This is the podcast for The Love of the Church, episode six from season one, The Church is Living. Here's a question for you, Caleb. I don't know if you've thought about this. How do we know you are alive? I think therefore I am. How do we know you're not like Chad GPT? You know, that's a really good question. What's that view where you think you're the only one that exists? That's called solipsism? Is that what that's called? That syndrome? Yeah. Yeah, I heard a joke one time where a guy believed that, like he was the only one that existed and everybody he met was like a figment of his own imagination. Right. So the one guy goes, well, how do you work with a guy like that? And he goes, well, we take care of him because when he goes, we all go. There you go. Yeah, my friend was in high school play his senior year, and I forget what the play was, but he had this imaginary bunny that he took with him everywhere. That was the whole gist of the play. Oh, that's funny. Harvey? Yeah, Harvey. Yeah, Harvey the rabbit. Yeah, and I think in our world today where anybody can be anything and anybody can identify as anything, reality and reality TV shows made such a splash a decade ago or more. It's hard to know what is reality. How do, you know, people aren't watching us. So how do they know, how do they know that I'm not just having some conversation with a really smart AI chat bot? And, you know, we called him Caleb and he sounds like Caleb, but he's actually not alive. Yeah, he's not alive. Yeah, he might be, he might have a body, but he might not be alive. He might be breathing. He might not be alive. Right. He's got animation and he grows in many different ways. Right? I eat and I drink and I think. But there seems to be this ongoing growth and experience, this ongoing thought process, this eating, this ability to think and relationally meet with people, I would normally think of that as me being alive. Pete Right. Yeah, I think those are Yeah, you got movement, you change, you grow, you can adapt, you can, you know, I mean, we know that certain things can do that without being quote unquote alive, but we often don't have a question about that with humans. You know, we kind of know, are they dead? Are they alive? But when it comes to church, It's not always easy. I mean, just because people are showing up to a church does not mean that church is alive, does not mean it's dead either, doesn't mean it's stagnant, doesn't mean it's thriving, doesn't mean it's, doesn't mean anything. So I think as we think through this conversation, this episode today, we wanna really think through this idea of the church is living, and what does that mean, and what does that look like, and how do we evaluate whether or not a church is alive and growing, changing, adapting, learning. We also know that it's going to be wearing out. People are going to be wearing out. The furniture is going to be wearing out. The building is going to be wearing out. There's a whole, all sorts of challenging aspects as we think through this process of the church is living. And so kind of in the back of my mind, I want to be, I want to kind of direct us and be thinking about this idea of of change, a church that is changing, and that's a hot button issue for churches today, because the question then is, well, what are you changing? So what are some things that can change, should change, must change in a church, and what are things that cannot, must not, will not change in a church? As you think about it from your end of being a pastor, what would you say? Okay, so just first of all, thinking about the Church being alive, when we're talking about the Church, we gotta go back to episode one, where we make this discussion about what is the Church, how do we define the Church. So, when we talk about the universal Church, well, the universal Church is never dead. It's never dead, right? Because you're in the body of Christ, He is building His Church, so He's constantly the one growing it. And it's very interesting, like, when you look at the book of Revelation, there's those seven churches, and I I know this is going to break the internet, and some people might not listen to our podcast after this, but I'm of the weird persuasion that those seven churches are actual literal churches. And one of the things that's really interesting is that each church is represented as a golden lamp stand. And Jesus says, if you do this, he critiques each church and he talks to each church. And there's one where he says, and if not, I will remove your lamp stand, meaning that it's effectiveness, it's effectiveness in ministry. the local expression of that church, the light will be extinguished, right? It'll no longer be a local church. So in thinking then about different locations and what's needed and what is the absolute essential, I always, I try to always go back to scripture and say, well, what does Paul say? And so I think of the book of Titus. So for me, what's absolutely essential is you gotta have biblical leaders, right, who are teaching and discipling the people. They have to be sound in doctrine, sound in application. There's gotta be growth spiritually. Then one of the other things that he says in chapter three is he talks about the interaction with those on the outside. There needs to be this idea of evangelism, outreach, and that growth and a good testimony outside. So to me, those are, you can't dispense with that. You can't, that is the bare bones. Everything else can be manipulated, right? So, like, if you don't have pews and you sit in a circle and somebody teaches from sitting down, they teach God's Word from sitting down in a circle, and it's a little bit more conversational, who am I to say, well, you can't teach God's Word that way? No, that's one of those things that culturally might be more appropriate in other places. So I think one of the things is