What should I look for in a church? How do I know if I’ve found a true church? What are some distinguishing features of a healthy church. These questions and more will be answered in this episode of the With All Wisdom Podcast.
Transcript
Derek: What should you look for in a church? How do you know if you found a true church? What are some distinguishing features of a healthy church? We’re going to answer these questions and more in the first of a two-part series in today’s With All Wisdom podcast. Welcome back to With All Wisdom, where we are applying biblical truth to your everyday life. My name is Derek Brown. I am pastor and elder at Creekside Bible Church in Cupertino, California, and also the academic dean at the Cornerstone Bible College and Seminary in Vallejo, California. And I am here today with Cliff McManis. He is pastor teacher at Creekside Bible Church, and he is also professor of theology at the Cornerstone Bible College and Seminary. And today we want to talk about finding a good church. What should a Christian look for when he or she is looking for a church? But before we get to that topic, we would love for you to visit withallwisdom.org, where you will find a large and growing collection of resources on a variety of topics, and these resources will help you grow spiritually and grow in your walk with the Lord. And with that, I want to start off our time with a question. Cliff, you’ve been a Christian for nearly 40 years. You’ve been in Christian ministry for just about as long, and you’ve had experience in a lot of different churches. So, Cliff, how would you graciously answer someone who suggests that all churches are basically the same, and that thinking about what to look for in a church and talking about it is just a waste of time?
Cliff: That is not a theoretical question, Derek, because I’ve had people say that to me, believers. Sometimes those folks have been in my own church, or they were just seeking advice from me or making that statement. And that premise is not correct. Not all churches are the same. There are obedient churches, which are also called healthy churches. There are disobedient churches, compromised churches. There are dangerous churches. There are pseudo-fake churches. So that just is one illustration that you can’t just say, all churches are the same and it doesn’t matter, so therefore it doesn’t matter where I go.
Derek: Yeah, excellent. And so that would actually lead us into the first point that we would make when we were talking about looking for a church. You first want to say that you need to look for a true church, right? Yeah, absolutely. Just a little background for the listeners there, Pastor Derek. You recently submitted this article that you had written just a few weeks ago for me to review, and the title was What Should I Look For in a Church? A Practical Guide. And then you lay out these biblical principles that basically we’re talking about today. And I really appreciated the timeliness of that article that you submitted to me, where you lay it out according to the Bible, here’s a guide to find a church that pleases God. So I just want to give the listening audience a little of the background of that, because as shepherds, you and I were elders at a church, we’re pastors at a church, and this is a question that we get routinely from our people, people we know, or people who have left our church and moved out of the area. So it’s just a pressing priority of a question that we’ve got to ask, and that’s why when I read your article, I said, Derek, we’ve got to turn this into a podcast, because we’ve got to explore this further and help our people.
Derek: Yeah, and I’m glad you brought that up, because one of the reasons I wanted to write it was because I get this question so often. And so I thought, hey, let’s create a resource that I can point people to and say, hey, these are some thoughts, things to look for. So that was the impetus behind the writing of that article.
Cliff: So going back to your question, what was it?
Derek: Well, the first thing you want to look for in a church is determining that it’s first a true church. And so, because there’s just a lot of places that call themselves church, you can get on Google, and you can look up churches, and there’ll be a lot of institutions, a lot of places that have the name church in their name.
Cliff: Yes. Well, let me give you just a couple of brief examples I’ve experienced. Prior to COVID, that’s how we all view the world now, life before COVID and life since COVID. But, you know, for 20 years or so as a pastor, shepherd, before COVID, I knew people, fellow believers, a few families who decided that their church was at their house. They call it their home church. We do it just like the New Testament. We just do church at our house. And then I asked them, what does that look like? Well, dad, he’s the head of the home, so he’s the pastor. Mom, she is, she plays the piano.
Derek: You have to have music.
Cliff: Yeah, and the seven kids, they’re the congregation, they sit on the couch. So Sunday, literally, this is what a family told me, and there are other examples that have it just like that. And they said that their family at home on Sunday mornings constitutes church in fulfillment of the biblical mandate. They have communion together, everything, but it’s just their family. But that is not a church. And that’s why what you laid out is so foundational to understand. True, early church saints did meet in homes, but in different contexts. But your family, by yourself, isolated from the rest of the body Sunday morning in your living room, doesn’t constitute a church. That’s not legitimate.
