How To CHURCH // Called To Governance // Jeff Rudder

Welcome to the Movement Church podcast. We want you to know that God is

for you and so are we. You're about to hear a sermon from one

of our weekend services in Palmer Lake, Colorado. We pray that your faith

is provoked, your mind is renewed, and your heart is awakened as you

engage the Word of God. Stay tuned back the message for ways to get

connected with us. God bless you. Thanks for tuning in. Glad you

have an opportunity to say hello to other folks, and we have a few

folks here I'll thank you who maybe I have never been here before, So

we're glad you're here. Welcome, And for those of you who are listening

on the podcast at some point, we're glad you're gonna be with us as

well through that. So I'm Jeff Rudder. For those of you who don't

know me, I'm part of the teaching team here at the Movement Church and

so we're grateful that we were able to have Fight this morning lead us in

worship. Worship was great. Thank you, Ben, and I'm going to

share some thoughts with you. As Fight mentioned, I'm the guy who's going

to stand up talk about the Bible. So we're currently in this sermon series

called how to Church, and our hope is that this series can help set

the stage for who we are as a church, how we operate, and

where we go from here, and also that through this we could maybe reclaim

the high ground on the very idea of church and maybe just start a great

reset on how our kids and their kids view church and participate in church.

We want to reclaim the high ground. That's a prayer. So amen.

We started this series a few weeks ago with the idea that we're the family

of God, and then John Wilson led us through a discussion of understanding that

we're called to be salt and light to a dark world. And then last

week Fight led us in a discussion about the idea that we're the living temple

of God and God is on the move. So this week we're going to

continue this discussion on how to Church, and we're going to talk about the

very exciting topic of church governance. It's okay, you can go ahead and

laugh. That's fine right now. Listen. I know this topic is probably

not what you were expecting when you got here this morning. It's probably not

on anybody's top ten list of things you want to discuss on a Sunday morning.

I get it. But if you stick with me, maybe we'll just

change that by the end of the time here. Okay. When Fight first

asked me to do this, I called a friend who's a pastor, and

I told him I needed his input that I was going to do this topic

or do this talk on church governance. And I asked him if he had

any ideas, and his first question was really telling. He just said why,

and then he followed up with your pastor most not like you very much?

All kidding aside his first question, why would we want to talk about

this idea of church governance? It's a fair question. Why should it matter

to us? Right? But as I dug in on this, I actually

became more and more convinced that God has something to say. Thank you so

much that God has something to say about this topic for us. It's not

working. We're going to edit this out of the podcast. I'm hoping that's

all right, Okay, yeah, yeah, no, I can't. I

can't hang on. Let's just try this. How's that you got it?

Yeah? Yeah, all right, they're got it. Okay, We're gonna

edit all this out. I'm not gonna start over unforeseen circumstances here this morning,

technical issues. Uh how about this, Lord be with us, Satan,

You're not welcome here this morning, so get out, all right.

Uh. So we're gonna dive in this morning, and we're gonna understand why

this topic of church governance, why it's important. And when we use the

word governance, let's try and define it. Webster's says this that governance is

really the activity of overseeing the control and direction of something. Okay, so

when you're pressing the gas pedal and steering the wheel, you are governing your

carnal. These two young ladies, I'm not sure how much control they're exhibiting

over the car, but they're having fun. And when Mac is knocking a

wedge to within six feet of the hole, Okay, she'd know I was

going to do this by the way. She is exerting governance, exerting control

over the club and over the ball. So I might be in trouble when

we get home. And when you're telling your teenagers get off the xbox and

clean your room, you are in the act of governing. You're controlling the

situation. But in this case, we're really talking about the church at large,

and specifically our church, the movement church. And when you think about

the responsibility to oversee the direction of the church, that's a high and worthy

cause, right, and so it should be treated as such. But too

often the greater purpose of helping direct the church. I just want to be

honest and say, sometimes it devolves into this internal church division that eats in

us and them mentality. Sometimes this is known as church politics. Okay,

in church politics, which is not really what we're going to talk about,

but I want to acknowledge the difference. Church politics could be one of the

most destructive forces known to mankind. And you don't have to raise your hand,

but I wonder if any of you have ever been wounded by the church

or its people. All right, some of you may have even left a

church because of church politics. Our hope is that what you find here is

very different than that. I want to give you a few examples of what

I'm talking about here. One church got into a heated debate. These are

all real stories. One church got into a heated debate, not over matters

of doctrine or scriptural authority. No, they got into a heated debate.

