I saw this posted on a friend’s page: “The greatest miracle God can do is to take a unholy
man out of an unholy world, make him holy, put him back into an unholy world and keep him
holy.”
I would counter that this statement demonstrates what is wrong with the too much of our church and evangelical world.
The great miracle God wants to do is to send His Spirit to make men holy and then send them out to unholy people (and, by extension, unholy situations) and make those unholy people and situations, by His grace, holy.
If we don’t embrace this “sentedness” of holiness, we lose it. And, all too often, have. Three of us co-authored a book last year titled The Doctrine of Good Works: Reclaiming a Neglected Protestant Teaching (Baker Academic). In it, we examined early Protestantism to discover what key figures said about “good works.”
From Luther to Beza to Turretin to Davenant and beyond, there seemed to be unanimity – works are not meritorious and can’t gain one’s salvation, but they are necessary to salvation.
John Davenant, who represented the Church of England at the Synod of Dort said, “We admit fully that God preserves and increases the gifts of grace in those who apply themselves to good works, and by the zeal of good works draws them on to the goal of salvation!”
Johann Gerhard, 17th century Lutheran church leader, explained, “unless we wish to cast away our faith, lose God’s grace and eternal life, and summon punishments of every kind, it is incumbent on us to pursue good works.” By good works, believers not only “produce true fruits of faith” but also make their “calling firm.”
Francis Turretin, Genevan-Italian scholastic scholar, speaks for early modern Reformed scholasticism when he encounters the query “Are good works necessary for salvation?” His answer leaves no room for doubt: “We affirm.”
Theodore Beza, French Calvinist theologian, declared that good works are necessary for
salvation because they have a necessary connection to true faith; without good works there is
no true faith, but with true faith there will always be good works.
Saved people are sent people and sent people excel in good works. If you want to experience an abundant life, there it is! But one can be hard-pressed to find that actually happening in many churches. Through our research, we sought out local congregations that had at least twenty percent of their people involved weekly in outreach like evangelism, prison work, nursing home ministry, public school Bible clubs, crisis pregnancy center or abortion clinic efforts.
Finding these active churches was much harder than we expected. It seemed that most local churches exist to support themselves and their own journey of discipleship. Being poured out into the community to meet others’ needs turned out to be a rare priority.
One of the ways I have tried to help seminary students picture the church is with a funnel that depicts the pathway into church and discipleship. The wide end of the funnel represents the entry point: the target audience, the worship service. The narrowing funnel indicates increasing levels of involvement – men’s and women’s fellowship groups, Sunday school classes or discipleship groups – followed by the board and other church leaders, formal or informal.
At the bottom of the funnel I usually draw arrows in multiple directions to demonstrate that the church is outward bound in compassionate and evangelistic ministry. A favorite assignment is for the students to plot their own churches on a funnel, filling in the specific groups and leaders within their congregation.
When Karl handed his funnel in, I did a double-take. He had replaced the arrows at the bottom of the funnel with something else. I asked him about it, and he explained that it was supposed to be a cork. “Everything in our church is just kept there to keep the church going.” No evangelism, no outreach, no ministries, no “running to the sound of the pain.” Just an organization whose sole purpose is to keep the organization going.
It dawned on us as authors – to be an exceptional church in America, have a regular compassionate or evangelistic ministry outside the four walls of the church every week. Simple as that. Let’s say your church provides a worship service for nursing home residents. Doing so makes that congregation one of the most engaged churches in America. To further step on the works accelerator, add a weekly prison ministry. Continue to ramp up the outreach quotient with weekly involvement in a local school, the crisis pregnancy center, or perhaps a ministry to the homeless and indigent.
“Beware!,” said Reformer Martin Luther, “God will not ask you at your death and at the Last Day how much you have left in your will, whether you have given so and so much to churches … he will say to you, ‘I was hungry, and you gave me no food; I was naked, and you did not clothe me’ [Matt. 25:42–43]. Take these words to heart!”
Matt Friedeman
