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by David Cox
Why this question is important? Perhaps we should answer this question first, so that we can lay the foundation for our study and understanding. Today we have a wild scene where people are entering the ministry in droves to do all kinds of things in the name of "serving Christ". As the things people do get farther and farther from any biblical example or basis, we find a very confusing and complex situation where it is difficult to know really what to make of it all. To add damage to damage, all of these people are all asking for money from churches and directly from individual Christians (by passing any counsel or guidance by their pastors). There is now becoming a circus type of attitude in many sectors whereby "God's ministers" are competing with one another for support dollars just to exist. This study seeks to put some kind of sense back into the ministry.
For example, in 1982 I was assistant pastor of a church in Charleston, South Carolina. As such I was in charge of filtering the flood of missionary contacts the pastor was receiving, and I was liaison between the pastor and the missions committee as well as head of the missions committee. A young man about 18 years old contacted us wanting to come present his ministry in Florida in our church (wanting missionary support). His ministry was to have church services on Sunday for the people in the marinas. As he explained, he had to raise $250,000 for a yacht in order to complete his ministry, as well as monthly support. We discussed his ministry, and I let the others talk first. The missions committee was about agreed to let him come. I dissented. My observations were as follows: (1) an 18 year old boy with no formal Bible training will not get any respect from the typical people in a marina. Most of those people are businessmen in their 40's that have "made it" in life. Will they listen to such a young man? I doubt it. (2) People in a marina on Sunday morning are obviously there because they do not want to be in church. Would these kind of people even be interested in having a church service? No. I doubt it. If they would want one, it would be on land in a comfort building and not in some boy's yacht. Evangelism would be the need, not church services. (3) Why does he need a yacht to do that ministry? Why doesn't he rent a storefront somewhere near the marina and go out witnessing on Saturdays and Sunday mornings, and have a 2:00PM service? The bottom line is that a lot of young kids would love to own a yacht and have somebody else pay for it and pay them a salary to boot. But is that really the best use of OUR MISSIONS MONEY? No.
This type of hard examination needs to be constantly done with missions.
Definition of what is the work of the Lord?
First, let's put some criteria out for discerning just what is the work the people of God should be doing. We as Baptists and people that are "baptistic" (many Bible churches) that seek to honor God, first of all hold the Word of God as our authority (first point of the Baptist Distinctive). As such, we cannot discern what is the work of the Lord unless we go to the Scriptures to find it.
We need to take a holistic view of the New Testament to find our answer. In other words, we do not "proof text", just grab one verse, interpret it as we want to justify whatever we preconceived as our desired outcome. We must find support in biblical mandates (imperatives) and in qualified New Testament examples. Among the elements that we find in the New Testament, we also need to understand what is and would be the priority that God would place on these things.
1. Preach the gospel.
2. Promote repentance.
3. Increase their faith.
4. Public confession and abandonment of sin.
5. Identification with Christ and the redeemed people of God (the church).
6. Make disciples, promote spiritual growth and maturity.
7. Evangelism.
This is the work of the people of God. Some would ask why is #1 and #7 the same? They are not. In the first case we preach the gospel to get people saved. In the last case, the people we have invested our lives into go out and repeat the cycle. This is a circle of events that should be happening in the work of God. This is real growth, real progress. Notice that the typical status symbols of success are missing? Nothing about building buildings, nothing about financial solvency, nothing about fame, status in the community nor great numbers of people. These things are what the world thinks is success, not God. We will not define more amply each point. Then we will examine other activities of God's people and put them into perspective.
Most simply put, the work of the Lord is to go to where the unsaved are, and present the gospel plan of salvation to them. That is, that they are sinners, that they must repent of their sins, that they must believe and accept Jesus the Lord as their only Savior, and they must publicly confess Christ. (See our study on what is necessary for salvation).
The focus must be returned to getting the gospel out. Anybody who says that they are a "minister", or "are in the ministry" and does not get involved in the evangelism of the lost is missing the entire purpose of the ministry. Missionaries and Christian ministries today try to take a fragmented approach to the ministry. They see everybody taking some part of the work of the Lord, and going off doing that thing.
God has put all of His gifts (spiritual talents and callings) into a nice package called "the church". We cannot understand the gifts that God gives outside of the context of the local church. That means, when people dump the local church to start a "Christian ministry" that is not a church, we begin to have serious problems. See our study on "Why the local church is the design and method of God".
Repentance is simply turning from sin to righteousness (God commanded actions, good works). The work of the Lord has a distinctive or focus of turning people from sin to righteousness. We cannot do that with going through some hard steps. First we must not be timid in identifying sin. This is not giving us liberty to call things sin that God has been very specific on, but there are a lot of hard things that have a tremendous public peer pressure to not call sin or wrong. For example, homosexuality is sin. Sodom and Gomorrah's sin was one of sodomity. This has to be condemned. Fornication is sin. Fornication is when two people have sex, and they are legally, morally, scripturally married. (They must be of the opposite sex.) Women in speaking and preaching ministries or leadership where men are under them in any way, shape or form is wrong.