The thing that almost wrecked this church was a fight over who should have access

to the copy machine. That's a real story. Another church almost broke apart

over use of the term pot luck to describe their church dinners. One group

wanted to call them pot blessing dinners. They had a fine theological point to

make about the word luck. They didn't like it, so they almost broke

apart over it. And let's be honest here in Colorado, we would probably

be wise to not use pot anything when we're talking about about what we're doing.

And lastly, a church nearly came apart at the seams because some members

were angry that at the annual business meeting the balance sheet was off by ten

cents. That's a real story. Honestly, it's no wonder a lot of

people think that church is a waste of time. But fortunately for us,

church politics is not what we're talking about here and it's not what we want

here. So this morning, what we're going to talk about is this idea

of how our church is governed. Okay, but mostly I want to talk

about the why behind the idea of church governance and leadership and how that matters

to us both as a church and how it matters to us as individuals.

So what does God have to say that's going to be relevant to us at

nine o'clock tomorrow morning. So let's look at how things are set up here

at the Movement Church. When you look at our church, we're still small,

We're only six months old, and we have a very uncomplicated structure.

We have two teams that work together, the Elders and the Strategic Leadership Team

to create mission, vision and values and generally set the direction for the church.

Here again, the elders and the Strategic Leadership Team. The elders are

made up of our senior pastor, that's Richie Fight in case you're wondering,

plus four others who meet the qualifications that are found in one Timothy chapter three

and Titus chapter one. And I'm not going to go into those today.

I'm not going to talk about that. But let me pause here and say

that in many churches, and this is just an acknowledgment of reality, many

churches, the senior pastor acts almost unilaterally to make decisions affecting the church.

We don't think that's wise. Okay, So here Fight is one member of

the Elder Team, and that's by design. We don't want any one voice

to be the person who is the decision maker. The best part is that

Fight doesn't want that either. So we have a great team. The Strategic

Leadership Team can consist of three members who work hand in hand with the Elders,

and they're working to make sure that we have a variety of viewpoints and

voices that go into every decision that's going to get made. And let me

tell you, I'm really kind of blown away personally at the wisdom and the

leadership and the desire to follow God exhibited by the team. John Janish,

who I don't think is here this morning. He's a chair of our Elder

team, and he's a guy who doesn't over talk or overthink, but he

keeps us on track. And then John Cressman and edgan Zalez. Between the

two of them, they have about a million years of experience in the business

world and it's a privilege to sit beside him and learn from them. Christine

Wilson on our st She's a strategic thinker and she's razor sharp, and let

me tell you, she's sort of a silent assassin, especially when it comes

to card games, right, Christine Spades, I think is what you want

to avoid with her. And then Leah Apaniro is always calling us to more

and to higher and to better. We're grateful for her. And Ryan Gillespie

is an engineer. He has a mind that solves problems and there's not a

problem he's ever met that he couldn't solve, and we're grateful to having the

team. And then there's Richie Fike. He's both a visionary and I understand.

I'm not sure about this, but I've heard he's one of the great

white rappers of our time, somewhere between Vanilla Ice and Eminem. I'm not

sure where he fits, but I've heard that. I don't know for sure.

The point is that we have some great leaders here at the Movement Church,

and our team members, to be honest with you, don't always agree.

That's a healthy thing. So there are two things I can promise,

okay. The first is that every decision that's made here about our little church

is made with the idea of making sure we're in alignment with God's will and

with God's word, and the Movement Church will never be a church that's dominated

by one voice, Okay, let's keep going. In addition to the elders

and the strategic leadership team, we've got an amazing group of staff here at

the Movement Church. That's Fight and Dana and Karen and Jeremiah and Christian,

and they're responsible for taking the mission vision and values and turning those into a

strategic plan and then implementing the plan in a way that's inviting and effective and

welcoming here. And they do a terrific job. You see it on Sunday

mornings. All this stuff you walk into and you see the great music and

all that, well, there's a lot of effort going into that before we

get here, and you see it on display all the time. And then

we have an amazing group of volunteers. They teach and they lead worship,

and they fill communion cups, and they sweep the floors and they set up

chairs, and they come early and they stay late, and they do all

these things that nobody ever sees to make the church function. So if you

don't hear anything else I hear, or anything else I say in this sermon

this morning, I want you to hear this. Okay, thank you,

thank you, thank you for those of you who are engaged and involved and

help make this thing happen. We are so grateful. We couldn't operate without

you. Amen, is right. So I'm looking around the room here and

I'm starting to see glazed over eyes. I see some of our young people.

