David de Bruyn’s blog series giving pastoral advice to various types of stagnant Christians continues this week with a post on the importance of church attendance. I have not agreed with every position he takes throughout these letters, but major kudos to David for bringing these issues to our attention and provoking thought and conversation with his posts.
Of course attending church is very important indeed. No difficulties with that.
It is often said that our spiritual gift tends to influence our perception of need in the body of Christ. This is as true of Bible teachers as it is of any other of gift of the Spirit. To the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To the man who lives to pastor the sheep, every spiritual problem looks like it can be solved with a sermon — or, in this case, a series of sermons.
The Argument for Regular Church Attendance
Here is how David puts his argument for regular church attendance:
“Church attendance, to have any real benefit in your life, functions by growing in understanding of an ongoing, continuous exposition of the Word. A sequential, weekly, verse-by-verse exposition of Scripture is how we gain a large-scale, coherent, and comprehensive Christian worldview. The Bible is a collection of books that have beginnings, middles and endings. The Bible as a whole is a long, sequential story of God’s revelation to man. A faithful preacher must preach through the whole counsel of God one verse, paragraph, chapter and book at a time. To attend a church the way you do is the equivalent of like hearing a phone conversation that drops the last third of every sentence. It is like reading a book which misprinted every other page as blank, or listening to a tune which omitted a third of the notes. The point is, you would not be able to make sense of what you are hearing. That’s exactly why your kind of church attendance does not promote growth. You can only grow through understanding of the Word, and understanding comes through connecting a very long series of biblical dots. Because your attendance is so sporadic, it is simply impossible to connect those dots.”
Now, there’s no disputing that regular church attendance where there is competent, sequential exposition of the Bible will certainly help a new believer grow in the knowledge of God. But the idea that the way we do this in modern, Western local churches (auditing one or two weekly forty-to-forty-five minute sermons) is the primary way the Lord Jesus intended his church to grow is the product of a long series of questionable assumptions about spiritual gifts and the church.
Questionable Assumptions Examined
Here are a few:
1/ That the teaching of the apostles was sequential
David doesn’t say this, but if he doesn’t believe it, then he has to believe that even if the teaching of the apostles wasn’t sequential, we have since developed something better than they had, or at least are doing as well as we can with it in an era in which the church has no prophetic gift.
A quick glance at the New Testament makes that a difficult position to hold. Paul’s church planting exercises began with a six- to nine-month missionary journey that took him through Cyprus, Pamphylia, Galatia and Perga. This was followed by a trip to Syria, Cilicia, Derbe, Lystra, Phrygia, Galatia, Troas, Philippi, Samothrace, Neopolis, Amphipolis, Thessalonica, Berea, Athens and, finally, a one-and-a-half-year stay in Corinth (where the most well-taught believers in the NT ironically turned out to be the worst practitioners of the faith, if 1 Corinthians accurately represents their spiritual condition). We could go through Paul’s entire ministry this way, but what quickly becomes evident is that nowhere other than in Corinth could the apostle have provided his new converts with the whole counsel of God, let alone sequentially. The sheer number of new churches and the limited time Paul had to invest in each of these before being driven out of town by the local Jews usually precluded it. Evidently, the Lord did not expect it. He had other ways of meeting the needs of those new and growing believers.
In fact, my experience of growing up in churches that did not have sequential ministry is that their congregants were no more or less mature than the churches that did. As one might expect, most churches have a spectrum of maturity notwithstanding their method.
2/ That spiritual growth requires a Bible in the form we have it today
The gospel spread through the world before the New Testament existed in its current form. Most congregations would have had the Old Testament in its entirety in written or oral form, but there is no evidence they studied it sequentially or exhaustively. As for the New Testament, most local churches in the first forty years or so had only a few of the gospels and epistles, making do with the gifts of prophecy, tongues and interpretation. The Bible in anything like its current form didn’t exist until the fourth century AD, and didn’t become ubiquitous until long after the invention of the printing press. And yet somehow, against all odds, no small number of our ancient brothers and sisters in Christ managed to grow to maturity without enjoying regular, sequential exposition of the Word from the platform.
