235. Hyles Church Manual Examined - Part 2 - When Ministry Become a Machine - The Hyles Sunday School System
Episode Notes
We take a deep dive into the Infallible Hyles Church Manual. We hope you enjoy.
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Transcript
Welcome back to the 4-Freedom Podcast. It is a wonderful time to be with us, with you, and recording has been great.
It has been awesome to be back in the saddle week to week now. Getting to see my beautiful friend Brett on the other side of the screen there, and we're excited about what we've got coming up in the future.
We appreciate you as listeners who have been tuning in to our episodes, and we could not do this without you.
We could not be a part of this podcast without you listening and without you being a part of us.
And so we want to thank you for tuning in week to week, and thank you for being a part of it. But we are thankful for this last week that we've had.
Brett, how are things going over in Mississippi land, and how are you and your family doing, man?
Man, things are going great over here. Church is doing well. Family's doing well. Everybody's busy. Both my boys have jobs now, so nobody's at home. Everybody's off doing their job.
I've got one kid in school, and then he goes to Sonic, and then I've got another kid, a 16-year-old.
They've got a job at a chicken farm, so he goes there every morning, and then me and Emily have jobs. And so we're just kind of scattered out doing our thing, and just living life and enjoying ministry and having a good time.
Yeah, that's great. You said he got a job at Sonic. Is that right? Yeah.
Yeah, I saw he's been Snapchatting me since we got back from Nicaragua, and so it's been cool to see. He didn't tell me where, but then I kept seeing a couple, like, I saw the little blue mark on the side.
I'm like, well, is that Sonic? Where is he at? So that's pretty cool. First job, always fun. I did have, you know, me and James got to announce this to everybody. We've got a mandate from the White House.
We're going to have to change the name of our podcast. Our podcast from now on will be the For America podcast. For America, yes.
So you've got the state of New America. You've got Lake America, and so now we've got to be the For America podcast. Yeah, For America, that's right. I think we should just put America in every one of our states. It's North Carolina America,
the South Carolina. We just should really institute America into every one of our state names. Yeah, Mississippi should just be Miss America. Miss America, yeah, absolutely. Rename the Mississippi River to the Miss America River. That's right. Exactly. I love it.
Listen to this. We're giving you ideas here. We're floating them out to you. You need to be paying attention. Big idea. Huge, huge idea. Brett, as we're recording this, yesterday kicked off the NFL season, man. I'm always excited when football starts back.
Man, I'm a football junkie. I've gone on a couple of fantasy leagues. Me and a couple of friends of mine, we do a pick them every week. But, man, it's good just to get back in the routine of sports and life and ministry.
My season in October is coming up crazy busy. It started out where I had, like, nothing going on. And then I looked at my calendar, and more and more stuff got put on. I got asked to do a revival at Homecoming at Rick Ivey's church.
And then I'm preaching a revival for a friend of mine. We sent him out of our church, and we're going to preach there four times in October.
I'm doing chapel at my wife's school. I'm doing chapel at school in Rockwell.
Man, we've got – I've just been wide open slammed, and I love it. But I think it's awesome to see the Lord working and using and just being open to see what he's got for us. So, man, it's been good. Isn't Rick – isn't he planning an Israel trip?
I believe he had one on the books. I don't know if he is or not, but I know he had talked about it. But I'll have to talk to him and find out what's going on with that. Okay.
I know there's tension, a little tension over there right now. So I wasn't sure if he had went through with it. Yeah.
Now, speaking of Israel, I did just speak with Parit. My trip for 2027 going into 28 is on the books.
I'll be putting more information about that out, but it's going to be over the new year of December 27.
I think it's December 27th. We'll be landing in Israel, and then we're going to spend the new year in Israel over the new year holiday and then come back, I think, on January 4th. That way some teachers and those that get Christmas break can jump in with us. But I'm excited.
I've already got several signed up for that. If you'd be interested, we'll throw that out there on our socials as well, and you can jump on that trip with me. I'd love to have you.
And I'm excited about going back and leading another group and leading another trip there. It's going to be a wonderful time. And there are groups over there right now, aren't there? Yeah.
Parit said there's nothing going on as far as any type of conflict. She said it's like it was when we were there just back in January. Everything was calm.
Everything was good. No problems whatsoever. She said I haven't heard of anything, and all the flights are back open. Everything's back good to go. She said now is a great time to come. She said if flights aren't coming in, people can't come. But all the flights are open, and everyone's coming. And she said it's great.
Well, good deal. We're looking forward to it. Yeah, yeah.
If you haven't checked out my new book, From Brokenness to Freedom or Freedom from Depression, those are out there.
You can go check those out. We'd love to have you. Hope it would be an encouragement. Again, I want to thank you for the ones that have purchased it and the help that you're getting. Thank you for reaching out to me. And we'll be giving some free bookaways here soon.
If you'd like one of those, we'll put out some stuff on social media for you.
And as always, if you haven't checked out our cigar line, we've got four different cigars. That'll be a blessing. And it's a great time just to get around a brotherhood and sisterhood and enjoy smoke to the glory of God. And it's a great time just to bond over that.
I don't know how many times the conversation that I've been able to share the gospel with someone over a great cigar.
And I'm thankful that the Lord has opened this door for us to help fund the podcast and have a little side business for us.
And so if you ever want to avail yourself of that or have questions about it, feel free to reach out to us and let us know your thoughts and questions on that. Absolutely.
Absolutely. I remember we were in Central America and we had that conference and you said that in the conference about playing soccer to the glory of God.
We had our mission. We had our mission report Sunday, this past Sunday, and we spent the whole service talking about our mission trip to Nicaragua. And man, it was a great time. It was a great time reflecting, hearing testimonies.
We watched videos from you and from Lee that y'all had sent to us and we had testimony time.
And it was a great time for me, especially because Colin got to come with me and my son got to come with me out of the country. And I just remember us being at that pastor's conference and you saying that.
And they just laughing at us because soccer is just soccer is the devil. Soccer is playing soccer,
singing to hell. But there was some legalism there that we were trying to come back. And I think we did a good job. But, you know, I think we made some progress with that.
Yeah. Yeah, that's great. I'm glad you guys got to present. Was your whole team able to get up and talk? Yeah.
Every team member got up and we played some videos. We had a slideshow. We showed like 500 pictures in our slideshow. It only lasted about four minutes.
So it sounds like a lot. You know, it's not like it was a 15 minute video. But there's about 500 pictures that we went through. And we're actually taking an offering for Oscar Jr.'s bus this coming Sunday.
See, we presented it this Sunday, the need of it. But I was like, OK, I'm going to give you a week to prepare. Next week, we're going to take up an offering. And the numbers that Lee gave us is the van is going to cost $25,000.
They have 13 in the bank. Yeah. So they need 12,000 more to get the van.
And that is going to not only help his church, help people get to church, but the kids at that dump, it will enable them to be a part of the Educate a Child program. And so, man, when I said that, people were like, man, we can't wait to give toward that.
