Peter Witkowski Discipleship

Don’t Post…Pray

As the post coronavirus world spins about with seemingly little regard for the axis of sanity, men and women find their hearts weighted down by tomorrow’s fears. Like the soothsayers of old, they dissect the animal of social media, seeking to extract messages about the future. Equipped with unverified tidbits of truth, they take to social media, believing a barrage of tweets and articles linked to their Facebook page will convince the world that social distancing will lead to the downfall of the United States. Others fear a lack of facemask will result in thousands of needless deaths. Regardless of the fear, most American seek the same anti-dote: social media validation. This should not be the practice of the Christian. We should find our hope in the sweet closet of prayer, tucked away from buzzing highway of social media.

David wrote Psalm 3 as his world descended into chaos. His son, Absalom, had declared himself king. As David fled Jerusalem, his top advisor joined the rebellion. In the space of a few hours, the comforts of home were replaced with the fears of death. The whole world had gone against him. David writes, “Many are rising against me; many are saying of my soul, “There is no salvation for him in God (Ps 3:2).” Though David’s world lacked sanity, David did not lack hope. He knew God was his shield. Though men had turned against him, David knew God had placed him on Israel’s throne. God’s could not be overthrown by a rouge prince. David placed his trust in God.

Christian have even more cause to place their trust in God because he has died for their sin. The Christian’s glory is the glory of God given to her at salvation. God died to save her, lifting her from death to life. Since God saved her, she has every reason to trust God with her coronavirus fears.

Facebook post cannot keep you or I from catching the nasty virus. Twitter battles cannot prevent the downfall of our nation. But God can. Not only can God protect us, we can trust him to protect us for he hears our cries for help. David writes, “I cried aloud to the Lord, and he answered me from his holy hill.” Though David slept in a tent while Absalom slept atop David’s castle, God heard David. Though fears may dance atop our hearts, God still hears and answers our prayers from the pit of chaos.

The Christian’s Instagram post will not change the thinking of the President, of the Governor, or of the mayor. They will not hear the Christian’s theory about what the doctors are really up to. If the truth-be-told, most of our friends will not take our concerns seriously. But God hears the cries of his people. The ruler of the universe who directs the hearts of kings and who laughs at the armies of earth hears our prayers. Our Facebook posts cannot prevent anarchy. But, God can. Our Twitter wars cannot heal the sick. But, God can. Our Instagram posts cannot keep the church from mishandling the coronavirus crisis. But, God can. E.M. Bounds notes,

National affairs need to be prayed over…Lawmakers, law judges, and law executives need leaders in Israel to pray for them. How much fewer mistakes if there was more praying done in civil matters?

Do you fear death, the destruction of the economy, or a police state? Follow David and pray to the God who hears you. To whom will you take your fears?

Peter Witkowski Discipleship, Pain & Suffering

It is Ok to Mourn: Good Friday and COVID-19

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We should mourn this Good Friday. The coronavirus has enveloped the globe in a cloud of black death. It has also reached into the church and overturned her basket of well-planned Easter events, sending Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Sunday morning services wobbling across the floor to cancelation. When the glorious Easter sunrise fills the horizon this Sunday, there will be no loud congregational singing, giddy children, or sweet hugs of friendship circulating though our church. We will remain home, isolated from friends. Though the world has suffered under the curse of sin for thousands of years, the isolation of holy week brings the sorrow of sin into our souls anew. For the first time in years, many of our hearts feel the words of Psalm 22:1 that Jesus screamed on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

During such times of profound brokenness, Christians should run to the Lord. Like the great King David who faced many piercing trials, Christians should confess their anguish to God. They should ask God,

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all day (Ps 13:1-2a)?

The Coronavirus’s ability to disrupt the church calendar should serve as a powerful reminder of how broken our world is and of how much we need Jesus. We should allow the cancellation of our services to lead our hearts to humble and persistent cries for deliverance. “O you my help, come quickly to my aid! (Ps 22:19),” The Coronavirus is a problem of divine proportions than can only be solved by a divine antidote.

The antidote will come. The message of Good Friday is that Jesus conquers sin and death. For thousands of years, human culture has been trying to find antidotes to the brokenness of the world through education, feeding programs, and medicine. All of human efforts have failed. Men and women remain tied to pride, greed, lust, and selfishness. Sin is a problem of cosmic proportions that no person, nation, or culture can conquer. Yet, Jesus conquered it on the cross. He was forsaken by God so that we might be welcomed into heaven. Jesus died for our sins and then rose again on the third day to prove he had delivered his children from sin. Those who repent and believe can follow Jesus to love, generosity, and selflessness. But to get to salvation, men and women must wrestle with their brokenness. They must realize they are sinners before they can cry out for a savior and embrace his salvation. Only those who know they are drowning will let the lifeguard rescue them.

