Over forty years ago The Banner of March 20, 1931, included an article under the intriguing title, “The Ministers of Petty Falls.” In it Rev. Watson Groen made some shall? observations about the morale of the ministers and churches of the Christian Reformed denomination in the area of the country where they are most highly concentrated, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He pointed out that the churches which were such close neighbors had developed a nasty spirit of competition which was extremely demoralizing to both churches and ministers.
The church members, Groen found, tended to classify their pastors into three groups, “those that draw the crowds, those that hold their own and those that arc no good.” Where the individual minister was classified depended on the number of people who attended the Sunday evening service. The pressure to draw a Sunday evening crowd, he saw distorting the minister’s preaching and work. “The larger purposes of the church have been forgotten; and the poor minister instead of working to save souls, is working to save his hide. To put it less crudely, he is putting forth every effort to bid for the favor of the people against another minister who is putting forth a similar effort in a church of the same denomination only a few city blocks away.” This state of affairs which formerly had been deplored as “a wicked thing, a menace to be fought against,” Rev. Groen saw had come to be “accepted as the normal state of the church.” While unpopular pastors became discouraged, those who were drawing the crowds, usually newcomers, he observed were employing theatrical pulpit habits and other tactics to manufacture popularity which “sooner or later become the weapons whereby they destroy their own usefulness as ministers of Jesus Christ.”
Looking Farther into the Put – We should observe that such problems have been fairly common in the history of the church. Lord Manning, one of the biographers of the early Reformer, John Wycliffe, cites him as observing six hundred years ago that there were three sorts of sermons: the string of anecdotes, the scholastic discussion, and the practical exposition of the Word. Whereas only the last of the three was really legitimate, unfortunately the second, the collection of stories he observed “pleasith ofte more the people”!
Long before that, however, the Apostle Paul had to warn against the same trend in the church in Corinth where the tendency to follow men and the inclination to seek after powerful “signs” and put a premium on “excellency of speech” was obscuring the gospel and threatening to tear the church apart. He deplored this whole spirit as “carnal” (I Cor. 3:1–3). Christians must realize, “What then is Apollos? and what is Paul? Ministers through whom ye believed; and each as the Lord gave to him. I planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth anything, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase” (vss. 5–7). One is a little startled by the violence of John Calvin’s language as he comments on this Corinthian situation as described in 1:12: “If any man is influenced by ambition, that man gathers disciples, not to Christ, but to himself. This is the fountain of all evils—this the most hurtful of all plagues—this the deadly poison of all Churches, when ministers seek their own interests rather than those of Christ. In short, the unity of the Church consists more especially in this one thing—that we all depend upon Christ alone, and that men thus occupy an inferior place so as not to detract in any degree from his pre-eminence.”
The Situation Today – Compared with the situation Rev. Groon saw and deplored, that of the churches of today does not seem to have improved in spite of the warnings of the Scriptures and our predecessors. The popularity game is still only too evident in the life to the churches. Currently it seems to be getting some, no doubt unintentional, but very effective encouragement from the procedures of “Evangelism Thrust.”
Church members throughout the denomination have been prompted to critically evaluate the worship and all other activities of the churches. While such a critical evaluation may be a good thing, whether its effects will be wholesome or destructive depends upon what standards are used in making it. In reading the main guide book, Called to Serve, although the reader observes some appropriate Scripture references, he is impressed even more by the insistence at every point that personal opinions and feelings are to be elicited and consulted. The questions, “What do you think?” “How do you feel?” “Do you experience . . .?” “Do I find it relevant to my life?” “Are you comfortable with . . .?” “Do I feel satisfied with . . .?” abound throughout the hook and reveal an unmistakable tendency to let such popular opinions and “feelings” decide what Christians and the church should be and do.
Although the above is promoted in the interests of “Evangelism,” it appears unlikely that many unbelievers will be brought to Christ by a message or program that is a mere expression of what “I think” or “I feel.” It is certain that such a thorough indoctrination in the assumption that whatever people “think” and “feel” should determine the churches’ faith and life must obscure or destroy the testimony to the gospel. It must produce a gospel which is “after men” and which therefore cannot be the gospel of Christ (Gal. 1:11). It must produce a way of life that is what Paul called “walking after the flesh” instead of “after the Spirit,” one which can only bring death “because the mind of the flesh is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, neither can it be: and they that are in the flesh cannot please God” (Romans 8:3–7; cf. 12, 13).