It's such a good cause. Because you show them pictures of them kids, you know, smutty clothes, running around at the dump.
And, you know, say, look, they need a van to be a part of the Educate a Child program and to get all the benefits of that. And people are more than willing to help out and give toward that. So that's what we've got looking forward to this coming Sunday. Yeah, that's great.
I'm glad you guys got to present. We had a great time when we presented ours a couple weeks back. And looking forward to also taking up an offering for Oscar Jr.
as well for that need that he's got. And I don't think he knows that how much has been raised.
Because when I asked him how much they've raised for it, he told me, he said, we're nowhere near it. He said, we've only raised like $1,000.
So, you know, as their church, they're putting some money into it. They have no idea that us on the state side, we're taking up offerings and helping to help out with that. So it's a blessing to be able to have a small part in that. Oh, praise the Lord. Amen.
Yeah, yeah. So, well, I think it's time to jump into our episode. Started last week on the Howell's Church Manual. And so let's jump into part two today. For freedom, you set me free. Not for change, not for guilt, not for Pharisee. Grace lit the flame, now I'm puffing peace.
Cigars and victory justified, released. Welcome to the 4-Freedom Podcast. This podcast exists to bring the freedom of the gospel for everyday Christians with everyday issues.
I ain't saved by dress codes, not by what I eat. I'm covered in the righteousness, washed from head to feet. No tally of tradition, no man-made code.
Blood bought my freedom, now I ride that road. They clutch pearls when they see smoke rings rise. But my praise still ascends past the legalist cries. Christ plus nothing, that's the real math.
So miss me with your fence laws and your extra path. He sat with sinners, I'm sitting with saints. Sipping grace from the bottle, no room for fakes. I light one for liberty, toast to the king. Every ash a sermon, death has lost its sting. For freedom, you set me free.
Not for change, not for guilt, not for Pharisee. Grace lit the flame, now I'm puffing peace.
Cigars and victory justified, released. For freedom, you set me free. Not for change, not for guilt, not for Pharisee. Grace lit the flame, now I'm puffing peace. Cigars and victory justified, released. Let grace begin.
For freedom, you set me free. Not for change, not for guilt, not for Pharisee. Grace lit the flame, now I'm puffing peace. Now here are your hosts, James Safrit and Brett Martin.
And so today we're going to continue walking through the House Church Manual. As you've been listening to this series, I hope you have been. Again, we're not asking you to read the book.
We're going to help you get through all that because reading through it would make you mad. And we're not saying that everything that Jack House taught was wrong. We just want to talk through some main things. And last week we talked through the deacons and the yes men.
And today we're going to look at some things that I think Brett and me both think say some good things. Sunday school teachers, they ought to know their Bible. They ought to prepare themselves. They ought to pray for the people that they teach. And the churches, they ought to care about evangelism.
One of the things that we as Baptists, as Southern Baptists, as Independent Baptists, both,
I think the thing that we struggle with the absolute most in ministry is discipling one another.
And so we have a tool that we have built in, our Sunday school, our small groups, that is a discipleship mechanism.
And if we use it properly, it can be a great way for us to use this in a great way. So we ought to reach people. We ought to disciple people. And none of that's the problem that we see here.
The problem is when you take this biblical command and you have a good idea and you have church preferences and you have this philosophy from one man and you mix them all together in a blender and you start treating the whole package as if it was what faithfulness to God was.
And I think that's exactly what we're going to see today as we walk through this chapter of the House Church Manual, the Sunday school system. Right.
Right. And like you said, it's not like we're up here saying that, man, every single thing that Jack Howell's ever said was wrong.
And we said this last episode is like even a broken clock is right, you know, twice a day. So there are some nuggets in here that could in the House Church Manual when it comes to Sunday school and Sunday school teachers that are good things.
And we're not saying that they're not. I mean, listen,
House says Sunday school teachers ought to study their Bible. I'm not going to say, well, bless God, I'm against studying Bible now because Jack Howell said it. You know, that that's you know, there are some genuinely good ideas and good things in this chapter.
But what me and James are interested in is the system that's underneath it, because as you start to read through the chapter, you start to see a pattern form and faithfulness becomes attendance. Spirituality becomes conformity. Evangelism becomes numbers.
And, you know, we're not evangelizing to disciple anymore. We're evangelized to get that number up. We've got to pump those numbers up. And ministry just becomes this machine that constantly has to produce something.
And I think that's where a lot of people who grew up in this particular IFB culture are going to recognize what we're going to be talking about here.
Yeah. First thing we're going to look at in our first segment is the performance side of it. And this is one of those areas that has been preached to us, right? Three to thrive is what Lee Robertson used to say.
Three to thrive. I don't know if Howells did this. I'm sure they did because Champion didn't do much things different than what Howells did. But the weekly service report that you had to fill out, the evangelism report, how many hours did you go soul winning?
How many people did you share the gospel with? How many people accepted Jesus? How many services did you go to? Did y'all have to do a service report there? We did. And I can remember, I believe it was Jack Howells' grandson-in-law. His name, he pastors at Gospelite in Malvern.
His name, John Horton is his name. And he married, I believe, Beverly's daughter.
And so he's Jack Howells' daughter. I remember he would come to chapel and he'd get up and he'd say, if you're lying on those service reports, if you're lying on those things, the Lord's going to get you when you come back into ministry, when you get in the ministry, because you're lying about going out and so on.
You're lying about telling people about the gospel. And so performance-driven was this massive thing in our culture and in the Howells' culture as well.
And so as we walk through this, we're going to start with sort of the checking the boxes, per se, as Sunday school workers.
Howell says this, that every Sunday school worker or teacher has to be a born-again Christian and an active member of the church. Now, Brett, I read that statement and I don't have any disagreement in it.
I'm not going to tell anyone that's an unbeliever and a non-member, yeah, come on in and teach my Sunday school.
No, you've got to be dedicated to the church. You've got to be a believer in Jesus Christ first and foremost. And so we're not going to argue there. And if you're teaching the Bible in church, you probably ought to be a Christian. And you probably ought to belong to the church as well. Absolutely. No disagreement here.
Agree with that wholeheartedly. But then we keep reading. All right. Next statement. He says that they require faithfulness.
Now, Brett, I don't have any disagreement to faithfulness either. I want people to be in church. I want people to be where they're supposed to be and their families growing and getting together. But then he defines faithfulness. He defines what faithfulness is. And his faithfulness and his determination is faithfulness to Sunday school,
faithfulness to Sunday morning preaching, faithfulness to Sunday evening service, faithfulness to Wednesday evening service, faithfulness to the teachers and officers meeting before Wednesday night church.
And so now we move into this bigger, broader principle of Christians should be faithfully gathering to the church, but to a very specific schedule that he has. And he has mandated for this ability to work in the Sunday school area. Exactly.
And that's the distinction I want people to hear, because somebody is inevitably going to say, well, Brett, don't you think church members ought to be faithful? Absolutely. I'm a pastor. James is a pastor. We want people at church. I want my leaders at church.
