Are Para-Church Groups Spiritual Adulterers?

What would your response be to a person that says:

• I like you, come over anytime, but please don’t bring your wife?
• I love you, but I refuse to spend time with you if your wife is present?
• I can’t stand being around your wife, let’s go spend time together without her?

The hair on the back of my neck stands up just to read such statements. Most of us would find such statements reprehensible. Those would be fighting words if said to us, wouldn’t they?

Are para-church groups that claim to be lovers of Jesus Christ, but do not connect persons to the church (the Bride) spiritual adulterers? How can you say you love the groom (Jesus) and disregard the bride (the Church)? Again, the hair on the back of my neck stands up when I think of it in those terms.

When we support para-church groups or persons that aren’t connecting converts to a local fellowship of believers, it is like supporting a relationship with the “other” woman instead of the bride. How can we even imagine leading people to enter a love relationship with Jesus and not help them to love spending time with his bride, the church?

Are these para-church groups’ spiritual adulterers? The “other” woman? Vying for the affections of new believers?

Ed Stetzer recently asked: Can You Love Jesus and Ignore His Bride? (Read his comments here). He was addressing recent research about the huge number of young people that drop out of church after high school. When they land on a college campus, they often find groups that want to “love Jesus” together, but they don’t intentionally connect the students to the local church. How can that be?

Are these and other para-church groups’ spiritual adulterers? If they don’t encourage those who love Jesus to love His Bride (the Church), it would seem to be the case.

What do you think?

Bobby Gilstrap, DoM
Huron & Southeastern Baptist Associations
Michigan

Our Changing World

The church of twenty-first century America faces an exciting new challenge: namely, how to present a timeless message to a culture that often feels the church is irrelevant? You do not have to look far to discover that the cultural landscape of America is drastically changing. Companies such as Sears, Chevron, and Goodyear have been removed from the Dow Jones Index and replaced with high-tech companies such as Microsoft, Intel, and SBC Communications. Maps are being exchanged for GPS, mail for email, calling for texting. VHS for DVD, CD’s for iPods, and books for Google. As technology has increased, the rapidity with which cultural renovation can occur has become staggering. In some ways it’s a missiologist’s dream.

My experience has been that the North American church is keenly aware of its new cultural challenge; we know the world is changing. The problem has been what are we supposed to do about it? If you listen carefully, at this point in my article, you may hear the crashing sounds off your grandmother’s high-heels and hymnal colliding with your son’s flip-flops and guitar! Because, frequently, in our efforts to respond to changing culture, North American churches have crashed and clashed into and over 1 of 2 extremes.

1. We retreat into our stained glass monastery by turning the Great Commission inward, as we indolently rest in arms of truth and purity.
2. We charge the fringes of our culture recklessly exchanging evangelism for compassion, holiness for relevance, and theology for philosophy.

I believe the answer to the problem of culture screams out at the church from the starlit stable in the dusty town of Bethlehem. It’s called The Incarnation! The Word became flesh and He dwelt among the people. The incarnation brings life to the crippled, while reminding the healed to “go and sin no more.” The Incarnation rises with the sun in prayer anchoring His soul in truth before challenging the shackles of legalism. God’s calling is not a call to hopeless defeatism that bleakly seeks to endure until His coming. The good news by its very nature lives among people and discovers life eternal in the midst of death. It is an extraordinary mix between one’s vertical relationship with God and horizontal relationship with others. It’s a call to the truth of the gospel balanced by the love of the gospel, holiness and love, grace and justice, creativity and tradition, passion and purity, zeal and wisdom. The incarnation is seen in Matthew the Tax Collector, Simon the Zealot, Peter the Leader, Paul the Planner, Martha the Servant, Mary the Worshiper, and John the Thinker. The call of the first century is the call of the twenty-first century church: a faith-filled call to authentically live in the skin God gave us while experiencing the adventure of sharing and living the good news of truth.

Posted by
Lash Banks, Director of Missions
Grayson Baptist Association