A Vision For the 21st Century Church (1989)

Most of it is those things that we consider so much a part of what we do today, most of which really cannot be found in the New Testament Scripture.  And I’m saying to you, brothers, that those of you who are pastors, and I have been a pastor as well as an evangelist. Gentlemen, as I have ministered among you and your churches, my heart has bled for you, that the modern-day concept of the pastoral ministry has so locked you into things that your people are expecting of you.  The tragedy has enshrouded not only the preaching of the Word of God but has affected the whole tenor and expression of the church itself.

Forgetting those things which are behind. I am not bound by the seven pastoral ministries of Roman Catholic priests in the year 1530 in eastern Germany.  I would invite you to look again at what your calling and practice is, and also that of God’s people. I can witness to the fact that the Lord’s people don’t mind having others pray for them; you don’t have to go visit all those sick folk, you don’t have to preach over the dead.  And all of the other things that you and I get called on to do were in the first, second, and third centuries in the hands of God’s ordinary people.  And very little of it was in the hands of those who’d been called to preach. They had other jobs, far more dramatic and, in fact, terrifying to do.

Well, now, I come to the final one, and this one is going to shock you like it did me. I am going to ask you a question. Have you ever wondered not where the Sunday morning church service comes from, but where the Sunday morning sermon comes from?  Well, Gene, it comes from the tradition of the preaching of the Word of God. There is no question that there is the preaching of the Word of God, but that’s a far cry from the Sunday morning sermon to which we are all attached, and if you please, enslaved, come hell, come high water, at 11.30 a.m. on Sunday morning, we have to preach a sermon. Where did that tradition come from?

It has been traced, and you can read this in history books.  I’m sure you’ve heard the term rhetoric. Let’s go back to the Roman Empire during the days when the Christian faith first began. Rhetoric was taught as one of three or four sacred subjects by all the schools, mostly attended by the elite and the rich.  Oratory was an innate part of the Greco-Roman tradition. And after the Romans conquered the Greeks, and the Greeks had no great orations to give over many different crises that they had traditionally had great orators to address, they began to play like in Greece, and vast audiences would gather, and they would pretend that the Spartans were upon them, or the Romans, and a man would come up before the audience and pretend a great oration, and the people would go wild over his ability to captivate his audience.

Now, there were Roman orators who became converted to Jesus Christ in the fourth century. They had been steeped in a 400-year tradition of rhetoric.  Rhetoric had been addressed by Aristotle, who said every good speech oration has to have an introduction, a clear conclusion, and two, three, or four major points.  And that is still being taught today to young ministers. That’s what we learn to do on Sunday morning. I am not discounting the need of the preaching of the Word of God, but I would like for us to see a vision of how these things can express themselves much better in a more primitive, first, second, and third-century expression of the church.

Gentlemen, it is frightening. As I read, it was frightening to me to read the ancient documents of how the orator would come out in front of an audience, and there in front of the audience, he would put on a robe with a strange-looking collar. And then he would bring his oration. But I think the thing that stunned me the most was to find out why we have chapters and verses in the New Testament.  It was not originally for the edification and for the help of God’s people, but the tradition among the orators was that before they spoke, they read a passage out of one of the classics.  And they would say chapter so-and-so, verse so-and-so. And then they would read it, and then they would speak on it.

And when those men, some of them, became converted to Jesus Christ, they asked that the New Testament be divided into chapters and verses so they could carry on that same tradition.  And today, when we stand up to preach a sermon, we are in the rhetorical tradition of the ancient Romans.  Brothers, if we could see what the first-century Christians did, the ministers of the Word of God, they preached out of emergency.  And they preached out of urgency. And their preaching was sporadic. It was inconsistent. I mean by that you never knew when they would or would not do it. It was not tied into ritual.  And when they preached, they stayed with a subject until God’s people were soaked with it and had become masters of its spiritual content.

Forgetting those things which are behind. I hope that a little of this has opened up for you the prospects of what you, especially you young men, might be able to do with a great liberality of practice open before you.  Brothers, break, first in your thinking, then in your practice of traditions that have come down to us, most of them in the period around the 50 years of the Reformation and the 50 years around the coming of Constantine to the throne in the Roman Empire in 313-323 AD.

Now, those are practices that we are locked into today that over the next 100 years may very well become irrelevant to the people of this country as their own needs change and as the world becomes more worldly. Gentlemen, I see a church of the 21st century that I would like to share with you.  It is not a church that gathers in formal dress on Sunday morning to go to Sunday school and church. And I have a dear friend who recently simply said before a vast audience of people, the Sunday school will become irrelevant in the next 50 years.  And I know that’s sacrosanct. But consider, brothers, the community of the believers.

If there is anything that church history has taught me in the study of the first, second, and third century church, it was this, that it was not some way of evangelism.  It was not some way of preaching the gospel. It was not some method nor depth of commitment that they had that we did not have. There were two things that marked those people that made them both so attractive and so abominable to the society around them.  One was their depth of Christ, and the other one was, and this has been so completely overlooked, the very beauty, the attractiveness, and the magnetism of the body of Christ.  People came to the Lord Jesus Christ in the first, second, and third centuries because of the ecclesia. It was so beautiful, so incredibly unlike anything they had ever seen.  It was not a place people gathered on Sunday morning. It was a civilization within itself. It was a 24-hour-a-day, 7 days-a-week, 365 days-a-year way of living.  They met in homes. Their meetings lasted for hours. Often they did not see ministers or anything near a minister, nor an elder, nor a deacon, for months and sometimes years.

If that sounds impossible to you, then perhaps you would enjoy studying the ministry of Pram Pradham in India, where he single-handedly went out and preached the gospel in villages and left people with nothing more than a gospel of John and the gathering.  And he would have to come back sometimes six months later, not one of them could read or write. And yet there they were, meeting all the time during the week, sitting down in their homes and in their huts and meeting for hours and hours and hours, sharing with one another their divine encounter with Christ.

This was how the first-century church came into being, how it took root. Paul would go into a city and preach the gospel. He did not appoint elders. Not the first time, not ever. He left the people holding on to one another in desperate situations. He then returned and appointed elders, but those elders were appointed on top of, or in the midst of, an organic expression of the body of Christ, which had already found a way of gathering, of caring for one another, of loving one another, of living with one another as a civilization, as a way of life unknown to the rest of the world and unprecedented in all of human history.