Rethinking Church: The Bible

If there's a problem with the way churches are today, what should they be like?

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

On the podcast recently I talked about the work of Dr Tom Wadsworth, a Biblical scholar who has done a lot of research into what churches were like in the New Testament. He says that the way churches were back then is very different to the way they are now. If you missed it, you can see the podcast here:

Church (but not as we know it)

I said there that God has given us an opportunity now to go back to the drawing board and rethink what church should be like. This is something I’ve been doing for the last few years, as you will know if you’ve been a regular here. But I think now is the time to flesh out those ideas and start drawing out some more concrete plans.

Over the past couple of years I’ve started up an initiative on Understand the Bible called Church with UTB. The idea behind it was for it to be an online tool to help people get a house church running — providing songs, Bible teaching, etc. When I started it, my idea was to try and translate a traditional church service to a house church setting. As such I retained elements like the confession, etc. However, I’m beginning to wonder whether we should be much more radical.

But, what would such radical changes look like in practice?

My plan is to start thinking through that exact topic here on Substack. I want to take the lessons I’ve learned from Tom Wadsworth’s research, as well as my own thinking and research I’ve done over the past few years, and start applying that to how Church with UTB might look different. I want to explore all the different aspects of church as it relates to how we do things today.

Today I’m going to start with the Bible — which is always the best place to begin.

The Bible has to come first

The first foundation stone we need to lay is the Word of God, the Scriptures. Ephesians 2:20 says, “[God’s household is] built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone.”

Jesus is the chief cornerstone of the church, of course — everything is through Jesus. But the church is built on the foundation of “the apostles and prophets”, which I think is a concise way of referring to the teaching of the Old and New Testaments. Jesus, as the head of the church, rules his church through his Word.

What does that mean? Let me quote from this article on Ligonier Ministries:

What does it mean that Jesus is the only head of the church? It means that He rules over His church by His Word and by the Spirit. He has placed the Bible in the hands of the church through His Apostles. The Bible tells us what Christ would have us believe and how Christ would have us live. Jesus has also sent His Spirit to indwell believers. It is the Spirit’s delight and commitment to equip believers to walk in the paths that Christ has set for them in His Word (see Isa. 59:21).

The Scriptures are the means by which Jesus exercises his lordship over the church: he directs us to what is good and right through his Word. As the quotation goes on to say, that isn’t the only thing — we have the Holy Spirit (hallelujah!) — but our lives as Christians and our life as the church must be built on the Word of God. That is how he accomplishes his purposes (Isaiah 55:10-11¹).

In short, this means three things:

• Firstly, if the Bible says we should be doing something, or doing something a certain way and not another, we should do it. No questions.

• Secondly, if the Bible says we should NOT be doing something, we should not do it. No questions.

• Thirdly, if the Bible is silent on an issue, we can take it that there is some leeway and it is a question of godly wisdom.²

The essential point is that the Scriptures must be authoritative over everything we do as individuals as well as corporately as a church.

Last week I preached on 1 Samuel 3, which is all about the Word of God. As part of the sermon I quoted from the Anglican Book of Homilies:

Therefore, forsaking the corrupt judgment of fleshly men, which care not but for their carcase, let us reverently hear and read holy Scriptures, which is the food of the soul. Let us diligently search for the well of life in the books of the New and Old Testament, and not run to the stinking puddles of men’s traditions, devised by man’s imagination, for our justification and salvation. For in holy Scripture is fully contained what we ought to do and what to eschew, what to believe, what to love, and what to look for at God’s hands at length.

A Fruitful Exhortation to the Reading and Knowledge of Holy Scripture³

Cranmer contrasts the holy Scriptures, the “food of the soul”, with one of my favourite of his expressions: “the stinking puddles of men’s traditions.” What a brilliant phrase!

The point is that the Word of God comes first, even over our most cherished traditions. Although we human beings love our traditions, we must be prepared to jettison them and rethink. The Scriptures alone are authoritative; traditions — even those which have been in the church for generations — are not. The Westminster Confession of Faith puts it well:

The Supreme Judge, by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.

Westminster Confession of Faith, I.X⁴

The history of ignoring God’s Word

Up until a few years ago, the most egregious examples I saw of God’s Word being ignored came from within the Church of England. (I don’t have a particular axe to grind with the CofE, by the way, it was my own denomination up until a couple of years ago so that’s what I’m most familiar with). It might be difficult to understand for people whose involvement with the Church of England has only been through a local church, but trust me: the institution has almost entirely abandoned the notion of biblical authority. When I was training, every curate had to attend diocesan curate training events. In my experience, I was in a very small minority in believing that the Bible should have real authority over what we did and believed as a church. Most of my fellow curates were happy to take the Bible in a sort of ‘advisory’ capacity — anything they didn’t like could be dismissed as ‘just your interpretation’.

My experience is par for the course in the CofE. If you’re unfamiliar with what’s happening inside, much of the last few years has been caught up wrangling over issues of sexuality. With my perspective now, looking back from the outside, the very fact the church has been wrestling over an issue which is one of the clearest moral issues in the Bible demonstrates how far away it has departed from biblical authority. Tragically, I could say the same thing about most mainline denominations today. If you don’t know much about church history, you could be forgiven for thinking that what’s happening in the church is uniquely bad. But the truth is, there has always been a need to fight for the authority of the Word of God in the church.

For example, Spurgeon’s final years were caught up in something called the “downgrade controversy”. He was battling against the Baptist Union taking steps away from traditional, biblical orthodoxy — including the inspiration and infallibility of Scripture.

