An Article By John Armstrong

I read the following article by John Armstrong at theresurgence.com
I found it to be thought provoking. What do you think? God bless y'all real good.


Keeping Christ Primary: Still the Church's Greatest Task. Author: John Armstrong DATE: 2007 POSTED ON: 03.20.08
"Primary: earliest, original, of the first rank, of first importance, chief." So reads the entry in the Concise Oxford Dictionary (1976).

What, I ask you, is the church's primary task? Not what are the many good things the church should be doing, since there are a number of good answers to this question. But rather, what is really of first importance in the life of the church? How should leaders in your church think about doing the primary thing, that which is truly of first importance?

Spiritual Amnesia
It seems to me history reveals that the church of Jesus Christ is always in danger of spiritual amnesia. This danger seems even more evident to me now than it has been in many, many years. Today we argue about all kinds of church-related issues and needs. We even occasionally speak about revival and renewal. And we promote numerous causes-social, spiritual and political-but rarely do we address the need to restore the primary thing-the proclamation and place of Jesus Christ as Lord. Simply put, we don't see Christ as the end for which the Church exists in the world. He is, if we are concerned with him at all, seen by us as a means to an end but almost never as the end itself.

Listen to our conversations. Read our literature. Pay attention to our sermons and our popular speakers. Ask yourself: "Where is Christ in these orations and equations?" What really fires our imagination, moves our will, and strengthens our resolve? It doesn't seem to be Christ, not if our words and actions are a true barometer.

Recent years have witnessed a great deal of conversation about dysfunctional families in America. We even have Dr. Phil to remind us of this problem on a daily basis. There can be no doubt-the evidence abounds, no matter the angle from which you consider it-the problems of everyday life are deeply and systemically rooted in the life and structure of the family itself. Numerous case studies have clearly revealed that human life is best nurtured within the family. In fact, when family structure breaks down the results within the larger culture are clearly connected; social breakdown and rampant personal dysfunction happen everywhere. The connection that I am seeking to make here should be self-evident. But I use the family dysfunction category for a different context, namely the church family. I am suggesting that there should be no doubt that our most basic problems in the Christian life begin within God's family; i.e., inside the church.

The Need for Healthy Churches
Over the course of the last fifteen years, I have written a great deal about the need for healthier churches and stronger Christian leaders. I even wrote an entire book on the moral breakdown of ministers. I am called to invest my life in the kinds of people and issues that touch the health of the church. I have suggested for fifteen years, in public and private, that very few local churches in North America can be honestly described as robust and healthy. No one seems to take serious issue with my conclusion. I have come to think the reason is fairly obvious-we instinctively know that our congregations are not healthy.

My question then is really very simple: "If this observation is true, that our churches are not spiritually robust and healthy, then why aren't we deeply concerned about the renewing of our dysfunctional congregations?" And if we are concerned, what should be primary in our effort for restoring the church's health?

Plainly the most dysfunctional of all churches, at least on the pages of the New Testament, had to be the church in Corinth. From reading the Pauline letters to Corinth we discover that there were at least four different rival camps within this one church. Members lied to each other, cheated and stole from one another, and even took their fellow members to court to settle personal differences. Furthermore, these members engaged in the most ignominious sexual behavior within the life of the congregation. To top it off they routinely got drunk at their regular celebrations of the Lord's Supper. The apostle informs us that God's judgment against them resulted in some pretty direct discipline.

So then whoever eats the bread and drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord. Everyone ought to examine themselves before they eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For those who eat and drink without discerning the body of Christ eat and drink judgment on themselves. That is why many among you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep. But if we were more discerning with regard to ourselves, we would not come under such judgment (1 Corinthians 11:27-31).

Most of the church growth experts that I know would have written this congregation off as a bad church plant and simply moved on, counting their losses and planting a new and more exciting local church with a bright young entrepreneurial pastor. I can hear such experts saying: "This church doesn't deserve our support. It can only drain our energies and resources. Move on. Start fresh. Let this one die. New churches, with vision and hope, are always to be preferred to old ones with their huge problems and serious breakdown." To quote the old gambler, "You've got to know when to hold 'em and you've got to know when to fold 'em."

Thankfully Paul didn't follow this kind of worldly advice. Around A.D. 55 he began to write a letter to this flock. Eventually there were several epistles sent to the church in Corinth, perhaps four in all, though only two are included in the canon of the New Testament. These letters urged the Christians at Corinth to cut out the nonsense and to correct their problems by properly understanding the gospel of Jesus Christ. A careful reading of the first letter demonstrates a number of specific pastoral steps that should be followed to resolve specific problems in the Corinthian church, problems that were both ethical and doctrinal.

Near the very beginning of Paul's first letter we get an important insight into the primary thing needed to bring health back to this church. This insight had clearly been missed in the Corinthian context. I want to suggest that it is too easily passed over, or simply assumed, in the modern church context. Paul wrote:

And I, when I came to you, brothers and sisters, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.
1 Corinthians 2:1-5

Put simply, Paul says that a healthy, balanced and prospering church is not a church focused upon size, budget or program. Church health is not about unique sectarian systems of doctrine, or the promotion of special interest groups that defend the right issues. Furthermore, a healthy church does not make human wisdom, or even pulpit eloquence, the centerpiece of its ministry. The church is at its best, and thus is the healthiest, when it keeps "the main thing" the main thing, that is when it makes Christ primary.

Most New Testament scholars agree that Paul was an intellectual giant. He was bi-lingual, if not tri-lingual. He had the equivalent education of a PhD in religion and philosophy. He understood the major issues of his day and he could debate with the best Jewish and Greek minds. But it seems this brilliant man decided, as an act of sheer faithfulness to God, to keep that which is of first importance primary.

