June 05, 2008
Peripheral Believers
In his book Exodus, author Dave Shiflett delves into what makes liberal churches tick. One of Dave’s interviewees is a man named Gary who says, “Any sane person would agree that you’ve got problems if you’re losing a great portion of your church population. But the liberal priests would actually say it was a good thing. They said [that] ‘what we’re losing are the peripheral believers’ and that shedding all those people would actually make the church stronger.” Certainly the Good Shepherd who goes after one lost sheep would disagree. I’m amazed that we allow it to be said that believers, peripheral or not, are expendable. Satan must be celebrating at the thought of a ‘core group of people’ getting the credit for strengthening the church.
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Gail;
-----The attitudes of the liberal priests are exactly where the church is led when its people begin viewing the church as an organization in need of direction. Once viewed thus, it becomes important for a certain direction to be determined. Then having selected a direction, it becomes important to maintain focus on that direction by eliminating or marginalizing any who are not moving parallel to it. They think that maintains the strength of the church organization just as it does the strength of any other organization.
-----But the Lord is not directly concerned with the organizational strength of the church. He is concerned first with the salvation, then with the spiritual strength of each person in the church. So the amount of strength in a person is not the Biblical criteria for inclusion in the body, only the presence of faith in Christ Jesus is the criteria. In fact, Rom 12:3 indicates that the amount of faith each person has is measured to him by God Himself. Therefore, if one having salvation through faith is yet weak in his faith, how are we to complain, condemn, or in any other way deny him? His weak faith was measured to him by God. Rather, we are to love him, shelter him, teach him, encourage him, please him, and give to him all the other godly blessings that genuine fellowship provides.
-----In this way the church achieves organizational strength. It is the same concept that doctors say of your human body: it maintains its strength and vitality at the cellular level. The more spiritually strong are the members of the body, the more strong is the church. And spiritual strength is about personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Therefore, a core group really can effect the strength of the church if it is core because of exceptionally close relationships with the Lord. It gets spread to the others in the group much the same way as what Sister Anonymous experienced and related to us in her comment to your blog of February 25, 2008, “The church body that I moved from a couple of years ago was lead by older men that had raised their children and had successful marriages and KNEW THEIR SCRIPTURES. Those men were there with sincere tears of joy in their eyes when my husband and I were baptized. They personally taught my husband God's Word, how to have a relationship with Christ, how to be a husband and how to be a father. At the same time, their wives (the older women) taught me how to have a relationship with Christ, to be a wife, and a mother. All in gentleness and with due regard to Scripture.” That is the example of a core group having a real effect on the strength of a church, responding to weakness with nurture, caring for the church by caring for the person. To them the church is what it is to Jesus, simply His people gathered together, accommodating one another, serving one another, reaching out together, and allowing one another to do what the Spirit drives each one to do.
Love is in action, not philosophy,
Steve Corey
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