A Vision For the 21st Century Church (1989)

Sunday morning church is one of them. And this is one of those things we are going to be forced to forget and leave.  And this is the story. During the Reformation in Wittenberg, Germany, Martin Luther began his Protestant church services at 5 a.m., which had been the tradition of Christians gathering throughout the centuries in Europe.  But he also liked to go to the tavern on Saturday night and drink beer. So the later he stayed at the tavern, the more he moved up his Sunday morning church service.  So 6 a.m., 7 a.m., 8 a.m. And he stayed longer and longer at the tavern on Saturday night, drank more and more beer, moved it up to 9 a.m., then 10 a.m. Finally, someone said to Martin, Martin, if you keep this up, there’s not going to be any Sunday morning Mass.  You’ve only got one hour left. He said, Great, that’s fine. We’ll move it to 11 a.m.

And that’s why you and I gather at 11 a.m. And we’re locked in.  We have to shut down at 12 because everyone’s hungry and wants to go home and eat. I had the privilege of going into Thailand just as Vietnam fell, and I went there into the jungles to bring out a tribe of Christians who had not been seen. They were Hmong, had not been seen in 50 years, been converted by a missionary who left them.  And I went into the refugee camp, and there in the middle of the refugee camp was a hut that was about three feet higher than any other hut.  And I got there on Sunday morning, and I walked in. Now, these people had not seen any other Christians in 50 years until that very time that I walked in there. And there were bamboo poles stretched out on stakes, all in a row.  There was a pulpit up front, and they met in the jungle at 11 a.m. on Sunday morning. It has gotten into the very lifeblood of the church.

I’m going to come back to this business of the Sunday morning church service. And I realize this is so sacred, it’s almost inconceivable that we would ever dare break with it.  But gentlemen, I am saying to you, somewhere within the next century, and especially to you young men, we will have to break with this tradition, or we will suffer enormous loss as the matrix of society changes before our eyes.

We will not only have to adapt, we will have to adapt radically.  And I would present to you the pattern of the first-century church. Well, some other things you might be interested in. I think you probably know that the choir really did not come chronologically into the church through the Old Testament concept of the temple.  But it came to us through the pagan choir. And it was introduced into the Christian church about 50 years after Constantine. And at that time, the popular music was chanting, and it froze.  And today, the Gregorian chant is still within the Roman Catholic Church. And we have, of course, left the chant, but we still have the choir.

Now, gentlemen, there are a lot of other things that I’d like to run down with you on these, but I think I’m going to present one or two that are just downright scary.  The Sunday morning order of service, which, at least for us who are Baptists, and I speak as a Baptist now, we hold to religiously.  But the truth of the matter is, if you’ll go to a Lutheran church, a Methodist church, a Baptist church, anybody but the Pentecostals, you’ll find that Protestant churches have a very similar presentation on Sunday morning.  This was invented about the same time as the Sunday morning church service. It was invented by John Calvin, picked up by John Knox, and brought into the evangelicals by that means, and brought to America by the pilgrims, the Puritans, and others.  And we are locked in today to an order of service invented by John Calvin in the year 1540. Now, that’s disconcerting, and you can look at it and say, I don’t want to hear that. That’s offensive. Or you can say, forgetting those things which are behind.  If that’s where it came from, then I can be liberated to think in new, wider, broader, more dramatic terms.

Brothers and sisters, I may be mistaken, but I think that if you took a poll of Christians across America, they would tell you something that would shock you.  And that is, after 400 years, the Sunday morning Protestant church service is boring.  And brothers, there is so much more dynamic, such greater freedom for the expression of the gathering of the body of Christ than you and I, most of us, have ever seen and known.  I would like to challenge you to consider a totally different view of how we as believers gather in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

A couple more. I think you need to know where our seminaries came from. This is a shocker. In fact, I have been asking and writing to seminaries for, I suppose, ten years.  Did anybody know where they came from? I got back answers, telephone calls, letters, and personal inquiries on campuses. No Protestant. Presidents of seminaries and on down.  No one could tell me where the seminary originated from.

Well, it originated in 1545 at the Council of Trent. It was a Roman Catholic thing. They met for 18 years trying to decide whether or not they would reform themselves as the Protestants were pressuring them to do, or if they would remain conservative in the state they were in.  And finally, after 18 years, they decided they were going to stay the way they were. But they had two problems they felt they needed to deal with. One was the low caliber of the priest at that time, and the other was the immorality in Europe.  And in the last six months, they fought a battle over what they would do. Now, I’m telling you history. I did not make this up. You may read it in books yourselves. All you have to do is study the Council of Trent.

As for the immorality that they felt was rampant in the church and throughout Europe, where the Catholic Church was, they came up with this cause, that there had been too many statues made during the Renaissance with people with no clothes on.  So they asked the governments of Europe to go around and plant propitious fig leaves on those statues. That was their cure for their morality in Europe and in the churches.  Read it. And as to the matter of the low standard of the ministry, they invented something called the seminarium, which in our language has become the seminary.  It was brought over out of a Protestant imitation of that into our country. Now, I have nothing to say to that except I believe we need to reexamine today how it was the Lord Jesus Christ raised up men who were called to preach the gospel.  And we need very much to study exactly how Paul related to Timothy, Secundus, Aristarchus, Titus, Gaius, Epaphroditus, and how he raised those Gentile workers up to preach the gospel.  It may be, gentlemen, that we have a more powerful tool in the first century approach to raising up young men to preach the gospel than we do in seminaries.  Now, that may be too radical for anyone within this auditorium to consider, but I ask you as a fellow believer in Christ, committed to the Word of God, that these things are matters we must consider as we stand on the brink of a new century.

And now I’m going to do a death feat here, I’m going to walk right into the jaws of sure destruction. Gentlemen, I want to talk with you, and I don’t mind telling you,  I have never discussed this subject before publicly. This is the first time. Maybe you should write me a letter and tell me if I should ever, again, as long as I live, discuss these things where we Protestants got what we have today in the way of traditions.

I don’t know if you know this or not, but we have just done away with the church building, the choir, the pew, and the seminary, as things being New Testament, the Sunday morning order of service, and 11 a.m.  Now, I’m going to the last two. I hope you’re ready, and I call for your Christian graciousness. I cannot change historical facts.

Where did the practice of the modern-day pastor come from? I looked for that longer and harder than anything else, and when I finally found it in some of the old records of early Protestant expression, I was surprised, to say the least.  At the time of Luther, the Roman Catholic priests had something called the seven pastoral ministries.  Don’t confuse that with the seven sacraments. The seven pastoral ministries. And those seven pastoral ministries were picked up by the Protestants, who were mostly Roman Catholic priests turned Protestant under the teachings of Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and others.  I’m frightened to tell you what those practices of the Roman Catholic priests were. One of them was to pray over civic gatherings and bless them, you know, like a football game. Another was to bury the dead. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to find in the New Testament a funeral being preached over by a Christian; it is a Roman, not Roman Catholic, but a Roman tradition. The philosophers preached over the dead bodies of people before they buried or burned them, and this was picked up by the Catholics, and then brought over into our territory. The priests were to visit the sick.  And some of them were to tend to the preaching of the Word.