The most important thing we learn about the church when we come before God is that he is the one who builds it. It was on the "rock" of Peter's confession that Christ said, "I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" (Matt. 16:18 ESV).

The New Testament uses many metaphors to speak of this process, but those of building and growing are frequent. And the key point is that this is God's work. The church needs to be led, taught, pastored, and organized, but it is God alone who builds and nourishes it.

This is Paul's main point in 1 Corinthians 3:1-15.What we think the church is will explain how we think it will grow. How we think the church grows, explains what ministry is. Paul had been driven to raise these questions because many people in Corinth were going about their life in the church in the wrong way. They were not spiritual in their understanding and behavior. Paul could not address them as "spiritual" (3:1) because they were seeing the church simply from within their own fallen perspective. They had to be spoken to as the children that they were (3:1).

Is not the evangelical church in the same boat today? That this is a moment of great weakness seems to be commonly agreed. What the remedy is has become a matter of debate. The parallels between our situation and the one in Corinth, however, are really quite striking. Would we not do well to ask, then, what they had not understood?

Paul's perspective on this matter is summed up in a few pointed words. How should we think of ourselves? The answer is as "God's fellow workers" (3:9; in Paul's Greek, the word "God" is placed first for emphasis). How should we think of the church? It is "God's field" and "God's building" (3:9).

And why should we think of it as God's field and building? Because the church is his creation, and only he can grow it. He gives it its qualitative growth inwardly, in terms of character and obedience, and its quantitative growth outwardly, in terms of numerical expansion.

We see this second truth at work in the early days of the church's life when we read that "the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved" (Acts 2:47, italics mine). All of this being true, it is the Lord who "assigns" the work in the church (1 Cor. 3:5) to bring about its growth, nurturing, and training.

The church's goals and functions, therefore, are given to it. They come not from business manuals, not from cultural norms, and not from marketing savvy, but from what the Lord has told us in the Scriptures. It is in the light of these truths that we will be judged (1 Cor. 3:8). And this leads Paul to the heart of the matter. We sow and water, but it is God who gives the growth (3:6-7).

This last statement rests on three New Testament doctrines. Each one is under siege in the church today, and each one needs to be preserved if we are to see again the full expression of God's excellency in the life of the church. And this is the key to the restoration of its full health.

God Is Sovereign

First, when Paul says it is God who grows the church, he clearly is assuming that God is sovereign. God rules over all of life, bringing about his providential will, from the mighty events like the falling of empires to the most insignificant, like the falling of the sparrow. This means that within this world, kingdoms and cultures rise and fall according to his sovereign will.

Paul says he has even established the nations' boundaries (Acts 17:26). Nothing, therefore, is more absurd than the panic that now grips the evangelical church. It is terrorized by the specter of postmodernity. Reading today's "how-to" literature, one has to draw the conclusion that the church's days are numbered unless we rush in to prop it up with our own know-how. God, you see, has more on his hands than he can possibly handle. Unless the church capitulates and kisses its (post)modern enemies, it is done for!

The desperate measures being proposed for these desperate times are often little more than a case of weak knees and unbelief. We believe altogether too little in God's sovereign control, otherwise we would not be in full retreat before the pressures and demands of the (post)modern world. We look like the soldiers of some sorry nation that are very brave when safe in their protected barracks, but at the first sight of the enemy, lay down their arms and run.

The truth is that there is nothing in our postmodern world that is a serious threat, or an insurmountable obstacle, to the will of God. This is true of his saving will as well. He is as sovereign in the way he begets faith today as he is over the sparrow that flies or falls. He will grow the church. Today, we no longer seem to believe this, and we want to "aid his cause" by our weak and foolish capitulations.

We Are Captive

Second, Paul's belief rests on a conviction about human inability. This is why it is only God who can grow the church. The point is that only God can impart new, supernatural life. We can pray for people, seek God's blessing for the church, preach, counsel, and witness, but God alone gives the growth.

If it were only a matter of changing people's attitudes, we could grow the church. We could use marketing techniques, the best advertising, and motivational speakers. We could grow the church as a successful corporation is grown.

The problem, though, is the problem we are up against. It is so much deeper than anything that might hinder a corporation from becoming successful. The problem is aptly summed up in some lines from Charles Wesley's great hymn. "Long my imprisoned spirit lay," he wrote, "fast bound in sin and nature's night."

That is the problem. It is the problem of innate hostility to the truth of God to which we are willing captives. We are driven by an unwillingness to yield to Christ's claims on us. What is the solution? "Thine eye," Wesley wrote poetically, "diffused a quick'ning ray; I woke-the dungeon flamed with light! My chains fell off, my heart was free; I rose, went forth, and followed thee."

He was speaking about the deep-seated inability of all people to know God, to honor him, or to obey him in and of themselves. This is an inability that marketing technique, psychological motivation, and generational pandering cannot touch. It is immune to all techniques of persuasion. It is only overcome supernaturally. Only God can grow the church. He does so first through regeneration and then by sanctification.