Peter when he gave expression to his feeling of revulsion at Jesus having to suffer and die was rebuked with the sharp reply, “Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art a stumbling block unto me: for thou mindest not the things of God but the things of men” (Matt. 16:21–23). If this is the way the Lord states the case, can making “What do you feel?” or “What do you think?” or “What does the community think?” determine the course of our evangelism be expected to produce anything but a gospel but that will tum out to be the devil’s rather than the Lord’s?
Is not this feeling-and opinion-oriented approach to evangelism just one more manifestation of the prevailing sick humanistic philosophy which everywhere puts men’s feelings in the place of God’s commandments?
In our court system this philosophy is letting community opinion determine law and shifting attention from the law and its penalties to sympathy for the criminal. “Poor fellow, shouldn’t society try to do something about his feeling of unhappiness instead of blaming him?” In our schools it is shifting the purpose from disciplined learning and training to just trying to make students feel happy. (In a recent Christian Educators Journal several articles advocated the abandonment of the grading system in order to make students feel less frustrated.) In the training of ministers this current philosophy shifts the center of attention from theology to psychology and sociology. As we observe this philosophy currently tearing apart all the structures of orderly living, can we expect that deliberately bringing it into the church “to make it relevant to our time” will produce anything but a similar destruction of the church?
Another Cause of Competition – Rev. Groen forty years ago saw and deplored the competitive situation in which people shifted from church to church, following ministers and thereby putting pressure on them to develop popular tricks to hold the crowd instead of preaching the gospel without fear or favor. Groen’s comments assume that the gospel was in all of those churches, but that the pressure to seek popularity was tending to obscure or hinder its faithful preaching. Abraham Kuyper, half a century earlier in the Netherlands, saw people beginning to drift from church to church, becoming followers of the individual minister, and he too deplored this development. In his case however he saw this not merely as a result of misplaced emphasis on personality differences, but as a result of the loss of confessional unity of the churches.
W. F. A. Winckel in his biography (Leven en Arbeid van Dr. A. Kuyper, p. 37) describes how in this loss of a defined, common faith, each minister begins to bring his own doctrine, principles, methods, insights and opinions. “Such an abuse provides the most fertile soil for unholy splitting into parties, breeds the unholiest jealousy, deprives the minister of his official character, makes the congregation undiscoverable . . . and effaces every trace of the communion of saints in which the pulse of all Christian living should beat.” In this state of affairs Kuyper saw that the remedy must lie not merely in trying to bind people in loyalty to their own minister and congregation, but in seeking the restoration of the visible church. We might say, that the church must again become in practice what the Word of God calls it, “the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth” (I Tim. 3:15).
Our Position and Course – As we consider the condition of our churches today we notice not only the unhealthy competition that Rev. Groen deplored, but also increasing indications of the kind of loss of the unity of the faith which Dr. Kuyper saw in the Netherlands a century ago. The recent series of articles of Rev. Clarence Boomsma in The Banner call attention to many indications of such a “polarization” of convictions within our churches. A new little book by a recent Dutch observer (Terugzien Na Viifentwintig Jaren, Rudolf Van Reest, pp. 70-72) calls attention to the same development as especially in the Grand Rapids area people gravitate from church to church not just because of ministers’ personal idiosyncracies but because the stance of the individual congregation (more “conservative” or more “liberal”) is more or less appealing to them. (The present proposal to organize a group that was formerly part of a non-ecclesiastical “Church of the Acts” is a new and extreme example of the effort to legalize such congregations with increasingly different convictions.) The Dutch writer points out that this tendency toward developing widely different kinds of congregations in the same denomination (really congregationalism) prevents efforts to bring reformation by way of discipline.
It is in smaller places where people do not have the opportunity to shift from one church to another that protests arise when things go wrong and that efforts to bring reformation can begin. It may be difficult to say whether our present problem of church competition more nearly resembles that which Groen saw forty years ago or that which Kuyper faced in the Netherlands a century ago. In either case the remedy which the Word of God prescribes for the sickness of the church is the same. We must not just surrender to the unhealthy subjectivism of our time and resign ourselves to living with the divisions and confusion it is producing in our churches and lives; but we must prayerfully return to the preaching, teaching and discipline which the Word of God prescribes and to the Lord to whom they direct us. That is the way to restored life and health for us and for Christ’s church.