But it’s been the case since the very early days of the church. The Bible itself speaks of those who “distort” the Word of God (2 Peter 3:16, 2 Corinthians 4:2). Why do they do this? Hilary of Poitiers (310-367), a bishop of the early church, wrote these words in his most famous work De Trinitate:

And yet our disbelief tilts even against obvious truth; we strive in our fury to pluck even God from His throne. If we could, we would climb by bodily strength to heaven, would fling into confusion the ordered courses of sun and stars, would disarrange the ebb and flow of tides, check rivers at their source or make their waters flow backward, would shake the foundations of the world, in the utter irreverence of our rage against the paternal work of God. It is well that our bodily limitations confine us within more modest bounds. Assuredly, there is no concealment of the mischief we would do if we could. In one respect we are free; and so with blasphemous insolence we distort the truth and turn our weapons against the words of God.

De Trinitate, III.21⁵

Hilary says that we as human beings rage against God, and yet as we are not able to climb up to heaven and wage war against him there, we turn our attention to the only thing we have power over: his Word.

All through the centuries, godly men have had to take a stand for the Scriptures, against those who would see it distorted or destroyed. Just about every name you can think of in the history of the church (Augustine, Athanasius, Martin Luther, John Calvin, etc) have had to take their stand on the Word of God.

It should therefore come as no surprise that we, too, should be called upon to take our stand on the Word of God. However, I do believe that the way we are called upon to take our stand is different to the way it may have been in the past. Let’s move on to think about some of the ways that we need to take a stand today.

Taking a stand on the Word today

I have already written about some of the ways that churches who claim to believe in Scripture are only paying lip service to biblical authority:

The church must stop paying lip service to Biblical authority

However, I believe that the problem is much deeper: there is a fundamental problem in the way that we go about church all together. We need to rethink why it is that we meet in the first place!

As Tom Wadsworth says in his research, the early church did not have ‘services’. They did not think that they were meeting together to make some kind of offering to God; instead, they were celebrating the fact that God had already made the supreme sacrifice in his Son. Also, the early church met together for the purposes of edification - NOT worship. They came together to edify and encourage one another, to help each other in their walk with Christ and spur one another on to good works (Hebrews 10:24-25⁶).

One of the things I’ve been trying to bang the drum about for a long time — since before covid even — is that of discipleship. Churches simply aren’t taking discipleship seriously; they aren’t thinking about the best way to help people grow to maturity in Christ. (I talked about that in this video, for example).

If we are serious about taking a stand on the Word, we need to seriously rethink the whole way we approach church at the moment. If we are not helping people grow into maturity in Christ, then we are failing and need to urgently make changes. This will be a painful process. I know from experience that if you’ve invested years into an institution like the CofE, you have a huge emotional investment in maintaining the status quo. But challenge the status quo is exactly what we must do.

Over the coming weeks I will be exploring what changes specifically we need to make, so let me finish this piece with a final caution.

A caution against Biblicism

The other day I was watching an interesting video by Stephen Nichols on the Second Great Awakening in America. He talked about Charles Finney, who was a presbyterian minister and revivalist at that time. He also said that Finney came to believe in “biblicism” — that is, the idea that we need nothing apart from the Bible. The snag is, Finney also rejected quite a lot of orthodox theology — such as Original Sin and the Trinity.

This is the classic problem with Biblicism: someone starts out by saying “I don’t need anything other than the Bible”, and ends up by rejecting a lot of mainstream orthodox theology. There have been many examples in history of of people doing just this.

I’m concerned here that people might think I am advocating a Biblicist approach. Please understand that this is not the case! I do not wish to throw out creeds and confessions. Rather, I am saying that we need to be prepared to reassess everything in the light of the Bible.

Let me take an example. I love the Puritans and I often read their works. (I am currently doing a series on Understand the Bible reading through John Owen’s book On the Mortification of Sin). However, just because I love the puritans doesn’t mean I agree with everything they say. Their words carry a lot of weight with me, but they are not on the same level as Scripture. I am suggesting we need to have a similar approach with our church traditions.

G.K. Chesterton once said:

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

I am not advocating us being like Chesterton’s “modern type of reformer” who would gaily sweep away any tradition just for the sake of it. However, sometimes traditions do need to be swept away if they are no longer serving their purpose. If we examine our traditions, think about what they were there for, and hold them up to the light of Scripture, I think we will be in a good place to avoid the twin errors of falling into traditionalism or biblicism.

Next time…

As I said, what I want to do over the coming weeks is examine many of our practices and traditions as a church and think about what is right and what needs to change. Topics I currently have in mind to include are:

• The place of church leadership;

• Why we meet together and what a church gathering should look like (which may come in several parts e.g. songs, sermon, etc);

• Communion / the Lord’s Supper.

I’m sure more will come up on the way, as it always does, but if anyone has any ideas for topics to look into I’d like to hear it. Do leave your comments and ideas below!

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1. Isaiah 55:10-11: “For just as rain and snow fall from heaven
and do not return without watering the earth,
making it bud and sprout,
and providing seed to sow and food to eat,
so My word that proceeds from My mouth
will not return to Me empty,
but it will accomplish what I please,
and it will prosper where I send it.”

2. Paul makes reference to “disputable matters” in Romans 14:1. There has been a long tradition in the church of recognising that there are matters which Christians can legitimately disagree about without dividing the body of Christ. However, I don’t want to get side-tracked here by what exactly those issues are!

3. https://anglicanheritage.com/homilies/h101/

4. https://thewestminsterstandard.org/the-westminster-confession/

5. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/330203.htm

6. Hebrews 10:24-25: “And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”