You know, I want them there. If somebody teaches a Sunday school once, you know, they teach a Sunday school once every three weeks and then disappear the rest of the time. And we got to track them down. You know that that's a problem. We got a problem there. But here's the question.
Who gets to define biblical faithfulness? Does Hebrews 10 tell us not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together?
Yes, it does. But as Hebrews 10 say, Sunday school, Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday teachers meeting, Wednesday night, if you miss one, you're unfaithful.
No, that doesn't say that at all. And that's where we have to separate biblical principle from institutional preference.
Yeah. And it would have been fine if he would have said and how at First Baptist Church of Haman, this is what we define as faithfulness. This is what we outline and lay out for our teachers. But he uses this broad statement of this is what faithfulness is.
And so it all of a sudden now, you know, you plant a church in Mississippi and you're like, okay, well, what are we going to have in the church? Well, we've got to have Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, Wednesday night teachers meeting, Saturday bus visitation. All these things have to be there.
And you have to be at least if you're going to be faithful.
And so it brings us to this idea that churches are allowed to have expectations for leaders, but we can't take those expectations for our leaders in our own church and broad brush it to every church out there. Right.
Sure. And that's another distinction. A church can say, hey, if you're going to teach a class, here's what we expect. There's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing inherently sinful about that. The danger comes when I start equating my church's expectations with God's expectations for every faithful Christian.
And that's where legalism starts to creep in because Jack Howells doesn't just say, this is the way we do it. He says, this is the way everybody should do it. Yeah.
So he starts with the performance and attendance, and then he begins to throw in this next little word, this next little word that comes in that begins to shape the idea and the ideology of Jack Howells throughout his
entire ministry. If you do any of the research on Jack Howells, you know that Jack Howells, they put out these pens. And I actually was talking to a guy the other day that actually helped put out all the pens that says, I stand with Jack.
Jack is innocent when he had all of his scandal and everything.
And the guy that put it out, he truly at the time believed that Jack was innocent.
But now he said that he regrets ever making any of those pens because he said, I've seen the evidence and I know that he wasn't. And so Jack Howells, his entire ministry was built on this one simple word that he now begins to integrate into his Sunday school, which is loyalty.
Howells says that he expects loyalty from their Sunday school workers, loyalty to the church program, loyalty to the ministry of the pastor.
Then near the end, I mean, this isn't the first or second thing. This is the end of his list. Now we get loyalty to the gospel and loyalty to the word of God.
You know, I think that we would probably say, hey, we want you to be loyal to Christ first and foremost. Christ is king.
He is the Lord overall. But he starts with saying, you've got to be loyalty to your Sunday school leaders, the church program, the ministry of me. Oh, yeah. And also God's word and God himself.
And so this is this is dangerous when we get to this because loyalty is good. But the boundaries and the the the the mindset that he has here is out of whack a little bit. Exactly.
And you see the the number of their loyalty to the church program, to the ministry of the pastor.
Oh, and the gospel as well. And the word of God as well. Yeah, exactly. Listen, loyal to the gospel. Amen. Loyalty to God's word. Amen.
Loyalty to Jesus Christ. Absolutely. But then we slip loyalty to the ministry of the pastor in the very same category. And after what we've already seen in the deacon chapter, that language bothers me because when did loyalty to Brett Martin's ministry become a spiritual qualification?
I mean, I want our people committed to Christ on them committed to scripture. I want them committed to the mission of the church. But if I ever create a culture where disagreeing with Brett is treated like being disloyal to Jesus, we've got a serious problem.
And and how he pushed that loyalty. He really hammered it home.
You know, the second man, the book, we had a class on the second man. It was all about loyalty.
And, you know, when when the pastor's having an affair with the deacon's wife, I guess you want people loyal to you where you can keep your job. But, you know, that's you know, he's putting that up with the same. You're disloyal to me. You're disloyal to Jesus.
Yep. When he talks through this loyalty becomes very dangerous because what it begins to do is it sets your pastor up as an idol.
We had a missionary come in last night at our church and kicked off our small groups. And he was talking about how the he had a pastor get up and was talking about how we shouldn't have any idols in our life.
And he mentioned and he said, you know, I grew up in the 90s, early 80s. He's a couple years older than me. And he said, you didn't grow up in that time.
And Michael Jordan not be your idol. He said, I remember it clear as day.
I had a Michael Jordan poster on the back of my door and he's got his tongue out and he's doing his air Jordan and he's going in for a dunk, iconic picture of Michael Jordan.
And he said, it really got a hold of me that I was worshiping Michael Jordan more than I was Jesus.
And he said, I went home and I ripped that poster down because I didn't want any idols in my life. He said, now I still think that Michael Jordan is the greatest player of all time. He said, but I don't worship Michael like I used to.
He said, that used to be everything. I knew the stats.
I knew the shoe size. I knew everything that Michael did. He said, and that is the difference between admiring someone and be idolizing someone.
And he's, I, when he was saying this, I was thinking about these notes because how often did I sit in a chapel where a teenage boy or a college student boy would get up and preach.
And he would have that, that, that, that Jack house clearing his throat every three seconds or all of a sudden, you know, in our context with Eric facey, he'd get all excited and start pulling his pants up.
You know, Eric was always about fixing his pants while he was preaching, um, and really energetic.
Like all of a sudden their mannerisms are mimicking this man because they're so idolizing him that they're changing who they are to say these things.
And this is where the, the, the danger of this loyalty can come in. Healthy leadership can be disagreed with healthy leadership can say I was wrong. Um, because you know, that's where we're all human and we can all do that.
And so, uh, we don't need to put ourselves or someone else up on this pedestal other than Jesus. James, does that mean I have to take my life size poster James Safrit off my bedroom door? Maybe, maybe.
I'm just wondering, do you still have your banana, banana spray that you put, you spray about four or five times a day? Oh man, I had, I had a box when I was at house Anderson. I had a big old box of banana.
And you know, cause Jack Scott, he would, he would hit that banana on the, on the, uh, on the altar. He'd hit it a few times every service. And so that was, that was the big thing to have was that, but not, man, that, that was a deep cut. That was deep track.
Eric was the same way. He had his binocular for a long time.
And I'd seen mid sermon, dude, mid sermon. He'd hit it a couple of times. I'm like, what is he doing?
Like, is this like his, does he have some type of cocaine or something? Like, is this his energy thing? Uh, then I come to realize that it was a Jack house and the whole house Anderson thing. And even when I was in house Anderson,
people were still doing that coffin thing when it was a medical thing that I had, he had a medical condition. That's why he did that. But people would mimic it because they thought it was so cool. They thought that was his thing. Yeah. Exactly.
You know, a pastor isn't the CEO of Jesus incorporated.
You know, he, he, he's an under shepherd. Jesus is the one who owns the church, not the pastor. And so Jesus is the one we need to look up to.
And, and I think we see this in our culture today, not just in IFB. We've got this, this, this thing today where even mainstream, uh, orthodoxy, where we put these pastors up on pedestals and we, we idolize the celebrity pastor is, is, is, is, is a big thing.
