Every Member Matters

Every Member Matters. This is probably not a motto that you will see in the gym that you go to. I know that my gym would not care one bit if I walked in and cancelled my membership today. Maybe you are a member at a country club or a swim club. The same applies to them as well. They were doing just fine when you joined and they will be just fine when you leave. But tying the idea of membership to membership in the church is even deeper. You cannot walk into any other place that you are a member of and have a say in the operations of the establishment. That is what makes membership in the local church much different.

We aren’t going to get into why you should join yourself to a local church. We will do that in a couple of weeks. But we are going to focus on how members function in the context of the local church. Our scripture for today is a familiar one if you were with us last week. We are going to be in Acts 6. This is the same passage where we see the implied institution of deacons. But we are going to take the scope out a little further than just deacons and look at the entire church in Acts 6.

Acts 6:1–7 ESV

1 Now in these days when the disciples were increasing in number, a complaint by the Hellenists arose against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution. 2 And the twelve summoned the full number of the disciples and said, “It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables. 3 Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we will appoint to this duty. 4 But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.” 5 And what they said pleased the whole gathering, and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit, and Philip, and Prochorus, and Nicanor, and Timon, and Parmenas, and Nicolaus, a proselyte of Antioch. 6 These they set before the apostles, and they prayed and laid their hands on them. 7 And the word of God continued to increase, and the number of the disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith.

Pray

Being a healthier church. This is the focus of these next several weeks as we move through God’s word and see what it tells us about aspects of the church. I could poll the room and it would probably be unanimous that we all want to be part of a biblically healthy church. But are we willing to be obedient to scripture to do that. There probably aren’t many churches you could walk into this morning that you will hear a sermon on church structure. It is not something that is appealing to the ears. On the surface level, you probably do not get excited when you hear about it. But we all want the byproduct of having a healthy church structure. So what is the byproduct. Gospel Effectiveness.

Build the Kingdom, Impact our Community

Our mission as a church is to Build the Kingdom and Impact our Community. How our church is structured, will determine how effective we are at that. We want to be the most effective as possible when it comes to gospel impact. And that is where we get our main idea for the text today.

A Healthy Church Structure Enhances Gospel Effectiveness

Repeat that with me.

You can go to 10 different churches and find 10 conflicting ideas on how a church should be structured. But when we say that we want to be a church that is biblically healthy, that means we look to scripture to see how we should do it. When churches are not structured properly, it can actually hinder gospel effectiveness.

This is because the focus will be on other things. There will be issues that aren’t resolved the way that they should be. There will be fights and oftentimes it leads to church splits. So what is the biblically healthy structure that a church should have? That is what we find in Acts 6 that we are going to be breaking down for us this morning.

Elder Led

A biblically healthy church should be elder led. I know that some of you just tensed up a little bit. Maybe this is something that brings up bad memories or emotions from a dark time in your church life. I want you to have an open heart when we talk about these things today. So set aside any hard feelings you may have about church structure.

First off, I used this word elder. So what is an elder? An elder is just another word for pastor. There are words in scripture that are interchangeable. These are pastor, elders, and overseers. So when you are reading scripture and see these words, this is what it means. It is someone who has been recognized by a local body who has been given charge of them as an under-shepherd of Christ.

So why am I using the term, elder instead of pastor? Great question. This is because the word elder is used 76 times in the New Testament. So I am going to speak about it the way that scripture does. We often have a different definition of elder. Yes it is a correct word to use for someone who is older than you. But biblically, it is an office that is established by scripture for the church. Let’s see how this plays out in Acts 6.

Acts 6:1–2 ESV

1 Now in these days when the disciples were increasing in number, a complaint by the Hellenists arose against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution. 2 And the twelve summoned the full number of the disciples and said, “It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables.

Who were the twelve that this verse talks about? The twelve were what we call the Apostles. The Apostles were the preachers and teachers of the word. See, they had a focused area of ministry. They were to focus on preaching God’s word and and prayer as we see in a few verses. And there were 12 of them that were overseeing this congregation. What happened is there began to be gaps in the service to the body.

When I was young, I would often get these random pains. Sometimes, they were dull lasting pains, sometimes short and sharp pains. I would think something was wrong and would say something to my mom and she always had the same answer. Those are just growing pains.

Churches go through growing pains. I would contend that we are very close to going through some ourselves. This is why a passage like this is so important. We need to understand biblically, how each and every member of the church should function. I am not sure about you, but I have been part of a church that has experienced growing pains.

