Polemics, Para-Church Organizations

Real briefly, for those of you who don't know and for those who are listening on the recording, we're going to go over what they are and what they are not. Parachurch organizations are organizations that could be a ministry, it could be a business or a group that works outside the confines of a church in an attempt to equip, facilitate, or direct the churches they come in contact with.

I apparently missed with. So, examples of that might be Christian bookstores, seminaries, independent Bible study creation organizations, for example, NAB Press or K Arthur. Gene, didn't you used to work? With NAVPRESS on some level or another? Not NAVPRESS, the conference center. I was in the food service. Oh, the navigators. You were independent from that, okay. Yeah, I worked in the food service. Your wife spoke highly of your... 30 gallons of whatever. We had dinner with the Malloys that evening. He would have to make everything big enough for large groups all the time. And now he's only cooking for two. Lots of leftovers for weeks.

Now, what parachurch organizations are not would be things like the Holly Hills website. Even though it reaches outside of just the church, that doesn't make it a parachurch organization. It's not independent of Holly Hills Bible Church. It's not something that is outside of the confines of the church. It doesn't operate independently. The elders direct it. So it works there that way. If Holly Hills does an outreach of any sort, that doesn't make it a parachurch organization. It just means it's part of Holly Hills and what Holly Hills does.

There are some churches, for example, Tyndale Seminary that I went to was actually an extension of Tyndale the Church in Texas. So it was not a parachurch organization like some seminaries are. It was actually part of the church body and was supposed to be directed by the elders of the church also directing and governing the seminary. So there are parachurch ministries and non-parachurch ministries and they may be with the same purpose.

So it's just important to know that when you're dealing with something like a seminary or dealing with something like a website with educational material for believers like the Holly Hills website. There are independent ones and there are ones that are under churches and you just need to know when you come in contact with them what they are. Who's in charge of this thing? Real quick, what are some parachurch organizations that you either know of, have worked with, or maybe even have participated in?

Awana. Awana is one, that's good. Rocket CVS, is that one? What? Community Bible Study. Community Bible Study. Parachurch organization. Rocky Mountain Creation Fellowship. Okay, Rocky Mountain Creation Fellowship. Answers in Genesis. Answers in Genesis.

Okay, there's a lot of parachurch organizations. How about family Christian bookstores? Focus on the family. Focus on the family is one. I actually used to work at an independent Christian bookstore in Carson City called The Manger. So I have some experience with that.

What about through the Bible ministries that teach God's word but they aren't a church, they're just a ministry on the radio? That would be a parachurch organization because it's not subject to a church. Unless a church was the one producing the material. I don't know enough about that organization to say myself.

One that we're all probably familiar with here at the church, I believe, is MJS Books. Miles Stanford's material, I think, is not affiliated with Holly Hills. I believe that's something that operates outside of Holly Hills, even though we're all pretty familiar with the material that's there. There's lots of different independent teachers that go around and do teaching throughout different churches. One that we supported in Texas I've helped with their website, Sojourner Ministries, and it's a guy named Steve Gerr, and he goes around the country and teaches. Arnold Frugtenbaum, some of you may have heard of him, definitely travels all the time.

When I talked to him at one seminary conference, he actually said he was at home about two days out of the month. which is just crazy for me to comprehend. I'm like, wow, you get to see your wife, you know, two days out of 30 or 31. That's pretty bad. Of course, it's a higher ratio in February, but. Yeah, Institute of Creation Research.

So there's lots of different parachurch organizations and each one of us has probably come in contact with them. In my own life, Kay Arthur and her Bible study series was something I did in high school in a Sunday school class. I worked at the Christian bookstore. I went to the Tyndale Seminary, which like I said is supposed to be underneath the leadership of the church, but in many ways it operated independently. I've worked with sojourners, I've worked with MJS books, and I've worked with the conservative theological society. In my own life there's been a lot of parachurch organizations that I've been involved with.

That's if you don't live in the springs then. They're all there. That's right, they're all in the springs. Did he tell you about the church at Tyndale? Was it an independent church? It was an independent church like Holly Hills. non-denominational. I just wanted to get everybody familiar because most of us have in one way or another been influenced or come in contact with some para-church organization.

The next heading I've got on here is actually the good, the bad, and the ugly. I don't want to be nasty about para-church organizations because there's a lot of ones that have done well. Oh, it's a big one. World Vision. There's a lot of organizations like that that work together.