And a lot of times you put, you put these pastors up on pedestals and they end up falling because they're human and it ends up doing more, more, more harm than good.
And so even in today's, not just IFB, but even in today's standards, we got to watch out for the celebrity pastor thing. Yeah, absolutely.
Uh, uh, then we get to something that, you know, I think anybody that's familiar with old school fundamentalism is going to recognize immediately. The third thing that he throws out here, how says that Sunday school workers must live a separated life.
There it is. It came out right. He, he couldn't resist. It came out eventually. Yeah.
Yeah. He could not resist saying that this was going to have to be a part of it. He says teachers should be separate from the world. Uh, he lists drinking, he lists dancing, gambling, uh, and other questionable amusements.
Now, Brett, uh, I've, I've preached holiness. You've preached holiness. Um, I've, I've heard about holiness messages. Um, and we're obviously not arguing holiness.
We're not saying, Hey, you shouldn't live a holy life. No, exactly. You're, I mean, the Bible commands holiness. The Bible commands separation from sin.
Romans 12, two says, do not be informed to this world. First Peter says, be holy for I am holy. But here's the problem. Legalism takes the biblical command to be holy. And then somebody makes a list defining what holiness looks like.
And then eventually obedience to the list becomes the test of whether you're holy.
And that's how we end up with entire Christian subcultures where spirituality is measured by things. Scripture never uses to measure spirituality. You know, like for instance, how long is your hair?
Well, what kind of, what kind of music do you listen to? Do you listen to that rock music?
Uh, what, what, what is your wife wear? Do you go to the movie theater? Or, or, or it's called the movie house or, or things like, I forget what they called it. I think it was the movie house or something like that. Do you have a television? Do you miss Wednesday night?
And before long, you can check every box on the list and still be proud and hateful and dishonest and unforgiving and, and, and mean as a snake.
That's right, Brett. But you got to remember, you can do all those things, but as long as you're separated, you're fine.
Oh, you're separated. You know, you know, you, you, you, you, you, you may be the biggest jerk in North Carolina, but bless God, you, you, you don't go to the movies. That's right. That's right. So, all right.
The next one is the fourth command of the Sunday school fourth command. Uh, house begins to give his teachers a list and Brett, I'm not joking. When I say this, a list of 40 things, 40 commandments, 40 commandments that they have to follow.
And again, some of these are pretty excellent. Uh, he, he, he lays out, have a daily prayer, devotion, private devotion, pray for your students, prepare yourself mentally, prepare yourself. Spiritually study the lesson, greet people when they arrive,
be the first one there, make, make visitors feel welcome. And Brett, those are all great ideas. Right. Those, that those are things that I would put on the list of, of,
to give to our teachers. You know, there are things that I think that are fantastic, good things, but here's where it gets interesting. Mixed into that list are, visit every pupil's home every three months. Visit every absentee. Attend the Wednesday teachers meeting. Support the entire church program.
Be faithful to every public service of the church. Every teacher should, should, should I keep the Lord's day holy and finally make the work of the Lord, the most important thing in your life. And this is a fantastic example of how legalism develops.
Because legalism rarely hands you a list of 40 obviously ridiculous things. It gives you 10 biblical commands, 10 really good ideas, 10 organizational policies, and then 10 personal preferences.
And staples it all together and then gives it to you as the entire package of Christian faithfulness. Yeah.
And you know, that's really good to, to organize like that, Brett, because what happens is, is if number 27 is, um,
you know, be faithful to every public service of the church.
And I'm a farmer and I can't make it to a Sunday night or a Wednesday night because I've got chickens that are so big and I've got to work and I can't be there for that.
Uh, or, or, or if I'm a nurse and I've got to work a different schedule and I've got to, uh, you know, I can't be there every Sunday because I'm working every other Sunday because someone's got to work at the hospital.
Someone's got to do these things. Uh, it's just the way the occupant, the occupation rolls all of a sudden, because I have questioned number 27, because I can't be there. It's like, I'm questioning number two. I'm not loyal to God anymore. Um, and it puts it in this, um,
equal footing of you've disobeyed this one. So now all of a sudden you, you're, you're a wicked reprobate.
Exactly. And that's the trap. If, if I say, where does the Bible say a Sunday school teacher has to attend every single public service, then somebody will come back with. So you don't think Christians should be faithful. That's not what I said. We're asking what has God commanded and what have we had?
That's the question. Now, before we move on to the next section, let me go back a little bit and talk about the movies. I remember whenever I was, I was not this way when I was at house Anderson, but whenever I was at, uh, my Christian school growing up, I was really bought in.
And I really, you know, my dad wanted to take me to the movies. And I was like, dad, I can't go to the movies because, you know, it's a sin to go to the movies. And my dad thought that was the most ridiculous thing.
And so then he, he dragged me, he forced me to go to the movies. And I thought I was sinning because I was going to the movies and he dragged me to RoboCop three.
And because he thought it was something that he didn't know what it was. It was like the worst movie we'd ever seen in our entire lives.
But at least we go to the, he broke me of that. And, uh, so I, I didn't have that issue. In fact, we just went and seen Spider-Man brand new day, which I would suggest to anyone. It's a brand new day is it's a brand new day.
Yeah. I wouldn't watch it. It was fantastic. It was fantastic movie. Only thing I had a problem with was language. Punisher was really vulgar in his language. Um, and so I wouldn't take a smaller kid to that.
And, and, but, you know, and even then that was with, you know, Spider-Man covering his mouth with webbing. Yeah. So, so.
All right, let's jump back in. In segment two, he jumps into, uh, this idea of control and, uh, what control looks like.
And he, he labels this the cardinal sin, Brett. Uh, and I think I've, I've got to read my favorite line in the entire chapter. Howell tells his Sunday school teachers ready for this. He says, leave that stinking quarterly at home.
And then he says the cardinal sin in a Sunday school class would be a, for a person not to teach from an open Bible. The cardinal sin. The cardinal sin. The unpardonable, unforgivable cardinal sin.
Get rid of it. Throw that, throw that quarterly out the window, baby. Forget everything Paul warned Timothy about. We have discovered the greatest threat to the New Testament church.
And it is Sunday school literature. Throw that mess up. Can you believe it? Now, here's what makes it even better. Earlier in the chapter, Pyle specifically says that he's not opposed to Sunday school literature. So, I mean, which, which is it?
I mean, I'm not against it, but it's, it's still the cardinal sin. So, he literally, you know, contradicts himself within the chapter. Because he says,
well, it's a cardinal sin. Later on, he says he doesn't have a problem with it. So, I mean, what's, what's up, Jack? What's, what's going on, Jackie boy? You know, this is funny because it actually illustrates the point perfectly.
There's, there's nothing wrong with saying we want every teacher to teach directly from the Bible. That's going to be our church policy. That's fine. That's great.
But, go ahead. Yeah, and I actually like that idea. But don't turn methodology into morality.
