Marks of An Effective Church, Part 1
Selected Scriptures
This morning, as we come to our message, we're going to be digressing from 1 Corinthians because I want to share with you a message that maybe we needed to share a long time ago. As you well know, I have a great love for the church, not only Grace Community Church, but the Church of our Lord Jesus Christ in general. I have a great love for men of God, for pastors in churches, so I have a great burden that the church should be what God intended it to be.
When I hear the words of the Apostle Paul in Acts 20, and he said, "Take care of the church, which Christ has purchased with His own blood," that's a tremendously serious responsibility, and I have a great concern for the church, and at Grace Church, we have endeavored to be obedient to the Word of God in framing the directives of this church.
We are not all what God would have us to be, by any means, but we believe that we have a grip on some of the basics that make a church what it ought to be. Off and on, scattered here and there, from time to time, we've endeavored to share with you these priorities, these basics. But this morning, I want to pull all of them together, and I want to share with you, and it will take us two weeks, this week and next week; but I want to share with you, what are the marks of an effective church.
No week goes by; I guess no day goes by, but some other church contacts us and asks us to help give them direction. They desire to know how it is that God has blessed us and what it is that we have done that has caused that. Well, this is a ministry that goes on constantly. About a year or more ago, we put out a little syllabus, a little leadership syllabus, and we can't keep them. In fact, they're all gone and in a reprint now. They're distributed all over the country, because there's such a desire to know what are the foundational principles of a church that is effective for God.
And that's really what I want to share with you this morning. And God has blessed Grace Community Church. There's no question about that. God has displayed evidence of His power and His presence again and again and again. Blessings from His grace have been abundantly heaped upon us. We've seen people saved; we've seen lives changed; we've seen homes put back together; we've seen Christians maturing; we've seen them reproductive; we've seen people coming from many places to be a part of Grace Church.
There is something here that God is doing; that God is blessing, and I really feel in my heart that maybe everything we've already seen is only the prologue if the Lord should carry to what He could do or what He will do. And people are saying why is it happening there? Our church has the same Scriptures, the same Holy Spirit, the same Lord Jesus Christ, and it doesn't seem as though too much is going on at our place. Why is it happening there?
Well, maybe the best answer to that is because God is sovereign, and God chose to have it happen here, and we're just spectators. And, in a sense, that is true, isn't it? God builds His church; Jesus builds His church; we don't, and He builds it the way He wants, where He wants, when He wants, how He wants, and yet that isn't all of the story. It isn't just is sovereign choice. There must be submission to certain principles that allow the church to be all that the Lord wants it to be. There are some basic things. Size is not the issue. There are tremendously successful and God-blessed churches that are very small. There are other churches that are very large and having no spiritual success or very little spiritual success.
You never measure a church's spiritual light by its numbers. The easiest thing to do is attract people. That's easy. A hard one is to make disciples. Size isn't the issue. Conferences are held all over America constantly on how to be big. I've never gone to one of them. I'm not interested in that. Who needs to be big? That isn't the issue. The issue is to how to make disciples, and it seems as though we have been trapped in a contest across our land to see who's the biggest church. That isn't the point. That is irrelevant to God.
There are reasons, though, why a church does prosper spiritually and why it does grow numerically, and these reasons, I think, are important for us to understand. I suppose that I've always been committed to these principles. In fact, I'm confident that I have, but I never really set them out in order. I needed somebody else to do that for me. And when I was at the Moody Pastor Conference with Jerry Mitchell and Jim Harris and our staff, Howard Hendricks from Dallas Theological Seminary, spoke one day.
And in his message, he gave what he felt were the marks of a successful church. He didn't take very much time, and he didn't elaborate on them in detail, and he didn't give any scriptural support for them. That wasn't his purpose. He just listed them. He said, "In all of my travels around the country," and he's been preaching in church after church after church after church for years and years; he says, "In every kind of church, from small to large, from very, very traditional, very routine ritual-oriented to very free-form, let‑it‑all‑hang‑out kind of churches, and all these churches, conglomerate, have had the same key factors that have made them successful."
So, he said, "These are the things that I have seen as the common denominators of a successful church, and the more of these the church has, the more successful it is. Not all of them have all of them, but all of them have some of them. And the more they have, the more successful they are. Well, I listened to that message, and I felt like somebody was reciting to me all of the things I believe, and you'll never know how confirming that was to my heart, so know that the things that we believe in here are not something that we pulled out of the air, but here's somebody who's never been to this church in his life, somebody that I never talked to prior to that, and he says these are the things that make a church what God wants it to be.