New Tribes Missions, some of the missionaries organizations we're familiar with are definitely not affiliated with a denomination or a church, but they operate independently. There's a lot of good things that can come out of para-church organizations like evangelism, sometimes proselytization. If we go into Islamic countries and we send a missionary there evangelizing, that's a good thing.

A lot of churches are not able to afford to do a full missions program, but they can contribute to a specific para-church organization and get plugged in. I don't have any more handouts Marilyn, I'm sorry. So with para-church organizations there can be good things that come out of it. Definitely that's one of the things that is exciting sometimes for a small body is that they can plug into a para-church organization and really contribute even if they can't fund the whole thing themselves. So that can be a very valuable thing.

Some parachurch organizations really do a great job of clearly communicating biblical ideas that may not be understood at that local body. If you live in a small rural town out in the middle of nowhere, like in Montana or Wyoming or one of the states that's more sparsely populated, You may not have access to a really great Bible church with really great teaching all the time, and one of the ways you can get a hold of that content, that material, is through radio. There are Christian radio stations that would probably be a parachurch organization as well. There's a long list of them that we actually use or utilize without necessarily realizing it. So there can be a lot of good things that come out of these various organizations.

Now then there's the bad. The problem with parachurch ministries is that they do not have elders, though some have a board of directors of some sort, to keep them in check. What happens if there is not a group of elders in leadership directing it like you would have in a healthy church body? Your doctrine starts to slip and slide.

We talked about, I mentioned briefly, Tyndale is a seminary that is based out of a church. The elders that are over the church body are also over the seminary, so that's an exception. But often with some of these organizations that operate outside of the normal church context, you end up having the potential for some really big variations on the theology. Some parachurch organizations I believe Wycliffe Bible translators actually are big on diversity.

We want to have lots of different ideas represented here. What's the problem with that? You don't stand in the unity of the faith. It's not unity of the faith and it also brings into question truth. Absolute truth of the nature that we can know and be certain of. So you have issues with that. Now the uglier part of this These groups may completely lack all discernment. One example of this could be Christian bookstores that are more concerned with selling Jesus junk and making revenue and profits than they are disseminating the truth as given in scripture.

Do you all remember or are you familiar with the What Would Jesus Do bracelets that came out probably twelve years ago or ten years ago now? Those bracelets were huge. At the Christian bookstore I happened to be working at, when at the time those got really popular, somehow our bookstore name and phone number got in a newspaper in Missouri. And we got phone call after phone call of people wanting to order boxes of these little bracelets to say what would Jesus do? WWJD We shipped them out all over the place and people really wanted them.

We were getting them from some distributor somewhere else. I'm sure their local Christian bookstore could have brought them in, but we were in a newspaper article. I will say publicly, in the defense of that bookstore, we weren't carrying that. That wasn't the sole purpose of the bookstore, but it was just a strange thing where Having gone to the Christian Distributors Conference that was just in Denver a couple weeks ago, I think Marianne actually got to go help there.

There's a lot of stuff that you can buy that has no theological sound doctrine whatsoever. The purpose is entertainment. The purpose is making money. I think it was back in the early 90s that the Christian music market reached 5% of all sales in the American music market. And guess what suddenly took place in the Christian music market? Of all the producers of the music, suddenly they were bought out by secular companies who said 5%? That's a big chunk of change that we're not getting any action on. So they bought them out. and then they've glutted the market with a bunch of questionable theology in Christian music. And basically there's a lot of artists with songs that have no profanity in them.

And that cuts, that meets the grade. So the quality in the lyrics has dropped down in a lot of cases. Not every case, and I'm not saying that to be derogatory, and we're going to have a different class on Christian music, so we'll do that later. But that can be pretty ugly though, if it comes down to it. If you go into a Christian bookstore and you pick up some of the books, can anybody think of some of the authors you've seen in Christian bookstores that make you cringe?

Benny Hinn is definitely in there. And they have their Catholic sections. Yeah, and there's Catholic sections. Most of the Christian bookstores carry the 12-step program book for Alcoholics Anonymous, which I think is the big book, they call it. It's not specifically Christian per se, it's religious in nature because they want you to find your own higher being. Whoever your higher power is to help you have victory over this alcoholism. Do any bookstores carry new age things? Some of them are creeping into that. Jessica just mentioned something that we'd seen in Texas that really shocked us.