That's the problem. Don't take, this is how we do it and turn it into, this is the godly way to do it. Those aren't the same statement. James, you, you, you're a pastor,
you go over, you're Sunday, you have Sunday school material that y'all use in your church. And it's a great thing.
I mean, Sunday school material. I mean, do you, do y'all pick the Sunday school material? Have you, yeah, we, recently, we use our LifeWave Bible Studies for Life Gospel Project for our younger ones.
The Bible in four years or three years or whatever it is for the, for our under 18 ministries. And it's really great stuff.
But our class, we, we went ahead and we, we stopped doing LifeWave and we're just doing the, it's just walking through little pamphlets that, that ask questions. And you go through books or topics and it's just a great way to just get interaction and talk.
And so, yeah, we use them, but, you know, I think that when we look at this, this one here, the cardinal sin that he lays out, it shows the hypocrisy of even his own teaching. Right.
He starts out by saying, you know, Hey, study, study the curriculum, study the literature that you've been given. But then all of a sudden halfway through the same chapter, he's like, throw that mess out the window. Like, hold on.
I thought I was supposed to study. Like you begin to almost be schizophrenic because I've got to be loyal to the man of God. I've got to be loyal to what he's telling me. He tells me to study the curriculum and the literature.
And now he's telling me to throw it out and, and I shouldn't even use it. I should just have my open Bible. Like he begins to really,
you can see his, his loyalty and control even through this one little area, because he has got to control every single little thing. Um, then, then he, he talks about the, the weekly teachers meeting every Wednesday.
The teachers are required to attend how teaches them to Sunday school lesson. He prepares a three page outline. He gives them the aim, the introduction,
the body, the conclusion, even a memory version, a question that goes along with it. Then the staff members divide them by department and show the teachers how to apply the lesson to their particular age group. Right. And I, and listen, I want to be fair here. Centralized curriculum isn't inherently wrong.
Churches do curriculum. Churches train teachers, pastors, equipped leaders. There's nothing wrong with any of that. But remember, we're not looking at this one paragraph in isolation. Put the whole system together. Workers must be loyalty to the ministry of the pastor.
Workers support the entire church program. Workers attend every service. Workers attend the mandatory teachers meeting. Pastor supplies the lesson. Pastor supplies the outline.
The staff explains how it should be taught. And then suddenly you have a very, uh, centralized system. Yeah.
Yeah. And Brett, centralized systems are not inherently or automatically abusive, but what they do is they form this cycle of, um, centralized thought that can lead to a form of abuse.
Um, oftentimes, uh, as we talk to survivors, oftentimes people will say this statement and family members of mine have said this statement. I'm not going to say who, but family members and people I've talked to have said this, something bad happened.
And I went to the pastor because that's what I was told to do. And I thought genuinely that the pastor was going to take care of it. And I'll ask them, why didn't you call the cops?
Uh, if it was an abuse situation. And this is what they'll say. We were told that the pastor would take care of it. And so we go to the pastor. So you create this centralized system that everything has to run through the pastor.
And then it relieves the guilt that you have because you went to the pastor thinking and knowing good and well that he's going to do what's best for me. And then he just sweeps down the rug and nothing happens.
Uh, you know, I don't want to bring it up now, but the whole documentary of the death of a pastor's wife is the exact same way, right? They, they went to the pastor with their concerns. Okay.
The pastor and the elders are supposed to handle these things. They sort of centralize and sweep it under the rug and then nothing happens. And then all of a sudden you see the, the culture of abuse that can happen.
Right. And my question about this system here is how are teachers,
excuse me, how are teachers supposed to use their spiritual gift? I mean, when the pastor writes the lesson, writes the outline,
teaches it to the staff, the staff teaches it to the teacher and says, this is the outline. This is how you say it. This is how you do it. Where does the teacher's spiritual gift come in?
Because anybody can just say, oh, well, I'll just copy what the pastor said. You know, he taught it to me.
I'll just teach it just like he taught me. And, and it, it, it robs people of using their own spiritual gift, but you brought up abuse and, and, and, and that's an important, you know, um, and centralized systems aren't automatically abusive, but they're vulnerable to abuse.
Particularly when you've built a theology around loyalty to the man at the center, you know, healthy churches don't need everybody thinking exactly like the pastor on every secondary issue.
You know, if you agree, if you disagree with Jack House, you disagreed with his, uh, eschatology, Matt, then man, you're, you're, you're disloyal to the pastor. You listen, I've got people in my own church that don't agree with my eschatology.
I've got people in this church that are more reformed than I am, but that doesn't mean that we can't, you know, not, not everything is a life or death issue. You know, my goal as a pastor shouldn't be to produce a congregation full of little Brent Martins.
I mean, one of me is, is plenty enough. Did I just hear Emily say amen? Yeah. Oh yeah. She's in the back. She, she, she said it louder than everybody else. I bet man.
Um, all right, so let's go to the next segment here. The, the idea of pressure. Um, now he begins to walk through the evangelism as a scoreboard.
Um, and he begins to walk through what this means. This is where the chapter changes. We moved from Sunday school organization into evangelism.
And let me say before we criticize anything, uh, the evangelistic zeal in this chapter is impressive. Um, the people want to reach people.
Um, and we went in the neighborhoods. This is the, I mean, I grew up in this, Brett, you grew up in this. They visited hospitals. They, they ministered to people with disabilities. Um, they had ministries for deaf people.
Uh, they had, they operated buses and we're going to get to the whole bus ministry. And the idea behind that here in a couple of weeks, um, they had a rescue mission. They intentionally tried to reach people that other churches might overlook.
And there's something that the modern church probably should hear in this, this segment. Exactly. You know, there's something that me and you have always said.
There's, there are things about our ISB roots that we have taken with us that we still have. And that is, you know, the, the zeal for evangelism, the zeal for reaching people.
You know, I'll criticize Howes absolutely when I think he's wrong, but I'm not going to pretend like evangelistic passion is bad. I'd love to see more Southern Baptist churches consumed with reaching lost people like that.
I'd love to see more Christians, you know, knocking doors, inviting neighbors, sharing the gospel, going after people who aren't coming to us. So the criticism is not evangelism. The question happened when evangelism becomes a production system. Um, you know, let's, let's measure the numbers. Yeah. Listen to the numbers. Sorry.
Listen to the numbers. Howes says that in six months, 1400 people walked the aisle, either professing faith or joining the church. 721 were baptized.
He said 85% had already been dealt with or won to Christ in their homes before walking the aisle.
Then the numbers keep coming. Staff members brought over 600 people down the aisle. Sunday school teachers led 411 people to Christ. The deaf ministry produced another number. The rescue mission produced another number. The buses produced this number. Everything was measured by the metrics of the numbers. Exactly.
And listen, counting isn't sinful. And acts counts people. Acts tells us about 3000 souls being added to the church.
And so I'm not going to make this silly argument that numbers don't matter. Numbers represent people. But there's a difference between counting what God has done and building a system that pressures people to produce a count. And, and, and that's a massive distinction.
