Joshua Keith Craft

0:53 But but the the thing that's interesting that's a unique it's like I see this pattern. This is like the pattern I see or the principle of church. Um Jesus establishes the vision of the church. The vision of the church is clear. Right. Right. Jesus establishes the vision of this environment that's about life and spiritual transformation and discipleship and fulfilling the great commission and fulfilling the great commandment. Right. All that. And then he doesn't tell us how to do it right. He says, "Here's what here's here's what you guys are going to go do. Here's what I've here's what I want you to do." I mean, with the disciples, he could have sat down with them and said, "Look, vision, strategy, vision, structure, strategy. Here's what the here's the why behind the church. Here's all you guys are going to have different roles and then here's what you're going to do, right?" I think there's a lot of reasons why God didn't do it that way. He did do it that way in the Old Testament. Then the New Testament church comes along and God's like, "Hey, here's and this is kind of how principles are in our life.

1:53 Figure out how to apply what I'm saying." Mhm. You know, like you read about uh love, you read about love in the Bible, like something like love, right? Um you have to figure out in your own life how to how to be how to apply love. Well, you work out your your salvation with fear and trembling. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah, come on, man. like, you know, make yourself a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. Wait a minute. I Yeah. Well, and then saying, what does it mean for me to be a living sacrifice? Like, I don't even know. I got to figure that out. I think the fact that you're breathing means you check that box. The holy part is where I think we really have a lot of working out to do. What does it mean for me to practice like sacrificial love with my wife or sacrificial love with my kids? Or what does it mean for me to turn the other cheek and love my enemy? That's a that's a hard no one has the right answer, right? So, everyone has an answer cuz like some people will say um and I can't remember if we talked about this on the podcast or you and me just had this conversation or maybe I had this conversation with somebody else like there's a lot of people who say, you know, uh it's the Bible says love your love your enemies but we got to kill all the Muslims, right? Oh, 100%. Yeah.

3:07 And then they can they can come up with really great biblical uh proof for why we should we should as Christians want to eradicate our enemies from the earth whoever our enemies happen to be. Right. Right. Whoever we deem our enemies. Right. Yeah. Is that right or wrong? I don't know. I can say person that's not my interpretation. That's not how I see it. And this is where people get off. Where people get off is they say my interpretation is the right one. Right. Right. So to back to the house church thing, people go, "Oh, well, the only kind of good God go God-fearing gospel church is like a house church because there's less corruption. There's more accountability." That's not necessarily true. You're dealing with a different level of issues, but you're going to have wherever people go, there's going to be issues. There's going to be hypocrisy. There's going to be uh misunderstandings. There's going to be disagreements. I mean, in the Bible, it talks about Paul and Barnabas um were were like best buddies, did a lot of life together, traveled the world together, preaching the gospel. We don't know what happened. The Bible says that they had a sharp disagreement and they never were together again.

4:14 Yeah. And both of them went and built the church. They both went and built the church separately from each other even though they were partners for a long time. Right. So, I think that's actually a cool thing. like it's not a bug, it's a feature in that this is where I feel like the Catholic Church doesn't doesn't have it right in that you know this word Catholic means universal and they think that they have uh they think that all churches should be Catholic in in their expression of what Catholic means right so we've interpreted a lot of Catholic dogmas are not built on scripture they're built on people's interpretation Right. So in Catholicism, uh you're you're saved by following the by by grace, but also by uh all your obedience to the sacraments.

5:12 Yeah. which is kind of kind of what the Pharisees said was like they went to Jesus in in uh in the book of Mark and in and Mark Mark 7 I think and they said you know your disciples they violated the transg why why were the traditions of the elders so important because to the Pharisees obeying the traditions was just important just as important as obeying the laws right right so that's where we get sideways where where we get sideways is turning our tr our traditions into truth. So hence hence where we're at like in the current modern church world there's principles to church. So the principles to church you have to have a governance model and there's three that the Bible basically infers. None of these none of these are what the Bible says this is the way to govern a church. But it's pretty clear in scripture that you can have an uh you can have an episcopal model which is a run by an individual leader or hierarchy of individual leaders. You can have a congregational model which is run by the whole congregation. Everybody votes or you can have kind of a mix of that which is the elder model.

