“Faithful churches are hard to find” is a sentiment that is quite common among conservative Christians. It is easy to understand why we hear this so often. There are loads of unfaithful churches that receive a great deal of press. Ordaining women, homosexuals, and transsexuals to the pastoral ministry is becoming more commonplace. Churches blessing same-sex unions and affirming “gay Christians” are understood as love. The woke mobs rather than the Scriptures control the doctrine and practice of many churches. Shepherds let the wolves in to devour the sheep through false teaching and by not disciplining sins defined by Scripture. However, they are all too willing to condemn and cancel people for the sins defined by the zeitgeist. News of these sorts of churches floods our feeds, confirming our fears that a good church is hard to find.
The types of churches described above are most certainly synagogues of Satan and must be avoided. But there are times when our definition of “faithful” becomes too narrow. A faithful church is what you perceive to be a perfect church, a church in which all the families have their lives together, where the pastor walks about three feet above the ground, where nothing bad has ever happened, and where everyone is a studied theologian and biblical scholar with all doctrinal matters completely settled. The faithful church is the church that exalts your non-essential pet doctrine as the threshold for membership and harps on that doctrine in such a way every week that makes the whole congregation smug in not being like the rest of those churches out there. The faithful church is the one that employs the methods you believe are the right way to do things.
Many church purists couldn’t write the way Paul or Jesus did to churches. When Paul greeted the Colossians, a church he had never visited (Col 2:1), he called them “faithful brothers.” This was a young church planted by Epaphras (Col 1:7-8; 4:12) that was being inundated with teaching by Jews trying to convince them that they needed to submit to the old ways of the Law. We don’t know how far the Colossians were down that rabbit hole or how close they were to capitulating, but Paul has no problem calling them “faithful brothers.”
While we know little about how close the Colossians may or may not have been to falling into error, we know something about the Corinthians. Their problems are apparent almost from the beginning of Paul’s first letter to them. Almost the beginning. If you only read the first nine verses of 1 Corinthians, you would think, “Well, I finally found a faithful church.” Starting at 1:10, your opinion would change. They had divisions, were celebrating the grace they were extending to a man sleeping with his stepmother, suing one another in Caesar’s courts, sleeping with prostitutes, making a mockery of the Lord’s Supper, and even denying the resurrection of the dead. Knowing all these things, would you have opened your letter to them the way Paul did? Would you say, “Honey, I think we finally found a good church home”?
When Jesus sends letters to the angels of the seven churches in Asia Minor (Rev 2—3), five churches are severely rebuked for their errors and called to repent. Two of the churches, Smyrna and Philadelphia, receive only praise. Do you mean to tell me that the One whose eyes are a flame of fire, seeing all things and discerning every misdeed, didn’t see anything wrong in these churches? Surely, the omniscient Christ Jesus could see something that needed correcting. There are always matters to correct and places we need to grow out of our ignorant immaturity. But Jesus chooses not to become the pedantic judge who points out every fault and foible. He commends the churches for their faithfulness and leaves it at that.
Discerning between faithfulness and unfaithfulness, what matters disqualify a church from being considered faithful, is sometimes relatively easy. Sometimes, not so much. There are churches in which horrible things have happened in word and deed but are faithful churches because they addressed the issues with the application of Scripture to their level of knowledge. They were in the process of maturing, so they didn’t know all the things you know now because you learned from their mistakes. But they learned and pressed on. All churches remain in that process. The next generation or two may look back on us and be aghast at what we didn’t know or the things we did.
Faithful churches follow Jesus, which means that when confronted with his commands and corrections, they obey; they confess their sins, repent, and move forward. We have every reason to believe that the Colossians heeded Paul. We know that the Corinthians listened to Paul for the most part (possibly being overzealous in some cases). Faithful churches hear the voice of their Lord no matter where they are in the maturing process, and they respond with obedience. Different churches are in different places in this maturity process. Their faithfulness should not be judged solely on their maturity but on how they listen when they hear the Lord’s voice.
So, take care in judging the faithfulness of churches. We must be discriminating, but you don’t want to speak ill of a church that Jesus would praise.