Okay. Let me interject one thing here, Brett, because I know you saw it done and I'm sure you did it as well, but I can remember on Mark Cantrell's bus route, we would count our numbers up and we would
have, let's say we had eight 75 on the bus that day.
And as we pulled up, all of a sudden we had a family that drove into the church and we had this family that drove in.
And all of a sudden this bus worker that wasn't on the bus was there at church. And Mark goes, Hey, that's 12 more people that technically are here from our bus.
So go ahead and change our number from 75 up to 87. Because all of a sudden we counted people that were already there. So now we inflated our number.
And then when they take the 85 and they put it on the board or 87 or whatever it is, then they, oops, sorry. Then they count the, the, the number of the sanctuary. Well, now they're not counting that they're those, that 15 is now counted twice. Now that 15 is 30.
Then all of a sudden these numbers are inflated because everything is measured by the metric of numbers. Exactly. That's what it's most about.
When I was in, I going to first Baptist Hammond at house Anderson, and I was in division 11, we were a small division.
And so in order for us to get the resources that we needed, we need to put out numbers that we produced and, you know, fudging the numbers was just part of the game. You had to read between the lines. You had to count people that drove in.
So yeah, we, we, we've done all that. But listen, there's probably one line in this entire chapter that bothers me the most. Talking about the pastor's personal soul winning, Jack Howes writes, Every Sunday,
you should have someone prepared to walk the aisle, professing publicly his faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
James, that's every Sunday. Man, can you imagine the pressure that puts on people that if I don't, and I remember as a kid when we were, I mean, Jack Howes came to my church.
I remember my mom and dad telling me, I don't remember it because I was so young, but, but my mom and dad would tell me, and I saw videos where we would be sitting there.
And all of a sudden, uh, in the middle of a Sunday night service, all right, if you let someone to the Lord stand up this week and everybody stand up and then the pastor would call each and every person.
How many, how many, how many, and all of a sudden five, I led five to the Lord this week. And all of a sudden we're going through the entire church service. And if you didn't stand up now, you were feeling guilty.
And he would look at everybody. He'd go, well, we didn't have quite as many this week as we had last week, but we got more sitting down this week than we have standing up. I think we need to do a little more work. Don't you church?
And all of a sudden the pressure and the, the manipulation that that brings,
uh, not to do it out of loving people, but to do it out of loyalty to the pastor. Exactly. And, you know, of that number that Jack house quoted 1600 people walk the aisle.
Okay. How many of those joined the church? How many did we disciple? How many of those did we baptize, you know? And listen, just putting that in the reports and having people stand up, like you mentioned, that's, that's enormous pressure. Have requiring the pastor to walk somebody down the aisle every week.
That's enormous pressure. Where is that requirement in scripture? Listen, should a pastor evangelize? Yes. Should a pastor model evangelism? Absolutely. Should we pray for conversions every week? Absolutely.
Not saying that we shouldn't. But where does God say, pastor, if you're doing your job correctly, you need to have somebody ready to walk the aisle every Sunday. He doesn't say that. Okay.
And this is why that concerns us. Once you've decided beforehand what the visible result of faithful ministry must be, you're eventually going to be tempted to produce the result. Like fabricate it. Yeah, absolutely.
And you know, one of the things that I had to retrain my mind was the idea of the altar call or the invitation. And we're going to get that later on in this series. But I was taught and trained.
I mean, I remember having a class with Reno Likens teaching us how to manipulate the altar call.
And so all of a sudden we get into this mindset that if I preach and I give an altar call and no one comes down, no one responds, I am a failure of a preacher. And I remember my first couple of sermons, I was thinking, God, what am I doing wrong?
Man, no one's coming down. Not realizing that Idaho didn't have this mentality of the manipulated altar call that I was so used to.
I mean, I was used to when Eric would get done and he'd say his amen, thousand people would be hitting the altars. Everybody's down there crying, loving on each other. And all of a sudden I got done. I'm like, dude, what is going on?
And I had to, I went to the pastor. I struggled with it for a long time. I went to him and I said, listen, I guess I'm just a failure.
No one is coming. He said, no, you're not a failure. They're not used to that around here.
He said, we want people to make decisions where they're at, what they're dealing with. They don't have to come down and make this emotional decision.
And I had to relearn and retrain myself that this, just having someone not walk down the aisle is not a failure because the Lord works in lots of different ways.
And so this is good for us to be able to talk through. My pastor used to say this when the, when the altars were getting thin, he would say, there's two reasons, not there. There's two reasons to come to the altar. One, God spoke to you.
And two, he didn't speak to you. So that's the two reasons, two reasons why you need to come to the altar. And now imagine that culture multiplied across the staff.
Kyle says that even secretaries were required to spend at least four hours a week witnessing to unsaved people. Again, witnessing good,
staff evangelizing good. But we're slowly converting spiritual ministry into these measurable quotes and putting all this pressure on people. I remember my pastor,
when I told him that I want, when I got down to college, I came back, told him I want to be a pastor. He gave me a Sunday school room and he said, OK. He said, Brett, this is your church.
I want you to fill it with brand new first time visitors. I mean, we were having trouble getting first time visitors in the main service. I'm supposed to go out and knock doors and fill a Sunday school classroom with with brand new first time visitors.
And when I wasn't able to do that, he kind of made me feel like a failure.
And that was part of the reason I almost left the ministry at that point. And I said, well, maybe this this pastor thing isn't for me.
But man, there's all this pressure and all trickles down from how else, you know, putting all this pressure on his staff and stuff like that. Yeah, you know, and which leads us to the next point. The decisionism, as he calls it, raises this other issue throughout the chapter.
This repeated phrase isn't simply people were converted. The phrase was people walked the aisle or people were brought down the aisle. This is the idea that this decisionism is so important in this culture.
Right. And that's where we need to talk about decisionism. An aisle is not the gospel. An invitation system is not the gospel. Praying a particular prayer is not the gospel. AB3, what is it? ABC 123, pray after me.
And listen, I'm not against invitations. I give invitations in my church, every single service. I'm not against somebody coming forward and walking publicly. But walking an aisle doesn't save anybody. Roman says we're justified by faith.
Well, thief on the cross didn't walk an aisle. You know, he had a pretty good excuse. You know, he was he was stuck around somewhere.
But the question isn't did we get them down the aisle. The question is, have they repented and believe the gospel? Matthew 28 doesn't tell us to simply manufacture decisions. Jesus says make disciples, baptize them, teach them to observe everything that Christ commanded. That's bigger than producing a moment.
Yeah. I want to give you a practical story, Brett. This past week, I was visiting with a friend, one of our church members. His wife just had surgery. And we're talking about life and church and ministry.
And he looked at me and he said, pastor, he said, I want to tell you about a story when at my home church, he said, I had a good friend of mine who never came to church. He said, I witnessed to him and tried to get him to come to church.
And he just said, you know, church isn't for me. Thanks for inviting me, but I'm just not going to church. And so I hadn't.