Well, I have felt also, not to add anything to him or take anything away from him, but I felt there were some other things as well that I would add to the list, so some of his and some of mine has become the message this morning. No. 1: You can just jot them down. There will be more than ten, but that's all you need for today. We'll never get close to that. No. 1: Now, here are key ingredients in a successful church.
One: A plurality of Godly leaders; a plurality of Godly leaders. You cannot bypass this and get to God's blessing. There must be Godliness in leadership. There must be Holy men who are in the positions of direction and responsibility in a church. There is no substitute for that. "Christ is the head of the church," Paul says repeatedly: Ephesians, Colossians. Christ, as the head of the church, wants to rule His church. All He needs to rule His church is Holy people through whom He can rule. Unholy people just get in the way. It's amazing how most churches choose their leadership, the people who are most successful in business, the people who have the most to say, the people who have the most money, the people who are professional people. That's how most churches choose.
I had a pastor confess to me one of the problems that he had in working with his Board was that half of them were Christians in and a half of them were not, and I said, yes, that is a problem, since Satan and Christ don't cooperate. A man is not to be the leader of the church because he is the wisest, because he is the best businessman, because he has the most money, because he has innate leadership ability, because he is a super salesman. He is to be a leader in a church because he is a Man of God.
That is the beginning of all effectiveness in the church. God has always mediated his rule in the world through Godly people. You go back in the beginning, and God mediated his rule on earth through Adam, and even after the fall, it was through human conscience, and after that, it was through government, and then after that, God began to mediate His rule through patriarchs, and after that, it was through judges, remember? And then it was through kings and prophets and priests, and in the Gospels of Canaan, he mediated his rule on earth through the presence of Christ, and now, it is through the church, and the church is specifically by its leaders, and the leaders are simply the representatives of Jesus Christ in the world, and the primary ingredient in leadership is Holiness, man of God. That's what's needed in the church.
And it takes time to make a man of God. Do you know that? It takes time. Forty years, it took God to make something out of Moses. It took years of Joshua being an understudy to Moses before Joshua was ready to lead. It took years to prepare Abraham. It took years to prepare David. It took time and effort and work to get Peter straightened out. It took time in the desert to make something out of Paul. It took time for Philip to cease being a deacon and become an evangelist. Takes time to make a man of God.
When Timothy stayed in Ephesus, he realized that he had toreally get the church rolling, and the job was to bring the saints to maturity, and he knew that he couldn't do it alone, but that he needed leaders for the church, and so Paul said to him, "That's good, Timothy, it is commendable for a man to desire to be a leader, but you make sure he is a certain kind of man. You just don't want volunteers; you want certain kind of men." Titus faced the same thing in Crete. Paul said to him, "Now, Titus, you ordained elders in every city. You pick out those leaders, but make sure they are certain kinds of leaders. They are Godly leaders."
And so in 1 Timothy 1-7, in Titus 1:5-10, Paul gives a profile of a Godly leader. These are the kind of people that are to be leading the church. I'm going to give you the qualifications, and there are 20 of them given in those two passages. I'm just going to read them; listen. Leaders are to be above reproach. That's a great place to start, isn't it? Above reproach; that is, to be unblamable, to have nothing in their life for which they can be reproached or blamed or rebuked.
Two: They are to be one-woman men; that is, they are to love their wives totally and devotedly.
Three: They are to be temperate. That means stable, spiritually, solid. They have it together. They've got a clear, Biblical, spiritual perspective on life.
Four: They are to be prudent. Sometimes, the Word is translated sober-minded, and it means they know the priorities. They know the priorities.
Five: They are to be respectable. That means they have such a well-ordered life, such a well-arranged life that they are honored for it.
Six: Hospitable. That means they are to love strangers.
Seven: They are to be apt to teach. That's one word in the Greek, a word that is used very seldom, only twice. It is diddaktikos. It is never used to speak of the gift of teaching, and it is never used to speak of the office of teacher. It is something different. It is not saying that a leader must be a great Bible teacher. You're saying that he must be diddaktikos. That means two sides of the same thing; he must be teachable. That's one side of it, and he must be able to communicate to others. And the idea of the word is not so much the dynamics of his teaching as the sensitivity to other people. That is, he is not only teachable, but he teaches with a meekness and a gentleness and a right spirit. Nothing is worse in leadership then a guy who comes on like this. "Listen, this is what you got to do because this is what it says, so do it or else." See? No, that doesn't make it.