we gotta go, okay, what is absolutely, does God's word say, as absolutely essential? That's essential, right? The fellowship of believers, the discipleship process, the elders, all that other stuff. We don't need a bulletin. Or you might have a bulletin. Shocking. I don't care. Yeah, shocking. You might have a QR code. Yeah, yeah, I don't care. That's one of those things that in each culture there are these essentials that are really non-essential. So I call them essential non-essentials. Right. And sometimes if you don't have it, it's so disrupting to the congregation that you actually can't even minister. You can't even do those other things. So sometimes those things are necessary for a moment. But I would argue those things are absolute essential. Everything else can be fudged, right? the building, what the building looks like, where you meet, how long you meet, how many songs you sing, do you sing from a red hymnal, do you sing from a blue hymnal, do you have electric guitars, do you only have piano, do you clap, do you not clap, do you have a time where everybody shakes their hand, all of that It just depends on the locale, and it depends on whether those things that you do are not so distracting that take away from the things that are absolutely necessary. That would be my answer as a pastor. Yeah, I think there's the challenges of generational dynamics where one generation remembers how they used to do it and another generation doesn't have a clue how they used to do it. I remember when I was pastoring in Michigan, we had a discussion about Sunday night services and getting rid of Sunday night services. And quite honestly, a lot of just people weren't coming. It wasn't, it was just clear that the time had passed for that. And I remember we had a congregational meeting to discuss this. And one of the guys at one point he raised his hand, he goes, I know what we need to do. He said, we just need to do what we did in the seventies. And he said, we need to have, um, a bus ministry and a big children's ministry. And then people will come and we do that in the evening. And then we can get people here in the evening. And I told him, I said, we can't even get people to work in the nursery on Sunday morning. How in the world are we supposed to do what you are suggesting and do what they did 50 years ago in the 1970s? And so change in one respect for the congregant is, I remember the heyday, and it was almost like pragmatic of, well, we did this, formulaic. we had a big bus ministry, or we did this, or we did that, or we had these big Sunday events, and people came, and so if we just keep doing that, then we'll always be good in doing what we're supposed to be doing. The reality is times change, people change, society changes, everything changes, and the church has to change. We can't change the gospel. We don't stop preaching the gospel. We don't stop preaching the fact that everyone is a sinner and that everyone needs a savior and that we're all in this process of growing in Christlikeness. And so we go through this process of these things the gospel cannot change. But the methodologies, the means by which we're going to engage people, that's going to change. And maybe we're not doing four services a week, but we're doing one main service and we do multiple small groups or multiple different you know, Bible studies or whatever the case may be. And so I think a church is wise to constantly be evaluating their people schedules, the demographics, the locations, the whole dynamic of everything that they're dealing with to say, what do we need to do in order to be effective and efficient in reaching people with the cause of Jesus Christ? Not just, hey, what did we do 50 years ago? Let's just repeat that. But rather, what do we need to do to change to become what Christ wants us to become? Absolutely. Absolutely. And I feel like the Bible has got to be centered in that, because if I listen to your story, and I've had several stories like that as well, it seems like the metric by which you're judging whether something is good or is bad is pragmatic, because it worked back then. That is not our goal. Our goal isn't because it worked. Our goal is, is it actually ministering to people? And there are several things, there are several ministries that I've been a part of where we did stuff that was sanctified busy work, that really didn't minister to anybody, but it looked really good. And people could pat themselves on the back and say, look what I'm doing for the Lord, but it was not effective. I heard one story one time where there was a whole bunch of volunteers that would come in, and the budget of this particular ministry set aside half of a ream. for outreach purposes and the other half for office purposes, and they had a person whose job was to sit there and count the pieces of paper to make sure that the ream was exactly even for each one, and that was their ministry. And I'm just thinking, That doesn't accomplish anything. I mean, I'm sorry. I mean, I'm glad that somebody was able to find something to do, but there are so much other things to do that are actually meaningful. So yeah, that needs to be phased out because it's not accomplishing the goal that Jesus has sent out. But I'm also not a fan of change for change sake. And I don't think you are either, right? Just because we used to do it, Well, okay, but that's not a good reason to change either. So the Bible's always got to be the main arbiter of that change. Yeah, and I think that's important for us to know. It's not just change for change's sake, and it's not stagnacity for being stagnant's sake. It's a constant evaluation, and maybe after we hear from our great sponsors again, we could talk a little bit more about how, as a pastor, I can lead, or as a congregant, be part of a church that is leading in this process of change. Hi, I'm Ruthie from C&D Church Supplies. C&D Church Supplies, a trusted name in church supplies, would like to introduce you to Church Doc. Are you tired of people not respecting the building, furniture, or practices of your church? That's why we've created ChurchDoc. 