Let's Connect
The Official Podcast of Connect Church in Rockdale, Texas, where we want to help you live a life that matters; one that is both on mission and has a purpose to know Jesus and make disciples.
Let's Connect
Episode 30 - Acts 14 & 15 and the Modern Church
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We reflect on what makes a true church, exploring how modern churches often become entangled in organizational structures rather than focusing on their primary mission of bringing people to Christ.
• Looking at Acts 14-15 to understand how early churches were communities of believers, not buildings or institutions
• Examining how committees and organizational structures can distract from spiritual missions
• Sharing our experience as a "nomadic" church meeting in different locations around Rockdale
• Discussing how this approach frees us from constraints that burden traditional churches
• Exploring what churches could accomplish if their only focus was saving people and bringing them to God
• Recognizing that even the early church had conflicts, but the mission continued forward
• Considering what it means to be a true New Testament church in today's world
Join us Sundays at 10:00 AM for fellowship with coffee and donuts, service at 10:30 AM at the American Legion Hall (Carlisle Hall) in Rockdale, Texas. We have children's church and nursery available.
Welcome to Let's Connect
Speaker 1Welcome to let's Connect, the official podcast of Connect Church in Rockdale, Texas, where we want to help you to live a life that matters, one that is both on mission and has a purpose to follow Jesus and make disciples. So let's get started.
Speaker 2All right, welcome into let's Connect. I'm your host, Bill Whitmire, and I'm here with our pastor, as always, Ken.
Speaker 3Ansel Ken, how are you doing today? Hey, hey, man, I'm good really.
Speaker 2I almost said you know I do some radio stuff and I have a nickname that the guys in Cameron gave me years ago because I went to high school in Giddings and so they're all yeoman and.
Speaker 3I became Buffalo Bill, so I do another radio show and I was doing some of that this morning and I kept announcing hey, this is your host, buffalo Bill.
Speaker 2So I almost said that here.
Speaker 3That's good, that's great. You could have done that.
Speaker 2Yeah, I guess so, but people would have been like what's going on with those guys? Maybe we would have sounded cooler, I guess. Well, maybe, maybe me anyway, I'd have a problem with that.
Speaker 3Well, you're already cool, jennifer. She's got a podcast she listens to and she walks every morning. Today she said, oh, they didn't post one. I said well, you can listen to the Bill and Ken show. This is about God.
Speaker 2It's not our show, but you know anyway.
Speaker 2So today is you could be listening to this at any time, but today is actually technically 9-11 here when we're taping this, and so there's a lot of 9-11 ceremonies going on and stuff, and we talk about a lot of things that go on. But today, and it's hit me, and you and I were talking about what we wanted to talk about today before we started recording, and there's a whole bunch of things and we brought up a lot of things, whole bunch of things, and we brought up a lot of things. But Monday night in Bible study this week we talked, we were in Acts 14 and 15, I think, and we spent a lot of time in 14. And you know, that's when Paul and Barnabas are kind of cruising around, going from town to town and it just as we're listening to it and we're going through the Bible study. It really hit me where these guys were, what they were doing.
Paul and Barnabas in Acts 14-15
Speaker 2And you know we think about church as such a construct. You know it's just a constructed building. It's a place where we go. It's that place where a lot of people feel at home. But the fact of the matter is the church is wherever we meet as a body of believers, and at this time you had Paul and Barnabas in this case, and there were others that were out there that were preaching the gospel, the other apostles, and they're talking to these people, and you still have a lot of folks out there that are, and in this case and there's a lot of I guess it relates well to today there's a lot of folks out there that have these issues as well, but back in that time you had the Gentiles that had never really believed or believed, but never really.
Speaker 2They weren't Jewish, they weren't Jewish, they weren't in that Jewish faith. And when Christ was walking the earth, he said you need to do this, you need to do this. You don't need to worry about the old laws, you need to do this. He's resurrected. He's here for 40 more days. He preaches to people. He spreads that message. More days he preaches to people, he spreads that message and then it's almost like the moment he's gone. Humans get in the way again and start saying well I know what Jesus said.
Speaker 2But you need to do this and you need to be circumcised. You need to do this, you have to live by the laws. And in today's world we find the same thing in churches we get caught in these church constructs. I'm sorry, I thought I interrupted you.