6:22 You know what's so wonderful about that Josh? I'm sorry to interrupt you, man, but it's kind of dawning on me as we're talking about this. Cuz on the one hand, I can kind of like I think you and I can get along well because I think we're both prone to a little bit of cynicism and darkness like in our friendship like we've both experienced that. Like I remember our first conversation I realized I was like, "Oh, this guy has seen some dark like has thought some dark thoughts and I was like I've been there too." Like that was one of our first like long conversations. Dark thoughts, man. Well, be yeah because I feel I what I've said to you is like you're able to manage a high level of cynicism without letting it overcome you. Whereas a lot of people if they had your level of cynicism every day would be like the worst day of their lives and you're still like a it's all good man I'll be there tomorrow and you're like dude you think this is going to fail like yeah but I'll be there anyways that's complete side note to you but as I'm sitting here listening to you I'm like man the thing that I was would like to get as a human is that it's like God wants you to do X Y and Z and then you're going to get this this outcome but instead everything is good.

7:16 Yeah. Yeah. But isn't it such a picture of God's grace that he goes like, "Hey, look, here's what it's for." How you work your way to that is completely up to you? Like that's a God who who's going to have diversity. And I'm not like a you diversity has become, especially in conservative circles, like a bad word. Um because it's like it's become a way to almost reverse racism. I don't mean it like that. I mean it like when you look at what God creates, God loves diversity. There's no way you can say that. He spoke a word and we have like 50,000 different types of plants. You know, humans don't all look the same. Like God lo God is is vast in his expression. So wouldn't it not make sense that the church would be the same way? Cuz what is the actual point of the church? Like he said, go and make disciples. It's that we'd be in relationship together, that there would be a gathering of believers that can work out salvation with fear and trembling, that can point out, you know, blind spots, that can be accountability, that we can walk through life together and be the family of God and reflect him as the body.

8:09 Yeah. Now, how you do that, oh man, that's where like that's where there's so much grace. And I think that that's actually kind of an amazing thing, man. It just dawned on me while we're doing this. I mean, I remember I remember and you know, I'm so grateful for my dad. My dad helped me uh learn this like early and my I like there's a lot of the school I went to. I went to ORU. I went to Oral Roberts University. Shout out ORU. I'm the worst alumni in history. My mom actually my I'd never seen my diploma, right? And my mom Yeah. My mom found it. They were moving. They were moving houses and my mom found it and brought over to my house. So, I graduated in uh 2009 or whatever. And uh shout out to RU. I'm a poor You put that on the wall, bro. Come on. You're somewhere. It's somewhere sitting here on the table. I haven't even looked. It's like it's like underneath your dog's bed. Yeah.

8:59 It's like um but I remember going to RU and I didn't like I didn't like their expression of Christianity. I just didn't like it. There's a lot I didn't like and I get into that, but it's this isn't really about that. So I I a lot I remember calling my dad and going, "This sucks, man. I don't like they make us go to chapel. Chapel sucks. Like this is their worship isn't this. The this isn't that." Blah, blah, blah. And my dad goes, my dad goes, "Okay, well imagine something." I go, "Okay." He goes, "Imagine that we go to an ice cream store. I go buy ice cream." And uh you like strawberry. I like vanilla. But then you talk to the you talk to the guy that runs the ice cream store. Like, look, I don't like strawberry or I don't like vanilla. Next time I come in here, better all be strawberry. Right. Right. He's like, "No, like you can get the thing about an ice cream store like BaskinRobins or whatever." Right. The thing about an ice cream shop is you can get whatever flavor you want and just cuz you have a flavor doesn't mean that this other person's flavor is like a bad flavor, right?

