Church

Developing Your Ministry Philosophy

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In a previous post (Church Work’s Governing Principles), I explained how church work or the ministry should be governed by some “working principles”. These principles are rules, internal yes, personal definitely, but none-the-less established procedures for doing what you do in the ministry. These rules should be based on biblical principles explicitly understood and stated by the pastor as the how and why we do what we do.

I want to expand on this concept and apply it to various areas of the ministry, not-the-least being ministry ethics. But I will wait until a later post to develop ministry ethics.

This commentary explores the development of your own personal philosophy of the ministry. How you do it, why you do it, what it is that you do.

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Biblical NT Church: Service Elements

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church services

I must repeat, and insist that God has given us the precept of “Church,” and we are not at liberty to set what God has given us aside to do some other thing we want to do. If we examine the New Testament, we see what a church is, and we see it functioning quite well. (“Well” in the sense that the NT church does what God wants it to do. We have no right to insert our desires and purposes into what is God’s work.) A typical church in the New Testament has various service elements which we would do well to understand and imitate. As this series goes on, we will come back to these service elements and re-examine them and meditate on them. For now, we start by defining the Service Elements briefly.

Click on tag: Church-Definition to see the entire series.

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What is the Priesthood of Every Believer?

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What is the Priesthood of Every Believer? explains this neecssary and essential Bible doctrine and how it works.

The short definition is that God has ordered every single believer (saved person) in this dispensation of the New Testament to be a priest before God, offering sacrifices and serving God and the body of Christ.

1 Peter 2:9 But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light: Revelation 1:6 (God) hath made us… priests unto God

If words mean something, then God declaring us to be a royal priesthood should mean something. We are not under the Old Testament rule and structure of things. In other words, we (all male believers) do not go to the temple in Jerusalem to offer a sacrifical lamb. The temple is closed as far as offering animal sacrifices, and a non-Jew would not be allowed in to sacrifice anyway. Moreover, under the Old Testament law, no Israelite was allowed to offer sacrifice in the temple except with the help or mediation of a legitimate Jewish priest. Messianic Jews try to mix New and Old Testament such as forcing the New Testament believers to obey the Old Testament law, and that is just not possible today.

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Why we should go to a plural eldership?

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Why we should go to a plural eldership? (for pastors)

Topic: plural eldership
by David Cox 1998

The question presented is one that can simply be answered, because the plurality model is the biblical representation of local church government. In other articles I wish to present, I will deal with specific issues and especially the biblical basis, but in this article I would like to present a general argument on the basis of some Scriptures and some common sense.

When we look at the local church, many typically have a single pastor which does the majority of the preaching, teaching, and administration of the local church. There are usually a small group of men who are called deacons who approve the financial affairs of the local church. The attitude of our typical local church is one that would be summed up in the following, “we pay the pastor to do the work of the ministry, so why should we get involved?” The exception is that of finances, but other than that and some Sunday School classes, most of the work of the ministry is laid on the shoulders of one man, the pastor.

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Few Outwardly Focused Ministries

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Few Outwardly Focused Ministries

Few Outwardly Focused Ministries
By David Cox

Following our study of 7 Deadly sins of a dying church, the next one is that they have few outwardly focused ministries. The key here is introspection, or a selfishness of doing everything for their own selves. As a missionary, I have experienced some 50 years of watching things in local churches. At one time churches rallied around their work abroad, and today, church after church either just does not support missions at all, or their missions budget is sending their own people on joy rides around the world (mission trips) where the go to England to pass out some tracts, and mostly see sights.

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