Peter De Jong is pastor of the Christian Reformed Church of Dutton, Michigan.
The church members, Groen found, tended to classify their pastors into three groups, “those that draw the crowds, those that hold their own and those that arc no good.” Where the individual minister was classified depended on the number of people who attended the Sunday evening service. The pressure to draw a Sunday evening crowd, he saw distorting the minister’s preaching and work. “The larger purposes of the church have been forgotten; and the poor minister instead of working to save souls, is working to save his hide. To put it less crudely, he is putting forth every effort to bid for the favor of the people against another minister who is putting forth a similar effort in a church of the same denomination only a few city blocks away.” This state of affairs which formerly had been deplored as “a wicked thing, a menace to be fought against,” Rev. Groen saw had come to be “accepted as the normal state of the church.” While unpopular pastors became discouraged, those who were drawing the crowds, usually newcomers, he observed were employing theatrical pulpit habits and other tactics to manufacture popularity which “sooner or later become the weapons whereby they destroy their own usefulness as ministers of Jesus Christ.”
Looking Farther into the Put – We should observe that such problems have been fairly common in the history of the church. Lord Manning, one of the biographers of the early Reformer, John Wycliffe, cites him as observing six hundred years ago that there were three sorts of sermons: the string of anecdotes, the scholastic discussion, and the practical exposition of the Word. Whereas only the last of the three was really legitimate, unfortunately the second, the collection of stories he observed “pleasith ofte more the people”!
Long before that, however, the Apostle Paul had to warn against the same trend in the church in Corinth where the tendency to follow men and the inclination to seek after powerful “signs” and put a premium on “excellency of speech” was obscuring the gospel and threatening to tear the church apart. He deplored this whole spirit as “carnal” (I Cor. 3:1–3). Christians must realize, “What then is Apollos? and what is Paul? Ministers through whom ye believed; and each as the Lord gave to him. I planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth anything, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase” (vss. 5–7). One is a little startled by the violence of John Calvin’s language as he comments on this Corinthian situation as described in 1:12: “If any man is influenced by ambition, that man gathers disciples, not to Christ, but to himself. This is the fountain of all evils—this the most hurtful of all plagues—this the deadly poison of all Churches, when ministers seek their own interests rather than those of Christ. In short, the unity of the Church consists more especially in this one thing—that we all depend upon Christ alone, and that men thus occupy an inferior place so as not to detract in any degree from his pre-eminence.”
The Situation Today – Compared with the situation Rev. Groon saw and deplored, that of the churches of today does not seem to have improved in spite of the warnings of the Scriptures and our predecessors. The popularity game is still only too evident in the life to the churches. Currently it seems to be getting some, no doubt unintentional, but very effective encouragement from the procedures of “Evangelism Thrust.”
Church members throughout the denomination have been prompted to critically evaluate the worship and all other activities of the churches. While such a critical evaluation may be a good thing, whether its effects will be wholesome or destructive depends upon what standards are used in making it. In reading the main guide book, Called to Serve, although the reader observes some appropriate Scripture references, he is impressed even more by the insistence at every point that personal opinions and feelings are to be elicited and consulted. The questions, “What do you think?” “How do you feel?” “Do you experience . . .?” “Do I find it relevant to my life?” “Are you comfortable with . . .?” “Do I feel satisfied with . . .?” abound throughout the hook and reveal an unmistakable tendency to let such popular opinions and “feelings” decide what Christians and the church should be and do.
Although the above is promoted in the interests of “Evangelism,” it appears unlikely that many unbelievers will be brought to Christ by a message or program that is a mere expression of what “I think” or “I feel.” It is certain that such a thorough indoctrination in the assumption that whatever people “think” and “feel” should determine the churches’ faith and life must obscure or destroy the testimony to the gospel. It must produce a gospel which is “after men” and which therefore cannot be the gospel of Christ (Gal. 1:11). It must produce a way of life that is what Paul called “walking after the flesh” instead of “after the Spirit,” one which can only bring death “because the mind of the flesh is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, neither can it be: and they that are in the flesh cannot please God” (Romans 8:3–7; cf. 12, 13).
