Needed, A New Way to Meet #5 – Beyond Traditional Church: Experiencing Christ as Head

This week, there will probably be somewhere between 50 and 500 and 1,000 experiences of church life. This week, 50 to 100 groups will probably begin meeting, out of a wonderful experience with the Lord, and every one of them will say, “We’ll make it; others didn’t, but we will, because God wouldn’t let us down, bring us this far, give us all this, and leave us. Man, you have overestimated your God. He’ll leave you high and dry. He’ll just walk off and leave you, flapping in the breeze. He will walk off and leave you. No, He leaves no proof of His existence, and He doesn’t show up very often. Don’t you realize your name is “believer”? Those who believe in the presence of no evidence. We are believers.

I can’t help it that God-ordained church planters. If you can’t handle one, fine, but say goodbye to any permanent experience of church life, and I am still standing here, 56 years old. I’ve said this before; I’ll say it now; I’ll say it till the day I die: I’ve never seen an exception, and I never will. Those groups die. They die. They dissolve, and they die. I made that statement in this building a year and a half ago to a group of people who don’t exist today. They were very irate that it wouldn’t happen to them. In fact, I vividly remember three people springing up immediately: “Our situation is different.” Maybe it was, but they don’t meet anymore.

Yes, we all know how to meet. Yes, we won’t take responsibility. Yes, we’re scared. Yes, we’re bringing our past experience into it. And yes, those are some of the things that kill us. They wouldn’t have to die if there were someone to help.

Let me go back to these meetings and look at them per minute. Perhaps the most serious problem you face… after the initial time of experiencing the Lord, when all things are equal and running well… is that without a ritual, people keep coming later and later and later and later until there is no meeting. You know, now it’s at 7:30, people are coming at 8, or 8:15. You start getting past 8:15, and people stop coming. That is a responsibility you’ve got, and it is a problem I have never found a cure for. And that’s, again, why you need an extra-local worker now and forever, world without end. You need somebody from the outside to come in and turn things upside down, around, and backward.

Do you want to hear my method? I’m giving you so many trade secrets this week. I will make an announcement that you better be there at 7 p.m., and if most of the church isn’t there by then, I’ll dismiss the meeting and send everybody home. That’s one. Now, you better not do this, but I can. I can do this because this is… that’s just the way it is. Two. I come in at 7 p.m., walk to the front of the meeting, get my Bible out, read a text, and start preaching. People come in; they’re absolutely dumbfounded. I’m halfway through the message, and they just got there. There’s been no singing or praying or anything else. And number three, and this one is drastic. The meeting is at 7 p.m., but we will lock the doors at 6:55, and no one can come in after that. And by the way, I’m looking for suggestions. Those are the three things I do, but I’ll take any ideas you’ve got.

I’ll tell you something: about every six months to a year, the church has to be put back together all over again when she is not following ritual and form, and when she has no people who lead her in the meetings; she has to be put back together again about every six months to a year. It’s got to be done. That is not scripture, and that is not New Testament; why can we not awaken to this? I don’t know if it totally falls apart; it’s like a piece of clay that begins to melt. You’ve made this beautiful pot. You look at it about a year later, and about half the pot has eased out over the table, and maybe one of the handles has fallen off, and it’s not holding water much longer. To me, this is a joy. This is a wonderful thing there, a good, wonderful, glorious resurrection and change of direction about every year, but it sure is hard on people who are set in their ways. A home is constantly undergoing revision, isn’t it?

Now, sometimes brothers and sisters try to pump up a meeting. Well, I think when we start pumping the meeting up, and I’m not opposed to seeing that happen from time to time, but when it becomes what you’re doing every week, it’s time to change the way you meet. You’ve got to do something different. You’ve got to stop whatever you’re doing. Generally speaking, we shouldn’t pump up a meeting; that is usually a sign problems are coming.

Every meeting has an element of leadership, and all I can say is that it’s there, and it’s probably natural; there’s not much you can do about it. But the church will reach a point where it becomes- and I’m using this word, it’s not a good word, but I’m using it in a positive sense- addicted to its meetings without human leaders, and will fight to keep that privilege.

Community tends to make us dependent on the community, and we can lose our individual relationship to the Lord. We don’t lose our individual relationship to the Lord; we stop taking responsibility for our lives and start looking to someone else. All I can tell you is that I fight that tooth and nail, constantly; I bring it up, I remind people of it, but I haven’t ever found a solution. When people get so attached to one another that their friendship is more important than the Lord and His house…We have a saying down in Texas: If a dog ever starts stealing eggs, you can’t break him. You can shoot him, and that’s true. You cannot break a dog from stealing eggs. Once he does, you’ll have to move him to the city where there aren’t any eggs. I don’t even know what to do with Christians when they reach that point other than to tell them to go have their friendship the rest of their life.

I try to avoid encouraging the church to have church-wide prayer meetings. That’s strange, isn’t it? We tend to pick up one another’s vocabularies. I always encourage you to have your own prayer life. I encourage you to meet with one or two people and keep your own way of speaking. Watch language in the church. This isn’t the church’s fault; it isn’t a leader’s fault. I watch people come in, and their attitude is, “I want to be one with you. Show me what your vocabulary is. What do we believe? What’s our vision? What’s our goal? And I will become a fanatic at it. Just fill me in on the details, and I’m ready to go.”

There are really needy people in this world who want to abdicate their responsibility to life and turn it over to someone else. I think one of my responsibilities, and everybody else’s, is not giving a whole lot of advice and not directing people…and I have a problem there. Do you want to hear about Gene Edwards’ problem? Well, I’m a very enthusiastic person. You come up to me and start talking to me about something, and man, I’m going to really encourage you. Five years later, you come back and say, ” You told me to do that.”

I ask everybody…I’m going to be asking; I haven’t had the privilege of doing this since I decided to ask. I would ask everybody to take one to two months a year away from the church, a sabbatical. Now, I don’t take a sabbatical. I wait until seven years; I think four is much better. Just don’t come. Attend the Baptist church for a year. Don’t get so involved that you literally lose your mind to the larger mind of the community. I don’t want to see people give up their individuality. I fight hard for it. It’s one of the things I stand for, and I can’t stand this business of courting little groups. I can’t stand this business of picking up a certain vocabulary, having visions and goals, and a movement orientation. I can’t stand head covering or authoritarianism. It’s just vocabulary meant to ensnare. I didn’t think the people who do it knew it, but it’s headed there anyway.