Perhaps caution and prudence would have counseled going slow and waiting, but those of us who left the church to begin another did so out of a sense of obedience – although who knows the true motivation of one’s own heart? Regardless, none of us was willing to stay even one week longer: we – others far more than me – had invested heavily in the previous church only to be, well, what felt like, betrayed. But for whatever reasons, we left.

One of the first unofficial acts of the new church (called “A Church” for long time due to lack of a name) was to appoint five of us to be a formation committee. We were charged with doing whatever was necessary to establish the church on a solid, biblical foundation: Christ Himself and the teachings of the apostles being that foundation.

We followed Malphurs’ instruction, structure, and forms closely. As recommended, we began by identifying the core values of the people: what was it about our group that was essential, if not unique, to us. These were the core values of the church; these would serve as the guides for us now and in the future.

In the end, we identified eight core values:

The Authority of Scripture
The Supremacy and Centrality of Christ
Discipleship
Loving God and Loving Others
Ministry Excellence
Prayer
Stewardship
Family Affirmation

As Malphurs says, the core values are the DNA of the local church: they determine what the church will and will not be, will and will not do. The five of us polled the congregation – with forms provided by Malphurs – and did the best we could in coming up with values that were true to and reflective of the group. Even so, we were the ones who chose the core values: we knew and admitted to one another that the group was likely to go along with whatever we put before them. To a man, each of us in the group were committed to establishing a biblical church.

It was about this time that we (the formation committee) began to feel a great sense of responsibility and humility. Perhaps without realizing it, the congregation had put the future of and nature of their new church in our hands: they had entrusted us with an authority and power much greater than they realized – or than we had initially realized. We went back to them more than once to explain this to them but, truthfully, I don’t think they understood what we were doing. This was new territory for them – as it was for us – and their focus was on the constitution, which they believed to be the critical document.

The next step was the mission statement, which was supposed to be memorable as well as able to fit on a T-shirt. The five of us brainstormed and finally settled on an eight-word sentence that encapsulated what we were about:

“Presenting Christ as Savior; Pursuing Him as Lord“.

The vision statement came quickly and relatively easy: we described what our church would look like if we were faithful to the core values and the mission statement. Seven characteristics were incorporated into our vision:

We envision a body of believers rooted in Scripture and knowledgeable of the truths and principles of the Bible. We see believers in whom the word of God dwells richly and to which they are submitted.

We envision a church filled with people committed to seeking the LORD and desiring to know Him more intimately every day. We see each believer loving Jesus Christ with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength.

We envision Christians living their lives from an eternal perspective, always seeking to glorify God and to approach life with His priorities in mind.

We envision every believer involved in discipleship, desiring to grow in the knowledge of God and to live a life worthy of their calling. We see men and women of all ages walking in the Spirit and pleasing God in their lives.

We envision a loving, committed, and intimate fellowship and communion of Christians. We see a body of believers striving for unity, seeking the good of one another, and dedicating themselves to the spiritual growth of the body which is Faith Bible Church.

We envision a church filled with believers who preach the gospel to the world through the lives they live. We see people committed to doing good to all people, and especially those of the household of faith.

We envision a church that will reproduce itself by establishing like-minded churches in towns and communities throughout the county, state, nation, and even the world. We see a body committed to reaching out to all people through church planting.

The fourth step, according to Malphurs, is to develop a strategy for building on the core values, accomplishing the mission, and achieving the vision. Realizing that we were but an ad hoc committee, we chose to leave such strategizing to the future elders, whoever they might be.

We spent hundreds of hours on the work. We were a committee that none of us would have put together but, we quickly realized, God had pulled together for this single purpose. We grew together not just as a team responsible for a task, but as a group of men committed to Christ but only loosely committed to one another. By the end of our work, our commitment to one another grew to a genuine love in Christ.

Nothing in my previous 33 years of ministry compares with the work I was involved in with Faith Bible Church (the congregation chose a name after two months or so of being “A Church”). The result is an infant church that will need to be shepherded into maturity over the coming years. There are many who are individually mature, but as a body we are quite immature: we don’t know how we fit together and are still in the “exploring my body” stage of neonatal development.

The work has only begun, as many of you know. As our work began drawing to a close, I said to one of the other men that I felt like we had just arrived at Rivendell: an important accomplishment, to be sure, but only the beginning of an adventure that will hopefully continue for years and decades to come.

Thanks for letting me share a little of this journey with you.

What the vote was ultimately about, however, was not the constitution; constitutions are necessary but relatively unimportant documents in a church. The vote was a referendum and conclusion to something that began before I ever arrived at the church.

