Finding a Biblical Church

Dealing with history and the apostate reality

There is a podcast of this material here, with quite a bit of additional commentary.

We are in a real mess in the midst of a toxic snarl of denominations, the American ideal of the rugged individualist, non-Biblical doctrine, and a historic past which is actually the record of how Satan made the church irrelevant.

Obviously, I could write a book about this. Frankly, there is not enough time to do that. The end is coming very fast. So, the Lord has asked me to write a practical guide to deal with the cultural realities of America today. I assume most of these things will work worldwide. But, I have no experience outside the borders of the United States.

I do have wide experience in a variety of churches

When I met the Lord in 1974, I was attending an Episcopal church. In the nearly 44 years we were married, Pat (my wife) and I always considered ourselves to be Episcopalian Charismatics. But they had gone off the rails and we had no church home.

We attended Methodist, Lutheran, Baptist, Assembly of God, Foursquare, Calvary Chapel, non-denominational, and Potters House of Prescott (I consider them to be evangelistic special forces). Plus we visited many others, looking for a good church. We always had a home Bible study and that was the core of our ministry.

Where did the church start?

We knew a fair amount about this because when we were married the Episcopalian church was involved in a major revision of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. Our interest was in Rite III. It was considered the less formal version for smaller groups. But what we found interesting was all the research about what believers used as a church service for the first couple hundred years, before the institutional church began corrupting things.

Most churches were home churches, in large homes. They were consciously modeled after a synagogue service. They had Agape meals that were modeled (more or less) after the Seder meals of Pesach (Passover). But they were much more free than anything we have today. They were led by spirit-filled people.

There is only one description of a church service in the Bible

What then, brethren? When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let all things be done for edification. If any speak in a tongue, let there be only two or at most three, and each in turn; and let one interpret. But if there is no one to interpret, let each of them keep silence in church and speak to himself and to God. Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said. If a revelation is made to another sitting by, let the first be silent. For you can all prophesy one by one, so that all may learn and all be encouraged; and the spirits of prophets are subject to prophets. For God is not a God of confusion but of peace.

1 Corinthians 14: 26–33

The synagogue services read scriptures from the Law and the Prophets with a lectionary which had a specified reading from the Torah, and a complementary reading from the Haftarah (the Prophets). As we can see, Paul’s service above was quite a bit looser than that. Paul’s model was more under control of the Holy Spirit through the leadership of the elders. There seems to be a lot of participation of the congregation.

Fairly soon, congregations developed a leader who was the normal teacher, teaching the Apostle’s doctrine. By the 4th century, the scriptures became the only reliable resource as the written Word of God. To fight heresies, the church no longer understood how to use the Holy Spirit to solve those issues—and human doctrine was developed.

The problem with that is that doctrine is a human intellectual construct designed to determine legitimacy. Church leadership quickly began using that to control the form of church services. People were warned to not base decisions on emotionally hearing from God, and very soon that morphed into “God does not speak to us any more except through the clergy.” Later the Written Word of God was added as a source of God speaking.

That sad lie has been the default in the church since that time. Also as churches grew bigger, and got rich, the church services devolved into spectator events. Eventually they were done in Latin, a language the people did not speak or understand.

The spectator style of church service sucked out all genuine spiritual life

What no one noticed was that church became an event produced by professionals. These professionals gradually became focused on theatrical perfection in the liturgical churches. But the major problem was that normal people were uneducated and could not read. The Roman Catholics became The Church in the West.

The teachers of apostolic truths were converted to an overly educated clergy class. The clergy were to produce a doctrinally pure service. Homilies were seen as relatively minor teachings which complemented the liturgy, promoting the current religious line of the huge political church..

Very quickly, Christianity changed from a life-changing event to a religious ritual with no discipleship at all. In that environment, aberrations like Purgatory, worship of Mary, the rosary bead ritualized confession, and so on took over for the people.

The disappearance of worship

One result of the huge institutional church was that the whole concept of worship was lost. Without the involvement of the Holy Spirit, the best that could be found was praise. Much of it was wonderful music. But the true spiritual worship of believers talking to their God in direct adoration was lost.

The Reformation brought in doctrinal warfare with liturgical perfection

Nothing else was possible with the institutional church controlled by entrenched seminary-indoctrinated clergy. In the liturgical churches, even major movements like Pietism and Hans Hauge’s baptism of the Holy Spirit with its revolutionary spiritual life among the Lutherans were brought under control and forced to the edges of religion.

The spectator church services offered no help to the denominational membership. Lay people were not allowed to even participate without clergy approval. Even Sunday School used the same model. Adult education was usually taught by the clergy class. What was taught was intellectual doctrine, not Biblical truth. The power of the Holy Spirit has been completely removed from the Christian religion.

The Evangelical movement helped

The Great Awakenings brought radical change to the Protestants who were the result of the Reformation. As GotQuestions.org notes: “Evangelicals believe in the authority of the Bible, that salvation is available through Jesus Christ alone, that Christians should live out their faith and make disciples of all nations, and that they should interact with society and effect change.”

Armed with the Bible and True Doctrine, they brought in a new religious model which brought back some of the power of the Acts of the Apostles. They brought in an evangelistic focus which brought about world missions operating within the colonial model of the European church.

But there are severe issues within the Evangelical view

By this time, church has been so radically restructured that basic needs are no longer part of the church. The spectator model is assumed with all of its issues. The following brief list of nine points shows us the corrupting problems. The basic problem is that the Holy Spirit is replaced by the written word of God.