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A congregant is kind of sometimes at the mercy of the leaders, although hopefully there's a good communication perspective. But one of the things that I would recommend for a pastor is really tied in one of the four roles of the pastor, and that's the episkopos role, which is the overseer. So there's four roles that Paul instructs Timothy. You have the episkopos, which is the overseer. You have the presbyteros, which is the governor, if you will, decision maker. You have the poimen, which is the shepherd. And then you have the oikonomos, which is the stewardship. So we steward our resources, we steward our people, we shepherd those that God has given to us, we govern, we exercise the presbyteros role, and then we exercise the episkopos role, which really the episkopos role is kind of like the old watchman on the tower who stands and he looks out And he looks in, he looks out to see what threats or issues are coming that would affect the church, but also where is God leading the church and where does God want the church to go? And then he also looks in, that's why I think it's going on in Philippians 4 when Paul says, I entreat you to help Syntyche and Yodie to get along. The episkopos role of the pastor, the elder, is actually looking in to the congregation to see where are there some challenges and where are there some issues? But it's this oversight role. Well, when we think about looking out to see where is God leading us, we have to say as a pastor, as a group of elders, or as a group of leaders, where is God leading us? What does God want us to do? What does God want us to become? What is God shaping us and changing us? And then everything ties in our ministry to that. So IBO, we do something that's called long-range ministry planning. We actually have done it quite a bit in the last few years for churches. It's basically where we come in and we help facilitate a group of leaders around this idea of what is the vision, which is your corporate purpose, why do you exist, what is God wanting you to become, what is your values, what is your character, who are you as a church, what do you value, and then defining those. You might come up with integrity or holiness or family focused or whatever. And then what do you mean by that? And then you bring the vision and you bring the values. We would argue that the vision needs to contain three elements. It's the great commission, the great commandment, and the glorification of God. So this is what God wants us to become. We are this group of people, we are becoming this. This is what God is leading us to do. And in the process, these are our values. These govern everything about us. And then coming out of that is what are called strategic initiatives, which may sound like a business term, but just basically what are things that we're going to do as a ministry as a result of who God wants us to become. And then those initiatives are objectively tied back into the vision and the values. So now I can sit there and say God wants us to become this or God wants us to move this way and so here's what that's going to look like and here's what we need to change in order to accomplish that. So maybe we've got a ministry that doesn't fit within that vision anymore and so we're gonna we're gonna get rid of it, and we're gonna add in a new ministry, or we're not even gonna add in a new ministry. We're gonna invest our time and resources in other things. And so as a pastor, as I'm practicing and exercising this episkopos role, I have to exercise it in such a way that I'm saying, this is where God is leading us to go, and he's leading a group of us to come to consensus around this, and then this is what has to change in order to accomplish what God has called us to do. I think, and you could probably attest to this as well, it's an interesting dynamic, because people show up to our church. I've had this happen all my years of pastoring. It probably has happened for you. People show up to church, and they'll say, oh, pastor, it would be great if we had such and such a ministry. You say, oh, okay, yeah, that's cool. And then you actually ask those people, hey, would you be willing to lead that? And sometimes they say yes, and sometimes they say no, but let's just imagine that they say yes. I'm pastor, we're happy to lead this ministry. Great. So they stay at your church for three or four or five years, six years, and they built this ministry. I mean, it does well, it serves a purpose. But then they leave, and the passion and drive for that ministry kind of leaves with them, but you've still got this ministry that some people say, well, we've always had this ministry. We've always done this outreach. We've always done whatever it is. And now the church is burdened down, weighted down by a log of ministry, if you will, that it has to keep going. But the problem is that happens like multiple times. Over the course of a church's history of 40, 50 years, they might be burdened down with a whole host of these things. And now they don't have enough people to run these ministries, but man, it's going to be hellfire and damnation for the pastor if he gets up and says, we've decided to end this ministry. So I think as a pastor, as you've seen that happen, how have you kind of navigated through with that? How would this Episcopal vision, values, initiatives kind of help a church? You know, maybe talk a little bit about that from your perspective. Yeah, so yeah, that happens all the time, and the moment you even hint at taking some of those away, you get the threat of, we're leaving if you don't do