Stay on Target: The Mission of the Church

Friends, if by day three you don't know about Radius, we have not done our job adequately, so I will make this personally brief. Those of you that don't know what Radius is, it is a nine-month training school located just across the border in the country of Mexico. If you speak English, we also have a campus in Mandarin, a campus in Hindi. We're going to be starting a campus in Africa. One of the ministries of Radius is Missionary. We're at a Missionary conference, and so Radius is kind of a mothership, so to speak. We also have a short-term ministry called Radius Serve. That's a one-week down in Tijuana, Mexico. You can build a house, and you get missions, training, and teaching on the Great Commission in the mornings and the evenings. But Radius itself, the nine-month training school, is very different than anything else out there.

That school, we take away their internet. The second week that they're down there, and their reading ability just goes like this. It's amazing. Critical thinking skills improve dramatically. There are early morning workouts. You're not allowed to go north. You have to stay down in the country down there. Because here's the truth, friends. If your training isn't stringent enough, isn't rigorous enough, why should we expect you to do well when the real-life task is going to be so much harder? We know this, and I've mentioned this already. We know, intuitively, that the better-trained people in any occupation tend to do better when it comes to game time. Radius is difficult training, or what our tagline says, "rigorous training." We know of nothing else like it. There are institutions that want to do versions of it, but Radius is the only one that trains specifically and only for getting to unreached language groups.

We are not a Swiss Army knife. We are a one-bladed knife. There are other glorious things in missions. There are wonderful things in missions that we amen and heartily stand behind. That's not Radius. Radius is only training for going to those last languages on earth where the gospel and the church have yet to go. And so you're going to get a lot of classes on ecclesiology. You're going to get a lot of different classes on teamwork. Your number one and number two issues within missions that are taking missionaries off the field are usually teams, teammates and teammate relations, and children. How to raise your children overseas so when they hit their teenage years, then your ministry doesn't face some huge hiccup and you have to come home. How to raise your kids in a particular way so that they want to be on board with this task, they're not adding luggage to the task, so to speak.

And so we're going to get into a lot of various facets of what it means to go for 10, 15, 20 years to start where no one has heard the name of Christ. Where do you start to preach? What do you start to do? All of those types of things. All of those types of things are accomplished within RADIUS. We have two visit days. And this would be the final thing that I'm going to pour you on. If you don't know these visit days, go back to the booth, which is on the back left over there. These are called RADIUS days. And we have a maximum admittance of about 125 pastors and potential students. It's almost always full. It happens in November and it happens in March. The best way to understand RADIUS is to come and visit it.

I can speak for an hour on RADIUS. And it wouldn't matter that much. Come and see the campus. Come and meet the students. Come and meet the faculty. And then you will have a really good idea, usually within about five minutes, whether this will be good for your training or for members of your church as they attempt to go to an unreached language because some of them are the gospel. Very unique. There's a reason why we have this type of a conference and it attracts this type of a lineup. There is a wide swath of people that may not agree on a bunch of things. But they definitely agree on if we want our members to go, we want them to be well trained. We want them to have this type of equipping before they go to the nations.

So my encouragement would be grab some literature, talk to the people at the booth, and maybe come for a visit during RADIUS days in November. Thank you.

Good morning, friends. Welcome to the third and final day, if you can believe it, of Missionary Conference 2026. I hope that you are well rested and ready for another full day because that's what we have for you. I also hope that you're ready for another free book because we have one for you. Thanks to our friends at Desiring God, we have copies for each of you of John Piper's 21 Servants of Sovereign Joy.

These are shorter biographies, 21 of them of significant figures throughout church history with a special emphasis or including, I should say, missionaries like Adoniram Judson, Hudson Taylor, and John G. Paton as well. And what I think you'll find most encouraging about these mini biographies is that they show how God, in his sovereign grace, uses imperfect sinners to accomplish extraordinary things for his glory. And so don't we need to be reminded of that over and over and over again. Christ's kingdom is going to be brought on earth not through the greatness of man, but through the greatness of our God. And this book will help remind you of that. So pick up your free copy, read it, meditate on it, thank the Lord for His sovereign grace that worked through His church. You will be edified by it.

