. Just because we have mediated forms of communication that allow us to see each other and talk to each other digitally, does not diminish the importance of the physical gathering of the church.
 
The oldest form of mediated communication is the written word, and so let us hear the Apostle John as he says, "I had much to write to you, but I would rather not write with pen and ink. I hope to see you soon, and we will talk face to face" (3 John 13-14). And so in our age, we should rather not zoom, or stream the service, but rather see each other and fellowship face to face.

Resource of the Week:  This week's resource is from 9Marks. Very few ministries have done more to help churches think about healthy ecclesiology than these guys. They have a lot of resources on their website, but today I want to highlight their Past…

Resource of the Week:

This week's resource is from 9Marks. Very few ministries have done more to help churches think about healthy ecclesiology than these guys. They have a lot of resources on their website, but today I want to highlight their Pastor's Talk Podcast. Always informative and entertaining, this podcast will help church leaders shepherd their congregations well.

Unity in the Church With Guest Blake Coffee

I was so happy to have Blake Coffee from Christian Unity Ministries on with us last week for our Pastor’s Round-Table discussion.

If you were not able to join us, I urge you to watch this video. What Blake had to share was so on-point and so needed in our cultural moment.

May we all be guided by God to have the discernment to share the right words to build one another up despite this divisive age we find ourselves in.

Resources mentioned:

• Christian Unity Ministries: https://www.christianunityministries.org/

 5 Principles of Unity a 6-week small group study.
We have plenty of copies available at the CBBA office, if you’re interested, email us to arrange a pick up.

• Oneanotherproject.com: FREE web-based small group tool