When I was out of high school and had left my family church, I started attending another church with some friends. This church went through a period of hard times, but eventually a new pastor came in and after some time, the church began to grow. It went from a church of around 60 to a church of over 100. Then some more time passed. It went from 100 to 150. Then some more time passed and it kept growing and there were some Sunday mornings when there were close to 200 people coming to the church. The church even contemplated purchasing more property to build on. But that was short lived.

See, the church was not ready for the growth. And there were some severe growing pains. There were power struggles in leadership. The right people were not in the right places. There was not a true biblical understanding of the role of the pastor, deacons, and members. And eventually, all of that growth that the church had experienced, was gone. Growing pains don’t have to be a bad thing as long as the church has its focus on the right things.

What was the focus for the church in Acts? It was the word of God. You might be thinking that only the apostles were focused on the word of God. That is not accurate. Yes, it is true that not everyone was preaching the word of God. There were multiple teachers of God’s word but the ones who were not preaching and teaching far outnumbered the ones who were. But the reason that there needed to be a solution to the growing pains was for the Apostles(pastor, elders, preachers), to be able to focus on the word of God. The body was focused on the word of God by choosing tables servers(deacons) to take the load off the apostles so that they could preach and teach.

Elder Led. But how do we get from preaching and teaching, to leading. The picture given to us in scripture of an elder is that he is a shepherd. Shepherds did not only watch over sheep but they had to lead the sheep. The sheep would trust the shepherd that he would protect them and keep them away from danger. That he would take them to the food and water that they needed. And when one would stray off the path, the shepherd would be there to push them back on.

Peter tells us this in his letter to churches in Rome.

1 Peter 5:1–4 ESV

1 So I exhort the elders among you, as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed: 2 shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; not for shameful gain, but eagerly; 3 not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock. 4 And when the chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory.

Shepherd the flock of God among you. Exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you. Not domineering. But being an example to the flock. This is a high calling.

When you have been apart of a church that has had a pastor that does not embody what Peter tells us an elder should be, you may have concern. But I would contend that the majority of cases like that are because the church has what you would call a single pastor model. Sometime in the last 100 years or so, churches began to get away from having a plurality of elders. This led to deacons actually becoming pseudo elders and ruling over churches. But this is not biblical. All throughout the New Testament, when we read of churches and it talks about the elders of those churches, it is never singular. The biblical model for church leadership is a plurality of elders. Multiple men sharing the spiritual load of a church to be able to lead them in the direction that God wants them to go in. Not having one man who is leading that does not have any checks and balances but having multiple men who are able to work together to lead a church.

For those of you who have been part of Immanuel Baptist for a while, it may have been before your time, but this was not a foreign concept for our church. You can look back in the records and in the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s, there were multiple pastors at one time that served our church. We would recognize one lead pastor but would have other pastors that would work with him to help share the load.

So, if we want to be a biblically healthy church, and we see in scripture that this is the model for elders, how do we get back to that? First of all, we pray. I would ask that you pray for God to raise up men who are in our church to aspire to the role of elder. Pray for God to send men who will be able to be raised up in the role of an elder. Churches all around are struggling to find pastors. The way that is solved is for healthy churches to raise up more elders than they need and send them out to pastor these churches. Maybe, right now, you feel this desire to pursue being a pastor. That is awesome. Don’t be like me and fight it for years. It doesn’t matter if you are 80 years old or 8 years old. The best time to start pursuing that is right now. So come and talk to me about it.

Will this happen overnight? No. It might be a couple of years, it might be 5 years, it might be 10 years. But that should not change our prayer for God to send men who are qualified for the office of elder to our congregation. Because we see in scripture that a biblically healthy church is led by elders and we strive to be more healthy.

Deacon Served

If you were here last Sunday, we spent the entire sermon talking about how we need a healthy deacons ministry to become a biblically healthier church. We looked at the qualifications of deacons and ways that they serve our church in our current context. Instead of me rehashing all of that out, let’s use our text that we have here for the church in the book of Acts and break down the institution of the first deacons.

Acts 6:3–4 ESV

3 Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we will appoint to this duty. 4 But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.”

There was this need that came up in the church. The Hellenistic Greek widows were being overlooked in the distribution of goods(growing pains). The apostles called for the entire church to come together. And now, we see that they asked them to pick out 7 men.

