The Church Answers Podcast

The Six Purposes of the Church: How They Really Play Out in a Local Congregation. Part 6 of 9: The Purpose of Ministry

The purposes of the church originate with the early churches in the New Testament. When Rick Warren wrote "The Purpose Driven Church" in 1995, the purposes became commonplace in conversations in churches around the world. Thom takes a detailed journey about the purposes of the church through nine episodes. Keep all of them together to share with your church leaders and members.

Duration:: 11m
Broadcast on:: 24 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

Welcome to the Church Answers podcast presented by Chaney & Associates. Chaney & Associates are the accounting firm for the church. Now get ready for fast-paced insights on key issues affecting the local church today. We release three episodes each week, so make sure you've seen or heard them all. And now, here's the CEO of Church Answers, Tom Rayner. You are watching on YouTube the Church Answers Podcast. You are listening on your favorite podcasting out the Church Answers Podcast as well. Thank you for listening. Give us a rating and review. I say that a lot, but please do it. Get the word out about us. Hey, if you're watching on YouTube, I'm finding myself doing more and more watching instead of just the audio. But wherever you are, thank you for being a part of the Church Answers Podcast. You are incredibly a blessing to us, and I don't take you for granted. We don't have a podcast if we don't have an audience. 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That book, which came out in 1995, where I read the manuscript for the first time in 1994, knew not just instinctively because it was so evident. It didn't take some type of intuition or discerning wisdom to know that this book was really going to be special. I had just attended a conference probably a year earlier in Telediga, Alabama, believe it or not, where Rick Warren spoke and it was called the Cameo Conference, C-A-M-E-O. Contemporary Approaches to Ministry of Angelism and Organization. And so since that was his theme of this conference, and it was an incredible theme, but I got one story. I got to tell you from this conference and then I'll get back to the purpose of the church. Rick gave an illustration of a topical sermon that he had used in his church and just he put it in there with the outline and it may have even had a little bit of the manuscript to it. I don't recall him, but the the title of the sermon was "How to Affair Proof Your Marriage." And he went through biblical definitions of marriage and faithfulness, all that kind of stuff. So what was really amusing? This was pre-internet days, so keep that in mind. In various newspapers in the state of Alabama, including the one that came to my house, the Birmingham News, there were a half dozen advertisements that said, "Come to our church and hear this sermon, How to Affair Proof Your Marriage." I mean, it was in the classified ads in the newspaper, half a dozen churches did. I was just cracking up because they took his idea. I'm not suggesting they played to her as a sermon. I don't know. I didn't listen to him, but just simply to say, everybody just kind of, "Ooh, that's a good sermon. I'm going to do that." And I remember one of my deacons saying to me when he saw the Saturday paper advertising to Sunday Sermons, he said to me, "Do we have some problem with churches in our area?" I guess so. We've got so many that are preaching a sermon on how to Affair Proof Your Marriage. I don't know how I got down on that, but that was just, that was an incidental in my relationship with Rick Warren. So Rick asked me to endorse the book. It did. And after I read it, '94, it came out in 1995. Incredible book. Powerful, powerful application. It's not just that he named the biblical purposes that the church should have. And again, evangelism, prayer, discipleship, ministry, worship, fellowship. It's not that he just identified them, but he said, "If we're calling those our purposes, we need to budget according to our purposes. We need to have ministries according to our purposes. We need to have a quipping according to our purposes." In other words, he changed the paradigm, particularly of the American church. And I know it had global influence, but particularly of the American church, he changed the paradigm from, "We're going to do things the way that we've always done them or the way the denomination has told us to do them. And we're going to ask the question, "What is the best thing we should be doing according to the purpose that God has called us to?" And he broke those out into five purposes. Of course, we later added prayer, Chuck Lawless and I did, as one of the six purposes in 1996. So we have this new book out, relatively new in '95 and '96, and it is already changing the shape of churches across the landscape. And churches are beginning to answer the question, "Why do we do what we do? What is our