In this episode we sit down to talk about what qualifies and disqualifies a person for ministry. How do you know when it’s time to resign? What kinds of structure and culture do we need to have in our churches to keep them and those who lead them healthy over time?
God is not after perfection, but he is after holiness… I’m concerned that we’ve lowered the standards of holiness in the church… which means we’re holding leaders everywhere else in our culture to lower standards…
In our media-driven culture, we no longer look to 1stTimothy 3 and Titus 1… instead we ask, “Can this person light the stage up?”
We made a decision here at New Life that when we ask a guest speaker to come to our conference or church or to impart to our people in any way, we are asking, “Is their character intact?” Sometimes that has meant we don’t invite people…
The problem is there are fewer and fewer spiritual moms and dads in the church… we have a lot of young men and women leading the church now with no spiritual moms and dads in their lives…
What holds the church together over time is lives that are rooted in Christ Jesus… genuinely righteous lives… if you don’t have those kinds of folks in leadership, the thing will ultimately blow apart…
When you have unrepentant sin in your life, where you get caught and you aren’t repentant… where you made efforts to hide it, conceal it, to live a double life… that is a sign that something is really broken inside of you and you need to step away…
The world is watching…. and one of the reasons the church has lost so much influence in the culture is that we have not handled our scandals well…
Abuses of sex, money, and power are disqualifiers… but also heresy… knowing that you are wrong but continuing to teach it… all of a sudden these people becomes apostles of a new theological movement, standing against the great tradition and doing it defiantly… when you catch a pastor in this kind of condition, it’s time for them to resign…
You can scour the documents of the early church all you want, and you won’t find a coordinated evangelistic strategy… mostly the church leaders minded the integrity of their common life… when we mind the integrity of our common life, it’s actually our best ‘growth’ strategy…
Churches that do not have clear government structures inside and outside, I would avoid… a church that doesn’t have a discernible network of elders within and a discernible group on the outside that can hold it to account—chances are it won’t be safe long term…