The Church? Who Needs It-Part B

Every human being has some need to belong to a family, a group, where they say, I belong here. We yearn for community and a good old Bible word, fellowship. A more modern term is community. We need that.

We long for that. It's a basic human need. Sociologically, people gravitate toward the group. Welcome to Connect with Skip Weekend Edition at a question that keeps coming up. Is the Church at a precipice of change, a moment where it must adapt to fit the times or become entirely extinct? That is one of the fiercest debates taking place not only within the Church, but also outside the Church. What is the role of the Church in the 21st century? Well, Skip has just started a new series that examines that very question.

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Visit connectwithskip.com slash offer to give online securely or call 800-922-1888, 800-922-1888 and request your copy of Pastor Skip's Picks. If you've opened your Bibles to Acts chapters one and two, we'll examine some verses there. As Skip Heitzig continues his introduction to our new series, Church, Who Needs It? Some people attend church out of their background, you know, their cultural expectation. I grew up going to church, thus I go to church. Other people, we could say, go to church because they're pressured into it by a spouse or by a parent or by a child.

They want to please them. It's probably safe to say that some want to go to church to be a good example to their children. They weren't attending church before, but now they have children and they say they need something, a moral underpinning, though I would never do it on my own. Now that I'm part of a family unit, let's go to church.

That's possible. Others may attend church to cold business contacts. After all, they might rationalize that it's better to do business with honest people that you would typically find at church than dishonest people. Still others might attend church for a potential date, husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend.

I don't know. I will quote this to you, though. George Gallup, one of those pollsters, wrote a book called Saints Among Us. He said, Though many Americans are religious in a loose sense, the core population, says Gallup, living deeply spiritual lives, is 13 percent.

That's after all of his polling. Those living deeply spiritual lives in our country, not 86, not 94, not 96 percent, 13 percent. Now we are basically following where Europe and England has preceded us. And last estimate, since 1980, since 1974, every year in England, 85 churches shut their doors.

They close, 85 a year. It's big business over in England to sell off church furnishings. Get this, christening fonts or baptismal fonts. Look really cool in your garden. And people are taking the old furnishings and selling them and people are making them bird baths in their gardens.

Or buying pews and they become seats in one's garden. Big business in that part of the world. Now, I will confess, I'm only painting so far a picture of the West. This is a picture of what's going on in Western culture in our country and in developed countries like Europe and England. Elsewhere, you ought to know this is not the case. In other parts of the world, it's exactly the opposite. In countries like China and India, church growth is out of control. It's exponentially gone bonkers.

Hard to keep track of it so much. In Sub-Saharan Africa, church growth is estimated at 20,000 conversions a day. In Latin America, the conversion rate is 10,000 people per day. What I want you to keep in mind is these are parts of the world where persecution is the highest. Parts of the world where political affiliations and political agendas are far from Christian and in a place where disease is rampant and the highest incidences of the AIDS virus is out of control. And yet the church is flourishing in that part of the world. Leith Anderson, an author from Minneapolis on societal change, writes this, We read the book of Acts and we celebrate the fact that on the day of Pentecost, 3,000 people came to Christ. But today, if you combine mainland China, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America, there's nearly a Pentecost every hour. Meanwhile, in the United States, we are closing 60 churches a week. So, here we are.

We live in this culture. Let's answer the question to kick off this series. If you have the recurring question, who needs the church, what's the answer?

What's the biblical answer? Well, the real answer is I do. You do. We all do. I want to share something that is a deep conviction of mine. I sincerely believe this with all my heart. I believe the best days for the church are not behind us. I believe they're ahead of us.

I do. I believe that for a number of reasons. I believe we're on the cusp of an opportunity because of what's happening in culture for the church to become so needed and so relevant. Let me give you four reasons why I need it, you need it, and we all need it. Number one, because we need God's people. We need God's people. You see, every human being has some need to belong to a family, a group, where they say I belong here. We yearn for community. The good old Bible word, fellowship. More modern term is community. We need that.

We long for it. It's a basic human need. Sociologically, people gravitate toward the group. The group that reflects their hobby or value system or culture or ethnicity, people gather in groups. Whether it's Boy Scouts or the Girls Club or the Elk's Lodge or Alcoholics Anonymous, people gravitate toward the group. It's a basic need that we have.

And here's why. God created us with the need to have relationship, to have community. This is precisely where the church can and should excel. Psalm 68, verse 6, it says, God sets the solitary in families.

