The Equipping Church

I write this book from the perspective of one who has pastored for over thirty years. I have witnessed and been part of the intense and voluminous exchange between those who favor the traditional approach to church ministry and those who favor a contemporary approach. As I have sought to lead the churches that I have pastored to grow in biblical fidelity, I have availed myself to the teachings of both the traditionalists and the culturati and have benefited from doing so. I have learned much from each. However, my determination to be biblically driven has led me to view both models as being insufficiently biblically based and biblically driven to fully satisfy the New Testament teaching about the local church. 

          The biblical question is not whether a church is contemporary or traditive, but rather is it an equipping or non-equipping church. This is not mere semantics because there simply is no command or prescribed paradigm in the New Testament that actually commends or condemns contemporary or traditional components or approaches. However, the Bible explicitly presents and prescribes the equipping model of the church in Ephesians 4:11-16, which has sufficient breadth to comprehend all of the New Testament teaching regarding the local church. In addition, this model is portrayed throughout the New Testament in both practice and supporting Scriptures. For that reason, the contemporary vs. traditional debate should be replaced by asking whether or not a church is substantively equipping believers to honor God with their lives and to advance the kingdom by engaging and evangelizing their world as prescribed by the New Testament (Matthew 28:18-20; Ephesians 4:11-16). 

I also will seek to set forth the elements necessary to transition a church from stifling, dead traditionalism or the trendy shallowness so often associated with the contemporary model to an equipping church. Therefore, I maintain that the true biblical model for the church, which may at times incorporate some traditional and some contemporary components in seeking to be an equipping church, is to be found in the Scripture and is “somewhere between fundamentalism and fluff.”

In addition to delineating distinctions between the contemporary and traditional approaches, I also will note some similarities. For example, on the positive side, men who love God and the Scripture, who do what they do because they believe they are honoring God, often lead both types of churches. On the negative side, neither contemporary nor traditional is thoroughly biblical, although some of the components of each are biblical; furthermore, neither is adequate to address the substantive needs of discipleship in the twenty-first century western world. While the equipping model, which is proposed in this book as the biblical model, may become encumbered with unbiblical or extraneous components, it is essentially different than the other two models in that it is biblically based and driven. Moreover, it results in a very different kind of Christian. 

  I write this book for pastors, staff, and lay people who desire to build New Testament churches that honor God first. I hope that men who are preparing for the pastorate will read it so that they begin with a biblical model and altogether avoid traveling down either the traditional or the trendy path. I pray that it will also be a help to those churches characterized by fundamentalist negatives or those that are traditional for the experiential security of tradition. May God grant churches, which were initially allured into mimicking the pragmatism of the avant-gardist, but now see the inadequacies of human wisdom and desire a thoroughly biblical ecclesiology, guidance, and encouragement in their quest for New Testament authenticity. 

To the traditionalist, the present contemporary model appears irreverently trendy and unacceptably shallow, more influenced by culture than influencing culture. To the ecclesiastically avant-garde, often known as the “church growth movement,” “emergent,” or just a “contemporary approach,” traditional methods and ideas seem to be out of touch, purposeless, and anachronistic. They view the traditionalist as being caught in a time warp. Because neither is thoroughly biblical, the danger of the traditional vs. contemporary juxtaposition is that it may cause one to miss a thoroughly New Testament church. The New Testament model for the church is neither pragmatic fluff nor sterile traditionalism, but rather biblically driven, which places her somewhere between traditionalists and culturati. The New Testament model is an equipping, engaging, and evangelistic church.

While it may be somewhat of an overstatement, I can demonstrate the point in the following comparison. The contemporary model emphasizes meeting people where they are, but unfortunately leaves them short of God’s spiritual goal for their life, whereas the traditional model seems to expect people to be where they are reaching out, responsive to whatever worked in the past. In stark contrast to both models, the equipping model prepares the church in both depth and breadth in order to train Christians to live authentic Christian lives and to reach people where they are and take them to where God wants them to be. 

A major emphasis of this book is education. This is to emphasize the truth that the church is about education. Separating or marginalizing Christianity from education is both unnatural and lethal. For example, evangelism is educating people about their sinfulness and need for a Savior. This is not to say that knowing is believing, but it is to say that knowing is essential to believing. In addition, discipleship is also about educating—equipping—believers to live in obedience to Christ and be involved in the advancement of His kingdom. Thus, Christ commanded the apostles and thereby the church to “teach them to observe all that I have commanded” (Matthew 28:20). Of course, teaching includes training, mentoring, modeling, etc., but these components cannot be allowed to be a substitute for, or in any way detract from, the clear consistent substantive teaching of the Scripture in the church.