The referendum involved the path that some of us sought to follow and, hopefully, lead others down. Our path was one of believing in the authority of Scripture and submission to it; one of the elders of the church, in contrast, said that he was not going to be bothered by what the Bible says, that he had his tradition and religion, and that was enough for him. Others referred to the Old Testament as “sharia,” a disparaging dismissal of the OT and a misappropriation of a term used for the code of law derived from the Koran. The things Paul wrote were true for Paul, another said, but were not God’s word to us. It goes on and on.

In short, the philosophy apparently subscribed to by the dominant group in the church was a mixture of Catholicism – wherein the church has greater authority than Scripture – and humanism, which winds up practicing the tragedy of the Book of Judges: “In those days Israel had no king. Each man did what he considered to be right” (Jdg 21.25, NET). Without an absolute authority, people are left to their own morality – a dangerous path that winds up wandering – or sprinting – away from God.

The vote was also the final act of a purge that had begun a year before and six months before I arrived on the scene. A popular pastor who taught the Bible from the pulpit had been removed by many of the same people who were instrumental in defeating the new constitution. Whether or not the pastor needed to be removed or not is moot; what resulted following his dismissal was the departure of many of the people who had begun attending the church when the pastor had come to the church. Some of those desirous of biblical teaching and submitting to the authority of the Bible remained, however, and it was these who were finally purged with the vote. The schism in the church was not about personalities but authority, the Bible, and the raison d’être of the church.

One night after the vote a group of us, representing a dozen families or so, met and decided to leave the church and start a new one. Thanks to diligent work by a few, we were able to meet the following Sunday for our first church service. We were roughly organized and it showed in our service – but it was a beginning.

Shortly thereafter, a decision was made to select a formation committee who would do the work necessary for pulling the church together and pointing it in a biblical direction. I was named to the group along with four other men, tasked with doing something none of us had done before: found a church.

Towards the end of last year I had run across a book by Aubrey Malphurs entitled Ministry Nuts & Bolts, which provided a general overview of what he had been teaching (at Dallas Theological Seminary) and practicing for over twenty years. Impressed by what I read there, I quickly ordered seven or eight of his more specific, more detailed books and began reading and studying them. These books became our guide for the work we were about to undertake.

That work, which (I think) was one of the most important things I’ve done in thirty-plus years of being a believer, and which (I know) was one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done in ministry, will be the subject of my next post.

[S]tatus was tied to a variety of factors: ‘occupational prestige, income or wealth, education and knowledge, religious purity, family and ethnic group position, and local-community status . . .’

‘Most individuals tend to measure themselves by the standards of some group that is very important to them – their reference group, whether or not they belong to it – rather than by the standards of the whole society.’ One could possess high status according to certain markers but low status when it came to others, creating a status dissonance that fed an internal restlessness and a greater desire to achieve the dignitas that one believed was one’s due’

[It involves] schmoozing, massaging a superior’s ego, rubbing shoulders with the powerful, pulling strings, scratching each other’s back, and dragging rivals’ names through the mud . . .

Most, if not all, of the problems . . . were hatched from the influence of this setting. Values that were antithetical to the message of the cross – particularly those related to honor and status . . . in which power manifesting itself in ruthlessness and self-advancement is thought to be the only sensible course – percolated into the church, destroying its fellowship and its Christian witness as some members sought to balance civic norms with Christian norms . . . Socially pretentious and self-important individuals appear to have dominated the church. It is likely that they flaunted their symbols of status, wisdom, influence, and family pedigree and looked down on others of lesser status. They appear to have wanted to preserve the social barriers of class and status that permeated their social world but were nullified in the cross of Christ.”

Apparently, they have no religious scruples about being well integrated into a pagan society that is inherently hostile to the wisdom of the cross. . . . Their faith appears not to have created any significant social and moral realignment of their lives. They face little or no social ostracism, and the lack of external pressure contributes to their internal dissension.

‘The church is not a cohesive community but a club, whose meetings provide important moments of spiritual insight and exaltation, but do not have global implications of moral and social change.’

This is not a description of any present-day church but of the church in Corinth to which Paul wrote his letters. It is taken from David Garland’s introduction to 1 Corinthians in the Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament; he quotes from Meeks, Stansbury, and Barclay in the sections above.

In a sense, however, it is a present-day and any-day church: what was true of people then is true of people now and in the future. The struggles of sinful people then remain the struggles for all of us in our own lives and churches, and the solutions proffered by Paul remain the solutions that we need to implement today.