A call for a new Reformation in the church: Reform the church, not a Reformed church

I have long felt that if we could just find a church that is “Reformed enough” we would be OK. That was the goal and the standard. I had the White Horse Inn mentality, that our goal should be churches that are more Reformed, and in being more Reformed they would be better. But over the past year or so, it has become apparent that being “Reformed” for the sake of being able to say you are “Reformed” really defeats the spirit of semper reformanda. If our goal is to constantly seek to conform ourselves to whichever Reformed confession we hold to and use that as the standard that determines one’s “Reformedness”, then I don’t really want any part of that. If the standard instead, if the goal of being Reformed is in reality and not just rhetoric to hold all that we do up to the Scriptures, sign me up. It is the Scripture that defines being Reformed, because I believe that an honest and comprehensive view of the Word leads inexorably to those doctrines that are labeled as “Reformed”: the absolute sovereignty of God in salvation, the utter sinfulness of man, the substitutionary death of Christ as propitiation, the doctrines of election, predestination and eternal security. Again, if being “Reformed” strays away from that and becomes just a series of church practices, I want no part of it. The R. Scott Clark camp that has declared that anyone who breaks from infant baptism cannot legitimately be called Reformed completely miss the mark because they have reduced being Reformed to being able to tick off boxes on a questionnaire. We need to reform the church, not make the church more “Reformed”. If we focus on Biblical restoration of the church, traditional “Reformed” doctrines will follow but trying to restructure a church that is at odds with the New Testament by adopting Reformed confessions is the theological equivalent of lipstick on a pig.

A few thoughts on this quest, many of which are merely repeats of previous posts.

We must absolutely break the hold that money has over the church. I keep hammering this but ever time I do I become more convinced of the pernicious influence of money on the church. Almost every church has strife over finances and many churches spend an inordinate amount of timing talking about, praying about, fussing about spending and giving. Take away the influence of money, as much as possible, and you start to take away the incentives to water down preaching and teaching, the opportunities to cause strife within the church over spending and budgets, you eliminate to an extent the problems of unregenerate church membership (if you aren’t worried about giving, you aren’t as worried about offending!). It isn’t an end-all solution, but it would go a long way toward legitimate reformation in the church.

We need to make the main thing the main thing. The Gospel is what matters and everything else, everything else, must become secondary to that. The church spends way too much time, too much money, expends too much energy on other stuff. Some of that stuff is very important, but when we have people who are functionally Biblically illiterate, that is a problem. We can go too far the other way and get so focused on right doctrine that we ignore those in need, but in my humble opinion the opposite is more often the case, that we spend lots of time on lots of stuff and at the proverbial end of the day failed the Gospel witness.

We absolutely must recover the doctrinal underpinnings of the Gospel, and return to a true fundamentalism. Not the faux fundamentalism we see where being a “fundamentalist” is worn like a badge and consists entirely of holding to a litany of credentials that have become meaningless “Independent, Fundamental, King James Only”. That sort of fundamentalism is not what the church needs, but we do need a return to the bedrock foundational truths: the inerrancy AND sufficiency of the Scriptures, the deity of Christ, His substitutionary atonement, His exclusivity, the reality of heaven and hell as literal, the sovereignty of God, etc. This is where the White Horse Inn, Together for the Gospel type ministries become vital. In T4G, we see four men from different denominational backgrounds that come together in affirmation of the essentials of the Gospel.

Simplify, simplify, simplify. Until we start to really concentrate on the Acts 2:42 functions of the church, we have no business trying to muck things up by complicating the purpose of the church. The purpose of the church is pretty basic: the apostle’s teaching, fellowship, breaking bread, prayer. Let’s stick to that and simplify how we do it. The more complicated we make the church, the more time we spend on stuff we shouldn’t be doing in the first place.

I would love to see a dismantling of the structures put in place over the centuries that in my opinion do far more to impede the Gospel than to promote it. That is a pretty ambitious statement. There is a lot of institutional inertia and protective self-interests in place. The seminaries, associations, denominations, multiple campus style churches all have had an enormous amount of time, money and emotion invested in them. I don’t see that going anywhere anytime soon.

Again there is nothing really new here, just the same thoughts I keep hashing over and then publishing on my blog. Really that is what I have this blog for, as an outlet for my thoughts, a place to work out concepts and ideas and hopefully to get input from others. Reforming the church is kind of my crusade. I have taken a long, uncomfortable look at myself over the last 14 months and I didn’t (and still don’t) like what I see. Along with that I am concerned about what the church has become. This hasn’t happened overnight, but the same failings keep cropping up and until we address the core problems, the cycle will repeat itself. The same thing holds true for me. Tinkering around the edges in my own sin hasn’t done much. What I was way overdue for and what I am striving for is a core examination of myself, held up to the mirror of Scripture and honestly realizing where my own hypocrisy and clinging to the old life has led me. Christ doesn’t call for incremental changes, the cross demands radical change. That holds true for me, it holds true for the church and I am pretty sure it holds true for you.