He said, I mentioned him in prayer one day on a Wednesday night prayer service. And the pastor turned it into his personal agenda to reach this man.
And so he started going to his house every single week and begging him and preaching to him to come to church and come to church and come to church. And he said, one Sunday he got up and he said, men, women, so excited next week.
This man that he said, so whatever his name was, so-and-so is coming to the church next Sunday. He's joining the church and he's getting baptized.
And he said, I sat there and I thought, this man's a lost man. He's not saved.
I know he's not saved. He told me he's not saved. He told me he doesn't believe in Jesus. What happened?
He said, so I left church and went to his house. And he said, I got there and I said, hey, man, I said, what's going on? Do you believe in Jesus?
He said, no, I don't believe in Jesus. He said, well, the pastor said that you're coming next Sunday to get saved or to get baptized and join the church. He said, yeah, I'm doing that.
So he'll stop coming to my house. I'm tired of him coming over here. I'm tired of him begging me to do these things.
And so I figured if I got baptized and joined the church, I wouldn't have to listen to him anymore. This is the result of this decisionism is sometimes people say this just to get you to stop.
They're not making any actual decision for Christ. They're saying it just to get you off their back. So the next thought here, he uses this strategy called trout line fishing.
I'd never heard of this before, Brett, this methodology that he uses. And the idea is instead of fishing with one hook, the pulpit, you put hooks everywhere. Pastor, staff, teachers, deacons, bus ministry, hospital ministry,
rescue mission, neighborhood visitation. And all week, the hooks are in the water. Then how says on Sunday morning during the invitation, they pull the hooks out of the water and see how many fish they can get. And actually, you know, I like part of that analogy.
Jesus said, follow me and I will make you fishers of men. And I agree with how's that evangelism shouldn't only happen from the pulpit.
Our people ought to be sharing Jesus Monday through Saturday. But the problem is when the metaphor becomes a machine, how many hooks, how many fish, how many aisles, how many baptisms, how many did your department produce? You know, people aren't statistics, they're souls. Sometimes faithful evangelism doesn't produce an immediate visible result.
We know that one man planted, another man harvested. Paul planted, Apollo's water.
God gave the increase. That means I can faithfully share Christ with somebody and they reject me. You know, that doesn't mean that my evangelism failed. It means my responsibility is faithfulness. I can't save anybody. Brett Martin can't save anybody. James Avery can't save anybody.
All we can do is tell them the truth. God is responsible for conversion, not us.
Absolutely. Leads us to our segment four. We'll quickly hurry here. Segment four on promotion.
Brett, I can't tell you how many promotions I've been a part of, how many campaigns I've been a part of. And all of a sudden, what we begin to mix here, I like how you have it written down. The Great Commission meets a sales contest.
Because we arrive at this promotion where it gets wild. Howes is a huge believer in special Sundays. I remember a picture of our church before it burned down. And they turned the look of the outside of the church into a boat. And they called it the lighthouse. The lifeboat lighthouse. Gospel lighthouse.
Lifeboat. It was this crazy thing. I mean, just the time and effort it put into all that. Big days. High days. Low days. Carrying the load Sunday. Old fashioned Sunday. Back to school day.
Baby day. Picture taking day. Record breaking day. Pack the pew day. B1 Sunday. Yeah, absolutely. B1 Sunday. They mailed vitamin B1 pills to everyone and said B1.
But all of this stems from this pragmatic view to just get people in the pew. Now, I do think that part of this is a good thing. I think having special Sundays that can excite people in the community to come.
One of the things that I like to do, we haven't done one here yet, is like a first responder appreciation Sunday where you bring in your first responders. You thank them for their work. You feed them a meal.
But you're getting them in the door to thank them for what they're doing and to give the gospel to them. Those are some good things. People will come for made-up holidays. I hate to say it like that, but people will come for made-up holidays.
And so, where Howe's turned everything into a made-up holiday by a promotion, we can use some of this and we can use it in a way to advance the gospel. All the time. I mean, Easter Sunday, Mission Sunday, veteran events, revival.
Listen, there's nothing wrong with promotion. Promotion isn't the problem. It's what happens when promotion becomes tied to competition and spiritual achievement.
I can't tell you, James, how many goldfish. Have you ever swallowed a goldfish? Never did. I was not dumb. I swallowed my... I had to get a... I was a bus captain. I had to swallow one.
And so, I got this thing where I would have to chase it with a Mountain Dew. And you'd have to swallow it head down because if you swallowed it thin first, it'd swim back up your throat. And so, I tell people that and they get grossed out.
I've had some bus workers that would chew it up and put it on their tongue and then show the kids. But I mean, I swallowed a mini goldfish trying to bring people to church.
And I thought, worst that I ever did, Brett, we did a big Easter promotion. We were going to feed everybody pizza or wings and watermelon.
It was Easter Sunday or something. It was some big day around Easter because I remember Candy Hunt. And all of a sudden, Jesse Foy Love, one of our bus workers, one of my leaders, he goes, hey man, let's make you a human pinata. And I'm like, what?
He said, yeah. He said, the kids are going to want candy. He said, let's wrap you in duct tape backwards. We're going to dump candy all over you so it's going to stick to it. And I'm just going to have you take off running.
And they're going to follow you and they're going to chase after you and get candy. And so I have like 120 kids chasing after me.
You can't run because your legs are duct taped. So I'm trying my hardest to get away from them. They'd grab onto me and they'd grab a piece of gum here and there. And you know, I'm a big football player. So I'm running and I'm looking back.
And all of a sudden I turn and I look and Jesse is coming at me. Football stance, linebacker style, picks me up and body slams me to the ground.
Next thing I know, I've got 120 kids on top of me trying to get this candy that's stuck to my duct tape off my back. Because we all of a sudden have to have these big day prizes. We did all this to win the big prize.
Howes describes in his book a 10-week spring and fall campaign with contests and prizes for bringing visitors. They gave new testaments to people who brought 10 visitors. They had competitions where the top people bringing visitors received help attending the Bible conference.
First prize may include a motel room with meals. Second prize would be something similar to the same. And then all the other prizes would include cabins and meals. And Howes would give this advice. Don't have only one prize. Because if one person gets too far ahead, everyone else will quit.
But James, you better get out there. Brother Bobby's sitting on 11 and you've only got seven. Yeah, absolutely.
If I've got four more lost people, I'll be sleeping in that cheap cabin that you got for me. Exactly. And listen, I understand what they're trying to accomplish. They're trying to motivate people to invite others to church.
And that's a good goal. But at some point, I've got to ask, when did the Great Commission become a sales contest? What is supposed to compel me to reach my neighbor? Or 2 Corinthians 5.14, because the love of Christ controls us.
I want to tell somebody about Jesus because Christ has saved me. And I want them to know him. Not because I'm three visitors away from winning a hotel room.
Yeah. And I think here's where it ties this whole chapter together. Attendance is measured. Faithfulness is measured. The visitation is measured. The conversations are measured. Our baptisms are measured.