10:04 Like that's that's life. Like that's one of the coolest things like variety is the spice of life is is the saying what what makes America great is that we're a mixing a melting pot of cultures. We're not like monolithic in our culture, right? Yeah. And um I think I think that's God's intention with the church is he he he knows the unique and this is back to even what we where we started with like unique giftings and the glory of God and stuff. He knows the unique gifting that's in each individual person, right? And then I love what CS Lewis said about friendship. What he said about friendship was that we think that we pick our friends, but God actually divinely ordains our friends for us because he knows what we need. Same thing for marriage, man. Jeez. Yeah. So, how much of a difference would it make in your life if you saw your friends as like a divine gift? Yeah. Right. Like if if I saw the people God brought me in my relationship, my my spouse, my my siblings, my my parents, whoever, as some kind of gift from God, how would that change my relationship to them? Right? And so every indivi, this is like the cool thing to me. Every individual is singular. We're one of one. And we all have this unique expression that is a part of who God is in the earth, right?

11:17 And [clears throat] then we get together and we we form something that's a gathering of people that agree on the principles, on the ideas, on the visions of of what the church can be, right? And then we come together and we mix all of our unique DNA in there. And that forms like this really super unique expression of a church. And the church to me, what the church can be is based on the individual potential of each person in the church coming together and forming something better together than they could separate. But you have to actually make room for that, right? Like the the problem that I have with with um churches like the Catholic Church is that they've built out so much. So there was a lot of room early on for Thomas Aquinas or Augustine or these these theologians to like build the doctrines of the church. Right. Well, now there's no more room because that guy was already here.

12:10 Right. Right. So, but there's always like a new thing like how come those guys get to establish how it is? How come those guys that were that lived a thousand years ago get to say how this should function? You know, and how come how come the and this is like my whole thought, right? How come the model of the church is just what it is and that's just how it has to be, right? How come how come how come the mega how come mega churches have to be a thing? But also, how come house churches have to be a thing? How come that's got to be that way, right? That's just proof that it's my flavor, right? It's like Well, let let me ask you this then because I hear what you're saying about about like the ice cream store analogy is a great one and I know I interrupted you midflow. So forgive me, but I think I think this is I think this is the right question to kind of tie a bow on this. So what are the musthaves? Cuz like cuz like there's clearly it's not like Jesus just said cuz this could be like the hey, you know what Josh, I listen to your podcast and I decided to start church with my wife and like me and my family go to that church and like we meet every Sunday at my house and it's like and that's our church. You know what I mean? Like there's clearly some musthaves. So what are the what are the essentials that it's like you know we we've seen that there's a lot of grace in the actual methodology of working out the gathering of believers but what are the essentials? Yeah. And well, this is where I think I diverge a lot from deconstructionist like viewpoints, right?

13:32 Okay. Um, regardless of a church leadership style or what happens in a church, one thing in scriptur is really clear is that we have to be a part of a church, right? We have to be a part of the universal church. We can't follow Jesus on our own and think that that's truly biblical Christianity. It's not biblical Christianity for it to just be you and your family and call that a church, right? He established the church for the reason for a reason. And despite like to me despite uh structural and leadership differences, all church leaders and mature Christians know this to be true, right? So the main thing is figuring out my flavor and then finding finding a church that aligns with my flavor. But what can't be missing is the fact that we're all going to eat ice cream, right? So, if you come to the ice cream shop and you want pudding, we don't that's not what this is, right? And that's kind of what what can tend to happen with people is they they reject um they reject the principles because they reject methodology.