They're turning gray prematurely. They're aging faster than they should. So I'm

not going to spend any more time talking about the nuts and bolts of our

governance model. If you have questions, you can grab me, or you

can grab Fike or any one of the leaders who a name. We'll be

happy to visit with you. But we're going to move on what we really

want to talk about today. What we want to do is to get underneath

this idea of governance and understand how God uses this concept in our own lives.

So I want to make five observations and we're going to move through those

quickly. About governance, which at its core is really about the creation of

order out of disarray and nothingness, and it's also about leadership. We want

to talk about those two things, so let's jump in. It's really no

secret that we live in a broken world, right in a world dominated by

chaos and confusion and deterioration. Everywhere you turn, and every time you turn

on the evening news, there's another story that's worse than the last one that

you heard. The stories of confusion in our world, they just get worse

and worse, and that should not be a surprise to us as Christians.

And to be clear, the author, the creator of all this confusion,

it's not God, it's Satan. John tent Ten tells us that he came

to kill, steal, and destroy. And I don't know about you,

but I see evidence of that in the world around us. He's doing a

pretty good job for what he's trying to accomplish. And the closer we get

to the return of Christ, I think, the more chaotic it's necessarily gonna

get. We're gonna see that. But even in the middle of all the

brokenness and all the damage that's being done, we know that Jesus came to

bring life. He tells us that, and not just a life where we

only exist, but a life where we thrive and have a purpose and get

to join him in his work to build up his kingdom. So focusing on

the brokenness of the world or the structures of the church, even is really

not what we're trying to understand today. What we'll understand is this, it's

about understanding how to govern our own lives and how we bring order into our

own homes that we want a dress. So let's look at Genesis chapter one.

Now, it's not often you get to start at the very beginning of

the book, so this is kind of fun. In the beginning, God

created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty, and

darkness covered the deep waters, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the

surface of the waters. What stands out to me, and this is the

phrase that the earth was formless and empty and darkness covered the deep waters.

Honestly, don't think i've ever heard a pastor talk about that. For raise.

It's sort of like fly over country in the Bible, you know,

just gets skipped a lot of the time. But I think there's something for

us to understand here, and we're gonna we're gonna get to that. It

all feels just a bit scary to me. When you think about that idea

that there was this great nothing out there, it sounds like a perfect trailer

for a horror movie. The earth was formless, and void, and darkness

covered the deep waters. Oh my gosh, it's so scary. What's gonna

happen? I can't be able to watch. Right. I wonder if sometimes,

though, we might feel just that way about our own lives, that

maybe we're here without purpose or without direction and feeling a sense of emptiness in

our own lives, surrounded by darkness of one kind or another. But then

we keep reading, right, we keep reading. The second part of verse

two says this, the spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the

waters, and that's important. We're gonna come back and just the second.

Okay, so the earth is formless and empty, surrounded by darkness. Sometimes

we feel that way, and then something amazing happens, okay, something that

changes everything. God speaks and he says this, let there be light.

And then he said about the light. Wow, that is really cool.

Know what he really said was the light is good. And this leads us

to our first observation for the day. Even when we feel surrounded by the

darkness, God is there. His light is there. It was always there.

It's been there from the beginning. Right. That should give us hope.

And you have to know this, God is not afraid of your darkness.

And God is not afraid of the darkness that comes from the enemy,

because He not only created the light, he is the light since the beginning

of time and before we were ever created, God was there in the darkness.

So if you're experiencing darkness in your life today, remember the words of

John the Apostle or John the Revelator, a lot of names for John.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it.

He's not of afraid. He's not afraid of the darkness that we experience.

We need to understand that this morning. Okay, let's keep going. And

then God said, let there be a space between the waters to separate the

waters of the heavens and the waters of the earth. In other words,

he created the sky. And then he said, let the waters beneath the

sky flow together into one place, so dry ground can appear. Okay,

that's how the land got here. Let's keep going. Then God said,

let the land sprout with vegetation. Those are the trees, the plants,

and the gardens and everything that makes this earth green and lush and beautiful.

