Church – Page 9 – Ethics as Worship

Many seminary students have heard (and probably repeated) the jokes and comments based on Jesus’ words in Matthew 13:57 when he says, “A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and in his own household.” The jokes and comments usually follow along the lines of no one will respect you in your home church if you ever return to preach or minister because they will always remember you as that bratty little kid who tormented the nursery workers. They will never be able to look past that time you dumped soap in the baptistery or short-sheeted the youth minister’s bed at youth camp. Now if you did some of those things as a child, it might not be a bad idea to go ahead and own up to them and apologize. It might clear the air a little.

The reality, however, is that seminary students and ministers alike can reap great benefits from staying connected to their home churches or the church that influenced them greatly during their time of preparation for future ministry. It is an overlooked relationship that ought to be restored.

This past Sunday, I had the joy, privilege, and honor of preaching at my home church, Bellevue Baptist Church in Cordova (Memphis), TN. As I told the congregation, it was a moment that I never dreamed would come. During the first 18 years of my life, I sat in the congregation listening to Adrian Rogers expound the Word of God faithfully week after week. The list of guest preachers to fill the pulpit for Dr. Rogers during those years was short and consisted of a who’s who list of Southern Baptist pulpiteers. The likes of Paige Patterson, John Phillips, Ken Whitten, and a few others were the only ones I ever heard pinch hit for Dr. Rogers. As unfitting as it may seem, my name now joins the list of those who have preached from that famed pulpit.

In recent years, the current pastor of Bellevue, Dr. Steve Gaines, has invested in a friendship with me that I did not deserve. I am sure that I am not the only former Bellevue member now in ministry somewhere else whom he has befriended. For that friendship, I am thankful. But more importantly, the connection back to the church where I first heard the gospel message is one that is more valuable than gold.

I am thankful for the investment of Bellevue Baptist Church in my life. They came alongside my parents and nurtured me spiritually. Although I believe it is the parents’ responsibility to lead their children spiritually, the church is an indispensable resource for equipping both parent and child.

In my limited experience as a seminary professor, I see that most students remain connected to their home churches for a brief time and then mostly lose touch. I don’t know if it is the fault of the student or the church, but I encourage both the student and the church to work at keeping the lines of communication open. As the years go by and that student graduates, I believe it is essential for the church to understand how their ministry has expanded beyond the boundaries of their visible ministry in the community. As I told the church Sunday, Bellevue has a ministry in Fort Worth at Southwestern Seminary because so much of what I teach is based on the theology and ministry I learned growing up there.

Certainly, the average minister will probably never have the opportunity to serve in his home church as a pastor. However, I believe staying connected to the church of one’s youth and reporting to them the extent of their ministry through you is a very biblical concept. At the conclusion of both his first and second missionary journeys, Paul returned to Antioch presumably to report to the church what had been accomplished (Acts 14:26-28; 18:22-23). This was the church where Paul spent his formative years after conversion and that recognized God had set him aside for ministry. Paul made a point to return to Antioch and inform the church how their ministry had expanded through Asia Minor and Europe.

For those of us serving in ministry beyond the immediate contexts of those churches that sent us out, we need to stay connected. Let the church know how they have increased their ministry through the ones they have sent out into the fields. This is healthy for the minister and healthy for the churches.

Redeeming Singleness: How the Storyline of Scripture Affirms the Single Life. By Barry Danylak. Foreword by John Piper. Wheaton: Crossway, 2010. 256 pages. Softcover, $16.99.