• With the Holy Spirit driven out, intellectuals rule: this produces a seminary-trained clergy class who lead by doctrinal statements with no spiritual power. Teaching and preaching focus on man-made doctrine.

• Believers remain unavoidable sinners by nature: Even though Yeshua has set us free from sin, evangelicals believe freedom from sin only takes place after we die. This is directly unscriptural. Romans 6: 11–14 clearly tells us this belief is no longer true.

“So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. Do not yield your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but yield yourselves to God as men who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.”

I wrote an article about this in my spiritual warfare section. It shows you how to fix this problem and keep yourself functionally sin-free on a practical level.

• The scriptures became the inerrant Word of God: The book was seen as the only trustworthy source of Truth. This idea is severely flawed as we see in Yeshua’s strong rebuke of the people in John 5: 39–40.

“You keep examining the Bible because you think that in it you have eternal life. Those very Scriptures bear witness to me, but you won’t come to me in order to have life!”

• A personal relationship with the Messiah was replaced by study of the written Word of God: It is seen as the major [or only] way that God talks to His people today.

• God does not talk with us any more: For that to become the norm, the Holy Spirit is necessary at a level which is not normally available in evangelical churches.

• The focus is exclusively on evangelism: The idea of discipleship was reduced to training about soul-winning. The concept of body ministry “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ” [which Paul talked about in Ephesians 4: 12] is lost.

• Spiritual warfare was powerless: This is also the result of focus on the written Word—without the Power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit tells us when evil spirits are involved. Quoting scripture is not spiritual warfare—unless the Holy Spirit tells you to do that.

• Word churches often become Bible idolaters: The Bible is raised to an ungodly place of worship.

• The Baptism of the Holy Spirit is taught as true, BUT: it is not part of their daily experience. This is even the normal experience among evangelical pentecostals.

Evangelicals make even Pentecostalism powerless

As I just covered in the 9th problem, though classical Pentecostals were used to bring back the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, most pentecostal church services are as weak and powerless as any Evangelical service.

There are good solutions to all of these nine problems & all the rest

Pat and I were truly blessed to be saved and filled with the Holy Spirit while we were in a liturgical church. It enabled us to see the problems with both the Evangelicals and the Pentecostals. We were not surprised to be given the left foot of fellowship by the Episcopalians. It was startling to be treated the same way by Evangelical and Pentecostal churches. I forgot to mention another factor that helped us understand these things.

My wife had a clear, strong calling as a pastor, not a CEO

She had no desire to be the spiritual head of a church. She was a classical pastor, a shepherd, a counselor, a mentor. The current definition of pastor in the American church is an abomination. No matter how hard you look, you will find nowhere in scripture that a pastor is called as an executive level organizational leader. Galatians 3: 28 is simply ignored—along with “call no man Father or Rabbi”.

CEO is not one of the five offices given in Ephesians 4. It’s not in the list of seven in Romans 12 either. The CEO and King of the church is Yeshua Messiah. He leads by the power of the Holy Spirit through His helpmate—we the Bride.

One of the reasons I loved her so much was her clear call to ministry. She understood agape in the core of her character. The Lord made it clear that I was to enable her calling. I did that with joy for just under 44 years. She was the only human who understood my calling as an anointed teacher. It turned out that we were anathema to evangelicals and even most pentecostals.

By the mid-20th century, Life was in home Bible studies

This was our ministry, no matter what church we were attending. But, it was obvious to us that this is where the life was in all the churches. Soon after we were married the megachurch paradigm took the attributes of evangelical and pentecostal churches, and made a spectator entertainment event the core of its organization.

It used some of the worst aspects of contemporary music with driving rhythms, enchanting repetitious lyrics, pulsing flashing lights, and smoke to eliminate worship, and even most praise. With some friends, I had started the first acid rock group in the Twin Cities in the late 60s. First was our only claim, the music wasn’t very good. However, I had some experiential understanding about how music was a powerful counter-culture tool. To see it blatantly used in the new churches was disturbing and often repulsive.

One powerful thing Charismatics added to the mix was its understanding of worship, how important it is, and how to add it smoothly to a church service. But true worship sells as well as holiness these days. Both have been eliminated in the Great Falling Away.

A capella worship in the Spirit and discipleship should be the core of a home bible study

The key is studying the scriptures, verse by verse, determining what the original words in Hebrew or Greek meant. We met on Friday nights. It was common to realize that it was well after 1:00 am and we sheepishly headed home.

Eventually, we started a Foursquare Mission work in 1993. We originally called our church, New Sabbath. It was an emergency care ministry for people (especially women) who had been abused by the church or fellow humans.

The first couple of months were wonderful. The power in the services was a real joy. However, the reality of modern church sheep reared its ugly head. The style of service described by Paul took too much work, and worse yet, it required people to think.

About three months in, the sheep rebelled and demanded a modified return to the spectator model. I found that very disturbing. But at least we kept the Holy Spirit in charge.

When Foursquare tried to force us to shut down because we were too small, we changed to Crown Of Thorns Nondenominational church. The Crowns of Thorns is a powerful symbol for abuse. The sheep refused to shut down. The Lord blessed it for over a decade—until Pat’s health made it completely untenable. Without her pastoral skills available, we had to shut it down.

I’ll make more specific suggestions in the Podcast version of this essay.