14:38 So, what we have to see like my dad says it this way, methods are many, principles are few, methods always change, but principles never do. So it's okay to reject methodology, but you can't reject principles. It's like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So I have to be able to clearly distinctively see and this has been my own personal journey. It's why I go to the level of depth I go to like historically and study because I want to see what what the actual principles are. I want to see what the patterns are throughout scripture so that I can know where to delineate a preference from a principle or a method from a principle. Correct? Right. So and most people don't do that. They just get hung up on their their their methodologies and their preferences. Like like for instance, you you said this before we started. There's people that come and they go, you know, we we got to do a better job for singles in this church. Mhm. We got we got why no there's no there's no singles ministry in the Bible. That might be a unique heart thing that you have. But the church itself doesn't have a mandate from God to have a singles ministry. The church also doesn't have a mandate from God to have a kids ministry or a youth ministry or any other version of ministry that we've created. Like we we're the ones that have created all these breakdowns of okay, here's the marriage ministry. Here's the men's ministry. Here's the here's the youth ministry. That's not in the Bible anywhere. That's just I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm just saying those are like ideas that people had that now have become the methodologies. But the but the scary thing is when we turn our methodologies into principles because eventually methodologies don't work. So then what is a church for? Right to to your question, right? There's I know there's a lot of implications for what I just said, but there what is a church for? Okay, so what you see throughout history and throughout scripture is there's really four key roles that God gives to the church. And some of this is clear and some of this is kind of implicit, right?

16:32 Okay. Based on the organizations cuz the church isn't the only organization mentioned in scripture. Okay. Right. Um the first thing is this ecclesia, this word ekklesia, okay, means gathering. So the first key role of the church, let's say, is to gather. It's a place for everybody who's a part of God's family to gather together, right? And this I this is probably bigger than your family. Like in the book of Deuteronomy, okay? In the book of Deuteronomy, the Bible says, uh, "Assemble all the people, men, women, children, foreigners living in your town, so that they may hear the book of instruction and learn to fear the Lord." Right? Uh, in the New Testament, Hebrews 10 says, "Don't let don't let us neglect meeting together like some people do, but encourage each other." So there's this idea in scripture that the church needs to represent that the church is a gathering place for all people who follow Jesus to come together.

17:27 Right. Um then then the second thing is to worship. Right. Right. Where do we get this idea from? There is a there was a a building in the or or a gathering or an organization whatever you want to call it uh called the tabernacle in the ancient world in the Old Testament. The tabernacle uh means uh tabernacle in in uh Hebrew means Mishkan. Mishkan means the dwelling place for the presence of God. So there's a place there's actually a place on the earth that represents the dwelling place of God's presence in a spiritual sense. I know that can be like hard for us, but really the building of the church and the place where people gather isn't just a place for gathering. It's a place where we worship together. Right. Right. Um in John 4, the Bible says we're going to worship the father in spirit and truth. Right? Leviticus 10 uh talks about how God displays the glory of God displays his glory through people who come near to him. Right? So part of drawing near to God is drawing near to the people of God. So that's tabernacle.

18:30 It's a place for us to worship. That's why we worship every time we gather as a church. Right? Then a synagogue. So then there's a synagogue. Synagogues are mentioned throughout scripture. And the way a lot of people think is that the synagogue, well, I'll say it this way. The synagogue, the tabernacle, and the temple are three separate buildings in scripture. They're not the same thing. So people think that the tabernacle was the temple and that the that the temple was also the synagogue. So when the New Testament talks about synagogue, that was just the temple. That's not true. To to this day, there's there's Jewish synagogues. I I'm just thinking about how how deep I kind of want to go on that. This is why I don't think you need to go too deep, but but the delineate between synagogue and temple because the tabernacle was what they set up like that's more Old Testament. They set up the tabernacle. It was the tent. The temple was what Solomon built. What was the synagogue? So the the Jews created a what's called the the synagogue or the beanness. And that is a place is a community gathering place where people gather to do business uh promote the welfare of the Jewish community. Uh in the in the ancient world during Jesus' time, there were synagogues and and the temple. So you only had one temple in the ancient world, the temple in Jerusalem. You didn't have temples throughout cities, but you had synagogues throughout cities.