This Word is somebody whose gentleness is teachable and whose gentleness shows up as he communicates. It's a sensitivity Word. It's a gentle Word. It's a submissive Word, somebody who can receive and give with sensitivity.
Eight: He is not to be addicted to wine or any alcohol or any drugs of any kind. He's to be in control of himself.
Nine: Not self‑willed. That means self-centered. You can't have people in leadership who are all concerned about themselves. The most important thing about a leader, in this area, is that he be concerned not about himself, but about the people, right; the people that he's leading.
And I find that this is a tremendous thing. It's so much easier for me to preach in this church. It really is. I would rather preach here than anyplace. You say that's because you know we love you and we tolerate you; well, that's part of it, but the major factor is this. I preach here with a totally different mental attitude than I do anywhere else. When I preach here, I am concerned about you because I'm caught up in your lives, and I am preaching in order that you might learn and that you might grasp these things and that your life might be changed, but when I go somewhere else, I don't know anybody sitting out there, and so, you know, I'm not concerned about them. I'm concerned about me. That's right. I'm more concerned about how I come across than about what they learn because I don't know them.
And I find that I'm much more able to teach here and preach here because it's you that I care about. When I go somewhere else, all I'm thinking is, "Boy, all those people are going to say, 'That John MacArthur; let's check him out; see if he's any good.'" So we are to be not self-centered, but people-centered, not self-willed. All right?
Ten: Not quick-tempered. Leadership cannot be quick-tempered, patient.
Eleven: Not cognatious. Remember that old word, cognatious? What does that mean? It means literally not a physical fighter. For a leader of the church, you don't want somebody who goes around popping people with their fist. That's literally what it means. It doesn't mean attitude; it's the actual act of delving somebody. You don't want a guy at a board meeting, standing up and going, "Yeah, you know," shoving the guy off the table or something.
Twelve: Here comes the attitude. You don't want somebody who's contentious. That word's only used in the Bible in these two lists, and it means somebody who likes to compete and debate, who wants to argue all the time.
Thirteen: He is to be gentle.
Fourteen: Free from the love of money; not necessarily free from money, free from the love of it.
Fifteen: Managing his house well. That means he keeps his children under control with dignity. I'm sure there are some people who keep their kids under control, but I'm not so sure they do it with dignity.
Sixteen: A good reputation with unbelievers. I mean, what does the world think of him? That's important because he's out there knocking heads with them, and they're going to know whether he's for real.
Seventeen: Loving what is good. He is to love what is good, a lover of good things, teaching just, which means fair.
Nineteen: Devout, which means he is Holy in his practical life.
Twenty: Not a new convert. Now, there you have the qualifications given in the Scriptures for leaders in the church. Do you think it's important? Do you think God has got a message there for us? That's the kind of people he wants in leadership. If you don't have that, then at the very beginning, you've got problems. In fact, it's so important that when an elder sins, he is to be publicly rebuked in front of the whole congregation, 1 Timothy 5:20; men of God. God wants.
Look at 1 Timothy 6, and let me just show you that term appears in the Bible, Man of God, 1 Timothy 6:11, Paul says to Timothy, "That thou, O Man of God." That's a beautiful title, Man of God. What does it mean? Well, there are two sides to a man, and one is negative and one is positive. The negative side; flee these things. The positive side, what? Follow after these things. So, Man of God flees certain things, and the earlier part of the chapter discusses those; pride, money, discontent, using his authority to manipulate people, etc., etc. He flees those; he follows Verse 11, righteousness, Godliness, faith, love, patience, meekness and fights the good fight of faith. In the leadership of the church, the Bible says there must be Godly men, Godly leaders and a plurality of them, more than one.
All right, the second point, the second thing necessary to an effective church, and we're not, by any means, exhausting these, just suggesting them, but the second is that the church must have functional goals and objectives. Now, we must say that the word "functional" is the most important word. We must have functional goals and objectives. And people with no goals are people with no direction, and if you don't know where you're going, you don't know when you've gotten there, so you have no sense of accomplishment.
We can't be like the man who jumped on his horse and ran off madly in all directions. There has to be some direction to what we're doing. Can you imagine a baseball game with no bases? Wouldn't have a lot of sense to it, would it? You hit the ball and you wouldn't know what to do. There have to be goals. There have to be clear-cut objectives placed before people so they know what they are to zero in on.
Howard Hendricks said, "The reason so many of us feel we're doing so well is that we don't know what we're doing." There must be the establishing of goals. Now, first, there must be the establishing of Biblical objectives. Now, if I were to ask you what the Biblical objectives of the church are, you would be able to answer me. I'm quite confident of that because we've told you and told you and told you. We are to win people to Christ, and we are to make them into mature saints, right? We call that evangelism identification or reach and teach or whatever.