And friends, if you'll stand with me once again, let's start the morning off in the best way that we can, by singing of how His mercy is more.

I don't want to take too much of his time. I'm thankful for him, thankful for his love for the church. Would you please welcome my friend Mark Dever.

You're one of the current intergecees we see when you stand. We're the current interns. If you want to know more about our internship, you can just talk to these guys. They're great. Another miscellaneous note, on this book that you're being given, John Piper's 21 Servants of Sovereign Joy, you need to understand what this is if you're using it right now. This is not just a book John thought, oh, I'm going to write for John's people. And so he sits down and tries to write out a chapter on somebody. For 20 years, 27 years, John led a pastor's conference. And every year, as a kind of gift to that pastor's conference, he would spend the previous year reading that person's writings, thinking about them, and trying to pray and derive lessons from their lives. Every single one of these messages took a year to write.

This is not a normal book. So I'm going to encourage you, understand what you have. You're going to have a shelf full of biographies, and this is not that. This is, it is, it is biographical. But it is also somebody who has reflected, actively prayed over, thought about, theologically considered what he could learn from, what we should learn from the various people he's included in. So John, thank you, it's a great gift. Thank you so much for that, and brothers and sisters, use that well. The second comment, it's so fun not being an authority of the conference, I can do what I want.

This is such a good conference. The talks in this program worked to organize this. As somebody who has clicked in on many conferences, this is so much better. That we usually get to... That also is good. Thank you, Mr. Boswell.

If you're like me, you're tired by this point. This is the third day of a conference. It's been very full. Let me just go and tell you what I'm going to say and why I'm going to say it.

And then if you need to tune out, check your email, do whatever. You've got the point. If you want more details, I'm going to go ahead and give the talk. but let me just tell you those of us who come to speak at a conference like this in private have a lot of complaints about missions.

A lot of stuff's going on we don't like. We're not pleased about. We talk together and we think, so what do we do about it? How do we make things better? You want your own local church to be better, right? You want your own Christian life to be better. You want to follow him more nearly. Well, when we look at missions, my basic contribution in this talk is the problems on the mission field just reflect the problems in our churches.

Don't go yelling at the mission agencies, the mission professors at the seminaries, the people writing the mission books. Just look in the mirror, look at your own church, look at what we're doing here. If we want to clean up the mission field, we got to clean up our churches.

So basically the to-do from this talk this morning, if you want to help world missions, teach the church about the church. That's my whole thesis. Everything else is going to be details, all right? Feel free and tune in and out as you have interest and ability.

I'm going to pray and then we're going to jump in. Lord, we thank you for this time. Pray you give us wisdom as we consider the truth about your church and your love for the people that you've made. Lord, we pray that you would help us to understand what your word teaches and understand implications of it for our day. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

So friends, the mission of the church is the church continuing, and prospering, and helping new churches be planted, especially where the name of Christ has not been proclaimed. Now that's a carefully worded sentence that I'm going to repeat.

The mission of the church is the church continuing and prospering, helping new churches being planted, especially where the name of Christ has not yet been proclaimed. About a year ago, David Garrison, one of the pioneers of the contemporary idea of church planting movements, the longtime missionary himself, published a celebratory volume called, Inside Church Planting Movements, with the promising subtitle, What 25 Years of Assessments Reveal.

Dr. Garrison found that around the world, church planting movements, and that's a rapid conversion, not just of individuals, but of large sections of people groups. He found that they've occurred in the last quarter of a century in many and varied parts of the world. Analyzing, learning from, and repeating the fruitful parts of the work that brought these about seemed to him the obvious way.

It's what we should be doing. Where has it worked? Now, how can we repeat that? This is how we're going to fulfill the plan of God. Summarized in the words of Jesus in Matthew 24, 14, and this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come. What's it going to take?

The end is the visible, bodily, glorious return of the Son of Man himself, Jesus Christ. The thought that you and I, that your church and mine, can actually, work so as to bring about this vindication, this cosmic celebration of the once rejected and raised Son of Man strikes us as almost an unbelievable privilege that we can have a part in that parade of grace.