The family Christian bookstores are starting to carry secular books. because they figure that if they carry the top 100, 200, 300 books that sell in the world that are not blatantly questionable, then they might sell those to you. You may go, oh hey, I can go grab that copy of I actually saw a programming book, which I thought was really weird, because when I think of programming, I don't think of family Christian bookstores.

I thought of Joy of Crooking. Yeah, Joy of Crooking. Maybe it teaches you not to say bad words when your program doesn't work. That's right. Unfortunately, there's a lot of voodoo terms that make their way into programming, like wave the dead chicken and stuff like that, but we won't get into that. Wow, that's a whole different direction to go. Sorry.

We've looked at who are some of the organizations, what are some of the great things, and what are some of the problems. Let's take a look at what the Bible says about parachurch organizations, which is actually kind of loaded because the truth of the matter is that parachurch organizations aren't mentioned in the Bible. It's not a topic of concern to the Apostle Paul or Peter or anybody else.

Because what were they really focused on at that point in time when they were starting the New Testament church? Establishing doctrine. What else? Edifying the saints. But they're worried about establishing doctrine and establishing churches with sound doctrine so that it can continue on moving forward.

There is no parachurch organization, there's barely a church. You've got small groups meeting in homes often in these communities and it's not a big multi-million dollar or billions of dollars actually in the United States here industry if you can call it that. That seems a little cheap to call it an industry. It should not be an organization, it should be an organism like was said in the main service recently. Paul does have some things to say how the body should operate so that parachurch organizations actually are less and less necessary.

This is a concept that my dad and I have discussed multiple times, and I believe he and the other elders are of like mind on this, that if good quality Christian doctrine is being taught in the church body, you're not going to need to go outside for it and make up for it. For example, seminary shouldn't be necessary because you should be able to go to church and have access to good theology covering from Genesis to Revelation, talking about apologetics, polemics, even discussing evangelism. We have Greek classes that have been taught several times here at Holly Hills, at least while I've been here. Those are all things that people assume you need to go to seminary to get.

In fact, you'll find a lot of pastors that when they get a hungry young buck comes into the pastor's office and says, man, I really want to grow in God's Word. And he goes, great, let's ship you off to Texas. Because they've got enough seminaries down there to train the world. Hopefully they're training you. But the truth of the matter is that it should be happening in the body.

Where are we going to get our next pastor? It should never be in the United States or in the world. It should be, who is the next generation of elders? And if the elders meet the requirement of what an elder is, there should always be somebody shepherding. One of the things I love about Holly Hills is that there's multiple elders and all the elders teach in a Sunday school class.

So you don't have to just hear, Dr. Vernon Peterman. That sounds so smug. I love to say that, though. That's my dad. You shouldn't have to just listen to one guy. Each one of the elders is gifted in a unique way. I learn different things when I sit under Hal, or Roger, or Mike, or my dad. They all have different things that they are passionate about, and if I listen to all of them, I'm going to grow spiritually in a complete and more holistic way than I would if I was just listening to my dad. Listen, I listened to my dad for 20 years until I got married. It was actually 21. Well, just shy of 21.

But the truth of the matter is that there's a lot of stuff that we can learn from the different elders, and that operates in a healthy way. So the Bible, when it addresses things, it's going to address things from a body life, body focused way. The Holy Spirit leading us in a grace based Christianity. Let's take a look at page 2 here. I've got several Bible verses that I want to take a look at.

Three of these are specific to the elders. And the last one is generally for the body. And this operates very differently from what is commonly thought of in the American culture for you've got the one, the hired gun, the one guy who does all the teaching and everybody just goes to the fount of knowledge, so to speak. And this operates really differently. So let's take a look at this. This is Speaking of Elders, Acts 20, 27-30. I'll go ahead and read it just so we have a strong voice for the recording.

For I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole purpose of God. Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God, which he purchased with his own blood. I know that after my departure, savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock. And from among you, or your own selves, men will arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them."

Now that's a really happy, lovey-dovey, huggy message, isn't it? Isn't that a special, warm message there that Paul would share with these elders that he's leaving in Acts? The truth of the matter is that the elders who were loving and guiding and directing the flock there in that church needed to be discerning of the character of the other people in the body. That has some pluses and also some things that you have to watch out for the minuses. If I see somebody's hurting in the body and I come alongside as an elder, which I'm not, but for the sake of example, what is that going to communicate to that person who's hurting?