Peter when he gave expression to his feeling of revulsion at Jesus having to suffer and die was rebuked with the sharp reply, “Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art a stumbling block unto me: for thou mindest not the things of God but the things of men” (Matt. 16:21–23). If this is the way the Lord states the case, can making “What do you feel?” or “What do you think?” or “What does the community think?” determine the course of our evangelism be expected to produce anything but a gospel but that will tum out to be the devil’s rather than the Lord’s?
Is not this feeling-and opinion-oriented approach to evangelism just one more manifestation of the prevailing sick humanistic philosophy which everywhere puts men’s feelings in the place of God’s commandments?
In our court system this philosophy is letting community opinion determine law and shifting attention from the law and its penalties to sympathy for the criminal. “Poor fellow, shouldn’t society try to do something about his feeling of unhappiness instead of blaming him?” In our schools it is shifting the purpose from disciplined learning and training to just trying to make students feel happy. (In a recent Christian Educators Journal several articles advocated the abandonment of the grading system in order to make students feel less frustrated.) In the training of ministers this current philosophy shifts the center of attention from theology to psychology and sociology. As we observe this philosophy currently tearing apart all the structures of orderly living, can we expect that deliberately bringing it into the church “to make it relevant to our time” will produce anything but a similar destruction of the church?
Another Cause of Competition – Rev. Groen forty years ago saw and deplored the competitive situation in which people shifted from church to church, following ministers and thereby putting pressure on them to develop popular tricks to hold the crowd instead of preaching the gospel without fear or favor. Groen’s comments assume that the gospel was in all of those churches, but that the pressure to seek popularity was tending to obscure or hinder its faithful preaching. Abraham Kuyper, half a century earlier in the Netherlands, saw people beginning to drift from church to church, becoming followers of the individual minister, and he too deplored this development. In his case however he saw this not merely as a result of misplaced emphasis on personality differences, but as a result of the loss of confessional unity of the churches.
W. F. A. Winckel in his biography (Leven en Arbeid van Dr. A. Kuyper, p. 37) describes how in this loss of a defined, common faith, each minister begins to bring his own doctrine, principles, methods, insights and opinions. “Such an abuse provides the most fertile soil for unholy splitting into parties, breeds the unholiest jealousy, deprives the minister of his official character, makes the congregation undiscoverable . . . and effaces every trace of the communion of saints in which the pulse of all Christian living should beat.” In this state of affairs Kuyper saw that the remedy must lie not merely in trying to bind people in loyalty to their own minister and congregation, but in seeking the restoration of the visible church. We might say, that the church must again become in practice what the Word of God calls it, “the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth” (I Tim. 3:15).
Our Position and Course – As we consider the condition of our churches today we notice not only the unhealthy competition that Rev. Groen deplored, but also increasing indications of the kind of loss of the unity of the faith which Dr. Kuyper saw in the Netherlands a century ago. The recent series of articles of Rev. Clarence Boomsma in The Banner call attention to many indications of such a “polarization” of convictions within our churches. A new little book by a recent Dutch observer (Terugzien Na Viifentwintig Jaren, Rudolf Van Reest, pp. 70-72) calls attention to the same development as especially in the Grand Rapids area people gravitate from church to church not just because of ministers’ personal idiosyncracies but because the stance of the individual congregation (more “conservative” or more “liberal”) is more or less appealing to them. (The present proposal to organize a group that was formerly part of a non-ecclesiastical “Church of the Acts” is a new and extreme example of the effort to legalize such congregations with increasingly different convictions.) The Dutch writer points out that this tendency toward developing widely different kinds of congregations in the same denomination (really congregationalism) prevents efforts to bring reformation by way of discipline.
It is in smaller places where people do not have the opportunity to shift from one church to another that protests arise when things go wrong and that efforts to bring reformation can begin. It may be difficult to say whether our present problem of church competition more nearly resembles that which Groen saw forty years ago or that which Kuyper faced in the Netherlands a century ago. In either case the remedy which the Word of God prescribes for the sickness of the church is the same. We must not just surrender to the unhealthy subjectivism of our time and resign ourselves to living with the divisions and confusion it is producing in our churches and lives; but we must prayerfully return to the preaching, teaching and discipline which the Word of God prescribes and to the Lord to whom they direct us. That is the way to restored life and health for us and for Christ’s church.
Peter De Jong is pastor of the Christian Reformed Church of Dutton, Michigan.