The Quiet Decay Inside Good Churches: Part Two
This is the second part of a two-part article on the loss of reverence inside the walls of good churches. The first part, which can be found here, laid the foundation by probing how a church can hold to sound doctrine while simultaneously losing its reverence before God. That “decay” often shows up in the way we speak and how we fill our church calendar. If you haven’t read Part One, that’s where I’d encourage you to start, because what follows will pick up where that left off.
When irreverence is neglected long enough, it rarely stays among the ordinary habits of church life. The same patterns that create an environment of careless speech and busyness as an alternative to reverence won’t just linger at the level of the average member. It eventually moves on to how the church handles new members coming through the door, and from there to how it identifies the men it brings into leadership. By the time it reaches that stage, it’s settled into the structure of the church, and damage like that can take generations to undo.
Let me explain what I mean. A new believer joins a solid church, the kind of church we’ve been discussing. The leadership and longtime members receive him warmly, and within a few weeks, the requests start coming. Would he be willing to help on Wednesday nights? Could he get into a rotation somewhere? Each request is reasonable by itself because healthy churches need members who serve. Taken together, though, they can communicate to the new member that his fellowship and standing will be measured by his participation. And participation gets measured by how willingly he says yes.
Again, as before, I want to be careful here, because nobody in the leadership of these churches is consciously manipulating anyone. Most of the members asking are sincere, faithful people who truly want a new member to feel welcomed into the life of the church. When I use the word manipulation, I’m talking about the structure of the church rather than the motives of the people. The church has been operating for years on the notion that participation is a marker of growth, and that notion can form the entire arc of how a person develops through the life of the church.
The harm in this isn’t immediately apparent, but over time it becomes evident. The new member will say yes to almost every request, because he’s eager to “get plugged in." So his Saturdays go to the men’s breakfast, his Wednesdays to the kitchen team, his Sunday mornings to the sound booth, where he’ll have to miss Sunday School to make sure everything is ready for service. He’s busy at the church and seen at the church and known by the people of the church, the way active members get known. And after two or three years of this, when somebody asks him how his walk with the Lord is going, he won’t have a very good answer, because he hasn’t been alone with the Lord in any perpetual way for a while.
The manipulation doesn’t stem from anyone in the church desiring to bring him harm. What's actually happening is that the church has conflated the appearance of faithfulness with the substance of it, and developed the new member to live by that same confusion.
The care of a new member in a healthy church would look very different. The first question asked would be about the state of the man’s soul, not his availability for serving. The first investments made in him would be in his understanding of Scripture, in his prayer life, in his marriage, if he’s married, and in his parenting, if he has children. The deeper questions would be either forming or fortifying this man’s foundation, and any service he eventually does would grow out of that foundation. Activity, in the healthier model, would be the fruit of fellowship with the Lord rather than the replacement for it.
But, unfortunately, that’s not what we see in many good churches. Many good churches function the other way around. The new member is signed up to serve first, and the question of his fellowship with God is left to come up on its own, if it ever comes up. By the time the deeper questions are asked, the man has been living by the wrong criteria for so long that he can’t even understand why the question is asked.
Once a church has been measuring spiritual maturity by this type of activity for long enough, the same standard eventually outlines how the church identifies its future leaders. The men who get tapped for elder consideration are usually the men who have been most visible in this “volume-of-service economy.” They’re the busy ones and the ones the members see at every event. These are the people whose names come up first when the existing elders ask who’s been around the longest or contributed the most.
But visible service was never the qualification for elders.
The qualifications for elders are given in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, and we need to note two things: what they emphasize and what they leave out. Paul says in 1 Timothy 3 the overseer,
“must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate, sensible, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not addicted to wine or pugnacious, but considerate, peaceable, free from the love of money; leading his own household well, having his children in submission with all dignity (but if a man does not know how to lead his own household, how will he take care of the church of God?), and not a new convert, so that he will not become conceited and fall into the condemnation of the devil. And he must have a good reputation with those outside the church, so that he will not fall into reproach and the snare of the devil.”
(1 Timothy 3:2-7)
Then in Titus 1, he adds,
“must be beyond reproach as God’s steward, not self-willed, not quick-tempered, not addicted to wine, not pugnacious, not fond of dishonest gain, but hospitable, loving what is good, sensible, righteous, holy, self-controlled, holding fast the faithful word which is in accordance with the teaching, so that he will be able both to exhort in sound doctrine and to reprove those who contradict.”