As men of God, we must promote repentance. This means identifying sin. This also means we must identify by teaching and example what is right, correct, good, and God pleasing behavior.
Part of the ministry is help along or produce "faith". By this, we mean to help people to believe God, specifically to more strong believe and rely on the Word of God. We must promote confidence and trust in God.
4. Public confession and abandonment of sin.
Another part of the ministry is to promote our people's confession and abandonment of sin. By this we mean that our people must publicly reject and turn from sin. We do not want our people to brag about their sins, but simply put, others must see sin hardened lives changed, sin abandoned, and righteousness taken up as the alternative.
5. Identification with Christ and the redeemed people of God (the church).
Perhaps one of the most little esteemed points in the work of the Lord today is a public identification with Christ as one of His redeemed. Churches are simply local groups of redeemed people, organized around the sole point of doing the work and will of God. Be careful, but follow my points.
Romans 10:9-11 state that for a person to be saved, he must believe in his heart that God raised Jesus from the dead for the salvation of men's souls, and that he must publicly confession Jesus as Lord. "Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed."
Matthew 10:32 Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. 33 But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven.
Christ himself said this verse. So apparently God has so designed salvation, or He so sees our faith in such a way as to negate the believing, making it invalid if there is not some kind of consistent public confession. This public confession must be on-going to be valid. A young couple that gets married, and the young man wants to party with dating other girls afterward, and offers, "Well, I did publicly get married to you, so that one time should satisfy you. Now I want to take my wedding ring off and do what I want to do, and that is not being committed to you." Such a young man will have a hard life ahead of him with most any woman if he takes that attitude. The commitment must be consistently followed up with a life style that validates his commitment.
The most obvious way is to tell others that we are saved by Jesus Christ and this is the reason of our hope of eternal life in heaven. Perhaps the way in which God has designed things is that water baptism, very close to after the person actually believes and receives Jesus is this public confession of Christ. That does not make baptism necessary for salvation, (the thief on the cross wasn't baptized but had the promise of Christ to be in heaven with him), but it does mean it is an excellent biblically mandated way of confessing Christ.
There can be argument that when a person who is truly saved identifies himself as one of the redeemed of Christ, joining this local group of redeemed who are organized to follow the will of God and to do the work of God, his identification and confession of Christ becomes very "solid".
Matthew 25:31-46 presents a scene of God separating two seemingly identical groups of people, and one being rewarded with eternal life, and the other with eternity in hell. The crux of this teaching is what discriminates one from the other. Those who are saved, are saved because they had a real relationship with Christ, and this is seen in how they reacted with their brethren in the Lord. Those who were self deceived on the other hand, did great works in the name of Christ, but their relationship with the brethren was non-existent. They disregarded the needs and problems of their brethren in the Lord as "not their problem", and God judged them harshly with not being truly saved. This teaching points up the importance of maintaining a good relationship with our spiritual brethren. Those who do not serve their brethren are doubtfully saved. All of this God designed to be done in the local church. This is what we see principally in the New Testament.
6. Make disciples, promote spiritual growth and maturity.
The work of the ministry is circular. Disciples are to end up producing more disciples which do the same. This is whole point of it all. A self perpetuation of the Christian making process. Only healthy, mature animals can reproduce, and likewise with Christians.
It is very discouraging to see so many "ministries" today that do not produce Christians, that do not promote the relationship between Christians as God has ordained it, principally within the context of a local church, and that generally ignore all God has laid down in Scriptures about how to "do the ministry".
The end result of the entire process is that our converts become disciples which become regular Christians doing the same thing we are doing, the work of the Lord. It is a full circle.
Catholicism has the idea that they control all of Christianity. This is done through the Pope and the church at Rome. No one can challenge their authority. Part of their idea is that the church is one, with Rome and the Pope being the head of it all. They have no concept of the autonomy of local churches, nor the fact that each local church should be self-governing, self-supporting, and self propagating. This is a very great difference.
In the Catholic scheme of things, the "church" is made of small groups all under the absolute control and government of Rome. While Rome gives each freedom to do "their gift", all must submit to Rome.
While as most Baptists do not submit to Rome, most all of them do take the rest of the concept. We have no evangelists in our church, so God will put those gifted people in some other church. The point of praying to God to meet their situation and need by sending them evangelists to be members of their churches or move somebody and empower them to that gift never enters their minds as a possibility. Most Baptists have wholesale thrown real Bible teaching out of the window, because they do not accept people under their own ministry, that received the teaching offered by their church, and allow these students to be pastor, or leaders. To be "really" trained for the ministry, you must go off somewhere else, to a dedicated place (seminary or Bible University) to be qualified to be pastor and leader of a church. What happened to teaching the Bible such that our students are fully prepared to enter the ministry without further preparation?
This is a splintering of the concept of what we are supposed to do. In other words, pick what you like the best, and your religious organization does just that, and nothing more. This defeats what God is trying to do in establishing local churches that in themselves are autonomous and self propagating. By making all "qualified" pastors to pass through one of a half dozen Christian universities, Satan can easily contaminate these schools and all of Christianity in the process.
