The Ambiguous Church

Last Sunday I had the pleasure and privilege of visiting a church of fellow Christians in Colorado. The good news is they keep the gospel of grace message the main thing (according to their mission statement). The bad news is the gospel was not taught during my Sunday morning visit. Instead, a guest speaker gave personal testimony. Now I enjoy personal testimonies, but when I come to a church for a Sunday sermon I desire and expect a sermon taught so that I may be better equipped to glorify God.

The root concern I have (as I do for a majority of "Protestant" Christian churches in western culture) is that this particular church limits their statement of beliefs to the basic ones. This is problematic because if a church is going to claim the entirety of the Bible is God-breathed and useful for teaching (2 Timothy 3:16) then that church would inevitably have to cover some "controversial" teachings in scripture in the more "obscure" passages. However, this particular church, like so many other today, leaves the "more obscure doctrine or teachings with less support... to the individuals to sort out on their own-". In other words the scripture offers up "recipes" of doctrine with which a seasoned pastor can go on to make "gourmet meals" for his flock but instead what is produced on Sundays is Happy Meals (elementary teachings). A church cannot grow in maturity if it only sticks to the passages that are most agreeable to the current culture.

A prudent church does well when it tackles entire books of the Bible at a time (a.k.a. expository teaching) so that it addresses all that is God-breathed, since all of it is useful. After all, what good is a shepherd that feeds meals to his sheep that are best suited for the goats?
One of my favorite churches in the nation, that is thriving because of its devotion to desiring knowledge of God above its desire to be agreeable, recently posted this statement about their approach to scripture...
"One of the reasons that we preach straight through books of the Bible as our main way of hearing from God in corporate worship at Bethlehem, with occasional topical series thrown in along the way, is that it encourages us to consider all that God has to say in a book of the Bible, rather than just the parts we especially like or the parts that are easier to understand. Which means that we inevitably come upon passages that are controversial. "