19:46 So synagogues, but synagogues were mostly secular. So they would still like read scripture and stuff but they would teach more they would teach more about scripture and how to conduct business. So when when when Jesus in his story at the beginning of his ministry he goes to the synagogue and he reads from the scroll of Isaiah they would read scripture but then they would do a lot of business together and they would meet and they would talk. Right? So synagogues were places where Jews were taught to be Jews. There were this is this is not just our approach to Judaism as it relates to religious practice. This is how we do money. This is how we do business in this community. The synagogue was where business deals were done and negotiated after after the temple was destroyed. And that's where I was deciding how deep I want to go because the temple doesn't exist anymore. So, right, the Bible, especially the Old Testament, commands Jews to sacrifice and worship to God at the temple. They can't do that anymore. So it's actually technically okay technically legally like according to the law you can't practice Judaism anymore it's not possible right it's almost like what Jesus said was correct yeah so the prophecy Jesus gave when he went into Jerusalem was true right in AD in 70 AD uh Emperor Trajan sieged Jerusalem and destroyed the temple and threw you can go to Jerusalem and see where they threw the foundations of the temple down still and there's mosques that are built on top of the temple Temple Mount now. So isn't that wild?

21:15 So rabbis, this is kind of to our conversation, rabbis created a new tradition where they said, "Oh, the temple of God is in your heart now. That's where you make sacrifices to God." God never said that. That's just that's just where they made allowances. So when the temple was destroyed, what the Jews did was they converted their synagogues to places of worship. But they were places of worship and places where people were equipped. Okay? So people look at churches like ours or churches that teach a lot of practical stuff like churches like Steven Ferdick's church like Elevation or who whatever else and like you know the church is just got to all be about worship and God and all that. It's like no actually the church also represents the synagogue which is the place where people are taught to realize their potential in every area of life. Right. Right. Very good. So Deuteronomy 11 says teach teach what God is teaching you to your children.

22:07 talk about them when you're at home, when you're on the road, when you're going to bed, when you're getting up. That's like people go, "Oh man, like Jews, you know that like Jews have always been hated on a level because Jews have always been successful to go back to greatness." Like people have a real problem with Jews because they like, "Oh, like they control the world." There's a reason why they control the world. The reason why they control the world or the reason why there's so much wealth in Jewish people is because they're taught from a young age, this is how we do what we do. So that's kind of what the purpose of the church should be, right? So Ephesians, so you said you said first, sorry, first two things to gather and to to worship like to worship. Gather to worship. The third thing is to equip, right? Okay. So very good. So Ephesians 4, the Bible says God gave gifts to the church, the five-fold ministry, apostles, prophets, teachers, evangelists, pastors, right? Yeah. And their responsibility is to equip God's people to do his work and build up the church.

23:00 Right. Right. So there's an it's, you know, my dad calls it the equipping station. Then the the the the last thing the fourth thing is um the to the place to sacrifice. So it's the temple. That's that's what hik which is the Hebrew word for temple u means god's palace. And and and in the ancient world the the temple was where the sacrifice was made. Right? So they would go literally sacrifice animals and all that. Well, Paul says in the New Testament, Paul says in Romans 12, he says, "Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, right?" And there's truth to this idea that to present my body as a living sacrifice is to kind of live my life in this roughly sacrificial way. But there's also truth to the fact that the church is the place where you give your time, talent, and treasure the most. The church is the place where you live the most sacrificial life. The church is the place that you serve. The church is the place that you give. The church is you the place where you where you develop people the most and you speak the most into their life and you build them up and you disciple them. And you do that because God's commanded you to do it. So to me, if a church is fulfilling those four key roles, whatever the other aspects of the church are, that's just methodology. So, if we're creating an environment where God's being worshiped, people are learning how to live, uh there's sacrifices that are being made and and we're gathering together, we're fulfilling the the biblical role of the church.