Derek: Right. So the church is made up of families and those who are single, not just one solitary family in their home on their own.
Cliff: Right. And there are prerequisites to having a true biblical church, which is what you laid out. What are the essential elements to actually have a church as opposed to just a Bible study?
Derek: Right.
Cliff: Or your family at home?
Derek: Right. So let’s start into that. Let’s answer that first question then. What is a true church? Because just having church in your name doesn’t necessarily classify you as a church in the New Testament sense of the word. We would define it this way. A true church is constituted by a group of regenerate believers in Jesus Christ. So it’s an essential component of the true church or a true church is the presence of the gospel or the good news. Because it’s only the gospel that saves and regenerates a person. If a church or place that calls themselves a church does not have the gospels, then they are not a legitimate church, regardless of how they describe themselves on Google. So then you have to ask the question, what is the gospel? Right. And we’ve done a podcast on this. We’ve done radio shows on this. And we’d encourage you to check those out. Go to With All Wisdom. You can find them there. The question of what the gospel is is an essential question. I mean, it’s the most important question. How can I be right with God? And if a church doesn’t have this message, then they’re not a church. And so we can summarize it this way. The gospel is the good news that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, has died for our sins, that he was buried, and that he rose again on the third day according to the Scriptures. And this good news can only be received by repentant faith apart from works.
Cliff: Amen. This was your starting point. First and foremost, a true biblical church has the gospel, is about the gospel. The gospel is the foundation of that entity. And that is so important, because today the streets of America are littered with buildings called churches. Many of those are traditional denominational churches. And you would know them if I mentioned their names. But many of them, and they’re large churches, they have facilities, they have budgets, they have huge staffs, they’re mega churches, and you go in and there is no gospel. They have abandoned the gospel. So they aren’t churches at all. They’re empty shells. And in the words of John in the Revelation, they’re actually synagogues of Satan, is what he calls them.
Derek: So this is essential. This is not something you can just kind of wash over. And this is where you have to be discerning, because a place that merely calls himself a church that may even resemble a true church in some ways, if they don’t have the gospel, they are not a true church in the New Testament sense of the word.
Cliff: Yeah. The way this is typically manifest here in America is when you have a so-called church, but it doesn’t have the gospel, it’s just a social club.
Derek: Yeah. That’s it. That’s what it is, right? So looking for a true church, but also you have to look for a true church. And I’m emphasizing the word church now, as in opposition to like a parachurch organization. The word para just means alongside, and there are plenty of ministries out there, Christian ministries, and several of them very good, that are not churches. You may even have the gospel, and they’re doing ministry in the Lord’s name, and they’re focusing on some aspect of ministry, whether it’s helping the poor overseas or serving in various ways here domestically. But those institutions are not churches. They’re what we would call parachurch organizations. What we’re referring to when we talk about the church, we’re talking specifically of not only regenerate Christians, but regenerate Christians who believe the gospel, who have gathered together in a local setting and structured and constituted themselves as a church following the New Testament, following the New Testament model. So just because a group of Christians gets together, and just because they have the gospel and doing ministry doesn’t necessarily qualify them as a church, correct?
Cliff: That’s correct. There’s a certain minimum amount of ingredients you need to have a church. If you have a parachurch organization like Campus Crusade for Christ, or they’re called CRU, or whatever their new name is, you’ve got some wonderful believers, and they get together, and there’s a hundred of them, and maybe they’re on a college campus. They are a fellowship of believers, but they’re not a church. And the model for what a church is is by the Apostle Paul, and all the apostles really in the book of Acts very clearly lays that out. They have the gospel that we’ve already talked about. Then they have believers who gather around the gospel, and then Paul and the other apostles clearly lay out what else is needed for a church. And it has to do with leadership and the sacraments, and ordinance of worship is what we would call them, and also the role of Scripture, those three components, which we’ll flesh those out a little bit more. So your Campus Crusader, CRU, or it doesn’t matter what the legitimate Christian parachurch organization is, as they meet as a group of fellow believers, they aren’t having those other key ingredients, so they don’t constitute a church.
Derek: And this is where we probably want to say that despite the good things that these groups are doing, and we wouldn’t want to disparage the good things that they’re doing, we do have to emphasize that the New Testament speaks only of one Christian institution, and that is the church. There is one institution that Christ is building, and it’s the church. And so these parachurch organizations, they should be seen as derivative, not the primary entity. That’s the church, and then they’re meant to come alongside the church in various ways. But nevertheless, it’s the church that Christ is building. Any comment on that?