This observation doesn't mean that Paul was an anti-intellectual. He did not head up the ancient "Know Nothing Party." Ignorance is never the mother of true piety. A careful study of Paul's sermons and letters will demonstrate his amazing literary and intellectual powers. These were all used to great advantage, as his letters show.

What Truly Makes a Church Healthy?
What Paul is saying is actually quite plain-a healthy church is not established on human talent, conventional wisdom, or sociological/market-oriented insights. Why? Because "[T]he foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men" (1 Corinthians 1:25). "For," Paul adds, "what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake" (2 Corinthians 4:5).

What Paul is teaching is patently obvious-the healthiest congregation, at its very best, must revolve around the primacy of the person of Jesus Christ. And we do not proclaim our theology, though inevitably we must have one that helps to produce health. We surely do not embrace and promote a philosophy, though we must think deeply about the ultimate issues posed by various philosophical questions. And we should not make liturgy, institutional well-being, numerical growth, or denominational and special interests our raison d'être. What we are called to do, if the church is to be truly healthy, is simple really.

We must unapologetically make Jesus Christ the centerpiece of everything we preach, everything we pray, and everything we seek to do in this world.
No other reading of the words of the apostle "For I decided to know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified" (1 Corinthians 2:2) make any sense at all if we miss this point. Everything else, important as it may be, is secondary. This must be primary.

Martin Luther understood this text to be the very center of all true theology and faithful Bible reading. He wrote, "There is not a word in the Bible which is extra crucem, which can be understood without reference to the cross." And the great English theologian P.T. Forsyth put the same truth this way: "You do not understand Christ until you understand his cross."

If my reading of Paul is faithful, and it seems self-evident that it is, then a church does not revolve around a pastor, as important as this office and ministry is for a healthy church. There are two extremes to be avoided by this observation. First, a healthy church will almost always have a healthy pastor, or several healthy pastors. But this is not the primary thing to focus the church's ministry upon. Second, the elders and/or deacons (or church councils) are not the central thing in the life of your church either. It is important that you have godly and faithful leaders. Don't misunderstand me. But some seem to think that if you get the right leaders and the right system of leadership in place you will have health, ipso facto. (I have seen this emphasis fail time and time again over the past thirty-five years of ministry.) But if the proper emphasis is not on our leaders, then it is not on us as the congregation either. We are not the center of attention, as shocking as that sounds to modern Christian ears. To understand this point about what is truly primary would, I am convinced, lead to the true health of many Christians and thousands of local congregations. Read these words slowly and carefully:

The church is not about you, it is about him! Christ is Lord and you are not!
Your strengths, your weaknesses, your opinions, your gifts, and your personal experiences are not what the church is about. End of argument. Case closed.

The ancient Jews thought that the idea of a Messiah, crucified on a cross, was totally obnoxious, patently ridiculous. The Greeks thought this business of the cross was foolishness. They held this idea in utter contempt. Paul ignored the entire spectrum of this kind of response and tells us, simply, that he preached Christ crucified, "whom God made our wisdom and our righteousness" (1 Corinthians 1:30). Why?

Because Jesus Christ had been raised from the dead!
This fact established Paul's entire mission. John Calvin was right when he said, "The resurrection of Christ is the commencement of his reign" and added, "It is the most important article of our faith." Christ risen from the dead meant that Christ was Lord over all. J. I. Packer has this right and thus concludes: "The victim of Calvary . . . is loose and at large." Christ alone has authority to forgive sins. Christ alone is the fact of all facts, the truth of all truths. Christ alone and Christ above all else. That is Paul's point. He desired to decrease in order that Christ might increase as Lord. He must be primary!

Finally, Paul plainly understood what we have so easily forgotten. The church is the only organization, in reality the only organism, ordained by God to make Christ known to the world. The Bush administration doesn't have this mandate. Your place of employment doesn't have this mandate, even if it is a Christian institution. The school system doesn't have this commission, public or Christian. Only the church, expressed in various and diverse local settings, has this commission from God to preach this message, to live out this story, and to make followers of the resurrected Messiah.

But preaching Christ as primary is much more than proclaiming good expositions from the Bible each Sunday. If this was all Paul desired he could have made this point and closed shop. But he spent chapter after chapter making a far more important point in 1 Corinthians. We simply cannot preach Christ as primary and be done with it. No, we must live what we proclaim and we must work it out within our family (the church) or we will become a dysfunctional family. We are to do this work, which is called by Paul "work[ing] out your salvation with fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12). We do not do the work to earn our salvation but we dare not profess God's salvation without doing this work. This means that we must be reconciled one to another. It means we must actively pursue the healing of our churches. And beyond all else it means that we must make Christ the primary goal of all we undertake. Health is not an option if w e would be faithful to the call of Christ to make him primary. We must address our dysfunction with the only cure that still works.

If most of our churches are not healthy, and again I think most of us would admit this to be true, then we must do everything that we can to restore them to this biblical pattern of "Christ alone." This pattern begins with making Christ the primary issue, not with us or with our building of sandcastles on the beach. A. W. Tozer was right when he said, "The cross of Christ is the most revolutionary thing ever to appear among men."

A Prayer to Keep Christ Central
"God make me an instrument of your peace. Let me sow love and allow me to be part of the healing of the church, not of its further division and dysfunction. Help me to keep the primary issue central-the supremacy of Christ and him crucified. Please do this Father, for the glory of Christ, Amen."