So understanding what it is to truly proclaim the gospel of the kingdom throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations is a matter of great importance to Christians everywhere. And so it is that all good ends from God's glory to, the vindication of the name of Christ and his mission, to the salvation of the lost, all of these things joined together to spur us on to work, to see God's will in his great gospel of Jesus Christ being proclaimed to all the world.

But the devil is quite literally in the details. At home and abroad, people and even churches that tout themselves as Christians give little evidence to the truth of that. The scourge of falsely understood and falsely reported conversions, does not first appear in the work of mission agencies and boards.

It first appears among pastors and churches and the members of those churches. The question, how are the problems that we see in world missions today to be cleaned up? And making changes in some agencies would help. Making some changes in Bible colleges and mission departments of seminaries would help.

But at the very headwaters of so many of the problems that we observe is the locality. Your church and mine. How have we taught and how have church members believed themselves to be saved and to lead others to consider themselves saved?

The project that I feel like I've been engaged in for decades now is simply this. We have to change the way churches think about themselves. So for the Baptists among us, this is why so many of you pastors get fired, because you try to do this work and people don't appreciate it.

What does it mean to be a Christian? What is the gospel? What is the church? Those are the three crucial questions of the Reformation. They're the three crucial questions for every one of us today. What is the gospel?

What is a Christian? What is a church? How many problems in our mission field are simply projections of our misunderstandings and misdeeds in our own home churches? So how do we rectify this? Surely prayer and humble searching of the word.

And that must result in pastors thinking better about the church and the training that Christians will themselves take to become our missionaries. The missionaries that report dodgy conversion numbers probably come from churches that are themselves somewhat careless. Not so much in their accounting for their budgets as in their assurance of salvation. Given too quickly on too little evidence to those who are often too young.

Brothers and sisters, let us give ourselves to study the word to make sure that we understand what a Christian is and to make sure that we ourselves are following Christ and to make sure that our own churches are teaching about this as they should. I am used to being in situations where I raise these exact questions, and everybody is bored, and they think, what is the point? And I have been right so many times on this, I don't care about your boredom.

I was in a group called the Council on Ecclesiology decades ago now. People from lots of different seminaries and denominations brought together about 15 leaders from around the country. And knowing who was in the room after about three hours of very pointless and fruitless discussion, I raised the question, and I told the chairman at a coffee break that I wanted to raise the question of what the gospel is.

Well, he was very condescending, and he kind of laughed, and he said, Mark, I think we know what the gospel is. I said, well, good, it shouldn't take long then. Well, friends, I did raise that question after the coffee break, and that led to the end of the Council on Ecclesiology.

Literally, I'm not kidding. The moderator threw it out there. People were reluctant to go up on the whiteboard and write down a definition, but finally somebody did. Anyway, I'm remembering specifics, and I'm thinking better. I'm self-editing. Even in your 60s, you can grow in Christ.

and they shared the gospel and then someone else objected and someone else added this and someone else then objected and soon the room was in just a ferment of disagreement over what the gospel is. Never a wasted lunchtime conversation. What's the good news of Jesus Christ?

People will overhear it. Some people might get saved. Share the gospel with each other. Make sure you understand what that good news is. Anyway, my very practical and positive idea for you, especially those of you who are pastors because I know we have a lot of pastors at this conference, is simply this, Preach about the church to the church.

Preach about the church to the church. That's my once-in-a-summary, really, of everything else I have to say. This morning, I want to address this school of preachers on this terribly neglected aspect of what we're to preach about from the Bible.

And one of the reasons I think this is so neglected is because many people are skeptical that there is much in the Bible about the local church. Many people think that that's not a big deal. There may be stories or examples, but so the thinking goes, the situation then is so different from ours. There are so many clearer points, more central even to the gospel that I think little of my preaching of the Bible should actually be about the church.

Maybe in the course of my ministry, you think I'll do some topical series on the church. And if it goes really well, I'll publish it as a book. It's more like nine marks of a healthy church or something like that.

Done early in a ministry, just to be clear with the church so they understand what you know a church is as the new pastor. But the thought of regularly preaching about the church to the church seems somehow off.

And so we're preaching about the window rather than what we see through the window. Oh, we've had glorious messages from Ian, from Michael on the glory of Christ. And surely that's what we want to get behind. Why preach on the window?