They told the congregation that these men must have a good reputation and full of the spirit and wisdom. 1 Timothy 3 takes these qualifications and deepens them for better understanding.

These men would be the first picture of biblical deacons in scripture. What were these men going to do? They were going to serve the tables. So, is this all that deacons are supposed to do? When we have church wide lunches, is this when we finally give the deacons something to do and they scoop food into our plates? Or when we have the Lord’s Supper, is this so that we can finally put deacons to work? The serving of tables is how, in this instance in scripture, the purpose of servant deacons plays out.

In essence, the role of the deacon is to take the load off the elders for the ministry of the word. When churches have biblical deacon ministries where they are set up for the purpose of taking the load off the elders, their is greater potential for gospel advancement.

One of the duties of a pastor is to develop the ministry of the members of the church. Ephesians 4:11–12 “11 And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, 12 to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ,”

The pastor is to equips the saints(members of the body) for the work of ministry. One of the works of ministry is the function of deacons. The deacons serve the body, the physical needs of the church body, to free up the elders for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry. All of this for the building up the body of Christ.

This doesn’t always look the same. There may be times where deacons are literally serving tables. But there may be other times where deacons are going and doing house work for elderly members. They might be helping a young married couple moved into a new home. They may be organizing volunteers for a ministry outreach project in the community. You cannot put the service of the deacon ministry into a box because then you will hinder it. Deacons take the load off of the pastor so that gospel impact will be maximized.

I have mentioned the word gospel several times this morning. Maybe you are here and this is not a word that you hear every day. So what is the gospel. The word gospel actually means “good news”. (gospel presentation) (God, man, Christ, response)

In our passage, we have seen that biblically healthy churches should be elder led and deacon served. But this is just a fraction of the entire membership of a church. So what about the rest of the congregation? In this example in Acts of how a church should be structured, we also see that a biblically healthy church is…

Congregational Ruled

Some of you just thought, “Yes, its about time”. Depending on the church, there may be a broad spectrum of the voice that the congregation has. Some churches are set up where they never get a say in anything. They don’t vote on any people in leadership, including the pastor. They don’t get a say in where the money goes. But, on the other end of the spectrum, there are some churches that will kill their members with business meetings. The church I mentioned earlier that began to grow and lost all momentum because of structure, they would have monthly business meetings to vote on whether or not to pay the power bill. Not because they were strapped for money, but just because that was how the church was structured.

So where should we be as a church. I would contend that it should be somewhere in the middle. In the context of what we see in our passage, we know that the body made a major decision here.

Acts 6:5–6 ESV

5 And what they said pleased the whole gathering, and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit, and Philip, and Prochorus, and Nicanor, and Timon, and Parmenas, and Nicolaus, a proselyte of Antioch. 6 These they set before the apostles, and they prayed and laid their hands on them.

The apostles, being in the role of pastor/elders, called the congregation together, told them that there was an issue that the congregation needed to solve. They led them by telling them they needed to chose 7 men from among them, with high Christian character, and the elders would give them charge. In verse 5, we see that the congregation approved of what the apostles said. Who had the authority over this decision? It wasn’t the apostles. They were just leading the congregation. The congregation could have said no. Would it have been wise to do so? Probably not. But they had the authority to do so. But they approved of it. It says that they were pleased by what the apostles charged them to do.

Then they chose the 7 men. If you are a member at Immanuel, this year, the leadership is giving the authority back to you to chose deacons. Me and Danny(our deacon), prayed about this. We are convicted that this is the model that scripture has shown us. And we want to be obedient to scripture.

We want to be a biblically healthy church so we are going to do the things that are laid out in scripture. When we do this, when we have a church that is congregationally governed, it actually acts as a safeguard for the body. In the process that we are talking about with selecting deacons, it keeps it from becoming a good ole boys system or from it being some sort of campaign for power. But it doesn’t just stop there.

There is a slippery slope from being a congregational ruled church to a church that has it’s gospel effectiveness hindered by the congregation. The church I mentioned earlier that had to vote on paying the light bill, fell down that slope.

The elders in the church lead and teach. Hebrews 13:17 “17 Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you.” So the elders lead the church.

The way the lead pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist, Mark Dever puts it, “the elders are the steering wheel of the church. The congregation doesn’t steer. The congregation is more like the emergency brake.”