Our visitors are measured. Our departments begin to compete against one another. The individuals compete against one another. And big Sundays have goals. Everything is constantly pushing toward more, more, more.
You know, and Howes says churches have played little long enough and need to do something big.
He argues that a church running 100 can come near to having 300 on a big day than 150 because a huge goal motivates people. And that's where I think we see the philosophy clearly. Big is success. More is success. More attendance. More professions. More baptisms.
More buses. More visitors. More, more, more. But the New Testament's measure of ministry is not simply bigness. Because sometimes faithfulness produces 3,000 converts. Sometimes Jeremiah preaches for years and people won't listen.
So was Jeremiah a failure because nobody listened to him? Yeah. I like to often go back to Truett Cathy.
I worked at Chick-fil-A for four years. And so I got to hear this story I read after. And Truett's a great guy. I love the Lord. Built his business model around Chick-fil-A, around this God-centered business model.
And he was sitting in a boardroom in the early 2000s. And they were talking about this new chain of Boston chicken that was coming up.
And it was giving competition for Chick-fil-A and how they needed to put more stores out and do more and have bigger promotions. And everything that we just talked about outlined.
And he said, Truett just sat at the table, quiet as could be. And he said he just listened to the executives argue about how we can do this and how we can do this. He said, finally, he slammed his fist down the table. And everybody got startled and they looked at him.
And he said, I'm hearing all this talk about how we can get bigger and bigger and bigger. He said, before we get bigger, we've got to get better.
Before we get bigger in our world of chicken, we've got to get better at what we're doing right now. The bigger will follow once we get better. And he said they slowed their pace down.
They made sure all their stores were having consistent quality. And he said within 10 years, they were outpacing every other store out there. And Boston chicken,
Boston market had shut down most of their stores because their model was how big can we get without having good quality? And all of a sudden the model was changing to becoming better, better, better instead of bigger, bigger, bigger, which is this model.
So I think we should say this as we bring it home. Some people are listening here and they're saying, you know, I grew up in a church shaped by this philosophy. Some of people probably have really good memories. I have great memories.
I was saved in an independent Baptist church and I was saved in a house model church. They saw people saved. We, we got to see people saved. We learned scripture. We love people that are around them.
They, we were faithful to Christians serving in those churches. And we're not trying to erase that. Exactly.
I don't, I don't want anybody to listen to this episode and think, man, if that we're trying to say, if your church has Sunday night service, you're a legalist. No. If your church had a bus ministry, you're a legalist. No.
Your pastor gave an invitation. You're a legalist. No. If you had attendance contests and, and, and, and, uh, 10 week campaigns, everybody involved was evil. No, that's, that's not what we're saying. That's too simplistic. We're examining the philosophy behind the system.
And I think there are three warnings we ought to take away. Yeah. Number one is this. Don't confuse performance with faithfulness.
You can tend every single service you can have and still have a cold heart toward God. You can check every box that's out there and you can still not walk in the system.
Right. In the spirit. Number two, don't confuse pressure with evangelism.
We should plead with people to come to Christ. We should preach the gospel urgently, but listen, we can't save anybody.
Our job isn't to manipulate a visible response so we can write a big number on a, on a soul winning report. Our job is to, you know, preach Christ, share Christ, love people, call people to repentance and faith.
But we got to trust the Holy Spirit to do what only the Holy Spirit can do. We can't say we can tell them, but we can't save them. And we need to remember that.
One quick thing before we go on to the next one is I love how my seminary does it. They have a soul winning report because I'm on a Cassidy scholarship. But it isn't, you know,
somebody gets saved. I've had soul winning reports where you can't quit to somebody to get saved.
It's did you share the gospel with someone, whether they got saved or not? Did you have a gospel conversation? And I think that's a better way to do it. Absolutely.
Number three. So let's recap here real quick. Don't confuse performance with faithfulness. Don't confuse pressure with evangelism and don't confuse promotion with spiritual power.
You can fill a building with contests. Listen, anybody can put on a circus and, and, and fill a building up.
Anyone can put on a movie and fill a building up. You, you can give away prizes.
You can do these things. Uh, but you, you can have the biggest Sunday in the history of your church. And none of that necessarily means that God is moving. Um, you know, what does it say? Give them a theater and popcorn and they'll come.
Uh, are they coming to learn about Jesus or are they coming just to get their movie and popcorn?
Um, you could do all those things, but are people truly growing in Christ? Oh yeah. Just look at Jesus.
Jesus gave them fish and bread and, and they were, they crowded around them so much. He didn't even have time to get off by himself. But the second he started preaching, eat my flesh and drink my blood, he turned around. There wasn't nobody left with the 12.
He even looked at the 12 and said, will you also leave me? Well, even on that topic, Brett,
the, he fed them. And the next day they said, we're hungry. Feed us again, do a miracle again. And he looked at them and said, are you just here for the miracles? Are you here to hear from me? It's the same idea. Yeah. Right.
And you listen, you can have 75 people gathered faithfully around God's word, loving one another, making disciples,
serving their community, sending missionaries, sharing the gospel. And heaven may be far more pleased with that church than a building packed with 5,000 people because somebody figured out the right promotional gimmick. Absolutely.
So let's, let's land this chapter. Let's, let's close it down. And I'm sure you've, thank you for listening this long. We were not planning for it to go this long, but there's a lot here that I admire. I admire the preparation. I admire the organization.
I admire the evangelistic zeal of trying to get people to come into the building of the house of the Lord. I admire the desire to reach people that other churches overlook.
There are lots of people that churches look over and they don't care about them because they don't right beat. They don't look the right way, act the right way, talk the right way. Uh, but good motives don't automatically produce good methodology.
When you combine rigid expectations, loyalty to leadership, numerical quotes, uh,
competition and contest to pressure for visible results, ministry can stop looking like shepherding and it can start looking like a production.
Right. And that's what we're talking about. Our goal isn't less evangelism. We want more evangelism. Our goal isn't less commitment. We want deeper commitment. Our goal isn't pastors who don't lead. We want strong biblical leadership, but we want all of those things rounded in scripture rather than assist in a system.
Somebody built because Christian freedom doesn't mean we don't have standards. It means God gets to set the standards. Christian freedom doesn't mean we don't pursue holiness. It means God defines holiness and Christian freedom.
It doesn't mean we start, we stop evangelizing. It means we faithfully proclaim the gospel and trust God rather than a ministry machine to produce results. Absolutely. Well, thank you, Brett, for all those.
Uh, we are excited about all of what we've got coming up. I think next week we're going to jump into the bus ministry and look at what that looks like. And so thank you for tuning in with us. And, uh, until next time to God, be the glory. Great things.
He has done. Found my new name. Found that good grace. Found that healing. And the tears fell down my face. When I found my beginning. Has no ending. Found that second chance. Found my best friend. Found my forgiveness. Found my happiness. I've been singing ever since. Found my freedom in you.
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Again, I'll see you soon. Again, I'll see you soon. Again, I'll see you soon. Again, I'll see you soon. Again, I'll see you soon. Again, I'll see you soon.
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