Making Christ Central Part 1

We’ve got a long way to go. This is just trying to get rid of some of the garbage we’ve got. Then what do we do to get back to a… a genuine… Let me give you two more. Where do we get our pews? That’s interesting. When Constantine began building those church buildings, he did so in Rome, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and in a city he was founding called Constantinople. They were all being built. The church buildings were being built at the same time as he was building Constantinople. And interestingly enough, this is the difference between a Greek and an Italian. When they built those buildings, they didn’t think about anything, because they were, after all, memorials anyway. They didn’t think about putting anything in them for people to sit down in; people had been meeting in homes. The Greeks walked in, looked around, and just stood there for their meetings. The Italians, bless them, came in, looked around, and sat down on the floor, and so somebody got the idea of bringing in a bench, just a plain old bench.

So, the Italians had benches, and until this day, if you’ve ever been to an Eastern Orthodox church, you will find no seats in their buildings. They stand throughout their entire service. That’s why there are not very many Eastern Orthodox Christians, and believe it or not, the chair was invented just… nobody ever thought about putting a back on it. The chair was invented just before the Reformation, and the Protestants took one look at those hard benches, and they put a back on them, and that’s how we got our pews. Now I’ve got one more, and this is a crack-up, and this is a little embarrassing to tell, but it’s history, so I’m going to tell it the way it happened.

This is just history. During the time of Martin Luther, the Roman Catholics had to decide whether or not they were going to reform their church, because they were really corrupt at that time, or if they were going to defend what they had. So, the Pope called a meeting just north of Italy so that it would not be considered part of the Italian Roman Catholic influence, just over the border. The great Council of Trent lasted 18 years; they debated for 18 years whether they would reform or dig in. And at the end of 18 years, they decided they were going to dig in. They did not reform, but they did have two problems. One of them was the corruption of the priesthood and its ignorance, and the other one was the gross immorality that was in the church. Making decisions as only scholars can, this is what they came up with: that in every diocese where the Roman church still had land and power and political influence, there would be built a “seminarium” to train the priest to read, to write, to know Greek, to know Latin, and to make a highly educated priest out of them.

And so was born the seminary. By the way, Dwight L. Moody said, “Why do you have to go all the way through college before you can go to a seminary? Why don’t you just, when you get out of high school, do so?” And so, a low-grade seminary was born, which we call Bible schools, and that was actually… around, when was Moody Bible Institute formed? It was the first Bible school in the world. I don’t have time for this…all built on the curriculum and concepts of Aristotelian-type universities. And that’s where our Bible schools came from, and that is not the way workers should be raised up. It is not the way workers should be raised up. Now, why don’t you ask me how workers are supposed to be raised up?

God had His way, and to give you a little peek at what we need to do, we need to go back into God and discover that the first Bible school or seminary, the first training of the first Christian worker, began in eternity past in the Godhead. A pattern was established there that remained unbroken throughout the first century, and when Jesus Christ called twelve men to be with Him, He was doing nothing in the world but duplicating what the Father had put Him through in eternity past, and that was for someone to sit down and live with God. Amen. And twelve men sat down and lived with God and watched the Son of the living God fellowship with His Father, and that’s what they learned; that’s how they were trained. And when He ascended, those twelve men were trained. Having lived with God and watched the Son of God fellowship with His Father internally, that’s what was given them.

They were men who walked with an internal living Lord, and they were called sent ones. They were not called apostles. They were called sent ones. And what were they sent to do? Well, let me get really clear what a sent one is. A sent one is one who raises up the ecclesia. That’s what he does for a living, and he raises up ecclesias. He raises up Christian communities. I’m almost reluctant to use the word church because of what it conjures in our minds. And out of those ecclesias, the young men experience church life just as the twelve did, living with the Lord Jesus Christ in a community of 13 or 120 or whatever… And some of these men are called of the Lord, and they live with the sent ones, and then they took over the torch from the sent ones.

There’s nothing any clearer than that when Paul of Tarsus goes back to his eight churches he raised up — 8, not 800, not 8,000, or not 80,000, and not 800,000; 8 churches he raised up and went back and picked out one man from each of those fellowships, and they had already known church life. Then he took them to a city where there was no church and no Christians, and he said, “Watch me.” And eight young ex-heathen Gentiles walked with a sent one who raised up churches in that city and lived with Paul of Tarsus for four years, watching how he did it. And when Paul died, they took the mantle. Brothers and sisters, we need some sent ones, and we need some church life, and we need young men who will go live with the best sent ones we’ve got, who are called of God, and live with them, and we could turn the course of history by that simple practice.

(Continued in Part 2)