That's the love of God or the love of Christ in my life. That's relationship and fellowship and it's intimacy. I like the word intimacy. Please don't misconstrue that into something sexual. That's certainly not my intention. There's intimacy there, but it also means that if I see somebody going astray, as a shepherd, I'm going to be careful to come and try to communicate and be intimate with that person for their edification and their growth so that hopefully they will come back in line with what the scripture teaches.

And, in this case here, he's watching out for those people who are going to come out and try to say something special like, you have to come through me to hear the truth of God's word. That's scary if somebody were to say that. But he says, watch out, there's going to be men from within that group there that are going to try to rise up and take control and try to dominate and try to bring things to their way. Follow me, I have all the truth and everybody else is not anointed, like the televangelists might say. The thing that I think is interesting in the last verse there, verse 30, speaking perverse things to draw away the disciples after them. When Paul says perverse, I don't believe he's meaning specifically sexual things. I think he's talking about them perverting the doctrine and corrupting what was truth to have a special message, to have a special hold over those who listen. And that's a very dangerous thing.

And that's why the elders at Holly Hills and at every church where they have elders need to be coming together, studying God's Word, constantly proving God's Word to one another in their lives and in discussion, and then being intimate with the flock.

If you've got four elders and four thousand people at a church, how's that going to work? Not so well. Another thing the elders have discussed here at Holly Hills is if the church starts to grow and it gets big and they outgrow the building, they're not going to have a building program to build a bigger building. They're going to have a building program to build another building somewhere else to have other elders shepherd another flock somewhere else that can grow so that you have intimacy again in the body and you have relationship and you have shepherds who can know the health of their flock. It's a planned church split, yes.

Now, the last thing about this here is, are we as the flock supposed to be following a man? Do we follow Verne Peterman? I don't. Do we follow Miles Stanford? Do we follow Paul? Trick question. No, we follow Christ. Paul was riding under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, but we don't follow Paul. Paul says, don't follow me, follow Christ. So, the focus here is that the elders need to be shepherding, and the flock needs to be discerning. Still.

It's easy to come in contact with lots of material at the Christian bookstore that sounds like a nice, good, new Christian living book that's legalism. But they paint it so nicely that it's easy to get sucked in and buy in. There's a lot of legalism out there masquerading as Christian living and the elders and everybody should be looking out for that. Because these parachurch organizations happen to be making a nice profit off of spreading these messages.

So we need to be discerning and the elders need to be discerning and have relationship. Yes. Would you say that books like Experiencing God by Blackby and Hunt, is that right? I think so. Or any of the Max Lucado books, those are denominationally... Affiliated? Affiliated. They may be affiliated with the denomination. I think that it's those books are being distributed by prayer church organizations. This still comes down to the local elders and the local body needing to be discerning and needing to be watching out for the doctrine that's coming into their church.

The fad book thing is awesome. The Prayer of Jabez, the Experiencing God, Streams in the Desert. It seems like there's just cycles of fad books where everybody has to go read it because they're going to get the special new energy to go out and be awesome Christians. You've just got to read it, and it doesn't matter what the book is, if it's not the Bible, if it's not accurate doctrine, it's not going to be fruitful.

It's going to lead to legalism and the flesh being glorified instead of the Lord. So the next passage I've got on here is 1 Timothy 1, 3-11, and I'll go ahead and read this one again. As I urged you upon my departure from Macedonia, remain on at Ephesus, so that you may instruct certain men not to teach strange doctrines, nor to pay attention to myths and endless genealogies, which give rise to mere speculation, rather than furthering the administration of God, which is by faith. But the goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart, and a good conscience, and a sincere faith. For some men, straying from these things, have turned aside to fruitless discussions, wanting to be teachers of the law, even though they do not understand either what they are saying, or the matter about which they make confident assertions. But we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully, realizing the fact that law is not made for a righteous person, but for those who are lawless and rebellious, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who kill their fathers and mothers, for murderers and immoral men and homosexuals and kidnappers and liars and perjurers and whatever else is contrary to sound teaching, according to the glorious gospel of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted. Okay, so who is Paul writing to in 1st Timothy?

