Needed, A New Way to Meet #2: Rediscovering the Biblical Church

Here are the kinds of churches we’ve got on this earth. We’ve got churches led by a multiplicity of priests; that’s Roman Catholic. We have Protestant churches led by pastors. Then you’ve got churches outside the organized church. What you’ve got there is either a one-shot apostle or what I would call an elders’ church. What we generally had was a young man who was a member of a group outside the organized church. He got very, very hurt. He had some years of resting…this is very generalized…and then later, he started a little informal group. You join it, and he’s not a pastor. Actually, he has the gift of eldership, but he does not have the gift of church planting. Maybe he still has a job, but all he can do is raise up one little church.

Now, I’m going to put it this way. He can’t leave his wife for six months. He’s not obsessed. If you please, he’s not possessed. He’s perfectly happy to have an informal gathering of Christians in his or somebody else’s home, running 20, 30, 40, or 50 in the church; that won’t turn the world upside down, saints. I thank God for it. Most of us are in the elders’ churches or one-shot apostles. You understand what I mean by that? They can raise up one church. That’s it. Maybe in a lifetime, they’ll raise up two, but they’re not madmen.

I’m telling you, we’ve got to have madmen. The apostle is the…I’m sorry, forgive me. I don’t mean that word. I don’t like that word, and I don’t believe in that word. The church planter is the one thing that fights the matrix. He is the one thing that stands against the culture. He stands against your natural lethargy. He opposes all that you are. Most of you in this room have a home. You have a job. You have a home, you have a job, you have a family, and you’re going to live in a town for the rest of your life.

He can’t sit still for five minutes. He opposes culture, and he changes everything every week or two. He comes in…and y’all hate to see him come. He comes in with all his mad ideas, and he’s hollering, and he’s screaming, and he’s telling you this, and he’s telling you that, talking real radical. He helps you, and then he leaves. While he’s there, he tells you that young men should never marry and young women should never marry. So, he’s a nut. He’s a stark raving screwball. He’s a nuttier than a fruitcake. His name is Paul of Tarsus. He defies the second law of thermodynamics. He doesn’t believe all things should wind down, cool off, and come to a dead standstill.

God put him on this earth for that purpose, and you’ve got to have him. Otherwise, you end up with an elders’ church. I love them. I thank God for them. There must be thousands of them across the face of this earth, but they’re one reason our meetings stink. You who are those kind, and I hope I don’t offend you, those of you listening to this recording, I’m sorry, but I cannot be faithful to Scripture without saying this: you are in as untenable a situation as a pastor is. A pastor has no Scripture right to exist; neither do you. But then, we don’t have any church planters either, do we? So I don’t know what to say to solve this problem, but I’m going to present to you the problem. That’s what this message is all about: the problem. The problem is we don’t have any church planters. Let me go through this really quickly.

The apostles later went out and visited those churches. I don’t know how they met, and I don’t really care. I know that there was an awesome dynamic there, but I know those 12 men – those 12 men – their central message was Jesus Christ. It was not theology, worship, or meetings. They were restless men. They traveled their whole lives. They could not stay in one place. They were driven men. They were mad. They were not like ordinary people. And this way of talking is new to me. It’s taken me living this long to recognize the fact that most Christians, you standing in this room, sitting in this room, like to live where you do, and you’re going to enjoy living there.

I’m conceding that for the first time in my life. A few of you would be willing to move around once or twice or three times in your life, and then you’d come back later and get really mad and say, “Well, I had a home in that town. You told me to go to that other.” So, you know, you’re up to two or three moves. Those guys were like that. Peter dragged his wife along, but he did go.

Now, in Paul of Tarsus and Barnabas, what’s the pattern? For a time, the churches have no leaders. Paul and Barnabas go into a city as church planters. They are itinerant men. You understand they’re itinerant? They’re moving constantly. They go into town, stay a while, and leave. They do not ordain elders. Don’t read Scripture that way; that is unfair to Scripture. They do not choose elders. Those churches have no elders. Those churches have nothing but an apostle, and he’s missing.

The meetings become theirs after a time in which that church planter planted, built, and showed those people what to do. Later, there are elders. And there are few men living today, or who have ever lived, who are willing to walk away from the church and leave it without leadership, because their ministry cannot produce in a short time what a church needs to be left alone. They don’t have a gospel that’ll handle a situation like that. They went into four churches; they left four churches. They came back and ordained elders, but by then you couldn’t take those meetings away from God’s people.

Do you understand what I am saying to you? That those people were addicted to being in charge of their own meetings. Get this and get it clear. The meetings belonged to God’s people. If there were 50 elders in that church, it wouldn’t matter. The meetings belong to Christ and God’s people, and that’s where they belong, and that’s how a church is to be planted. Until we do this, this business of how to meet is dead in the water.

Now, I’m not going to tell you what to do when you go home. Still, I am telling you the highest way and the best way and God’s way and the way that was born, not in Israel in the Hebrew faith, and not in the methods of men, but born in the Godhead and born out in Galilee with Christ and the Twelve, and then exemplified by Barnabas and Paul, and Paul and Silas, and Timothy and Titus, and Secundus and Tychicus and Trophimus and Gaius and Aristarchus. And I got one more: Epaphroditus.

Those men bore it out—a consistent but divine, heavenly pattern. A church: leave it. Let it become the possessor of the meetings…and then…the elders. You can’t take the meetings away from God’s people once they’ve got them. That was the pattern of the first-century church, and that’s why it could have incredible variety. That’s why it did not need clergy, and that’s why ordinary and even sometimes illiterate men and women could lead those churches. Because the churches—the cutting edge of the churches’ experience—belong to us, and the meetings are ours.