Means of Growth

Third, Paul's understanding about how the church grows must be linked to the means God has ordained for its growth. Paul says he planted the seed and Apollos watered. What was planted? What was the water?

What was planted was surely the truth God has given us in the Scriptures. How shall we call on God and believe on him, Paul asks elsewhere, unless we have a preached Word through which to respond (Rom. 10:14)? It is, James tells us, "of his own will [that] he brought us forth."

But what means does God use? He brings us forth "by the word of truth" (James 1:18). How did the Thessalonians turn from their idols and believe on Christ? They "received the word" (1 Thess. 1:6) that had been preached in the full power of the Holy Spirit.

That is the seed. The watering is the work of encouraging belief in the teaching of that Word, fostering obedience, and encouraging a life of God-centeredness to which that Word points.

Let God Be God over the Church

These three doctrines underlie Paul's simple affirmation that it is God who grows the church. What is interesting is that few in the evangelical world would actually contest this. The point of confusion comes in how this happens.

What is the relation between the preaching of biblical truth and the church's growth? Between different kinds of worship and growth? Between music and growth? What must we do, and what will God do? And under what circumstances will he do it?

The answer is found in a place hidden to human view. It is private. It is the place within our souls where our most personal thinking, wanting, yearning, and hoping originate. It is where all our ambitions, plans, and goals come together.

So, what drives us? What do we really want? Do we really understand what it means to humble ourselves before God and forsake the self-sufficiency that is so natural and seems so sensible?

The outward appearance, as we all know, is one thing. We all know how to conform our speech and behavior to what is expected of us, don't we? We do so in pious ways, too. The inward reality, though, may be something different. The curtain is pulled across the windows of our souls so that outsiders cannot look in.

Before God, however, there is no hiding place. Before him we are what we are. It is in this inner sanctum that we determine whether we are going to build the church ourselves, or whether we are going to do much of it with a little help along the way. Or do we know-in a way that touches all our thoughts, every ambition for ourselves, every fiber of our being-that all we can do is plant and water, that it is God alone who can grow the church?

Letting God be God over his church, seeing him as its center and glory, its source and its life, is a truly liberating experience. It liberates us from thinking that we have to do, in ourselves, what we are entirely incapable of doing-that is, grow the church. We cannot do the work that only God can do.

We can work in the church, preach and teach, spread the gospel, encourage and urge each other on, but we cannot impart new life. Nor can we ever sanctify the church. Indeed, we cannot even feed the church. It is God who supplies the food; we are simply called to serve it (1 Cor. 3:5). This, however, is precisely why Paul says, a little later, that "we do not lose heart" (2 Cor. 4:1,16) but are "confident" (3:4; cf. 5:6).

While all of this is conventional enough, it is not common enough in evangelical churches. Lip service is paid to these ideas, but when we get really serious about "doing church," we turn to what we know best. We turn to structures and programs, appearances and management, advertising and marketing. Our preoccupation is with what we do and therefore with what we control.

This is what animates the conversation among evangelical leaders, what fills the pages of magazines like Leadership, and what attracts pastors to the really big, important conferences. This is what they are willing to pay serious money to hear. Alas! It is missing the point, if I may say so. What is of primary interest in a technological world is technique, for that, after all, is how we manage everything else.

In the kingdom of God things are different. It is not that we do not do things, but that our doing is rooted in our being. Who we are is more fundamental than what we do. Character is more basic than action. Being mastered by God is infinitely more important than having the know-how to manage the church.

Letting God be God over the church means that he becomes foundational to its being, thinking, and doing. In a highly pragmatic culture, such as we have in America, doing cuts itself off from thinking. The only thinking that gets done, at least with respect to the church, is about the how-to questions.

The kind of critical thinking, the serious evaluation that should go along with all of this, is impatiently brushed aside as irrelevant. If something works, if it is successful, that means that what was done has validated itself. What more needs to be thought about it?

I believe that today there is a deep yearning for churches in which God is God. Those are the churches that most easily become the communities we have all lost, where relationships are developed, even in this fallen world, in the sight of God. They are where people strive to be truthful in those relations—which really is the key to integrity—and integrity ties together our public and private lives. Churches, in fact, need to be communities that love the truth God has revealed and, in so doing, become serious and joyous about the God of that truth and intent upon serving him in his world.

The church is not a business, not an experiment, not a product to be sold. It is an outpost of the kingdom, a sign of things to come in Christ's sovereign rule, which is now hidden but will be made open and public. Then all the world will bow before him in recognition of who he is.

And this, I dare say, is the only answer we have for the church's existence and service. It is the anticipation of that great day. It is pointing beyond itself to that great day. It lives in this world, but it lives because it has seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. This is the knowledge that changes everything.

Business savvy, organizational wizardry, cultural relevance are simply no substitute for this. Unless the Lord rebuilds the evangelical church today, as we humble ourselves before him and hear afresh his Word, it will not be rebuilt.

 

From The Courage to Be Protestant by David F. Wells, copyright © 2008, published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., www.eerdmans.com. Used by permission. All rights reserved.