24:30 Let let me clarify on sacrifice because obviously we're not sacrificing animals. Would you count that as tithe as an offering as well as serving in the church or like what else would you count as sacrifice? 100%. I mean, I think the way we talk about it is um time, talent, treasure, temple. Yeah, I have time. My job is to live sacrificially with my time towards God, right? And I can kind of say, well, you know, I I serve in the community and I serve at homeless shelters and stuff. That's not that's not the church, right? Right. As a church, you could go do that. You doing that as an individual is not the church going and doing it. This is this is like where we have to understand the principle here. So, we gather together. Yeah, we gather together and we go sacrifice together as a family of God in the earth. So this is the place where we serve. This is the place where we give, where we live on mission with our money, where we put God first, all that stuff, right? And so, so what we get hung up on, you know, is methodology and we go, well, churches have to run this way or churches have to be structured this way or this is how a church service needs to look.

25:36 And that's okay. Hey, like it's okay to have that opinion, you know, like what I always tell people about, you know, there's two things that I usually tell people a lot is um number one, if someone comes to me and like I'm a pastor at our church and so people come to me and they go, "Hey, we we need to do more for single people or we need to have a ministry." Like one time I had a I'll tell a story. One time I had a lady come up to me and she's an older lady and she goes, "You know, we really don't have anything for in this church for elder elderly singles." And um I said, "Yeah, you're right." you know, and she's like, "Well, y'all need to do something about that." And I said, "Well, I'm so glad that you're here because that means you want to start the ministry, right?" She goes, "No, I don't I don't want to do it. I just I just think we should have it." It's like, that's like kind of what the average person does when they approach church. They're very critical and they say, "Well, here's what all the church here's what the church should do." When really the thing the thing to me is if you're saying, "Here's what the church should do." What you're kind of revealing to yourself is what you should be doing at church.

26:35 It's like saying it's like me coming over to your house like, "Dude, wouldn't it be so good to have some chocolate chip cookies right now?" Yeah. And you're like, "Yeah, bro. That'd be great." Like, "Hey, why don't you go make them?" You know, like, "I'm g to come to your house and tell you what to make them for me." You know what would be awesome, man? Would be if uh if if you guys had like hot chocolate when I came over here. It's like, well, we don't I don't have the ingredients, Nick. Like, you you on the way here, you could have gotten it. I'll tell you what would be even better. I'm going to watch your TV and you go get it, bro. How's that? Yeah. So if you live on mission you understand like I have a role in actually building the church right that's the first thing is there's you have a decision to make okay and this is really I think it's a little bit binary of a decision and that's number one uh the the first choice is what church are you going to be a part of so go shop around go church hop go see every church in the world every church in America figure out which church you're going to go to. If you can't find one, there's only there's only one other option, and that's you got to start a church, right?

27:37 Can't you can't there's not a third option of critiquing the church, destroying the church. And this is where I'm saying I I deviate a lot from like this idea of deconstructionism because like we're going to break we're going to break the church down, but there's not going to be anything, you know? We're just going to break down for the sake of it. Yeah. Yeah. It'll just be this spiritual dimension of following Jesus. And that's not that's not biblical, right? you're you're destroying you're not just destroying the methodologies which I always feel like should be destroyed like we should always move away from methodologies that don't work or aren't going to work but we can't destroy the principles at the same time right so the second thing is so the first that you should uh understand the role that you play in being a part of being a part of the church and what you bring to the church in terms of your gifts and talents and abilities And the second thing is, which is kind of what I mentioned a second ago, the second thing is you have to learn in order to do that effectively, you've got to learn how to distinguish the differences between principles and methodologies. And if and if we can do that, we're not going to get hung up on showing up to a church service and the flavor being vanilla instead of strawberry.

28:51 Thank you for listening to The Dialog. Make sure to like, share, and subscribe. And also, if you think someone else would enjoy this, please send it to them. If you want to get in touch or learn more about me, what I think, speak, and write, you can go to joshuacraft.com. Or you can also follow Nick and I on Instagram. Our handles are in the show notes. We'll see you next time.