Timothy. Alright, trick question. But he's writing there, he says, hey listen, I had to go to Macedonia. I left you there in Ephesus to do what? Okay, instruct but certain men not to teach strange doctrines nor to pay attention to myths and endless genealogies and the list that he goes on over there. So he had to tell them, no don't do that, even though that's what they were attracted to. There's a case in this context here that there's going to be people who are attracted to lots of crazy stuff and they're going to get drawn in.

Instead, he was needing to teach them other things and so I'm going to actually jump right into 1 Timothy 2.2, because it continues on in the next chapter of 1st Timothy. The things which you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrust these to faithful men who will be able to hold on to it and keep it to themselves.

Right? What does he actually say? Teach others also. Okay. So what happens if One elder disciples the next generation of elders, or one group of elders disciples the next generation of elders. And then that first generation dies, or goes to be with the Lord. The doctrine continues. There's integrity there. There's a continuity plan, so to speak. God established, in the beginning, this plan of continuity.

The elders disciple the next generation of elders, who disciple the next generation of elders, who disciple the next generation of elders, and you never come up going, man, I hope we can find a good student at a seminary so that we can have the next pastor. every time that something happens with the pastor. Now I have to say in my own family we've been blessed because Holly Hills called my dad from seminary to be here but it was recognized immediately between my dad and Hal and then later on the other elders that this needs to never happen again within Holly Hills. It needs to be that the next generation of elders is being discipled right now. I think that's part of why they have an older man that's an elder teaching a Sunday school class and a younger man such as myself being discipled by the older man alongside, teaching alongside the older man, so that maybe someday, if the Lord allows, I could be an elder.

Or Jim Poole, or the various people that have been, you know, Brad Mastin, various people that have been discipled up underneath the previous generation of elders, so that either they go out to another place and get to help facilitate a church if the Lord moves them to Milwaukee or Nebraska or some crazy place like that. Even Texas. I'm joking. But the truth of the matter is that if you've got these generations coming along, you're going to be able to pass on the truth.

And the parachurch organization, even if it's been useful in certain regards in our culture, is going to be less and less important for teaching doctrine and more and more for doing things like printing Bibles. There's lots of parachurch organizations printing Bibles. And that's probably good, because can you imagine if every church had to have their own Bible press? I mean, it would be like, oh, well the Bible press broke down this week and so we had to, you know, we need to ask for people to be particularly generous this week so that we can keep printing Bibles.

That would be a little complicated. Instead, it is fruitful for us to have different publishers printing out the Bible. Now, let's take a look at something that's a bit more general and local for the body in each one of us. This is a you and me and we kind of a thing and not just an elders them stuff or thing.

Titus 2, 1 through 8. But as for you, speak the things which are fitting for sound doctrine. Older men are to be temperate, dignified, sensible, sound in faith, in love, Sound in love, sound in perseverance, older women likewise are to be irreverent in their behavior, not malicious gossips, nor enslaved to much wine, teaching what is good, so that they may encourage the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands, so that the word of God will not be dishonored. Likewise, urge the young men to be sensible in all things, show yourself to be an example of good deeds, with purity in doctrine, dignified, sound in speech, which is beyond reproach, so that the opponent will be put to shame having nothing bad to say about us. Okay, so what does that look like if you were to summarize that down to a simple statement of what Paul is encouraging the body to be doing there? Talk the talk, walk the walk. Okay, he's certainly saying that, but what's going on there? What are the older men doing in the lives of the younger men? They're modeling and teaching. They're modeling and teaching, and there's a relationship there. How about the older women and the younger women? Same thing. Put your definition of older. Older would be not younger. You're older than me.

The thing that I see here is that there's discipleship going on within the body and there's fellowship and relationship between the generations. It's not an issue of, oh, I am 28 and I walked into Holly Hills and I saw too much white hair. This must not be a good church for me. I can't learn anything from these older people. Because you know what?

That is a common attitude today. We have churches that are geared towards different generations. There's a huge number of churches that focus in on reaching people between 18 and 34. That's their demographic. That's what they're going for. That used to be the way here. We were mostly older people.

The Lord that we have smart people like you. This is partly because I have prayed about this for 10 years. Because I could see the church was going to die if we didn't get young people in here. That's important. I was just going to say that since we've been here, which has been a relatively short time in the history of Holly Hills, several of the younger people have come to me specifically and said they were so excited to have older people to fellowship with and to learn from. And that's important.