Would that ever be a helpful part of Bible preaching? Well, I want us to consider in some of our remaining time this morning, some of what the Bible says about the local church and to consider that if we don't instruct our churches on this matter, who will?

What are we supposed to do? What are we supposed to believe? What are we supposed to do together as a church? How are we supposed to make decisions? Lots of practical questions faced by Christians, answered by Christians. Some of these questions answered a little bit differently, but some of the churches you've come from, or you'll go, home to do things very differently than the Capitol Hill Baptist Church does, even if they preach the same gospel.

Well, how does that happen? What should we think about such differences? Is there anything that two gospel preaching churches can disagree about that by definition is unimportant? Well, it's a good question to consider over lunch. And if we don't consider that question carefully, then we're leaving the door open to all kinds of things in our missionaries.

The only way we know the good news of Jesus Christ is because God has decided to reveal the truth about himself to us. He's done it through his word, by his spirit in the Bible. And the truth, of course, the truth of Christ is the means that God's spirit uses to reconcile us with himself.

that's surely the great good news that we rejoice in that's brought us here together, that for sinners like us there is salvation through the substitutionary death of Christ and the good news of the ascension, the resurrection and ascension, and return, coming return of this one, that he is our savior If we will trust in him, this is good news for you. You know, you can go to a missionary conference and be lost.

Maybe you had some friends who were coming. Maybe you thought it'd be a fun, a fun few days in Fort Worth. Welcome. We're glad you're here. The most important thing you can do is make sure you know what it means to be a Christian and make sure that you are a Christian.

Friends, that's the message we want to be clear on. New life comes through the word as Jesus prayed that it would. We saw yesterday with Kevin of the prayer in John 17, Jesus prays in verse 20, "My prayer is not for them alone. I also pray for for those, and he describes Christians then, those who will believe in me through their message.

So people become Christians through a specific message. And that's exactly what happens as we read through the New Testament. When we go to the book of Acts in chapter 10, verse 44, we say, we see Peter preaching to Cornelius and his friends. And we read while Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit came on all who heard the message.

And then in the next chapter, Acts 11, 14, we see this is what God had told Cornelius to expect. Peter will bring you a message through which you and all your household will be saved. This is why over in Romans chapter 10, Paul reasons as he does about the necessity of having someone preach this message specifically. Because as we read in Romans 10, 17, faith comes from hearing this message.

So it's not just the beginning of the Christian life, but throughout our life as Christians, that we find that the Bible, the Bible is, is our lifeline. The Bible is our feast. We can read Psalm 119 out loud and just rejoice in every stanza of celebrating the great life-giving word of God.

Paul wrote toward the end of his life to the younger preacher, Timothy. In 2 Timothy 3, all scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, And in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I give you this charge.

Preach the word. Be prepared in season, out of season, correct, rebuke, and encourage with great patience and careful instruction. So, this message right now is an attempt at such careful instruction to help us understand and recover faithfulness to God's word on something that is not essential for salvation.

But that is important for every missionary, every pastor, and finally every Christian. What is the local church to be and to do? Because if you don't understand the local church, you're not going to be able to do it. If you don't understand what they're to be and to do in Fort Worth, you don't understand what they're to be and to do in New Guinea.

May God help us to think and teach well about the church. We read in Ephesians 5.25, Paul says, Christ loved the church. He gave himself up for her. So, just as scripture teaches us about all of life and doctrine, it also teaches us specifically about our lives together as we assemble in a local church for corporate public worship. It teaches us important things about how we're to organize our life together in our churches. It certainly doesn't teach us everything, but neither does the Bible teach us nothing. And it should be our desire to search out everything that God has revealed about himself and joyfully to accept it and adopt it and submit ourselves to it and enjoy God's blessing in it.

So, that's what we want to investigate. Something of what scripture teaches us about life and doctrine, worship and polity, and understanding it all considering the fact that scripture does teach us about these things and that therefore we should be sure and teach the people committed to our care as we follow the words of the great commission to teach them to obey all that I've commanded you or Paul's words to Timothy in 2 Timothy 3. This is the beginning of developing a healthy missions culture in your church. The beginning of developing a healthy missions culture in your church is to make sure people understand clearly what a Christian is, what the gospel is, and what a church is.