Mark that. God sets the solitary in families. In other words, God's cure for isolation is to put people with His people.

We need His people. This is the place where when you weep, somebody will sit next to you and weep with you. This is the place when you're down and discouraged and you need help, that you'll find the right kind of help.

There's no other place, there's no other organization that can duplicate the kind of accountable community that you find in the church. It's true. It's true for me. Listen, when I struggle with an issue, I don't feel the freedom to go down to City Hall and pour out my heart or down to the Elk's Lodge or down to the local laundromat and just share it with anybody, but I will pour out my heart with God's family. Because it works.

And I'll do it because of 1 Corinthians 12, 26, you know it. If one member suffers, all the members suffer with it. If one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it. Do you think that happens at school? At work? In the civic group? When you get promoted, everybody rejoices?

Hardly. So competitive. That's why I say the best days are ahead of us.

You know why? We live in a complex, very busy world. It's a world in which technology is exponentially growing, moving so fast, and people are feeling less connected. You wouldn't think that because of the modes of communication we have with the internet, but people are sensing the lack of human touch. What people are crying for is that. That's what the church can provide. We want more than an email or a text message or Facebook.

We want face-to-face, eye-to-eye touch, real community. According to Leadership magazine, 90% of new church members will stay in the church if, number one, they can learn to articulate their faith. Number two, they belong to subgroups within the church, like choir, Bible study group, Sunday school class. And number three, if they have four to eight close friendships within the church.

Now, let me just say, with all of our shortcomings, with all of our problems as people, with all of the baggage that we all bring to the table, this is still a pretty good place to be. I can't imagine raising my family anywhere else but the church. I can't imagine getting good, solid, truthful, accountable counsel from anywhere but the church.

I can't imagine getting real encouragement from anywhere else. So because we need God's people, we need the church. There's a second reason. Because we need God's principles. We need God's principles. We need steady doses of truth that we are exposed to at least once, hopefully twice a week, if not more. And if there's one place where truth ought to be very distinctly and unambiguously heard, it's the church.

This is the place. 1 Timothy 3, verse 15. Paul said, The church of the living God is the pillar and ground of the truth. In other words, in a world cluttered with voices, cluttered with opinions on how you should live, what you should value, how you should plan your life, in the midst of all of those voices and all of those opinions, we need to hear that clarion call that cuts through it all and says, Thus saith the Lord. We need God's principles.

No wonder in Acts chapter 2, the very chapter we are reading, it says that the early apostles and disciples gave themselves to the apostles' doctrine, because they knew they needed God's truth. A couple of authors who observed and wrote about churches said this. Churches want to hear nice, optimistic messages free of the mention of sin or a call for repentance. Churches want nice, lean programs directed at nice, clean families, leading to growth without sacrifice. They want their organization to become bigger and bigger, even as their God becomes smaller and smaller.

The best way I know to fight that tendency is truth, steady doses of truth, God's principles week in and week out. Now those first two reasons why we need the church, because we need God's people and God's principles, those are two factors, two characteristics of every living organism. Every living organism has cells, it's comprised of cells, and cells need a couple of things. They need other cells around them to relate with, interact with, and they need food. And when you give cells that, they naturally reproduce.

They naturally reproduce. Same in the body of Christ. We need God's people, we need God's principles. Number three, we need God's purpose. That's why we need the church, because we need God's purpose. I think without fail, every human being I have ever met longs to know the purpose and the meaning of life. Why am I here? Where did I come from?

Where am I going? Every person I've ever met wants those deep questions answered. We would love to know that we're a part of some great cause bigger than ourselves.

You are. That is what the church is. This is the greatest cause in all of the world. Listen, if you're looking for some cause to get behind, you'll find no greater cause than the forgiveness cause, the salvation cause, and getting out the gospel cause. This cause is greater than any philanthropic cause, greater than any political cause, greater than any societal cause. To know that you're a part of God's stuff, what I like to call the family business.

Paul wrote to the Philippians in chapter one of that book, verse three, and he said, I always thank God for your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. Think of this as a family partnership. God has a business. It's about getting people to know him, getting people to heaven. You become one of his children, and now he enlists you in the cause, in the purpose, in the meaning. You're a part of the family business. That's what motivated Jesus. From a young child, he said to his mother, don't you know that I must be about my father's business?

And that family business motivated him all the way through his life. And that's our purpose. That's our purpose.

