Church for People Who Hate Church
Episode 4 transcript
JOHN YODER: [00:00:00] Hi everybody, welcome back. John Yoder here together with Sam Chacko and Moses Saldivar, and today we are finishing our series, Church for People Who Hate Church. Last time what we closed with is that healthy churches find ways to help newcomers build supportive spiritual families. All of us have biological families that may vary from very positive to very negative to completely absent, and we all need to find spiritual families of brothers and sisters in Christ who build us up.
[00:00:38] Now, many of you spend hours every day looking at your screens, and I understand. There's a level of relationship that can happen there, and it's not bad. But, hosting, getting likes, gaining followers and all of the other things that have to do with online relationships don't come [00:01:00] close to the level of openness and support that happen in face to face relationships. [00:01:06] Here's how Pastor Sam describes it.
SAM CHACKO: [00:01:10] You need to be known you need to be and you need relationships and people in your life And you need the church community around you so that when seasons are hard you have people that rally around you, and when seasons are good you have people to celebrate with you. The church will make mistakes. The church is filled with broken sinners, and they will consistently mess up.
JOHN YODER: [00:01:34] Now, some of you will say, “John, do I really need the church? [00:01:38] After all, I've got Jesus, I'm born again, I pray, I read the Bible, there's a lot of really good Christian content on the internet that I consume”. Maybe you even go to an online church. Do I really need to be in a face to face live church setting? And the answer is Yes, you [00:02:00] do. Here's what Pastor Moses has to say.
MOSES SALDIVAR: [00:02:03] We have things like technology that allow us to be able to study the Bible pretty much at any time. We have more information or fingertips than any other point in human history. We can listen to a sermon on a million different topics. We can listen to 10 pastors on one topic and with different viewpoints. [00:02:24] We can do that for sure.
But those people can't shepherd you. They can't walk with you when things are hard because they don't know you. So you can't say that this person is my pastor if they don't know you. So they've got to know you. And the one thing that the enemy wants to do is he wants to isolate us, and he wants to pull us out of community so that we can start believing a bunch of lies too. [00:02:53] One of those being that we don't need the church.
When very clearly if you look at just the story of scripture and how it [00:03:00] culminates, The Lord does his work through the action of the local church. He does that. So if the bride of Christ, that being the church, is important to Jesus, it should be important to us as well.
JOHN YODER: [00:03:15] At this point, many of you will say, “John, you're absolutely right. I get it. I need to be part of a church. But how do I find one?” Well, if you live near Richardson, Texas, you can visit Sam's Church, but I think most of you don't.
To be really honest, it would be about impossible to create a directory of multicultural or multi ethnic churches because what is toxic to one person is neutral to somebody else and positive to someone else. [00:03:45] And so what might deeply bless you might not be a blessing to someone else.
But there are things that you can do and it's really easy to do an online search for multicultural churches or multi ethnic churches [00:04:00] in your city. And when you visit a church's website, you can listen in to sermons, You can listen to the music, you can see pictures of the kinds of people that are there, and if you have kids or youth you can see what they have for them. [00:04:16] Sometimes just looking at the series title is enough to let you know whether or not that church addresses issues that are really important to you. And there may be contact information where you can email or call someone.
Well, what if you can't find a church like that in your community? Here in the Midwest, we've got a lot of little towns. [00:04:40] 10, 20, 25, 000 people. A generation ago, they were almost all white. But suddenly, a factory came, a meatpacking plant opened up, and in a short period of time, in came a large number of Latinos, or Somalis, or Ethiopians, or maybe [00:05:00] 10 different ethnicities. And there is no worship service in anything other than English. [00:05:07] Or, if there is a Spanish service, or an Oromo service, there really isn't anything for the second generation.
What do you do? One of the options is to form an online group, or to discover an existing one. Maybe you have friends in another community, and you meet over Zoom or whatever media works for you. [00:05:30] But you meet on a regular basis, you pray together, you study the Word, and you share your lives.
I know groups like that that have existed for years. across different countries in different time zones because people built relationships that were very meaningful to them and they continued those relationships discipling one another even though they lived in different countries.
[00:05:57] But I am going to recommend to you that [00:06:00] you find or build a face-to-face worshiping community in the place where you live. Whether that's a little town of 10,000 or you live in a big metro area and just have not found a healthy church yet. Now, most of you who have lived in the West, you're used to the Western model of church, where you need to have a building, a budget, a full time pastor with a seminary degree, you need a constitution and bylaws.
[00:06:30] There's nothing wrong with any of that, but none of that is required in the Word of God to be a church.
In many countries that I visited across Asia, God is using house churches to build up his kingdom. And Pastor Sam shares how this works in his parents’ home country of India.