this. So There is a delicate dance that has to happen of, as a pastor, I don't want somebody to come to church always ticked off. There are certain times where I'm willing, I've probably used this several times during our podcast, I'm willing to absorb some things that are going to suck out some of the time. I'm willing to take a little bit of abuse for a greater good. But I agree with you, if it distracts from what God's called us to do, which is to edify one another and evangelize the community around us, then in my mind, it's a distraction from ministry, it's a distraction from what we're supposed to do. And for me, a lot of it comes from So when I sit down with my elders, we look at – we try to evaluate each year our strengths. What is our – what are we really good at? We try to self-evaluate our weaknesses. Those are pretty obvious and people tell us. We also try to look at some opportunities. What are some of the opportunities that are before us that the Lord's placed in front of us? And what are some of those things that are pretty serious that deviate us from our mission or we're held liable, right? Like that bus ministry, there's a lot of liability there. And then we look at, well, what are our people doing and what Do we have enough people to accomplish this particular thing? And then what happens from that is I normally, we as elders, we normally pick a yearly theme and that yearly theme coincides with our strengths and our weaknesses and those opportunities. So we're spending a lot of time when we're talking from the pulpit about those things so that We're hoping that the Word of God and the Spirit of God works in the lives of people so that while we're kind of absorbing some of these time suck things, we're teaching you and then strategically at the time when we think it's the right time, you already now have God's Word. We just don't pick a book. I'm just going to do this book. We pick those books for specific reasons to address specific things, so that when it comes time for us to announce these certain things, you are not just convinced because Pastor Caleb says it, or the elder says it. You see it from God's word going, yeah, no, I see this as being a really important thing in the life of the church, because that's what God's word says. So for me, that becomes then the major thing, is coming from God's word. The other thing that I also like to emphasize, and I try to do this in my own life, I try to tell people this, is every day there are opportunities for ministry, and we need to change our view of what ministry is. Ministry is not necessarily that which happens on Sunday morning. So every moment is an opportunity to do ministry. So part of our life should be, God, what's the ministry for today? What opportunity are you bringing to my life today that I can do ministry? And so I feel like doing those things, we're not only just sharpening what we're doing at the church, but then also changing the way that people view ministry so that they realize, oh, everything is ministry, so that when then things change, they already have done ministry going, Yeah, no, that makes sense. I did this one thing yesterday, and now I'm doing a completely different thing. That's just the nature of how God works in our lives to accomplish his mission. Yeah. Yeah, and I think a pastor and a congregant, as they look at it from their different respective positions and perspectives, need to understand the church collectively, local church collectively, group of individuals, on an individual level is changing. Sanctification is all about change, changed into His image, growing into Christlikeness. So it stands to reason, then, that our church, collectively, in ministry and public life, all that ministry entails is going to be changing. It's growing, it's morphing, it's adapting. And so I think the challenge is when you have, you don't want to, like we said before, you don't want to change just for change sake. Like we don't just do stuff, you know, but we want to be intentional. But a church that fosters and cultivates this idea that we are constantly evaluating, constantly looking, constantly adjusting, is gonna be a church that is able to be nimble and able to be flexible to accomplish what God has called it to accomplish. And we saw that a little bit with COVID, the need to change on the fly. But there's a whole host of things that we need to be evaluating as our areas grow, as demographics change, as people's schedules change, as different businesses come and go, and how do we morph and change? And the fact of the matter is it's not one size fits all, nor is it, hey, we did this in the 70s, we can just keep doing this until Jesus comes. No, we should be preaching the gospel till Jesus comes. But outside of that, have Sunday night, don't have Sunday night. Have Sunday school, don't have Sunday school. Have Awana, don't have Awana. Who cares? And as the leadership decides, hey, this is something we need to do, we've prayed about it, we've sought God's wisdom in this, this is what he wants us to do, then the congregation needs to look at it and say, we're gonna trust and we're gonna follow and we're gonna be able to engage as we can through this process. You know, one of those books that we don't read, and we are shocked to find out it's part of the Scriptures, is Ecclesiastes. And Ecclesiastes talks about that, right? About there's a time to do this. And then there's another part in Ecclesiastes where he says, it was so much better in the past, because that's not really from wisdom. So yeah, so there's a time for everything. There's a time for ministry to be created. There's a time for a ministry to fold, right, a particular thing, and that's not failure. And I think that's some of the thing that I've found is that we have such a warped sense of what success in ministry is. So a lot of my people, When I talk to them about success in ministry, it's the headcount, right? How many people show up to it? That just means how many people show up. That might not be a successful ministry. That might be a successful ministry. I don't know. That's not a good measuring stick. And so a good measuring stick also can't be nostalgia, right? What I did as a kid that felt awesome. Well, of course, when I was a kid, the ice cream social was awesome. But does that mean that that's exactly what will help my church grow, is that we have to have always these constant ice cream socials? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. Who knows? It could be, it might not be. I think one of the other interesting conversations and maybe this could be for a podcast down the road about church planting. We are, like I think about our context of fellowships of churches, we're really good at thinking about church planting and what does it take to plant a church and thinking through getting it started and making sure it's successful and making sure it's sustainable and making sure we got a leader. We do a lot of thought process about planting a church, we do zero thought about killing a church, and that's a rough way to put it. But a church that is dead or is needing to be put out of its misery, if you will, we do a horrible job. One of the things that I've noticed even as I've traveled and engage with different ministries is how many ministries are sitting on hundreds of thousands of dollars that have been accumulated, maybe through the sale of land or through the sale of buildings. And now it's 50 people, because they sold off half the property, but they're sitting on $10 million. and they're basically just gonna meet out in existence for the next five years, blow through that million dollars, and then ultimately die, but the pastor was able to get paid for the next five years or 10 years. It's like, is that the best stewardship of God's money? Is that the best stewardship of God's resources? Is that the best stewardship of those people? And a lot of times what happens is the pastor is, and there's a song, I grew up in an independent fundamental Baptist world called Hold the Fort. Hold the fort for I am coming. It's this whole like, you know, woe is me mentality. Like I'm just hanging on for dear life until Jesus comes back. But a lot of times in these situations, the pastor is softly humming to himself, hold the fort while he's reaping the benefits of a million dollars sitting in a bank account that they're just draining 100,000 a year at a time to keep him paid and 50 people, 40 people, 30 people left in this massive building that if they thought about it, they could sell that, they could, Think through, strategically think through the sale of that building, restarting, replanting, reseeding, sending that money out to other places where the gospel is being advanced, and yet so many ministries sit on and really waste a lot of money because they don't know how to die. So if we're talking about the church's living, which it is, and growing and all that stuff, which is great, We also have to talk about, if we're going to be fair, churches need to die, and they need to die in a God-honoring way and in a manner that advances the cause of Christ rather than selfishly depletes resources over the course of a decade. Yeah, you know, that's pretty near and dear to my heart. I love small rural churches. There's just something really special about it, and I like going to those places where, you know, there's a group of believers, and they really want to grow in the Lord. And I've seen over and over again churches, just dead churches, and some of it is because of the bad behavior of the church, right? So the church itself becomes complacent. They don't want to grow spiritually. They just want to have a sanctified country club, right? My dad built this church. I'm not leaving this church because my dad built a church. Yeah, I'm not a fan of that, and I think that that should be—that's a bad place to be. But I also don't wanna discourage anybody who's in a small church who they are growing spiritually, they are trying to interact with the community, and the community around them has died. So that's what happened. I've seen that happen in several churches where the community itself has died. And because the community has died, the church is dying. And it makes sense because there's no people there. So if there's nobody there, then it makes sense that you then would die. It goes back to, Dave, you know what we said about how we define success in ministry, and when you have a bad definition of the end goal, then obviously, then the intermediate, you're gonna make bad decisions, and so if the end goal is to have as many people as possible, Well, yeah, well then those little churches survive. But if the goal is to edify one another and evangelize the community, and you're able to still edify one another and evangelize the community around you and that, well then I would say that's a vibrant church. It might not have hundreds of people, but it's living. But if the community around you is dying and you have to travel 45 minutes to go to your local church when you can travel, when everybody can then travel a different 45 and be part of another church instead of a town, well, yeah, no, that's just thinking, am I holding onto the building for nostalgia's sake because daddy built the church? Or am I really thinking of what's the best use of my time to really impact people and encourage people to live for Jesus? Yeah, it goes to our heart's motivation, and it sets us up well for the next episode of The Church is Thriving, and so how do we take that and think through a thriving church, which is, again, not contingent on the numbers that are coming, but what are we doing with the gospel? So I think that'll be an interesting conversation to explore in episode seven.