purpose? What is our reason for existence?" And one of the six purposes was ministry. Now, many times when we think of ministry, we just simply think of, "Okay, that's what churches do. They have ministry. They have music ministry. They have teaching ministry." He was very specific in what ministry was. He said, "Ministry is where you love your neighbor as yourself." He gets so biblical. Let me just read straight from his book. I'm reading for page 104. The word we use to describe this purpose, loving your neighbor as yourself, is ministry. The church exists to minister to people. Ministry is demonstrating God's love to others by meeting their needs and healing their hurts in the name of Jesus. Each time you reach out and love to others, you are ministering to them. The church is to minister all kinds of needs, spiritual, emotional, relational, and physical. Jesus said that even a cup of cold water given in the name, in his name, was considered a ministry and would not go unanswered. And then in Ephesians 4, 12, the church is to equip the saints for the work of ministry. In many ways where evangelism was the eternal purpose of the church, in other words, to be God's conduit of the gospel where they could know Christ and have His presence now and forever in the kingdom to come to heaven, ministry was that which was done temporarily between now and then the temporal and the eternity. We were to do ministry in the name of Christ to others. And so when you think of social ministries, when you think of community ministries, when you think of ministries that help the hurting, that was the type of ministry that he was that he was talking about. Now, in our earlier podcast, as I was going through the purposes of the church, and I talked about the purpose of discipleship, I talked about how discipleship was sometimes put into competition, if not contradiction with evangelism, which was unfortunate because it should not have been. You cannot have evangelism without discipleship, you can't have discipleship without evangelism. The great commission is evangelism that then becomes discipleship or the continuation of becoming a person of Christ and then growing as a person in Christ. Well, while evangelism and discipleship were often put in competition with each other, so was evangelism and ministry, particularly in the earlier parts of the 20th century is called the great social ministry debate, sometimes called the social gospel. And it was unfortunate because once again, it was an argument about do we help people in Jesus' name just because they're hurting physically, emotionally, are we to do that? And the answer is yes. And then the other part was, but no, we have to tell them the good news of Jesus Christ, evangelism, and the answer to that is yes. We began to make it too distinctive, two choices. And what Rick does so beautifully here, he says evangelism is one of our purposes. Ministry is one of our purposes. And he's very clear in the Purpose Driven Church book that was published in 1995. He's very clear that these purposes are constantly intersecting. These purposes are, yes, they have their own distinct characteristics and reasons for existence, but they are always intersecting. And he said, ministry should always be one of our purposes. Sometimes we will help people with that cup of cold water, with that physical emotional need. Sometimes we'll be talking about Christ and explaining the gospel to them. Many of the times we'll be doing both. And so he just reminded us that a church that was not doing ministry was an incomplete church. The late Peter Wagner wrote a book that someone touched upon this called Church Growth in the Whole Gospel, that if we're not also ministering in the name of Christ, it's not a whole gospel. I'll just simply say, Rick hit it before that. And he said, if we are not helping people in the name of Christ with their temporal physical emotional needs, it is not a complete gospel. Of course, there has to be the gospel of Christ and evangelism, but that's why Rick also said evangelism is critically important, but so is ministry. Ministry is the next purpose of the church that we wanted to cover. And we're going to cover one that I had to reread again to be reminded of what he meant when he said fellowship. I could get into that, but I'm not going to. I'm going to save that for the next episode. So as always, thank you for being a part of the church answers podcast. We continue to go over the purpose driven church we're now in our third week of this. And you'll continue to hear more about what Rick Warren did at Saddleback Church and the profound influence he had with the purpose driven church. All right. Thank you, Chaney and Associates. Thank you listeners. Thank you viewers at YouTube. We'll see you are here. You are be with you in the next episode. We'll see you then. You have been listening to the church answers podcast presented by Chaney and Associates. 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