Speaker 2We get caught in these church constructs where we're not, and it's one of the things that I like about what we do is that we are about following God's Word. We've been in several different buildings since we started. We're currently in the American Legion Hall here in Rockdale. Will we be there for much longer or will we be there for a long time? I really don't know. But I know that no matter where we have met, we have heard the Word of God, we have been exposed to the Word of God and what it takes to have a relationship with God, and a lot of times that doesn't require a building, you know. I mean you can meet out in the middle.
Speaker 2I remember one time we, we, we have a, a youth Christian youth ranch out close to where I live and I'm on that board of directors out there and so we were building us a quote unquote chapel and there were some folks that were really excited about it and we bored out this area of trees through this thick, thick, thicket I mean it was just as thick as it took us a long time to and so we had this beautiful wooden chapel of just trees and everything and we built the.
Speaker 2You know, we constructed a big cross and we built an altar and for that summer that was our chapel for children's camp and stuff. And a lot of the parents came expecting to see a new building and they got there and they walked out there and I think we only had one or two parents that were kind of shocked by it, but I don't think they liked being out in nature. Everybody else came out there and they were like man, this is so beautiful and the fact that you could hear God's word, listen to a sermon in nature, I don't know.
Speaker 2That's always stuck in my head as kind of something so special.
Speaker 3Yeah, that that is kind of so special. Yeah, that's the Sermon on the Mount right. Yeah, I mean Jesus in a boat. Yeah, if anything, the culture is helping the church, maybe with revival in the sense of brick and mortar right Isn't important anymore to the culture, like that's not how we shop.
Speaker 2We don't go to JCPenney's building and go in and you know, do whatever by the tough skins or whatever we used to wear when we were kids, tough skins were the best, yeah, they were the best.
Speaker 3And so, yeah, and so the church is realizing, you know, keep the main thing, the main thing and uh, yeah, organized. Um, I mean you gotta, you know organization is not bad, we don't mean to say that, but yeah, we sure lose our focus real quick. You know the Baptist even. You know they're big on committees and they got the committee on committees and you know I've been in those meetings so many times and you probably have too where we're just, you're just you got to have like so many people on every committee and you're just putting warm bodies in there and then those committees really don't do a lot. Kick the can. And yeah, what we see.
Speaker 3You talked about our men's Bible study and we're in Acts 14 and 15. And you see the church being active, pursuing people, wanting them saved, being stoned, left for dead. I mean, yeah, the circumcision thing and yeah, we'll get into that next week in Acts 16, where Paul you know Tim, we talked about Timothy took one for the team and let Paul circumcise him, and he's a grown man, you know all for God.
Church Beyond Buildings and Committees
Speaker 3And yeah, we sit around and argue about carpet colors and pews or chairs, but meanwhile, timothy, like man, I had major surgery I mean jesus, yeah, I mean yeah yeah, no no, yeah, I don't know, can you imagine that coming up in a church business?
Speaker 2I mean, you just kind of oh no, but I mean paul and barnabas, you know. Think about that. We've talked before about would you go to jail because of your Christianity? If they told you look, you either recount or you deny Christ, or you're going to jail, and not just any jail.
Speaker 2I can't imagine a Roman prison being that nice of a place and we have a hard time acknowledging Christ in front of our friends. You know we have a hard time serving Christ. You know I remember the church I was at when I left there. It's good people and I love them. I felt moved to come to Connect Church and to help build something and to help reach out. And when I say build something, I'm not talking about, you know, the biggest church group you can find or a building, but to build something where we're working with people to bring them to God. And you know you bring them to God and they stay with you.
Speaker 2I told you this Monday in Bible study you know, as a pastor, as a church, you should be a family of God, but your ultimate goal should be just what the disciples were, and that was to go out and spread God's name and make him known among the nations of the world. And so I left where I was because I felt like that's what we were going to be doing at Connect Church. And I feel I still feel that's what we're doing. And I remember I was asked well, you're on this committee and you're on this committee. Well, you know, you're on some pretty important committees and I understand that, but this is God telling me I need to be here, not here. And later on, and I realized that's how a lot of the Baptist churches work and that's actually how a lot of organized religion works is that the committees are very important.
Speaker 2Committee assignments doing this, that and the other are very important. But I realized once I'd left how important being on those committees were how, you know, I was the church clerk for the whole church and how important I felt like that position was. I'm an important dude at this church because I'm the church clerk, yeah, and being at connect. You know, last week I was the cool guy cause I took the trash out.