When I went to a church in Texas while we were church shopping, so to speak, there was a guy teaching who was in his 80s. I think he was in his 80s. And he was up there teaching still. And he said, listen, if you go into a church somewhere, if God takes you out of this area, and you don't see any white hair, you just walk right back out. He said, those are older believers, hopefully, and they will be mature and they can disciple you. As a younger believer, it's important for younger believers to understand the need for older believers in their lives to disciple them.

There's a relationship there. There's life experience. Sometimes, you know, God's Word doesn't talk about something, and that's okay, but you can talk to an older, mature believer who's going to be able to give you wise, godly counsel. Which is really good. we talked about, I think it was last week, about how big the Bible would have to be if it covered everything. But as a younger believer, it's encouraging to me to come into a church and see various stages of baldness. I'm sorry, I just said that out loud. No, but the thing is that everybody's looking around, is he talking about me?

The way you see here, older men are able to disciple younger men. If you're an older man and you don't feel like you're comfortable discipling younger men, talk to an elder and get discipled so that you can disciple younger men. If you're a younger guy, which in this case this morning is just you, Davis, and me, find an older man and ask. In your case, you could probably ask your dad. He's co-teaching one of the classes, although maybe you might want to ask somebody else. The idea is that there's a relationship there, and for the younger women, having an older woman that can disciple you.

This should be part of what is in our homes, but it should also be something that happens within the body. Hey, our families get together and they have fellowship, and I get to learn from so-and-so, is a good thing. It should never be, oh man, we're going to get together with that family again, he's going to talk about the Bible. There should be that relationship that happens, and in that context, Where does the para-church organization fit in? If we're doing what the Bible says, these para-church organizations that are often times, they're picking up the slack, if you will.

That's why they can exist and do so well, because they're picking up the slack. There's a problem there. You need to have a healthy body life, so these things are less of an issue. I'm on the last page here now. We'll take a look at again restating some of the questions about the good, the bad, and the ugly. The heading of this section is, are parachurch organizations wrong? And of course that's a loaded question. You can't make such a broad generalized question and apply to every single parachurch organization. As we said, there's some good things going on. We need Bible publishers, otherwise we're going to have problems. What did they do before printing and Bible publishing was available in the church?

They had to hand copy it. That's not evil or bad, in fact you probably would memorize a lot more of the scripture if we were hand copying every page of it. It is a benefit for us as believers to be able to go and be able to afford a Bible We can get Bibles now for a couple dollars. Granted, it's on newspaper paper, and the print quality isn't fantastic, and they look like bricks. It's a brick of paper, but it's God's Word. You can get Bibles. My Bible was much more expensive because it's special thin paper, and the printing quality is really high, and it's genuine leather.

But I'm hoping that will be a good investment on my own. Actually, that was a gift. It was a good investment of somebody else's money. And it ended up being something where, yeah, there's a bit more cost in it, but it's going to be a long-term resource for my spiritual growth. We have the Bible. It's good to have those external sources. Let's take a look briefly.

Nav Press, or Kay Arthur, and she's got Precept Ministries, if you've seen that. There's actually a gal out of Houston recently that I had come in contact with from a friend. who's doing Bible study series, and she's doing it from within her church's facilities, but it tends to extend way outside of the way the church operates. I can't think of her name though, so that was kind of a useless point. But with Kay Arthur's stuff, there's been multiple times where she will teach above and lead the men in various contexts, which is outside of what the Bible describes as being a healthy scenario. We just looked at Titus. It doesn't intermingle the same way.

Out of the first Corinthians, how would the inter-gender spiritual growth take place? Can anybody Remember when he says in 1 Corinthians 14, Paul writes, if the women have questions they should ask their husbands at home. Now there's cases where in this room there's at least several single gals and you don't have husbands at home, which makes sense because you're single. If you do have husbands at home, I'm worried.

Because that's not what we understand. I'm confused. But the idea is that There are some parachurch organizations where things operate outside of the biblical guidelines that are there. And it's a problem. You end up having situations where it's like, no, these guys need to be going and not being sitting under women. We talked about that with a televangelist a couple weeks ago, actually. A lot of these gal televangelists will teach over their men and actually dominate their husbands at home, at least as far as we can tell. So that's a problem.

