Distinctives of a Gospel Church
What Distinguishes a Gospel Church?
God’s aim in salvation was never merely to rescue individuals, creating “lone rangers” pursuing private relationships with Jesus.
Instead, as the Apostle Paul told Titus that the reason Jesus “gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness” was with the aim to “purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.” Sadly, it is fashionable nowadays to say “Christianity is a relationship, not a religion,” or to dismiss the need for “organized religion.” But the hard fact is that the very Good News that makes us Christians needs to pull us together into assemblies, or churches, where we can be built up and encouraged in our faith, kept accountable and helped when we stumble and fall, and work together to proclaim that same Gospel to the communities around us.
Our conviction is that the Gospel will be most clearly proclaimed by, and most compellingly displayed in, healthy churches that are distinguished by the characteristics below.
A Gospel Church is Evangelical
To be “evangelical” is not a cultural or political affiliation. It is to be changed by and live in service to the glorious Evangel, or Gospel, of Jesus Christ. Evangelicals are called to be, first, unashamed of the Gospel, unwilling to subtract from, modify, or water down the message that is the “power of God for salvation.” Being unashamed also calls us to share our faith with others, seeking to win souls to Christ, knowing that the Holy Spirit works through the message we proclaim to save God’s people out of the world. And second, evangelicals are called to be undistracted: “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). The mission of the church is to make disciples (Matt. 28:18-19). While we seek to love our neighbors and seek the good of our communities, we are convinced that no other activity or emphasis, no matter how good, should displace that mission.
A Gospel Church is Confessional
Our faith is not new, but ancient. We stand not alone, but confess the Christian faith passed down through the centuries. The faith we confess is rooted in history, and continues to shape our history. Gospel churches recognize and embrace the use as subordinate authorities, under Scripture alone as the sole final standard, of creeds, confessions, and catechisms in their congregational life. This includes upholding the authority of the ecumenical creeds (the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds, and the Definition of Chalcedon) as faithful summaries of biblical truth, and looking to other doctrinal standards such as the Reformed and Baptist confessions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for guidance in the task of keeping and passing on the faith “once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).
A Gospel Church is Reformational
Because healthy churches love the Gospel and seek to define themselves by it, they self-consciously stand in the tradition of the Protestant Reformers who, in the sixteenth century, bravely and faithfully retrieved that Gospel. A healthy church upholds five key principles of the Reformation, known today as the “five solas” from the following Latin slogans: Sola Gratia (we are saved by God’s grace alone…), Sola Fide (…through faith alone…), Solus Christus (…on account of the work of Christ Alone…), Sola Scriptura (…submitting to Scripture alone as our highest and final authority…), and Soli Deo Gloria (…all to the glory to God Alone).
Furthermore, healthy churches embrace the Reformation’s emphasis on God’s saving grace being sovereign and free rather than dependent on the will or work of man, a conviction summed up in the “five points” defended at the Synod of Dordt: first, that humans are by nature radically corrupt, every part of our being affected by sin; second, that God freely and sovereignly chooses a people for himself to be saved, not on condition of anything in the sinner; third, that Christ on the Cross accomplished a perfect and definite atonement, dying for specific sins on behalf of specific sinners and paying the whole penalty for each of them rather than merely making them “saveable”; fourth, that when God resolves to save a specific person his grace is unstoppable and overcomes the resistance of sin; and fifth, that those whom God has given to his Son to save will be saved to the uttermost, preserved by God and persevering in faith because of the Holy Spirit’s work. A healthy church holds all these doctrines with joy and thanksgiving and sees them as an encouragement to evangelism and missions, and is deeply humbled by their own unworthiness and God’s gracious love to them.
A Gospel Church is Complementarian
In the beginning, “God created man in his own image… male and female he created them.” In modern times, there is so much confusion about the nature and even very existence of manhood and womanhood and about the purpose and design of sex. And yet since, in God’s design, human marriage is intended to be a display of the Gospel, portraying the love between Christ and his Bride the Church (Eph. 5:22-33), it is not only vital that churches uphold the Bible’s teaching on these things, but it also presents a priceless opportunity to show God’s goodness in the midst of the darkness. Healthy churches celebrate the biblical definition of marriage as being between one man and one woman, and uphold biblical manhood and womanhood, secure in the truth that God made man and woman to be equal in value and worth and unembarrassed by the different and complementary roles God has assigned men and women in the home and the church. As such, healthy churches recognize only qualified men as pastors and elders while also developing mature women for service as Gospel workers, training them as mentors and teachers to other women and as missionaries at home and abroad. Because they recognize the reality of gender differences and the higher vulnerability that women have because of those differences, healthy churches do not tolerate abuse or neglect in their own midst and recognize that not only the church but the civil magistrate has an interest in opposing such sin, it being not merely a spiritual but also a temporal matter.
A Gospel Church is Baptistic
By the term “Baptist,” we don’t mean a denominational affiliation. The term is simpler and yet deeper than that. It refers to the biblical teaching about who the Church is. The Church is not a building. Christians are not an ethnic group. Rather the Church is the gathering of people who have been born from above (John 3:3,7). They believe in Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord. They follow him in faith. In obedience to their Lord they identify with him by being baptized according to his command. It is these believers, confessing the faith together, endorsed by fellow Christians, who make up the membership of a local church. Healthy churches, therefore, practice meaningful membership, ensuring that those seeking to join offer a credible profession of faith, viewing membership not as a privilege of status but rather as a call to work together in sacrificial every-member ministry, and holding one another accountable in love. Healthy churches practice church discipline, both formatively in teaching and training, and correctively in rebuking and, when all efforts to reconcile have failed, excluding those who persist in unrepentant sin. Healthy churches practice believer’s baptism, understanding that the church or “ekklesia” is the gathering of those “called out” of the world and that it is those who show evidence of having been called out in faith who are to receive water baptism as the sign of the New Covenant, administered by immersion as an outward identification with Jesus in his burial and resurrection.