When we are voting on light bills every month, which copy machine to buy, which electrical company we need to get to change light switches, that is when the potential for gospel impact on our community gets hindered. Because the focus is not in the right place. So functionally, what does it mean for a church to be congregational ruled. First and foremost, being congregational ruled is a protection to the church.

Having a congregational ruling body, it protects the church from false teachers. Members of a church that continue to sit underneath false teaching are accountable for letting false teaching occur. Therefore, the congregation has the authority to stop false teaching at the church.

Having a congregation ruling body protects the church from letting in unqualified elders. It is the decision of the congregation who serves at an elder/pastor.

Having a congregation ruling body protects the church from letting in unconverted members. I have instituted somewhat of a process to interview prospective members so that we are able to recognize if someone has heard the gospel, believed the gospel, and is striving to live a life that has been changed by the gospel. Then, you, as a church approve to whether or not we should accept this person into membership. The congregation protects the church from unregenerate members.

On the flip side of that, having a congregational ruling body protects the church from unregenerate membership by exercising church discipline on members. When we have members who are living in lifestyles that are not consistent with the Christian life that is laid out in scripture(sexually immoral, living in adultery, living in addiction, maybe they are neglecting meeting with the body), the congregation should not let them continue their membership and should tell them that the church cannot rightfully acknowledge their profession of faith any longer unless they repent.

Having a congregation ruling body protects the church from losing its outward focus and becoming a self-centered church. This is why the congregation votes on a yearly budget.

Now, these aren’t the only things the church should have authority over to decide, but I would contend that these are the most important matters for a congregation. Because these are matters that determine the health of a church.

The congregation has authority over the matter of health in the church. The congregation acts as an emergency brake when things are getting out of hand. And this working, comes down to whether or not a church believes that the structure that is found in scripture is how it should structure itself. And when it does, then that leads us to the last thing we see in our passage.

A Healthy Church Structure Enhances Gospel Effectiveness

The main point of the text in the main point of our sermon. Again, the mission we have as a congregation is to build the kingdom and impact our community. This is what it means for us to have gospel effectiveness. Having a healthy church structure does not hinder this, but it enhances this. We see the same thing happen to the church in Acts when they do this.

Acts 6:7 ESV

7 And the word of God continued to increase, and the number of the disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith.

The word of God increased. Why? Because the apostles(preachers) were able to focus on the preaching of God’s word. it was because the deacons tended to the physical needs of the body while the elders attended to the spiritual needs. And t, as a product of a healthy structure, the number of disciples multiplied. Now math wasn’t my best subject in school. But last time I checked, when it comes down to either adding or multiplying, the end result is greater when you multiply it. I don’t want to just see the number of disciples here, in our church and in our community, to be added to. I want to see it be multiplied. We say we want to see revival. We want to see people come to Christ like it was happening in the book of Acts. That happens when the focus is on the word of God.

If you have been coming here for some time, you have probably heard me say that I want Immanuel to be a church, that if we had to shut our doors for some reason, that our community would be in an uproar. We want the community to look to us when things aren’t going right. If there is some sort of tragedy that happens, we want everyone to know that we(not the pastor, not the deacons, but the entire congregation) are here for them. Will we be that church? Will we be a group of believers that are so changed by the gospel, that we structure our church in a way that enhances gospel effectiveness in our community. Build the kingdom. Impact our community.

Closing

Maybe you are here today and you have never truly submitted yourself to Jesus Christ as Lord and savior. I am going to take a moment and tell you how you do that.

(gospel presentation) (God, man, Christ, response)

We are called by Jesus to repent and believe. (explain repentance and the change that comes when we believe)

Believer, church members, brothers and sisters in Christ. The challenge the we have from scripture this morning is for us to focus on the advancement of the gospel. As we sing our last song, take a moment and ask God to show you how to do that. Maybe it is seeking church membership here at Immanuel to show the world that you are saved. Maybe it is through baptism so that you can invite your friends to come and witness what God is doing in your life. Maybe it is finding one person in your life who has not made a profession of faith and praying for them and intentionally sharing God’s word with them. Maybe you think that you aren’t there yet and you need to make a step in that direction by inviting someone to come to church with you next week. In fact, that can be a challenge for all of us. Everyone here, make it a point to invite 2 people to church next Sunday.

But while we sing our last song, ask God to open up your eyes and change your heart how it needs to be change so that we, as a group of believers that call ourselves a church, can best impact our community with the gospel.

Pray