So we're going to look at three questions more briefly and then spend our time, more time on a fourth question. And I'm approaching this topic like this because I want, I want us to remember how it is we approach God.

We approach him as he has told us to. Our form as Christians is to seek God's will in God's word, either by express command or from principles that we reason with. So let's take one as an example. Question number one of four questions. What shall we do?

What shall we do? The answer is in the Bible. The basic idea is that God made us. He knows what we were made for. We look to his word then for how we should live. And God has always been concerned about how the people specially called by his name will live. So when, when God calls Abram in Genesis chapter 12 out of paganism, he calls him to believe a promise and that belief will affect how Abraham was to live.

Later in Exodus, as Abraham's descendants have multiplied in Egypt, God gives him instructions about how his people, his, assembly, are to live. and that's the books of the law, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. That's what they're all about. In the new Testament, at the very end of Matthew, Jesus promised his disciples that his authority would be with them till the very end of the age. And was this promise just for the apostles? No, because they didn't last till the end of the age?

They would, wouldn't be around that long. No, he clearly intended this for those who would follow them in Christian ministry and witness together with those united to them. Those like Jesus prayed for them. He said, I'm going to give you a promise. I'm going to give you a promise. John 17, who will believe because of their message.

These were instructions to Christians and preachers and local churches and missionaries about what we're to do. We're to go, we're to make disciples, we're to baptize, we're to teach them to obey. Jesus said, all that I have commanded you, not all that is essential for salvation, but all that I have commanded you.

God's word has to do with life. This is the very core and substance of missions. This is the great missionary apostle Paul's message. What What did he do? He established churches and he taught them in person and by letter how to live.

It was Ian the first day who reminded us that Ephesians exults in the grace of God in those first three chapters with one imperative. And then in the last three chapters, there are 41 imperatives, all rooted in the indicatives of those first three chapters. Well, that's what Paul did. Paul established churches in the gospel and then taught them how to live.

It's by his word that Christ builds his church. A local church, whether it's in Washington, DC or Fort Worth, Texas or Beijing, is a body of people that are marked out by the fruit of God's spirit as holy and loving. So, friends, by direct command or implication or principles, God's word tells us everything we need to know about every aspect of following him in life. From From dating to marriage, from working to giving, from evangelizing to missions.

So how shall we live? The answer is in the Bible. Okay, question number two, what shall we believe? What shall we believe? The answer is in the Bible. You see the basic idea. God has revealed the truth about himself and us, and therefore we are dependent on him for the good news and everything else that we need to know about God. And this is what the church in many ways is doing. It's a group of people who are not only living lives of love themselves, but who are doing so because we all agree on how we have been loved in Christ.

It's not just you found the people with a nice attitude. My wife's family are from a small town in Kentucky, Hartford, Kentucky, that has a big billboard as you come into the city, home of 2,000 happy people and a few sore heads.

Well, that's not what the church is. The church is not just some people who happen to be attitudinally happy. No, we're people who know ourselves specifically to have been loved by God through Christ in the most amazing way.

You think of how Paul is going to be talking about the importance of the resurrected body in 1 Corinthians 15. And he says at the beginning of the chapter, now, brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel, you are saved if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. For what I received, I passed on to you as of first importance, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day. So, friends, this message is mandatory to be believed by those we would evangelize wherever we are in the world.

Whether we're our neighbors or people in another land. If we would be Christians, if we would have a Christian church. That's why Paul is so hard on the Galatians in Galatians chapter one, if they would believe any other gospel.

So what shall we believe? Well, either explicitly like substitutionary atonement or implicitly like the Trinity and church membership, the answer is in the Bible. What shall we do? The answer is in the Bible. What should we believe? The answer is in the Bible. All right, having seen how this normally works in the Christian life, we can't be surprised in that a third question finds the same answer. Question number three, how shall we worship?

The answer is in the Bible. The basic idea here is that God tells us how we should approach him in public worship. We read the Bible, we sing the Bible, we preach the Bible, and we pray the Bible. Friends, the church is not simply a group of people who believe the same gospel and live distinctly spirit-led lives. That would describe this conference, probably largely in the attendees. No, we're also a group of people that comes together regularly in order to worship God, as Jesus said in John 4, in spirit and in truth.

