How Do You Fix a Broken Church?
The church doesn’t need more interesting opinions. It needs the Truth.
How Do You Fix a Broken Church?
We could answer that question in a lot of ways. Change the music or the pastor. Create better programs. Reach more people. Update the building. But I think there’s a better approach.
Put the Bible back at the center.
A church is broken when Scripture is no longer at the center of what it does. If we no longer believe that the Bible is the inspired, authoritative Word of God, we lose the foundation upon which the church is built. If God’s Word is just one voice among many, we are no longer allowing God to speak with authority.
At that point, a church becomes nothing more than a self-help center with religious music—or a community center with a steeple.
I remember reading about a church that bragged that they didn’t always use Scripture for their messages. They often read from a novel and used that as their text.
There’s nothing wrong with a good novel. But when a church gathers together, it is literally gathering to hear from God. The church doesn’t need more interesting opinions. It needs the Truth.
When we take Scripture seriously, we don’t get to decide which parts to obey.
I see churches changing their position on important issues all the time. They aren’t standing on God’s foundation. How can we say that we honor God and His Word and then make up our own positions on those important issues?
When a church moves Scripture from the center to the side, it eventually begins deciding what it believes first and then searches the Bible for support.
That’s backwards.
We don’t determine what is true and then ask the Bible to agree with us. We go to the Bible to discover Truth.
“All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness.”
—2 Timothy 3:16
Notice those words. God’s Word teaches, rebukes us, corrects what we have gotten wrong, and trains us to live differently. That’s what Scripture is supposed to do.
So how do you fix a broken church?
Put Scripture back where it belongs.
It’s not a decoration or a formality in our statement of faith. We don’t sprinkle a verse into a sermon that is really about something else.
Put it at the center.