Now Kay Arthur's ministry has had some good things. She teaches inductive study approach to scripture. That's a consistent approach to hermeneutics that says we're going to get what we can out of scriptures based on what is clearly stated rather than extrapolating from what scripture says. to study the Bible really through her precepts ministry. And the thing is, it's not all bad. We have to have discernment. And with NAVPRESS, they've got a lot of good Bible study material and then they've got things by Hugh Ross that they've published. And he's a theistic evolutionist. And so, as believers, what do we have to do when we come in contact with everything that we come in contact with that's Bible study material? What should we do? My husband said, you spit out the bones. You have to have discernment.

But the same thing goes for what happens in this initial class and in the main sanctuary when you go out in the main service. I don't care who's up there teaching, whether it's my dad or one of the other elders. If he's expositing and you don't see what he's saying coming out of what is in the text, you need to go immediately after the service and run up and say, why are you teaching heresy? Or maybe not so much. Maybe you would come up and say, Elder so and so, I don't understand why you are stating such.

Jessica and I, when we were taking seminary classes, we came into one place where it seemed that the teacher was totally jumping around in the book of Isaiah and he's like this is prophecy and this is not prophecy and they were back-to-back verses and there was no reason to understand why something was prophetic and then the next verse was not prophetic and then the next verse was prophetic it was like boom boom boom and we didn't understand why and he never was able to explain to us why he thought it was one verse was prophetic and then followed by a non-prophetic and then a prophetic verse Be discerning. Study it. Understand what's being said there. Yes. Which is why Vern always says, don't believe a word he says. Don't believe what I say.

But we need to have discernment. There's lots of parachurch organizations that have mostly good material. And you need to find out where the mostly good material ends and the not so good material begins. And be discerning. What's one way, as a church body, that we can help facilitate that in our own lives? If you study something and you think it's really awesome, take it to other believers and say, what do you think about this?

I looked at this and I could agree. I thought their numerology was consistent. I thought their method of Studying was clean and clear and understandable and it's good. Do you agree? Do you see this the same way? And coming or going to an elder saying, listen, I just did this precepts ministry Bible study and I thought it was great. This is what I learned from it.

Do you see anything goofy out of what I'm presenting to you? Having discernment. Every once in a while you might even see something on Christian television that you might learn something from. I'm being sarcastic there, I'm sorry, but it's just one of those things where we need to have discernment as believers no matter what the source. When you watch Fox News, is that any more accurate and perfect than ABC News? It's going to be maybe more conservative, but you know what?

We still have to have discernment. It doesn't matter who the source is, if it's AP or Reuters. It doesn't matter. Discernment. That's kind of the theme of this class. You've noticed that over the last couple months, huh? Geez, maybe I should have discernment. The last paragraph here, as short as it is, really restates that. We need to have discernment. We need to be like the Bereans. And it doesn't matter who the source is. We need to seek God's Word, study it, and compare that to what's being said.

How many times, and I do this, so I'm confessing to you that I do this, how many times do you come across Christian material and it cross-references a Bible passage and it just gives you the address? It might just say Titus 2 and you never check it. You just take for granted this person's referencing that and that's proof. It's easy to do that because it takes a zero energy. You just go, okay, check it off on your list of that must be right and move on.

When I was working at the Christian bookstore, we sold a Bible in a Year in Chronological Order Bible. We went through a chunk of that, I believe, as a staff. The owner of the store gave each one of us a copy, and we went through, for a month, this Bible in a Year in Chronological Order, starting from whatever the date is, because it's dated throughout the year. And one of the gals on staff kept going throughout the year doing it. The rest of us were probably lazy.

But she went through and she found cross-reference errors in it because she was double-checking. She had a regular Bible. She had this condensed edited version that put things in chronological and when there were duplications they would just give you the one Old Testament passage and then when it cross-referenced with another one you just got one out of the two or three or however many there were. Well, she found errors in their cross-referencing. Because she was double-checking it. She would go and say, oh, Ezekiel, alright.

There she goes, checking it out. And we found mistakes. Now, it's not like we pulled every copy from our shelf and said, hey, this is a lie from the devil and burned it or something. But there was somebody there on staff, she was a librarian, I think that's where it came from. But she was double-checking it. and she found mistakes. There's been multiple times when I found principles that were true but were misreferenced. The discipleship material my dad took me through when I was about 20 years old actually is full of Old Testament quotes tried to kind of forced into a New Testament context and so it really took the Old Testament material out of context to try to prove what was really a biblical principle but it was not used correctly.