That's to be true for all of life, whether we are conducting that life in Arabic or English, in Hindi or in German. And that certainly includes the times when we Christians assemble together as churches. We are commanded in God's word not to forsake that regular weekly assembling. So it's no surprise that God should instruct us in his word what we are to do in that required assembling.

Though they can have a secondary role, creativity and innovation that are so valued in our culture are not primarily what worship in the local church is about. Not primarily what it is to inform the worship in the local church.

Given what we're like as sinners even though we're redeemed, we are fallen. We are unreliable guides to invent things that we would then require each other to do in coming to God. God has told us in his word all that we need to know, about what we should do as we come together.

In the Bible, again and again, human inventions were idolatrous. Consider the golden calf in Exodus 32. They were sincere in their desire to worship the God who had delivered them from Egypt, but look how horribly wrong they went.

Their disobedience to God's commands about idolatry and adultery, their rejection of what they were to believe and do showed itself in a grotesque distortion in their public worship of God. I wonder if you've seen such distortions tempt you.

Tempt your own church. We're seeing them in mission teams or practices that you've been a part of. Friends, one of the things that separated the false gods in the Old Testament from the true God is the false gods were mute.

People had to creatively figure out how to approach them. We could do this. I think we should do this. It's cool. My family always did it this way. Whereas the true God spoke. He told his people how to approach him.

I think of the words in Isaiah 29, 13, these people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain. Their teachings are but rules taught by men. In fact, Jesus quoted this very passage in Mark 7 when he was correcting the distortions that the traditions of the Pharisees had brought into the worship of God.

Friends, depravity makes us unreliable guides. We need God's self-revelation or we are lost. Everything we do in our church, in our times on Sunday morning, we intend to do in obedience to God's word. I think I just deboned my Bible. As a preacher, I have tons of stuff in my Bible usually. And I pulled out the bulletin from Sunday just in the hotel room this morning, so it wouldn't fall out while I was up here. But you know, I've got a a bulletin from Sunday. And if you're opening it up, there's an order of service on the first page. And everything we do in there, we mean to get from scripture.

None of it is meant to be, hey, that's a cool idea. Let's try this. So we have a scriptural call to worship. That's meant to symbolize the fact that as God's people, we are called together by his word. Faith comes through hearing the message about Christ, Romans 10:17. Even as we find calling us to read God's word throughout the Bible, we formally begin our time together by hearing God address us in His word. So, I'll do announcements and things before that. But then we'll have a moment of silence. And then it literally won't even be citing like Leviticus 14. No, it'll just be God's word read out. And that's like the call that goes out and the people who are God's people, they look up and they hear it. They know, "That's my Father's words."

That's how we come together. We begin with that. We may use very summary statements of what the Bible teaches us. We confess with our mouths as Romans 10, 9 calls us to. We sing hymns and psalms because we're commanded to in James 5:13 and Romans 15:11 and James and Ephesians 5:19 and Colossians 3:16. We pray and praise as we're instructed to do in Hebrews 13, 15 and in intercession as we're instructed to do in James 5 and Ephesians 6, 18. We read God's word to each other as we're instructed to do in Revelation 1, 3.

We confess our sins as we're told to do in 1 John 1, 9. We remind ourselves of God's glory for our great comfort. We give financially as we're instructed to do in Galatians 6, 6 and 2 Timothy 2, 6. Though for the first time in 150 years of our church's history, we did not do it with offering plates this past Sunday.

This past Sunday, we had no offering plates and the walls didn't fall in. We were fine. People still gave. They just gave probably electronically at other times. And we had a couple of wooden boxes at the back in case people wanted to do it then.

But the circumstance doesn't defeat the element that we want to replicate. We want to give. And of course, the preaching that we see Paul commanding like in 2 Timothy 4, 2, an example throughout the book of Acts. All of this should happen in our times together in our churches or if you're a missionary in your home church.

But those churches should also be the end, the goal of your missionary work. You want to see other churches like that established. When you send a missionary out, you're looking to see that replicated. There'll be language differences, cultural differences. There'll be all kinds of things that will be different. Some of which you expect, some of which will surprise you.