Cliff: Yeah. Matthew 16:18, Jesus, He only promised to build one entity, and it was the body of Christ, the church, not parachurch organizations. And He promised only to bless one entity and grow it, and that is the church. And Christ and the New Testament only promises that one entity will actually go on into the next life, beyond this life, and that is the church. So everything needs to be centered around the Church of Jesus Christ.
Derek: Right. Exactly. And that’s, again, we’re not disparaging excellent parachurch organizations, but the church, and specifically the local church, needs to have priority.
Cliff: Now, one thing I want to be clear on that, on parachurch organizations, because some could be listening thinking that we’re disparaging. Yeah, certainly not. Are you a part of any parachurch organization?
Derek: As a matter of fact, I am. I knew that, so that’s why I asked the question. And we mentioned it at the beginning of every show, actually, the Cornerstone Bible College and Seminary. We are happy to be part of that wonderful institution. And that institution actually sees the local church as its priority. We’re training men to go serve in local churches. We come alongside local churches to serve, but we also recognize that we’re a derivative entity.
Cliff: Absolutely. We come alongside, and that’s what that word means, parachurch organization, and we serve the church. We have no authority over the church. Important distinction.
Derek: One of the things you already mentioned, Cliff, was the preaching and handling of God’s Word as being an essential mark of a church. And if the preaching of God’s Word is absent from any Christian institution, then that institution cannot be by definition a church. When Paul instructed Timothy, a new pastor in Ephesus, to make preaching and teaching his primary work and to maintain a steady pulpit ministry, he was doing that in the church context. And so for him to set that aside would be to set aside a primary component of the local church. So the preaching of the Word of God is an essential mark of a church. And really, when the church preaches the Word of God, we’re doing what no other institution in the world can do, namely preach the Word of God.
Cliff: And others can teach the Bible. You can teach the Bible outside. You can teach the Bible at a Christian school. Just because you’re teaching the Bible doesn’t make it a church. The distinction there that the unique privilege of the church has, it’s not only what we do, we preach the Bible, we preach scripture, but it’s also how we do it. The methodology and also the leadership that God has put in place. There aren’t elders who run a Christian school. There are not local elders together running a seminary. There aren’t elders running your campus ministries. So it’s what we do with the Word and also the method by which we do it is unique to the entity of the church.
Derek: So that was my next point. That’s a great segue because then the next mark that we have to lay alongside that is pastoral leadership. That would be a distinguishing mark of a church, a local church. God intends that a plurality of qualified spiritually gifted men will provide the biblical preaching that must characterize a local church. It’s these qualified male pastors who are doing this preaching.
Cliff: Amen. And that’s the pattern in the book of Acts and the Apostle Paul. God raised up Paul to plant churches, not just fellowship groups or just house Bible studies, but literally churches, to be a church planter. That’s exactly what he did. He gave us the model. He would go into town, into city after city, and he’d do, step number one was preach the gospel, the true gospel message. Watch the Spirit of God save people and gather them together in a community of people, the body of Christ. And then Paul would put in place and establish a leadership, a qualified leadership that God required for a church. And Paul never did that in isolation by himself as the lone ranger. Everything that we see in the New Testament, every time Paul established a church, he did it with another man or two or a plurality of qualified men who were already elders. So the Apostle Paul wasn’t just an apostle. He was a qualified elder pastor-shepherd. He planted churches with Silas, with Barnabas, and others who were qualified elders. So people ask the question, well, what about a church plan where you don’t have enough men already to be qualified to have a plurality of elders? Well, in the New Testament, every single church at a minimum was planted by a plurality of qualified elders, the Apostle Paul and those other men. That’s where they started. So it’s a very foundation. It started with that plurality of godly elders and then grew from there. So that’s essential to a church.
Derek: And we’re going to touch on that issue specifically in a little bit because it’s really important to talk about that leadership and how that actually translates to church health. Next item, you had mentioned it already, the ordinances. We would say that those two ordinances that Christ has given the church specifically, the local church, is baptism and the Lord’s Supper. And so a church will have the preaching of the Word of God. First, it’ll be a true church. It’ll have the gospel. It’ll have the preaching of the Word of God. It’ll have qualified leadership, but then it will also have the practice of these two ordinances, baptism and the Lord’s Supper.