Who do we support with our prayers and money?
To follow the New Testament pattern of things, there are a very broad spread of gifts and ministries that God raises up. But all of these appear to be within a single local church, each member taking what gifts God has given him, and developing them within the context of that local church. There is no warrant for each member to build his own Christian religious organization, complete with buildings and raising money. The local church houses his ministry or pays for it if it needs to be physically outside of that church. This is all internal to that local church. They know him, they endorse his ministry, they pay for what is needed because they know the worker and the work. This going around raising money from many churches for a person's ministry is not seen in the New Testament.
Therefore, we would conclude, that Christians should follow the Bible guidelines and priorities in their giving. Their tithe goes to their local church, as well as the majority of their offerings. The greatest obligation a Christian has as far as giving is to the men who preach and teach to them the word of God. They should get more or most of the Christian's offerings. God's principle is that a man should live of the fruit of his own hands. He that is taught in the word should economically communicate (reciprocate) with he that teaches the word (Gal 6:6). After that obligation has been fulfilled, we see in the New Testament that the common giving was either to fulfill the needs of the poor and needy within that church, or to missionaries like Paul.
Benevolence - Most churches have completely misunderstand benevolence. It is true that the good Samaritan was some unbeliever probably, and the needy man being placed in the good Samaritan's path, he responded biblically to the need. But Galatians 6:10 clarifies this charity, "As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith." Our obligations and priorities as a Christian lie in helping those brethren in our midst before the unsaved beggars of the world. When believers were moved to financially send an offering to needy brethren in another part of the world, their way of doing it was to send the money by messenger (no checks nor banks in that day) to the leaders of the church in need, so that they can disperse it according to how they understand the need and the needy. It was a gift to the church, not to be dispersed by the messengers.
Missions - The only case of missionaries that we can identify with detail is that of the work of Paul and his band. These men were single minded in their "mission". They went to other parts of the world where the people had not received the gospel, and they preached the gospel in the streets and markets (publicly), and of those who accepted the Lord, they were discipled and then organized into local churches that were self functioning. Here we see the principles of missions clearly, self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating. This "mission" was not split up into different aspects (some doing evangelism, some discipling, others planting churches) but the missionaries did it all. A missionary went into a city, and he did all that was necessary to leave a local church of people fully functioning.
This is the only "real missions" that we see in the New Testament. There were no mission boards, no Christianity universities, no Christian publishing houses, no Christian radio stations, no Christian summer camps. The only Christian religious organizations were local churches. This should speak to us that the majority or all of our missions dollars should go to missionaries who are doing it all under the umbrella of a local church on that mission field. In other words, that local church he plants should be self-functioning.
What do we do as "the work of the Lord"?
This would seem to place evangelism and church planting at the top of the list of biblical missionaries. Why modern missionaries shy away from doing this is discouraging. I met a missionary in a mission's conference who was a teacher. He and his wife wanted to go to the mission field to teach missionary kids. (Again the begging question is why do many Christian parents in the US home school their kids just fine, and the missionary parents cannot do this and they must have dedicated teachers just for their kids.) The first time I heard their presentation, he said that he "was not called to the ministry", would not be a pastor, and did not have time to get very involved in any church on the mission field. After a year, they raised little support, and I heard their presentation again in a different church, and this time he is "church planting" principally, and also teaching in a mission school, actually principal of that school. Afterwards I talked with him, and he said that he hadn't changed what he wants to do, but he just said that so that he could get his support raised and get to the field faster. Churches must stop being simple minded about missions and ask hard questions, and cut off financial and prayer support for people who are not doing the work of the Lord.
But what about other needs, doesn't God approve of people helping people?
I am fully in support of churches and Christians helping other people, even people ministering. But I do not see in the New Testament everybody in the church that has a gift giving up their job and living off of financial from God's people. They lived and worked secular jobs and ministered besides that. That would seem to be the norm in the New Testament. Everybody served, using their gifts, but few actually lived off of financial donations of God's people. Those who did were the teachers-pastor of that church, and the missionaries (church planters).
It is a great crime to be sending "missions dollars" off to things that are not really "missions". They are ministries that are not getting people saved, discipled, and organized in a local church, such that they are reproducing the entire cycle.
God has designed a genius in what is the church, and they break with that when they start a Christian "ministry". No longer the people who donate the funds for the functioning of the ministry oversee the doctrine and conduct. No longer is the concept of community property put forth. They personally own the property and goods that are donated to their religious organization, and if they one day decide to start speaking in tongues, everything is in their name. Today there is a fraud that is going on, by which these "ministries" have governing boards. Bottom line, who governs whom? If there is a conflict of opinion, the board member is removed and the "owner" sticks around. This is the rule. These people who "own" pick the board members, and pick who leaves. God made the local church to have communal property so that pastor and members come and go, but the standards stay the same through the generations.
Last Updated on 12/09/05
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