GORDON: That should come with a lot of prayer. We have a lot of church jumping today.
That should come with a lot of prayer, great conviction, and doing your best to work with
the leadership if there are severe compromises to the ministry of the Word and the gospel
and what a church is called to do and to be. Historically, we say there are three
marks of a faithful and a true church: the pure preaching of the gospel, the right administration
of the sacraments, and church discipline. And I think those are good gauges by which to look at
your church and say, "Are these things taken seriously in the church?" Is the
ministry centered on making known the gospel, preaching Christ, expositing the Scriptures,
working carefully, I believe, through books of the Bible, and faithfully ministering the sacraments;
and being willing and loving you enough to discipline you if you're in serious sin?
And if those things are set aside, then we have little ones we are raising and
we have our own souls to care for and also our families. And I see a lot of people who
are more tied to friendships and culture and family than the truth of the gospel.
And I think this is where we have to be willing to count the cost and be willing to say,
"Are we involved in something that has a sincere concern to advance the truth as it is in Jesus?"
And if not, if I have come to that conscious conviction that that is not the case after prayer,
working with my family, and spending serious time talking to the leadership, then I think
it's entirely appropriate to look for a faithful church that demonstrates those historic marks.
THOMAS: I don't think that there's a one-size-fits-all answer to this question
because there are multiple circumstances which make the answer different for different people.
But as an example, in COVID season, you know, and that's a thing now, COVID season,
we went online. We were always online; we'd been online for twenty years, but people joined
us online, and some of them were near and some of them were far away. But those who were near
came to me and said something like this, that, "We haven't heard preaching like this
in years." And what they meant by "preaching like this" was not they had a grasp of
Reformed theology. What they meant was, "We haven't heard gospel preaching in years."
So, they had been members of churches that had drifted away slowly, perhaps imperceptibly,
and they hadn't realized what had happened. And what they heard was, "We don't need to be in this
church anymore because this church has abandoned the gospel." And in those sort of circumstances,
you know, we said, "Come. We welcome you." But there are obviously circumstances
for some people where to stay and to try and reform that church might be a possibility.
And that would depend on who that person is and who else is involved. Does it involve his wife?
Does it involve his children? Is he prepared to sacrifice gospel preaching to his children
for the sake of trying to save a church that's drifted from the faith? You know, so there is
no one-size-fits-all for this, but it's a very, very, very important question. And life is short
and I think for most people the answer is, "You need to be in a church where the
gospel is preached and your children are being ministered to in biblical and scriptural ways,
particularly in the woke society that we are in.