But when you shake out all the distinctions culturally, you'll see the same elements that are commanded by God's word present. So on the question, how should we worship? The answer is in the Bible. And that's true in our home churches and it's true on the mission field.

All this brings us to the fourth and last of these questions. Number four, how shall we live together? How should our church be organized? Are there a diversity of church structures in the New Testament? I mean, did things start kind of charismatic in Acts and 1 and 2 Corinthians, but end up Presbyterian by the time we get to the pastorals? You know, 1 and 2 Timothy or Titus.

Or is there a consistent government presented in the New Testament? Well, friends, here's my basic idea. God created the church. So as with our own experiences as individuals, God, the author, is in authority. He tells us what a church is and how to do it. How is the church to be organized? The answer is in the Bible.

We need to know what a church is intended to be if we're going to be able to evaluate how we're doing and what we should do going forward. Imagine trying to be a good husband or a good wife if you don't know what marriage is.

I mean, there's a freedom that comes in ignorance, but it's not a good freedom. You know, you're free to use the piano as a vacuum cleaner, but there's a lot better freedom when you know what somebody's purpose is, to use it in accordance with its purpose.

So it is with the church. And in our church's statement of faith that we've had since the day we were founded, a visible church of Christ is a congregation of baptized believers associated by covenant in the faith and fellowship of the gospel, observing the ordinances of Christ, governed by his laws, and exercising the gifts, rights, and privileges invested in them according to his word. That it's only scriptural officers or bishops or pastors and deacons, whose qualifications, claims, and duties are defined in the epistles to Timothy and Titus.

So friends, a church is governed by Christ's laws, lives in obedience to his teachings. The Bible tells us how we're to function. That's what the Westminster Confession said so well. Chapter one, paragraph six, the whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man's salvation, faith, and life is either expressly set down in scripture. So Nick, you were asking a question in the breakout yesterday. I was trying to, this is the section of the Westminster Confession I was referring to, is either expressly set down in scripture or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from scripture unto which nothing at any time is to be added. Whether by new revelations of the spirit or traditions of men.

Now here, I should just note that many otherwise Bible-believing Christians today may not accept the idea that the Bible tells us how we're to organize our church. And if that's the case, then you better believe there's going to be a ton of variety in the missions that they will sponsor. Because they don't believe these things are given.

They believe this for a few different reasons. Perhaps you've thought that the Bible doesn't teach us how we should organize our life together in a local church. Maybe you question whether the Bible teaches on this at all, either explicitly or implicitly.

I think that most evangelical and even Baptist seminaries today would not suggest that there is any consistent pattern of polity in the New Testament. Well, brethren and sisters, if that's been your assumption, just ask yourself this question. What would you do if there were such teaching in the Bible?

Would you submit to it? Many churches are cautious here. Well, scripture can be sufficient without it being specific on anything we might wonder about. I mean, people can imagine things, they can read them into the Bible, and that's certainly true.

But I think we want to be clear that scripture is sufficient in helping us do whatever God would have us to do, whether that's select a job or select a car. But that biblical teaching comes out not in specifics, but in principles.

However, in regards to polity, the organization and structure of a local church, we see in the Bible that God does care about it. He has set, as we read in 1 Corinthians 12, 28, different kinds of people in the church, including teachers and administrators. Why did he do that? Because he cares about how the church operates.

When Paul writes to the Colossians in Colossians 2, 5, he said that he was delighted to see how orderly you are. Have you ever looked at a church and actually been delighted by seeing how orderly it is? Does that seem a strange thing to you? Well, it seemed natural to Paul.

Others may reject considering this topic simply by saying, it's not important. I mean, it doesn't really matter. I think we tend to be impatient today with anything that's not essential for salvation. It's like most Americans today have two speeds. Something's either essential for salvation or it is unimportant.

You're not going to think very well if you do that. You're not going to read your Bibles very well. There are all kinds of things that have various levels of importance that you're going to have to think through.

There are not matters of real importance. That's certainly true. And there are things that are essential for salvation. Questions that are not salvation for not essential for salvation, but are really important for living out our Christian lives in obedience to God's words, they also exist. These commands are not arbitrary. Observing them is fruit. So, questions of polity and organization are of some importance in the life of the church.