(Titus 1:7-9)
Of course, these qualifications must be observable. An elder can’t be an invisible man. His home, doctrine, reputation, hospitality, self-control, and ability to teach must be known to the church in some meaningful way.
But, read that list slowly. Almost every qualification Paul identifies is a quality of character or competence rather than a marker of activity.
Sober-minded points to the man’s inner life.
Hospitable describes how his home is open to others.
Able to teach speaks to his competence in handling the Word, which is a function of years spent in careful study rather than on committees.
Not a new convert, so that he will not become conceited, may be the most pastorally important qualification on the list, because it warns directly against the pattern of bringing a man into leadership before he’s been tested long enough to know whether he meets the qualifications at all.
The standard of visibility and activity won’t produce men who match this list. It will produce men, however, who’ve been seen and involved, which is a different thing than men who have been formed by the Word and the Spirit into the kind of overseer Paul described. Some of those visible men will turn out to be qualified anyway, by the grace of God. Many of them, unfortunately, won’t. Some of the men who are truly qualified are quieter than the men who are most noticeable. They’re the ones whose understanding of Scripture has been formed and refined over years of study, and whose private walk with the Lord has shaped them into the kind of men other believers naturally trust.
This kind of measurement tends to skip those men. They didn’t sign up for as many committees, so they aren’t on the radar. They get written off as men who don’t care or who aren’t really involved in the life of the church when, in some cases, these are the very men who should be caring for the souls of the congregation. Meanwhile, the busy man who’s been on every committee for a decade gets nominated for elder, and the existing elders affirm him because they’ve seen him serve.
That’s where the corruption starts, but it doesn’t stop there.
Once elders have been selected by the wrong standard, they begin evaluating future candidates by the same standard that brought them in. Men who were chosen because they were noticed will naturally look for the same in the next round of candidates, and the same is true of every other surface-level indicator the church has been using. Men who confuse activity with maturity in their own growth will confuse activity with maturity in everyone else’s. Within a generation or two, the leadership of the church will be made up almost entirely of men who match the wrong list. The right list will have been forgotten, if it was ever even known, by everyone in the room.
This is the consequence Paul was protecting the church against in 1 Timothy 5:22 when he wrote,
Do not lay hands upon anyone hastily and thereby share responsibility for the sins of others; keep yourself pure.
(1 Timothy 5:22)
When the church takes a shortcut and treats activity or being seen as a sufficient marker of qualification, it lays hands hastily, regardless of how respectable the man being appointed appears.
The leadership a church ends up with is the leadership it deserves, in the sense that the standard it uses to select that leadership is the standard the leadership will use going forward. A church whose elders were chosen for visibility will select future elders with that same standard of visibility. A church whose elders are chosen for biblical qualification will produce future elders who are chosen for biblical qualification. The pattern reproduces itself, and the consequences for the church’s spiritual health will accumulate over decades.
I want to handle this carefully, because there are good men currently serving as elders in churches where the selection process was flawed. Some of those men are growing into the qualifications Paul lists, even if they were chosen for the wrong reasons. The Lord is gracious, and He can use imperfect leadership to feed His people, just as He’s done for two thousand years. The point isn’t that every elder selected by the wrong standard is unfit for office. The point is that this kind of standard does damage. It’s been doing damage for a long time, and the churches living under it are paying the price whether they recognize it or not.
So we come again to the practical question. If a man recognizes his own church in what I’ve been describing, the question now is what to do about it from where he sits.
A few thoughts.
The first has to do with the new members in your own circle. You probably know one or two, maybe more. The pattern I described, where a new member is welcomed and immediately enrolled into service can be interrupted at the member level long before it ever reaches the leadership. When a new family joins your church, the first thing you should do is get to know them and invite them into your home, where you can ask about their walk with the Lord. Be the kind of member who shows them what fellowship in a faithful church is supposed to look like, so that what they experience from you sets the standard. The activity will come. Let it come second.
The second concerns how you’ve been measuring the spiritual life of other men in your church. The standard I’ve been describing doesn’t just live in the leadership. It lives in every member who has unconsciously assumed that the busy guys are the godly ones and the quieter men are somehow falling short. If you’re being honest with yourself, you can probably think of a man in your church right now whose walk with the Lord is genuinely deep, but who you’ve written off because he isn’t on the committees and isn’t seen at every event. Pay attention to those men and honor them by taking them seriously instead of treating them as second-tier members because they aren’t busy. As a matter of fact, many of these men are likely more spiritually equipped than your present leadership. That’s not a blanket statement, and it isn’t true across the board, but in many cases, it is.