Cliff: It’s absolutely essential. Jesus was the one who actually gave those as a perennial or perpetual gift to the church. And He said that they needed to be continually implemented, honored, taught, and practiced until He returns. Baptism and communion are the Lord’s table. You use the word ordinances. That’s a good word. They’re not sacraments. Sacrament is a Latin word. It comes from the Catholic Church. At its root, it has the wrong meaning. The word sacrament in Latin lends to the idea that when we participate in the ordinances, they actually gain favor with God through works. So that’s why many Protestant churches use the term ordinance. And that’s important because there is a distinction. And there’s only two, not seven, not five, not three.
Derek: So let’s say you’re looking for a church. You want to make sure that these elements are there. You want to make sure, let’s just review, you want to make sure that it’s a true church, that it has the gospel. You want to make sure that it is a church, that it is an institution that is truly a church, not merely a parachurch organization. The way you’ll know that is that it has the preaching of the Word of God, preaching of the Word of God that is handled by qualified male leadership. And then it is an institution that is practicing the ordinances, practicing baptism and the Lord’s Supper. And you put those things together, and you have a group of regenerate believers in the Lord Jesus. They’ve come in together as a group of believers, as a church, and they’re practicing these things. Then you have found a church, a true church. But beyond that, I would contend, and I think you would too, Cliff, because we’ve talked about this a lot, that as you are looking at other churches, as you’re thinking about what to look for in a church, there’s lots of denominations. Frankly, there’s lots of churches out there. I mean, you can get on Google, you can just drive down the street and see multiple churches, and some of them true churches. What are some of the key principles that are reliable markers of corporate health or of a healthy church? What are some of those key marks that we should look for? And we want to discuss those. And as I’m already considering our time, it looks like we’re probably going to have to defer to a second part of this series, because this is really important. This is a vital component. We want to talk about these key aspects of a true church, but that are indicators that the church is, in fact, healthy. You want to comment on just taking it beyond these other things that we just saw?
Cliff: Yeah, so the way you framed the question, there are marks of a healthy church, signs of a healthy church. That’s a historic phrase. Goes back to the Reformation, and even before that, what are the priorities or the healthy marks of a biblical church? And so, we can talk further about that. And many of Prophets’ suggestions, you’ve got nine marks, ministries, that’s by Mark Dever and Company. They came to the conclusion that there are nine, basically, commandments in Scripture that you can’t compromise on. You can’t go to a church that does not practice or honor those. And so, he summarized it, distilled it down to nine. And I agree with his nine, because I think they flow directly from Scripture. So, the ones that we mentioned earlier, they are not negotiable. So, I just remember I had a good friend, he was in seminary, and we worked together prior to him going to seminary, we worked in ministry together. And then he started going to this church, came back to me and was getting counsel, and then he told me he found a church, it’s a good church, a Bible church, but he said this church does not practice communion, because they found it to be too divisive. So, they want to preserve unity in the church, therefore, they decided, the elders decided they’re not going to have communion anymore. No, you can’t do that. And then he went on to say that they also did the same thing with baptism, because people were squabbling and fighting over infant baptism, and can you baptize children and how old is it, and so on and so forth. And so, the elders decided they were going to do away with that. Anything that was controversial caused division, because we want peace in the church. They decided to just get rid of it and said, oh, no, no, brother, you can’t do that either. So, if they don’t change, you need to leave that church, because that is now maybe not even a church definition, or at a minimum, it is a highly compromised, and I would even say, dangerous church. So, these are absolutely essential.
Derek: And so, when we come back next time, what we’re going to do is we’re going to look at some basic highlights, basic indicators of church health that a person should look for, and we’ll just distill those down into a few so that they’re easy to digest. But one of them is going to go back to what you just talked about, the type of teaching that happens in a church, because there’s a certain kind of teaching that actually probably would have helped that situation that your friend was experiencing. The elders, rather than eliminating those two ordinances, should have been teaching through the biblical instructions specifically on those things, and that would have eliminated the dissension. It would have created a unity around scripture and the truth. So, we will come back with those, and we’re excited to do that. Meanwhile, we just would encourage you again to check out withallwisdom.org, where you’ll find a large and growing collection of resources pertaining to the things that we’ve talked to about even today that will help you grow in your discernment, grow in your walk with the Lord, and we look forward to seeing you again next time.