And yes, I also forgot to mention that they had no platforms.
3/ That truth is best communicated through sermonizing
The teaching of Jesus was primarily reactive (responding to challenges or false teaching) or interactive (asking questions of others, answering theirs or using one idea to trigger another). The gospels (not to mention some of Paul’s epistles) touch on numerous subjects rather than being made up of sustained theological arguments. Only the Sermon on the Mount looks anything like a modern sermon, and it can be read in about 15 minutes at a normal pace, always assuming that Matthew recorded most or all that the Lord said uninterrupted at the time. Likewise, Paul’s recorded sermons are few and far between.
1 Corinthians 14 suggests first century churches were also largely interactive, involving the participation of many prophets and teachers rather than one man orating for a sustained period, let alone a single, dominant pastor/teacher. The modern sermon style (introduction, three points, conclusion, largely uninterrupted) owes more to the oratory of the Greeks than to the first century church, and its effectiveness as the primary tool of spiritual development is highly debatable. Far too many of us find it unengaging and doze through a great deal of it when the element of give-and-take is absent. Small, interactive study groups, in my experience, produce growth much more speedily and lastingly than a diet of sermons-only.
4/ That personal Bible study and reading are of limited utility
David actually says this:
“So what then of the person who hears 32 sermons a year, or 23, or 15? There is no question: the person is spiritually starving. No amount of personal devotions can make up for that kind of loss. Their comprehension of Scripture will certainly remain infantile, vague, and superficial. It will lack context, scope, and depth. It will misread God’s character, misunderstand the purpose of redemption, and misconstrue the nature of the Christian life. It is really high arrogance to acknowledge that the Bible is as large as it is (over 780,000 words in English), and then present oneself to hear it for about 20 hours in a year.”
In fact, I have come to the conviction through personal experience that there is no better way to grow in the Lord than to read the scripture for myself every single day. No amount of sermons can ever substitute for personal study and meditation. Those who do not read the Word for themselves will always lag behind those who do, even if they sit through hundreds of sermons. Truth absorbed second-hand from someone else without digging into it for yourself will never be as memorable as the things you learn from personal study of the scriptures.
5/ That any given church teaching program can reach everyone
A good plan for taking a local church through the word of God is a blessing to those who can take it in, but David defeats his own argument by telling us that it takes more than 1,189 sermons to teach the whole Bible passably. That’s almost thirty years of sitting in a pew at the rate of one message a week when you add in the topical sermons he believes are also necessary in addition to the sequential preaching of the scriptures. I would estimate a maximum of 20% of believers are privileged to stay in the same church for thirty years. For the rest of us, death, school, marriage, travel, business and interpersonal conflicts and disagreements with local church doctrine and practice often shorten our stay in one place or another, and the end of every period of fellowship is also a complete reset on the content of the sermons you are able to take in. In fifty years, I have attended nine different local gatherings for sustained periods, and many others off and on, each with a different program.
In short, no one church and no one teaching program, however faithfully executed, has been the primary contributor to my growth in the Lord. I suspect I am not alone.
6/ That becoming established in the faith takes a long time
In Acts 14, Paul and Barnabas appointed elders in every church in Lystra, Iconium and Antioch, and this despite only have visited any of those cities once previously, and for a very limited period. One can only believe they followed Paul’s later instructions concerning elders in Timothy and Titus when they did so. The obvious implication is that it doesn’t take some people as long to grow to maturity as others, even without a steady diet of good sermons. How these men did it remains a mystery, but we can be pretty sure it didn’t involve thirty years of unblemished church attendance.
In Short
There is no argument that regular, high-quality Bible teaching strongly contributes to spiritual growth. It is also no surprise to find a career pastor promoting sequential Bible teaching and regular attendance as a necessity. But the Lord works in many ways, and people learn in many ways. If sequential sermonizing is the best of these, one wonders why the early church seems to have been so much more effective in spreading the gospel, making and discipling new converts than our churches today.
Possibly it’s because the primary means of growing spiritually is doing, not hearing. What we hear is only useful to the extent we share, repeat and practice it.
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