The third concerns what you do when your church is in an elder selection process. Most members assume that the process belongs entirely to the existing leadership and that they have no voice in it. That’s not biblically accurate. Sure, some church polity is elder rule and not elder-led, but that doesn’t mean, as a member, you can’t raise your voice. We’re church members, not cult members. The qualifications Paul gives in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 are observable, meaning church members are positioned to evaluate them in ways elders alone may miss. When your church is gathering input on potential elders, your voice matters, and you should use it to name the men whose walks you’ve come to respect, even if their involvement isn’t as much as others. Raise honest questions about candidates being put forward whose primary qualification seems to be how often they’ve been seen serving. Do this respectfully and privately, but do it. A member who’s noticed a pattern in his church and remains silent during the elder selection has missed an opportunity Paul intentionally gave him.
The fourth is for any pastor or elder reading this. If what I’ve described matches the leadership culture in your own church, the work that follows is yours to lead. Examine your selection criteria honestly. The questions before you are whether the men currently being considered for office are being considered because of their character and competence rather than their visibility, and whether the qualifications in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 are actually being evaluated rather than assumed because the candidate has been around long enough. Look hard at whether there are men in your congregation whose qualifications match Paul’s list more clearly than the men currently on your radar. The leadership a church ends up with is the leadership it deserves, and the church under your care will end up with the leadership your selection process produces. The man who corrects this hands the next generation a healthier church than the one he received, and the Lord himself sees that work even when no one in the present generation does.
Everything I’ve described in the last few sections traces back to the claim I opened with. When the reverence for God’s holiness disappears from the life of a church, the things that fill the void tend to be activity-based, because activity is the easiest replacement to manage and the most visible to measure. A church that took the holiness of God seriously wouldn’t accept busyness as an alternative to spiritual maturity.
Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us show gratitude, by which we may offer to God an acceptable service with reverence and awe; for our God is a consuming fire.
(Hebrews 12:28-29)
The text doesn’t say acceptable service is a substitute for reverence and awe. It says that acceptable service flows from reverence and awe. Reverence is the root, service is the fruit. Reverse the order, and the service that gets offered isn’t the service the verse is calling for.
That’s what’s at stake. The good churches I’ve been describing look faithful from the outside, and by every external measure, they are. But 1 Corinthians 3 warns us that the day is coming when the Lord Himself will sort the wood and hay and stubble from the gold and silver and precious stones. That day is closer than most of us live, and when it arrives, any activity that wasn’t rooted in reverence will be exposed for what it was.
Iain Murray, in The Forgotten Spurgeon, writes that Spurgeon was remembered as climbing the steps to the pulpit of the Metropolitan Tabernacle, whispering, “I believe in the Holy Ghost.” Murray ties that detail to what he calls the true explanation of Spurgeon’s ministry, which was the person and power of the Holy Spirit. Spurgeon understood that the man preparing to preach needed to be a man who was dependent on the Spirit of God, because without that, the preaching would be empty.
What’s true of the pulpit is true of the whole church. A church that no longer trembles before God will lose its power to shape its people into the image of Christ.
I want to close by acknowledging that nothing I’ve written here is meant to be an indictment, and I’m not so jaded that I don’t understand how it can be taken. But I’ve written this because I love the church, and because the God Isaiah saw in the temple is the same God we claim to worship today. The question we all need to ask ourselves is whether our churches still know how to come into His presence the way Isaiah did.
Whatever you do, don’t accept the substitution of activity for reverence. The work of the church is real, and the activity that you and I are involved in as members of our churches is necessary. The New Testament expects every believer to be involved in the life of their local church. But the activity itself is the fruit, not the root. The root of all this is our ability to fellowship honestly with a holy God. A church full of activity can be a healthy and good church, as long as it hasn’t put its roots in that activity, because the church that does will eventually fall.
The God we worship is a consuming fire. He’s the One whose glory caused Isaiah’s temple to fill with smoke and whose voice shook the threshold of His own house, and the seraphim who stood before Him in that vision covered their faces because seeing that God would have been too much for them. That’s the God we serve. That’s the God who has invited us, in Christ, to draw near to Him. That invitation isn’t a casual one, and the response to it shouldn’t be either. The faithful church that’s forgotten how to tremble before the One it worships has forgotten the most important thing about itself.
In His Service,
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