That's our meaning. That's our cause, the cause of God, the cause of Christ, the cause of the gospel. Our purpose is not to become the moral majority where we picket every social cause you can think of. That is not our purpose. The purpose of God's church on earth is to change one life at a time through preaching the gospel. And listen, if you get one person as a Christian and another person and another person and another person and a hundred, soon the whole society is going to change because the hearts change. That's our purpose.

That's our business. Here's the fourth reason we need the church, because we need God's presence. We need God's presence. He said, well, I already have God's presence, and I can have it alone. True, but there is a special promise to those who gather together, who meet together, who worship together as the body of Christ. Jesus said in Matthew 18, verse 20, wherever two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there in their midst.

We need that. We need what happens when we gather together like this and we hear each other's stories and we watch each other as we worship, and we're a part of it together. There's a special sense of God's presence, and that's why when we gather together, we want to make it about Him and not us, not about this special pastor or speaker or band, but it's all about Him principally.

A.W. Tozer wrote, it is scarcely possible in most places to get anyone to attend a meeting where the only attraction is God. One can only conclude that God's professed children are bored with Him, for they must be wooed to a meeting with a stick of striped candy in the form of religious movies, games, and refreshments.

See, this is very crucial. Though the church is a social gathering where we need God's people, it's more than a social gathering. And though the church is a place where we discover our purpose, it's more than a social gathering where we discover purpose. It's a place where we corporately worship God, and we need that. You and I were created with a need to worship Him. We find fulfillment when we worship Him. Revelation 4, verse 11, it says, For your pleasure we exist and were created.

Now, in closing, let me ask you this. Can't we do any of these things on our own? I mean, can't we sense God's presence on our own?

Can't we discover purpose on our own? Well, yeah, but not very well. Can't do it very well.

You cannot do it very well alone, apart from the group. You know why? Because you're not the body of Christ, personally. I'm not the body of Christ, personally. Together we are the body of Christ, corporately.

No one person has it. We need each other. Have you ever heard somebody say, I know you have, somebody say this, Well, I don't need to go to church because, here it is, I'm not into organized religion. Heard that?

That's like the cool thing to say now. And I always want to respond, Oh, so you're into disorganized religion. Because all that is is a cop-out saying, I don't want to be around people to tell me what I need to do. I don't want to be accountable to anyone.

I want to live my life as I see fit, without the group accountability that exists within the church. So, can you do these things and be a Christian without going to church? Well, yes, but you know what that's like? It's like being a tuba player, alone.

What could be more boring than that? No offense if you play the tuba, but you will admit if you do, you need the rest of the orchestra to help out. You have a certain place in that musical expression, you need the balance.

If you think you're going to play a tuba solo concert and have a lot of people attend, ain't going to happen. Or it's like being a football player without a team. What are you going to do? Go out and throw a ball in the air, catch it, kick it, run after it, sweat, throw it again, run after it?

Well, that's fun. You need a team. Or like being an army man or someone in the navy without the company. If you're a soldier, you need the army. Or it's like being a bee without the hive.

You need the group. Now, in Acts 1 and 2, we read a phrase twice. They were together in one accord. That doesn't mean they were driving a Honda. It means they were on the same page spiritually. They were together with unity of purpose and mind.

Together in one accord. I love God's church. I love His universal church. I love traveling to India or other places and being with God's people. But I want you to know, I love the local church.

I love this church. I've raised my family here, and I can't imagine being anywhere else. I've raised Nathan here, and I can't wait to raise my grandchildren here.

No pressure. I can't wait for that. I've lived my best years of my life, and I mean that. The best years of my life have been here. And the best years, I believe, are ahead.

I believe that. So let's not forsake the assembly of ourselves together, the writer of Hebrews says, as is the manner of some. But do it all the more as you see the day approaching. You know, in truth, church should feel almost like a second family to us. After all, it's a place where we can gather with our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Of course, families don't always get along, but we don't want to let our disagreements keep us from the joy of meeting together. That's all the time we have for today. But before we go, if you'd like a copy of today's teaching, Church Who Needs It?, it's available for just $6, including shipping, when you call us at 1-800-922-1888, or when you visit connectwithskip.com. And come back next time as Skip Heitzig shares a message he's titled, Hey, Look Who's Starting a Church? So be sure to find out who that is here on Connect with Skip Weekend Edition, a presentation of Connection Communications. Make a connection.

Make a connection at the foot of the cross and cast all burdens on His word. Make a connection. A connection. A connection. Connecting you to God's never changing truth in ever-changing times.