We are to win people to Jesus. We are to mature them. We have goals such as this. We want to unify families and prevent divorce and unhappy homes. We want to educate children and the things of God and bring Him out so that when there are old, they won't depart from them. We have a lot of Biblical goals, but in addition to Biblical goals, we must have functional goals. And this is the thing I want to talk about for a minute.
Functional goals are stepping stones to get to Biblical ones. It isn't enough to say, "Now, folks, we must learn the Word of God," and then just keep saying it. You must go a step further and provide some steps to get to that goal, right; for example, if we say we want to edify; we want to build up the church; we want to mature in the saints, the next thing we say is how are we going to accomplish that?
One: I know this is what I'm going to do. I will teach the Word of God from the pulpit. That is an objective that is functional. I will do that, and that will realize, in part, the Biblical goal of maturity, right? Not only that, we will develop a system of education. We call it ACTS, Active Christian Training Seminars, where people can go at whatever level of understanding they want and whatever level they feel they're capable of handling and learn whatever they need to learn. And so we have a scramble system, where adults can go here and there and learn as they feel the need to know.
In addition to that, we will develop the Lagos Bible Institute for people who have reached a certain level and want more knowledge of the Word of God. We'll have classes at night. Now, we find more people who are available in the day; we'll have them in the daytime. These are functional objectives to realize Biblical goals. Not only that, we know there are people who would like to meet together in other places and not have to come here. Let's have home Bible studies, and so we have, I guess, about 50 or 60 of those going on.
We have family curriculum provided for the fathers and the family to supplement your own training in the home. This is another functional objective. We have that goal; we wanted to accomplish that, and now we've realized it. We want to have an ACTS program; now, we have it. We wanted to have a Lagos; we have it. We wanted to have a family program. Thank God, we have that. You see, we set some functional goals, and we realized those goals, and we have more.
Now, sometimes, we set a functional goal and we don't always realize it, because sometimes, God has different plans than we do, but that's fun because when something doesn't work out, we can say God did it. There's a great first that you ought to remember. It's Proverbs 16:9. It says this: "The mind of a man plans his way, but the Lord direct his steps." The mind of a man plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps. We'll lay the plans, but God may divert us because that's His prerogative.
You remember, the Apostle Paul, in Acts, was trying to go into Bithynia, and the Holy Spirit didn't let him, and then he said, "Well, okay, I'll go over here," and the Holy Spirit didn't let him go their either, so he couldn't go north; he couldn't go south; he'd already been east. He said, "I guess I'm supposed to go west." He went west, and, all of a sudden, he got a call, a call to Macedonia. God shut some things off that He thought were functional objectives and directed him anywhere he wanted him to go. God is in the business of changing our plans, which is great. Let Him do it. Paul wrote to Romans, and he said, "I'm going to come to you on the way to Spain." He set some goals; some you realize, some you don't, and you have to submit all of them to the direction of God.
But it is important that you have those. Another goal that we have in the church, in the Biblical sense, is even evangelism. We want to win people to Christ, don't we? How are we going to get to that? Well, one way is to preach the responsibility of the believer to evangelize. Another way is to offer classes in evangelism.
Another way is to insert in the bulletin; what you see in there this morning, which, periodically appears as an impetus, a motivator, an instruction on how to be more effective in your witness. You see, these are functional goals that help us realize Biblical objectives. The reason we have baptism on Wednesday night the way we do, where we have the people give a testimony and said; I usually will say, "Whoever led this person to Christ, are you here?" Have you heard me say that? Are you here? I said, "Who is it? Is it Mrs. So - and" The reason I do that is because I want the other people to know that these people are being faithful in sharing Christ; that it might become a motivation for the rest of us to have the joy of seeing somebody baptized that we led to Christ.
There are all different ways to get at it. These are functional goals. They've got to be there. You can't just be nebulous. You've got to give people objectives and move toward them. All right, thirdly, the effective church also has a strong emphasis on discipleship, a strong emphasis on discipleship. Now, remember, these are things that are true of any successful church anywhere in America or anywhere else in the world. These are things that are not just what I believe, but these are things proven to be success factors, a strong emphasis on discipleship.
There must be a concerted effort to teach people the Word of God to bring them to maturity, and everybody is to be involved in that. The teaching pastor is to perfect the saints. The saints are to do the work of the ministry that the body may be built up. You can build the church by your ministr