Any search for good, biblically-sound books addressing the issue of singleness is most likely to leave the searcher disappointed and frustrated. Even the majority of Christian books on singleness generally leave the reader with a bad taste in his mouth. They either bemoan the problems found in marriage and suggest that it is better for singles to remain unmarried, or they serve as little more than a dating guide for Christian singles to find their perfect mate. Neither one of these outcomes, remaining single or finding a mate, are inherently wrong, but the methodology that most Christian singles books employ only separates itself from the magazines found at the grocery store checkout line by the smattering of Bible verses pasted across worldly wisdom. Thus, the reader will welcome a breath of fresh air upon opening this book with the expressed purpose of reflecting “on the purpose of the biblical affirmation of the single life by exploring how singleness itself fits into God’s larger purpose of redeeming a people for his glory” (15). Barry Danylak, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cambridge, offers this new book as a different look at the role of singleness in God’s plan for redemption and how it affects the contemporary church’s understanding of the single life.

Danylak opens the book with an eye-opening look at singleness in the American culture and its impact on the church. His statistics about lack of church involvement, low commitment, and sparse financial contributions among singles coupled with the cultural retreat from marriage paint a grim picture for the future of the church in America. However, he believes that the church can overcome this potentially dire situation. He admonishes his readers, “The composite message of the data is clear: the future life and vitality of the evangelical faith will require greater engagement with single adults both inside and outside the walls of the local church” (19).

During the six main chapters of the book, Danylak’s work reads like a biblical theology of marriage. He begins with a discussion of marriage and procreation from the creation account and moves to the establishment of the Abrahamic covenant and the blessings that were passed down through the generations of that covenant. The author rightfully asks the question for his readers about what this has to do with singleness and sets up a later comparison to spiritual offspring as a source of blessing (52–53). In chapters 2–4, Danylak continues to trace the results of the Abrahamic covenant through the history of Israel and documents the various times that singleness appears in the Old Testament, usually as a liability but sometimes with blessing.

In chapters 5–6 the author finally gets to the heart of biblical teaching on singleness. He offers a lengthy discussion on Jesus’ teaching about marriage and singleness, noting that Jesus has a surprisingly positive perspective on remaining unmarried. He then exegetes Paul’s discussion of singleness in 1 Cor 7 as a charisma for the church. He concludes that both Jesus and Paul retained a positive outlook on singleness because they recognized that the responsibilities of marriage could take away from a singular focus on ministry. In addition, being part of the body of Christ would provide a “new family” for believers whose bonds were even stronger than an earthly family (168).

As a biblical theology of marriage and offspring, Danylak’s work certainly excels because he traces the role of marriage and children in the covenants that God established with his people as an avenue for blessings. This is in keeping with an overall commendation of proper family relationships that one can see throughout the corpus of Scripture. In addition, he waded through some difficult waters to provide sound, theologically-grounded exegesis of Jesus’ and Paul’s teaching on the single life. There are some difficulties with those passages that Danylak handled skillfully and demonstrated his ability as a theologian.

As a biblical theology of singleness, which Danylak claims to have written, the book is a little lacking. He definitely handles the limited Scriptural teaching on the subject well, but the book gets weighed down in his lengthy discussions of marriage, offspring, and the difficulty of singleness in the Old Testament. While those are important topics to the discussion, a full two-thirds of the book is devoted to marriage and offspring and only one-third to the issue of singleness. The interesting thing is that he recognizes this as an issue in a couple of different places in the book, but he leaves the reader wanting with his promise of more to come later in the book. Finally, after his buildup in the introduction where he notes the pressing need for the church to engage singles both inside the church and in the culture, the book lacks a discussion on how to actually begin such engagement.

Despite its weaknesses, this book still has value for those interested in engaging singles with a gospel-centered focus. Danylak effectively dismisses the myth that singles are second-class citizens and shows how the single life can be a testimony of God’s faithfulness and unfettered devotion to the gospel. He concludes, “Christian singleness is a testimony to the supreme sufficiency of Christ for all things, testifying that through Christ life is fully blessed even without marriage and children. It prophetically points to a reality greater than the satisfactions of this present age by consciously anticipating the Christian’s eternal inheritance in the kingdom of God” (215). In this closing statement he confirms what he intended to do—show that the ultimate redemption story of Scripture affirms the single life.