SAM CHACKO:[00:06:51] I think about places like, I think a place like India where someone gets saved. [00:06:56] They get basic, very basic training, very [00:07:00] basic resources, and then they start churches in their villages, in their towns, right? It doesn't take much, and they're just reading Scripture together, praying, asking God to show up, and then asking God to, God, would you bring us someone to help us, um, discern this, right?
[00:07:15] Throughout Scripture, he opens reading Scripture by himself. God sends Philip. It's, it doesn't take, you don't need a lot. I think. I think for centuries, the house churches were it, right? For a long time in many parts of the world, it's house churches. It's not large buildings. It's not the structure and the systems.
[00:07:32] And so I think even now, post-pandemic, people are lonely. They don't want to just come sit in pews. They want to know, be known. I've got a church planter that I'm serving. They’re meeting in their home right now, and non-believing neighbors are showing up at their home and they're like, this is amazing. We are known, you know, us, you are our pastor. And they're not even followers of Jesus yet [00:08:00] because they're being shepherded.
[00:08:01] And so I think there is huge value in house churches, missional churches, micro church contract that I think is going to that God is going to use for his glory in our country.
JOHN YODER: [00:08:14] Pastor Moses agrees and adds his own thoughts about starting a house church.
MOSES SALDIVAR: [00:08:18] And sometimes that community that you're looking for may not be found in a traditional church environment. It may be found more in a home church type of environment or in more of a discipleship type of relationship. [00:08:35] That's where we need to look for it.
And not necessarily look for it through the sense of the traditional means of what we've grown accustomed to as far as how we define church in this country.
JOHN YODER: [00:08:47] Now some of you might respond to that and say, “John, I am not qualified. I don't have the spiritual maturity. I don't have the time. [00:08:55] I don't have the training. There's no way I or my [00:09:00] family could do this by ourselves”.
Well, maybe so, but even in your community, there's probably somebody who can help. Now, we've said that churches come in either negative, neutral, or positive, but even in a neutral or even a negative church, you can probably find one or two people that you could rank as positive, who will listen to you, understand your need, be supportive and might help you in that process. Here's advice from Pastor Moses.
MOSES SALDIVAR:[00:09:34] and the other thing that I would say is, is that what you'll find in a lot of those congregations as well, we're looking at the institution of the church. Not necessarily viewing it as the people that are inside the church.
There are people in there, I would say that we're real true discipleship really happens, in those one-on one relationships. Seek those folks out. Go find them. [00:10:00] They're there. They exist. There are people that that want to invest in you.
I can tell you a lot of times they won't do it out of fear because they fear. They don't know what they have to offer you. They don't think they have anything to offer you. But you probably see things that they do have to offer you. So don't be afraid to engage them and say, “Hey, would you be willing to walk with me in a discipleship type of relationship”?
JOHN YODER: [00:10:22] So please do seek help, recruit others to join you in the process, but be ready for God to use you as you are.
MOSES SALDIVAR: [00:10:32] So some of you who are listening. The Lord may actually be calling it, and this is hard because this is, it's a hard space to live in. He may actually be calling you to help start one of these new works. [00:10:44] Some of you, he's going to ask for you to walk alongside, for sure, but we need more.
JOHN YODER: [00:10:53] Friends, what Pastor Moses said is absolutely true. We need more churches [00:11:00] that are attractive to multicultural people. Whether they're live or online, whether they're large churches or house churches, we need many more expressions of faith.
[00:11:12] I closed our first time with John 10:27, “My sheep, hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me”. And I ask you a question. “Do you hear the voice of Jesus?”
I want to back up to John 10:16. Jesus says, “Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold, them also I must bring. And they will hear my voice, and there will be one flock and one shepherd”.
[00:11:46] When Jesus spoke those words, almost every believer in the world was Jewish. But Jesus envisioned a day when Latinos Africans, Asians, Middle Easterners, Caucasians, and [00:12:00] others would come together and worship, not as various different church communities, but as one global flock with God as their Father.
[00:12:09] When you become a follower of Jesus Christ, you also become a child of God, and you become a brother or sister to every other Christian in the world. Now, in a biological family, you do not get to pick your brothers and your sisters. And as we know, in our biological families and in our church families some are positive, some are neutral, some are negative. [00:12:35] We're all learning, we're all growing, we need to give each other grace.
But the call to follow Jesus is in part a call to join his flock and to be part of his church. So as we close out, I just want to extend to you an invitation to hear the voice of Jesus because he is [00:13:00] calling you and to make the decision to follow him as your King, as your Lord, as your Savior, and to be part of his church.