So there's all kinds of scenarios like that. We need to have discernment. We need to study God's word and know it so that when we come in contact with stuff we can say, oh yeah, that matches up with what I know scripture says versus, wow, that's a really new idea. I've never seen that before. Where did that come from? All right, so that's all the material I have. What kind of questions? I actually looked it up last week, and it was. That's always nice.

But some of the stuff, I mean some of the hymns, I didn't realize some of the biblical references. I think it's a really good thing. Sure. That is true, and for those of you listening on the recording, Marilyn said it's good we have scripture references up on the overheads that tie in where the hymns hopefully are rooted from. and it's good because you can really see the biblical foundation for what you're singing. One of the things that I love about a good hymn or a good praise song, in my opinion, is that it will help me memorize a biblical concept so I can walk around and sing it later on. Oh, I have my theology up here and in here and it's just walked out of my life because I'm singing it all the time. I'm learning it and I'm knowing it that way. 66 books of the Bible, that's a lot of the Bible if you were to just sit down and memorize the whole thing. But songs are a good way that we can do that. Any other thoughts or questions? Alright.

How do you categorize organizations like Youth for Christ or Campus Crusade? Youth for Christ or Campus Crusade? I think they're parachurch organizations. To my knowledge, and I'm not overly familiar with their structure, they don't operate out of one specific church. They usually come into a community and grab lots of different churches or members from different churches. Let's see here, I was involved very briefly with the Youth for Christ Bible Study, but I don't know if that represents typical Youth for Christ Bible Studies. I don't know what that looks like. I don't know what their mission is.

And what was the other one you mentioned? Campus Crusade for Christ. I want to say I did something with that organization too at some point in time, but I don't remember. Navigators would be a perfect example of a third. Yeah. We talked about that earlier. The truth of the matter is that there's lots of different organizations and they operate outside of what would be typically the church and they grab a lot of people. The Billy Graham organization does that. We talked about them in a previous class some. Promise Keepers is one. The thing about Promise Keepers is that not only is it para-church but it tends to be very ecumenical.

So we don't care if if this denomination or that denomination becomes a problem when some of those denominations are teaching a different gospel, like the Catholic Church. organizations, now like the Navigators, Dawson Trotman was really a man of the word, but as they have gone along now, they've departed from some of the things, I mean, a number of things in the ways that he did. I was discipled by a man who was under Dawson, and he still is pretty much like Dawson, but so many of them have gone astray, from that original purpose and they become ecumenical and they come one, come all. I think that's the way with so many of the churches. They tend to maybe start off real well with one man. When he's gone, then they begin to drift.

The same thing happened at Dallas Theological Seminary. Lewis Barry Schaefer started that out and it was really a small thing. It was, you know, here let's get everybody discipled up and he had a really small group of students. John Wolvard became the next president of the seminary and he tried to keep things streamlined and simple and straightforward and when Wolvard stepped down there was a different board of directors at the Dallas Theological Seminary and now they've kicked out certain professors that were saying, listen, we've fallen away from what was originally put in place. And so they said, listen, you're making too much of a squawk. We just can't have that anymore and you're out of here. So Robert Leitner, I know, is an example at Dallas Theological Seminary. They just said, we're done with the noise.

And the school has really embraced for the most part, a progressive dispensational approach to theology instead of the traditional dispensational model that Schaeffer taught. Now the thing is that over time sometimes there will be a clarification of theology. For example, Schofield taught a long earth origins model. He did not embrace a six-day creation model, a literal interpretation of Genesis 1. And so later on other theologians came and said, hey, we're not going to have that. So there was some clarification in theology between places, but then sometimes it drifts as well. And that's why as believers we all need to have discernment. We all need to seek that out.

That's why 1 Timothy 2. 2-2, yeah. Pass it on. Alright, that's the second bell. Let's close in prayer real quick, Doug, and then you can ask me your question. Some of these parables in the prayer church primarily are in interest, like Billy Graham, evangelism. I would say there are many groups like that. I wouldn't say primarily. It really depends. It's too big of a term, too big of an umbrella to just say they're all focused on one thing.

Let's close in prayer and then we'll Heavenly Father, we come before you. We thank you for this time that we've had discussing what can be a very useful group of organizations. But Lord, we also pray that you'd give us discernment as we live out our daily walks and come in contact with various outside sources besides your word. We thank you and praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.