02.01. The Pastor Saving Souls

HOW TO BUILD A CHURCH.

I. THE PASTOR SAVING SOULS. To build a church, the supreme object must be the salvation of men. It is the first business for which the church exists. God sent his son into the world that the world through him might be saved. Our Lord himself came to seek and to save that which was lost. The Holy Spirit, at Pentecost, endued the disciples with power to become witnesses for. Christ everywhere. The first sermon was a bow drawn for sinners, and the prick of the arrow was felt in three thousand hearts. From that hour there were daily additions to the church. Here everything points directly to the salvation of men. While this end was kept in the forefront, the secret of success in building the church was an open secret. To recover men lost by sin is the deepest motive which ever stirs the soul. It draws from God the greatest gifts he ever imparts. This passion for souls is the engine that moves the whole train. Divine power was not more conspicuous in the disciples than the human energy they put into their work. “ This one thing I do,” says Paul. They all had an eye single to the exaltation of the cross. They passed by many good things to do this chief thing. First, and continually, they won souls. It was their mission from their Master. This purpose of converting souls and gathering them into the fold, is to be kept uppermost to the last. This is what the church is here for. There is no true success if this fails. The church will not fill its other functions fitly, if this leading one is lost sight of. Culture goes for nothing if there are no new-born souls to cultivate. There is little building up without living stones to build with. But if there is success in converting men, there will be life and movement throughout the church. It is what the church lives on, — the joy of new-bom souls.

There are four sources from which to draw: the family, the Sunday-school, church-goers unsaved, and the great outside world. To keep four streams flowing into the church from these, is back of everything. In order to do this, ministers must be men of God, masters of gospel methods, filled with its spirit, and untiring fishers of men. To build a church is to take hold in God’s name and build it. Every victory for Christ costs prayer and toil and blood. It must be sweat through. The church will not grow in the chill air of this world, without somebody to love it, and yearn over it with watchful care, as the mother over the cradle. The pastor must give days and nights to it, counting all things as gain which he can possibly do for it, whatever the loss to him.. Men do this in business and make no moan over their sacrifices. Should Christ’s disciples do less? The strength put into business in this age, if consecrated to saving men, would rapidly build powerful churches all over this land. Business men move mountains to rear their rolling-mills and grain-elevators and railways. The thunder of their captains fills the land. Ministers, with God overhead, often fail to move mole-hills. Much of their lack of progress is the sheer want of an enterprise and endeavor in keeping with the greatness of the object and reward. It never harms the religion of a church to let a living stream of honest business energy flow through. The religious life of a community would never lag behind the business life, if the same eflbrts were put forth in its behalf. We need work. I speak for St. James, the neglected saint of the New Testament. Men believe and pray, but fail to do. Though manna lies thick on the ground, God’s people do not gather it. There is a soul to be saved at every Christian’s elbow, yet the heart to do it is wanting. Some say the art is lost. Many of the soldiers of the cross have called a halt in this brightest day of the Lord, and are taken up in mending the chariot of salvation, re-fashioning it after the wisdom of this world, putting on new attachments of human device, not satisfied with the divine model. We get what we strive for. A minister may be a hard worker, yet his church decline because he does not put his best work into it, or does not put it in wisely. When the pastor is occupied with less than the highest, the church feels the loss. The social life, the educational interests, art circles, literary gatherings, lectures, concerts, public courtesies, and wide outside demands, all bid for the preacher’s time, and he may give his left hand to them if he can. But to build the church of God calls for the full powers of a consecrated life. It may be good to be an accomplished scholar in curious learning, to be looking up subjects of unique interest, to be an effective writer, to have the oversight of schools, to lecture, and to lend a hand all round. Benefit comes of it, after its own kind. But it builds the church only remotely, and it often weakens it. It is not the prize which comes from drawing men into the fold; ministers lose unspeakably here. They are engaged in a thousand profitable things besides this, and neglect this, which is the very first work they are set to do. The general interests outside flourish, and their own proper work grows weak. They get what they live for, but the churches dwindle. The minister is built up, but the church is built down, and the end is loss to the minister also. Men are built by what they build. Nothing so develops character as holding with all one’s soul to the one great mission. To live among the miracles of the new birth, and the growth of the divine life, is to stand by the open gates of glory, and be filled and transfigured by the outshining of the mighty One.

Ministers justly seek to be widely useful for Christ, but there is no influence which one can exert, singlehanded, to be compared with the powder which one can wield under God through a well-ordered church, instinct, and radiant with the life of its great Head. The priest’s breath, when the silver trumpet was put to his lips, became a bugle blast in the ears of all Israel; so the church, built by the Spirit of God, is the pastor’s trumpet, ringing the invitations and warnings of the Word in the ears of the world. What higher or holier ambition can any minister have than 4o compact a community of spiritual lives into one organic body, and lift it up as a pillar of testimony, bringing its whole weight to bear in vindication of righteousness and truth, or scathing evil with the liofhtninof of its rebuke? What minister in the land, sincerely seeking to be useful, yet making the building of his church a secondary object, gains an influence equal to what it might have been had he staked his soul in rearing a true church of the Redeemer?

It is common to say the power of the ministry is decaying. If a minister is regarded as one ordained to do everything under heaven while his church is simply an annex, it may be true. But when the minister as a man of God sent to declare the gospel of the new life sticks to his business, his power was never greater. On his own ground to-day he is invincible. This keeping the salvation of souls in the lead, in building the church, is the best way to edify those that are saved already. The warmth and earnestness of Christian living which brings in converts preserves them alive when won. The preaching which produces conversions quickens at the same time all the saints, and holds them in service. The constant incoming of new members has a healthy and happy effect on the church. The teachers teach better. The preacher preaches better. The prayer-meetings have more life. The home altars blaze more brightly. The brethren are fired with greater ardor and zeal. The benevolence is stimulated. Not a department of the church but feels the blessedness. The best way to train a church and keep it in every good work is to so order it that fresh fruit of evangelism steadily flow into it.

Never was a greater error than to believe that there was a time evangelism for a certain, and then that the church must stop and train the converts. Both are done best alongside. The best kind of edification and training the church knows is that which comes from that style of church living, and praying, and teaching, and giving, and watching, and soul-seeking, which secures an inflow of souls all the year round. Every member has a place and a work then, and is built up and enlarged, and led from strength to strength in the Lord. If ten souls have been saved, and you wish to train them, set them to saving ten more, and let all the church lead in the work by spirit and example.