Speaker 2Yeah, you know, I mean, you know, in, in, in, in having those committee assignments and all of that. I mean I understand how organizations work, but God didn't have that. He had 12 disciples. Well, he had 12 apostles and then he had disciples that followed Him beyond the 12 apostles. You know we forget that there were lots of folks that followed Him everywhere and these people, you know, were there and they were part of that discipleship. They weren't on committees, they weren't in groups, they were just part of that group, part of that church.
Speaker 2And as we build churches today, we have to be more in common with that than when we used to be. You know, I've told you this, I've got a lot of family that was clergy. My great-great-grandfather was a Southern Baptist preacher in Georgia and I remember hearing the stories about him and how he purposely didn't have a committee and he was the one that I told you that's where I heard that from His job wasn't to build a church and keep them all together, His job was to bring people to God and then send them out to bring more people to God Sure, make disciples.
Speaker 2Yeah, make disciples and we get so wound up with building this big church structure and you know what happens. What's happened with a lot of churches that are like that? They're struggling to survive. They're in survival mode. They start cutting down on the amount of missionary money they spend. They start cutting back on just the missionary work they do in their own town. I mean, we send this podcast out to the world and hope that it touches people. We send this podcast out to the world and hope that it touches people, but the truth of the matter is we've got a missionary field right here in Rockdale, texas, and there are people that don't know Christ. I remember when we started, someone told me he said you're just starting another church. We already got too many churches in Rockdale. And I just looked at him and said, no, if everybody in Rockdale went to church, we wouldn't have enough pews. No, not enough seats. And so you know you can never. It's not enough.
Speaker 2We need to do more but, we get so caught up and that's what amazed me when we were reading this the other night was, as you read through Acts 14 and 15, you realize they're going through these towns and they're talking to these churches, and remember, these churches in those towns were groups of people.
Speaker 2They weren't buildings, they weren't structures the only thing that had structures at the time was the jewish churches and the uh the uh temples that were the roman and greek gods christians didn't have. I mean, it wasn't until they got to antioch, I think that they were even called christian and then that was like to chastise. Yeah, they didn't even have a name.
Speaker 3Yeah, I mean they were just believers in the sky of Jesus Christ. Yeah, they were just Jesus people.
Speaker 2Yeah.
Speaker 3Simple.
Refocusing on Making Disciples
Speaker 2Exactly Simple. I mean, you know there's a book called Simple Church. It's really a good read. It is. Yeah, it brings it back to how complicated we've made things. You know, and and somebody asked me the other day and I think I've said this a few weeks ago um, when we're going to have our own building, and I said I don't know, god only knows, god hasn't revealed that to us yet. God has put us where we're supposed to be right now to build the church the way he wants it built. Yeah, and you know what that could mean, that you know we want to touch as many people as we can. It's good to see a lot of people at church, many people as we can. It's good to see a lot of people at church. But at the same time, sometimes God puts you in that place to concentrate that church a little bit.
Speaker 1I guess a good way to say it, that's a great way to say it.
Speaker 2You may not grow any, you might come down in numbers a few, but you get to that place where everybody gets refocused and we concentrate back on what's important and that's our walk, our relationship with God.
Speaker 3Yeah, it's easy to get distracted and that's what we don't see in these passages in Acts. I mean, we see conflict Maybe you talked about the Jews and the Gentiles. The Jews were struggling to allow the Gentiles into the kingdom, and so church leadership steps up, solves the conflict. So we see the church, early church, valuing church leadership, and you know not, layers and layers and layers. Right, because committees do their work. And yeah, I don't know how we got off on this, but committees do their work, they present it to the church body. The church body then can just like like, destroy that work by voting no, and you know there's no real leadership, just layers of leadership that just eat donuts in meetings and then they go home and there's no real resolve in any of that. But man, that's not what we see in Scripture and it's so exciting and refreshing really to see that and to live it. You know I say it a lot because we've been in Acts for a while, but we're getting to live Acts right now, I feel like.
Speaker 3I mean, it's like it's coming off the pages and it's a part of our life and only God can do that, as people are surrendered to Him and just allow Him. Like he's hovering, like as he led the Israelites out of Egypt. You know, he's hovering over where we're meeting on Sunday right now and it's like that's where he's at, so that's where we want to be, and how good is that.
Speaker 2It's amazing. I mean, you know you're going to have times where you have a working group or something that's going to put something together for that church, but when you have that group whose whole job is to figure out what to do in a church, then that propensity for it to quit being about what Christ wants quit being about what God wants and start to become what that group wants takes over.