The pattern of Good Friday serves as a template for the Church as she encounters new symptoms of sin and death in the world. To find relief from this world, we must admit that we suffer and need God’s help. “Save me from the mouth of the lion (Ps. 22:21a).” When we take our grieving souls to God, we find deliverance. “You have rescued me from the horns of the wild oxen (Ps. 22:21b)!” Friends, the Coronavirus is a cosmic problem that God will recuse us from.

While we wait for the virus to end, many of us will become more aware of how much we miss the gathered body of Christ. We will be tempted to find unscriptural antidotes for our pain. Though we should embrace biblical forms of encouragement, we must resist the urge to drink the hyssop, an ancient pain reliever, that was offered to Jesus on the cross. (For more on my view of online church click here). If we turn to virtual Lord’s Supper, sermon binge watching, and zoom calls to treat our feelings of loneliness, we will not solve our sorrows for we still remain physically apart from our brothers and sisters We can touch the screen, but we cannot touch the face on the screen. If we try to fix our sorrows through human ingenuity, we will commit the mistake of the neglected spouse who copes with her distant marriage through romance novels. She may feel less pain while reading them. But when the chapters end, her marriage problems remain, and her heart has moved further away from her husband. The believer who feels neglected by God does not need a drive-in Easter service, he needs divine deliverance. He needs God to mercifully end the COVDI-19 crisis. If he fails to cry out to the Father as David and Jesus did because he is drinking grape juice and eating Ritz crackers in his home, he will neglect the biblical means of hope: prayer. He will find himself further from God. Just as those who fast allow hunger pains to drive them to pray, Christians should allow the pain of missed hugs, Lord’s Supper celebrations, congregational singing, public Scripture readings, and preached sermons to drive them to their knees in prayer. Instead trying to mitigate our sorrow through increased Wi-Fi bandwidth and FM transmitters, we need to join Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane and pour out our prayers of lament to the Father for he alone can help us.

If there ever was a religion that made sense of our lonely world and that gave us a space to mourn while we await salvation, it is Christianity. Christians have both the sorrow of the cross and the joy of the empty tomb. We can mourn our loneliness while we wait for our salvation from COVID-19.

Peter Witkowski Discipleship

Let’s Relax: Online “Church” Is not Church

Online churchThe COVID-19 shock-wave that turned the United States upside down knocked more than one pastor out of his pulpit. With the help of Facebook Live, Youtube, and lesser known platforms, ministers have begun to regain their footing, launching online services. As pastors have started “going live” they have also begun to criticize their sheep who fail to watch their the latest sermon or who watch that sermon irreverently. Pastors who a few weeks ago challenged the legitimacy of the Facebook users’ faith are now employing Facebook to question the faith of those who do not use Facebook enough.

Irony aside, the pastors’ complaint raise a foundational question: What is a church? Is the online service truly a church service? Do those members who fail to watch their pastor online break the commandment of Hebrews 10:25 and forsake the assembling of the church?

What is a Church?

A quick overview of the New Testament reveals that online church services cannot be equated with the typically weekly gathering of the church. Though the definition of the church can be expanded to cover pages as Dr. Greg Allison has done, it can also be reduced to two basic elements: the right preaching of the Word, and the proper administration of the sacraments. For a group of people to rightfully claim to be a church, they must meet regularly to preach the gospel, to administer the Lord’s table, and to perform baptisms.

Can people meaningfully do these things when they are not physically meeting together?

The Scriptures say no. When Paul wrote to the Corinthian church, he expected them to meet together as an assembled group of believers. He encouraged “the assembled” church to practice discipline, to rightly administer the Lord’s table, and to correctly employ tongues and biblical teaching (1 Cor. 5:4-5; 1 Cor. 11:18; 1 Cor. 14:23). The phrase, “When you are assembled” was the lens through which Paul shaped the church. When Christ spoke of the church, he too defined it as consisting of two to three people who physically gathered together to worship and to practice church discipline (Matt 16;18).

To borrow Jonathan Leeman’s terminology, the church is similar to a soccer team . The members of the team identify themselves when they play soccer together. Even when the teammates go home, buy groceries, and fly on airplanes, the members of the team can still be called “the team.”