Speaker 2And you have those. I don't want to say disagreements, but it is disagreements inside churches from time to time. And you see that when you look at Acts 15, 36 on down to the end of 15, and it talks about Paul and Barnabas, they separate ways. Now these guys had a difference in opinion of which way they go. I'm sure each one of them felt like God was leading in that, and you know what God could have been leading them both in a direction and it took them having this disagreement to get in those right places
Speaker 2them having this disagreement to get in those right places. But from time to time, inside of churches or outside of churches or as part of a church, there are going to be those disagreements, those issues and those things that come up, and that's okay too. I mean you work through that, but it's something you just have to pray about and then you work through and you keep doing. In the end you want to be doing what God wants you to be doing and not what man wants you to be doing, and all too often we get it into our hearts that I need that I'm not getting a leadership position in this church. I have a brother that I have seen and he may listen to this and he might be upset with me and that's okay, but I know he's left four different churches because he didn't get a leadership position that he wanted inside of that church and he felt like he would go to another church and he would be able to get it there.
Conflict and God's Mission Continues
Speaker 2We talk all the time about the three answers that God gives you when you pray. There's yes, no and not now. And sometimes, when you want to do that thing in a church, the answer may be no, but sometimes it's not yet. You know. And when somebody asked me that day, are y'all ever going to have a building of your own? And that was my answer to him was not yet. You know, when God's ready for us to have a church building, it's going to happen. You know he has taken care of us to this date.
Speaker 2He's provided for us and provided us places to meet, places to have our sermons, places to have the yard, places to have Camp Connect and to have a nursery, and provided us the means to be able to do that. And there may be a day when he finally does say you know what? This is where I want you.
Speaker 3Yeah, yeah, stacking chairs can get tiresome, but one of the things I love about what you said there at the end of Acts 15 is the mission of God continued forward, yeah, despite conflict. And that's the main thing. Right is that we keep trying to expand the kingdom by sharing the good news and providing people a place to. I mean, that's the whole point of connect is provide a place for people to connect to God and to God's people. And yeah, we can do that in a variety of places. God has shown us we can do that, and sometimes we weren't really sure how it was going to work, but God's good.
Speaker 2I mean we've been. I made this joke the other day to somebody. I said you know, we've been kind of a nomadic around Rockdale, like the Israelites were through the desert you know, and we've met in multiple different places, but God's work has continued the entire time. We had our two-year anniversary just this last Sunday. Saturday, we had a great little event on one of the city streets here in one of the neighborhoods and we had a lot of people come out.
Speaker 3I did beat the nurse both times playing corn by the way, so that was a significant achievement for me. Yeah, world champion. Yeah, that's right, skiles Avenue champion.
Speaker 2But that's a significant event and we do have a good core of people that come to our church and we do have a good core of people that come to our church and I love, I just love seeing them all and and we are just a church that follows God's word, follows what God wants us to do. Will we have committees in the future? I don't know, maybe because we might need to do something. You know, but Christ never had committees. Christ's church never had committees. His disciples went out and made churches and they didn't have committees. It wasn't until men, after Christ was gone, started having councils the Council of Trent, the Council of Lycia, you know the Niacin Council, all these councils that they started making rules and saying we need this and we need this and we need this. That's not a God thing. Those councils were never God things Because if you look at the Council of Trent, that's where they came up with the idea that faith alone is not enough to have God's grace, you need faith and works, that you don't just pray to God, you pray to God and the saints. And I mean it took it from where you did what God said to doing what man said.
Speaker 2And all too often in our everyday churches that we have today, we have lost track of what it is to listen to God and to hear God's message and to do as God says. And what we do is we talk about doing that, but we're more worried about does the roof leak? Do we have a roof? How are we going to get a roof? Is our internet working? Are we streaming like we're supposed to? We have all these other worries so many worries, that when people sit in church on Sunday, it's hard for them to sit there and listen to what God's telling them in the message. We talked a little bit about this last week. When we hear that message, we're so worried about this other stuff we're not paying attention to. When God's talking to us and telling us, hey man, you need to fix this, he's probably not going to say hey, man, that's not a good way to say it.
Speaker 3But something like hey, my son, this is.
Being a New Testament Church Today
Speaker 2Or my daughter. I need you to think about this. I need you to look at this. We should be a little conflicted, we should be a little convicted when we leave church on Sunday, but we should also be motivated to change ourselves. When I welcomed everybody this last Sunday, I talked about this and it's funny, but it's really not. But you get those people that sit in church and they hear you, they hear God preaching through you and they hear it and they think, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, fred over there really needs to fix that.
Speaker 3He's talking to Fred, he's not talking to me. Well, guess what?
Speaker 2He's talking to you too, because there's not a Sunday that goes by that I don't get something out of that service. And I'm thinking, man, you brought up the what was it? The Christian detector or whatever? If there was like a metal detector on the door to the church and I had to walk through it to say that.
Speaker 2I am a good and faithful servant, would that thing go off? And man, I got to tell you, I was like, wow, man, I agree with Ron. When Ron said he's going to go out the back door, I was like I'll be right behind you, buddy, cause I want to walk through that thing right now either. Yeah, you know.
Speaker 3Yeah, well it's, you know, the spirit's good, I mean all week long to to beat up on me and and, yeah, what I hear Jesus say is dude, really. I mean that's how he approaches me. But yeah, I think you know we put this in the context of these passages is we just see a fluid church. We see fluid servants of God that aren't stuck with their own vision for the church, whether it's in Antioch or Pamphylia or Lydia or Lystra or Derby, or wherever they are, jerusalem. We see the church working together to just continue to expand the borders of the kingdom. And, yeah, we can get stuck, quench the spirit, grieve the spirit, get our own agendas.
Speaker 3Yeah, and I know a guy in his church where he went forever. He was a maintenance guy, not a paid maintenance guy, just a member that his job was to, and I can tell you he didn't want another church building. Because he's the guy that you're going to call when a commode is backed up or a roof is leaking. And yeah, I don't, you know, everybody else just shows up on Sunday and slides in and it's all great, right, but they won't answer the call to fix the commode. So, yeah, yeah, man, there's just, there's a lot here today. I hope it made sense to people I mean, yeah, I do too.
Speaker 2I mean, we have to unpack chairs, pack them up yeah unpack stuff, pack it up and if we had? Our own building. We wouldn't have to do that. But you know what? At the same time, I don't have to put up with all the building stuff. You don't have to put up with all the building stuff, you don't have to put up with all the building stuff. We are free the rest of that time to really sit and consider what God, what it is, and as.
Speaker 2Paul and Barnabas and the other disciples traveled wherever they went.
Speaker 3That's all they were thinking about. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2They weren't thinking about starting a building program or creating a building fund. It was just about saving people and bringing them to God. Wow, what if the church? What if that was the only thing the church had to worry about today? Dude, you're speaking my love language. I mean, we'd be in a whole different place than we are right now. That's where we probably ought to be shooting for you think, huh?
Speaker 3I think so, man, I agree 100%. I think it's my turn. Yeah, it is, it is All right. What did we learn today, though? Recap this I know AI is going to do it right.
Speaker 2Well, I think the big thing is to not get so locked into the material constraints of the world and our titles and what we're looking for in the church, and be more concerned with hearing the word of God, following the word of God, looking at yourself and thinking am I a good representation of what God wants me to be, or am I more worried about my position or our structure, or our structure or our building or whatever it is? And you know, monday in Bible study, all that stuff just kept popping into my head as we were going through it.
Speaker 3Yeah yeah, it's pretty cool to be part of a New Testament church a real New Testament church.
Speaker 1All right, let me pray.
Episode Closing and Invitation
Speaker 3Holy Father, we love you. We're amazed by you. We thank you. Holy Spirit, man, just blow through every church, every Christian. Just blow through their life. Recommend a good way. Speak, father. Let them hear your voice, even if it's been some time. Father, we just pray a blessing upon the church's people, and so we pray a blessing upon people, father, that are following you, and that they might be able to break free from those constraints that we've talked about and follow you in the greatest possible way. We pray these things in your son's name, amen.
Speaker 2Amen. All right, that is episode 3-0, the big 30. Big episode 30. So if you're in Rockdale over the weekend, come on by. We start at 10 o'clock, we'll have donuts and coffee and fellowship service starts at 1030. We do have a children's church and we have a nursery, so bring the kiddos as well. Uh, we're at the American Legion hall, the Carlisle hall, here in Rockdale, texas. If you're in the area, we hope to see you. If not, we'll be back next week with another episode of let's Connect. God bless y'all.