In same way, the church is the church because it physically assembles together to hear the word preached, to eat the Lord’s Supper, and to baptize new converts. The church does not cease being the church between Monday and Saturday. Nor does a church’s inability to meet during the Coronavirus imply that the church has ceased being the church. But she has stopped meeting. Zoom meetings, phone calls, and live-streamed services are not the same thing as the game. The unassembled members can’t hear the whole church proclaim the gospel through prayer, song, and giving. They can’t pass the bread and the cup. They can’t dunk new believers in the baptistry.  They can’t hug one another and take each other out to lunch. Like Leeman, I too, “have a hard time envisioning an assembly that doesn’t assemble.” To worship, to play the game, the church, the team, must physically meet together.

What About Spiritual Presence?

Some pastors object to the exclusivity of physical assemblies, noting that 1 Corinthians 5:3 and Colossians 2:5 describe Paul as being spiritual present with distant churches. This spiritual connection between people hundreds of miles apart appears to negate the necessity of physical church meetings.

But when pastors place these texts in their biblical contexts, they will discover that Paul’s expression cannot be used to justify the live-streaming trend. Paul speaks of a spiritual presence precisely because he could not be physically present with the churches in question. Yet, he still connects with these assemblies spiritually because he knows they are possessed by the Holy Spirit that possesses him. Thus, he is confident that the churches he cannot physically attend will share his conclusions because all parties are lead by the same God. In much the same way a Brazilian church would expect a Bible believing Chinese church to condemn pornography or to pray in “Jesus’s name,” Paul expects the readers of his letters to live out the Christian the faith as he was doing. All Christians are spiritually connected by the Holy Spirit through the Word of God.

Some pastors object to the above interpretation. As John Gill and Chrysostom, they argue that Paul was spiritually observing the congregations at Corinth and Colossia. But this view still cannot prove that YouTube is the equivalent of the physically assembled church. In Gill and Chrysotom’s view, Paul supernaturally saw the churches through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Paul went to the churches in much the same way that Ebeneezer Scrooge traveled to the shadowy visions of Christmas past, present, and future, seeing things no normal person can see. Even pastors backed by professional media teams cannot accomplish this supernatural feat and be present as Paul was present with these ancient congregations. For all its grandeur, live streamed services fall short of prophetic, real time visions. 

In short, Pastors today can only be spiritually present with their congregation when both the pastor and the congregation assent to teaching of the Bible, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. This connection can occur and be furthered when the church is assembled together and when it is scattered. It can transpire when the pastor is online and when the pastor is offline.

So Are Online Service Bad?

No, they are beneficial. Online services and activities should be an encouragement to our souls. Throughout church history, Christians have encouraged one another with letters built around scriptural instruction, admonishment, and encouragement. Christians still enjoy and cherish gospel letters.

In a similar manner, live streaming platforms allow pastors to send meaningful notes to their entire church team and family. Just as a man enjoys Skyping with his wife and kids while on a work trip, pastors have a great rational for wanting to be in the living rooms of their church members during times of separation. And church members have every reason to want to hear from their spiritual fathers.  The family of God should love to communicate while they wait for the next face to face interaction. Live streaming blesses family relationships, allowing the team to stay in communication while apart.

In my experience, a word of encouragement from one’s spiritual father caries far more weight than a message of truth from a famous uncle or cousin whose lives thousands of miles away. But if a team member finds the online ministry of Pastor Joe in Oregon or Pastor Steve in New York to be more encouraging than my church’s online ministry, praise God for the ministry of other gospel centered pastors.

Online streaming has proven to be a phenomenal tool on the pastoral tool belt. Pastors and church members can embrace it with enthusiasm, sending and receiving digital messages.

Is It a Sin Not to Attend “Online Church?”

And now we return to the question which started our discussion: Do people sin when they neglect the church’s online service?

No, Christians have not sinned when they failed to watch Pastor Bob’s latest sermon or when they caught the last ten minutes of his sermon in their pajamas. Though Pastor Bob may have been at the church building, the church was not assembled. Moreover, some saints lack the technology to keep pace with their pastors digital evolution. Other members encounter a host of environmental struggles such as power outages, screaming children, and defective technology that keep them from watching. Though these members fail to watch online, their heart motives remain pure. Pastors who criticize their sheep for not watching their online services or for watching their online services “incorrectly” go beyond the bounds of Scripture. Like the pharisees of old, these pastors turn blessings into burdens. These pastoral rebukes bear a striking resemblance to the actions of a crazy uncle who complains about his nephew because the nephew did not regard the uncle’s birthday card highly enough. Instead of criticizing their spiritual children for not liking them more, pastors should examine their hearts to see how well they have loved their congregation. The pastor who loves people well will have no difficulty finding his people online.

Let’s relax, embrace the technology, and remember that our online services are not church services. Are you ready to relax?