And if that weren't enough, God then keeps someone creating. He says,

let lights appear in the sky to separate the day from the night. Let

those lights shine down on the earth. That's the moon and the sun and

the stars. And then he said, let the waters swarm with fish and

other life, and let the skies be filled with birds of every kind.

And I think, just to show off a little bit, he actually created

a fish that could fly to make this verse kind of come alive. Right.

Did you know there's actually three species of flying fish. I didn't know

that, but God created that. Let's keep going. And then he said,

let the earth produce every sort of animal, each producing offspring of the

same kind. That's the wild animals. That's our pets. Even this is

Maze. This is our dog. She's a special needs dog. Pray for

her. Right now, we're getting to the good stuff here. Though.

Then God said, let us make human beings in our image to be like

us. They will rain over the fish in the sea, the birds in

the s sky, and the small animals that scurry along the ground. So

God created human beings in his own image, in the image of God.

He created them male and female. He created them. Then God blessed them

and said, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and govern it.

Rain over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and

all the animals that scurry along the ground. And so here we are.

We are the pinnacle of God's creation. It's an amazing thing that God spoke

right, and out of nothing came everything. God spoke, and out of

nothing came everything. And out of this pre creation chaos that existed before God

began to speak, comes a very ordered existence. And so the first thing

we see God doing in scripture is creating this orderly existence out of nothing to

something that was a formless void, formless and empty. It had no direction,

no purpose. In God spoke. And then the second thing he did

was put Adam and Eve in charge of this newly ordered world he had fashioned.

In verse twenty eight of the first chapter of Genesis, right, he

invites them to join in on his plan by filling the earth and by governing

it. So, this whole idea of governance itself, it's as old as

creation. In fact, it was a necessary part of creation. It demonstrates

both the character of God and the very nature of God. It's a reflection

of him as a God who doesn't want disarray and disorder and chaos for his

creation. He wants it to be orderly. So even before the fall,

we were supposed to govern what God had created. This is part of the

original plan before there was sin. And so we when we look at this,

we know there's a God of order and peace and that he wants that

for our lives. He's not a god of chaos and confusion and deterioration.

And we also know that he isn't afraid of our darkness. Okay, so

how do we get God's order and peace and how do we get the darkness

out of our own lives? Well, when God was ready to do all

that, what did he do? He simply spoke it. So our observation

number two is this the order and peace that we want in our daily lives

can be found in the words of God. That's really fascinating. It's God's

word that brings about order from chaos and confusion, and peace from disarray and

everything from nothing. And by the way, Satan knows that it's God's word

that contain the power to do this. It's God's words that can do this.

So look at how Satan actually chose to attack this new creation God had

made. It says this. The serpent was the shrewdest of all the wild

animals the Lord God had made. One day, he asked the woman,

did God really say you must not eat the fruit from and of the trees

in the garden? Did God really say that? By the way, it's

a misquote on Satan's part. Okay, he's twisting it. He attacks the

words that God had previously spoken to Adam. And even when he told them

that if they eat from this one tree that they will surely die, Satan

said, did God really say that? He's attacking the words of God.

John eight forty four says this about Satan. He was a murderer from the

beginning. He's always hated the truth because there is no truth in him.

When he lies, it's consistent with his character, for he's a liar,

and he's the father of lies. That's who we're dealing with here today,

the Father of lies. So our third observation is this, the enemy might

attack you by using God's words, so we better be able to discern when

it's being rightly or wrongly applied in order to govern our own lives. In

order to make sense of this, thing, and it's not just Satan that

tries to twist up God's words. Okay, how many times in recent years

have you heard someone misquoting scripture or misapplying a scripture to make their point.

Here's a couple examples of how this happens. Matthew seven to one says this,

do not judge others, and you will not be judged. Well.

That verse is often used to justify a litany of behaviors and beliefs that couldn't

be any further from the heart of God, and a whole lot of Christians

are willing to suspend everything they know about the character of God because Satan twists

this verse to mean something it was never intended to mean. It's okay for

us to discern right from wrong based on God's standards, not our own.

Okay, it's not okay to create subjective standards based on our preferences. That's

why knowing what's actually in the book is really important for us. If we're

gonna follow Christ, we have to know it's in the book. That's the

first example. And remember it. When Jesus began his ministry, Satan comes

to Jesus in Matthew for and he says this, if you're God, throw

yourself down, for it is written he will command his angels concerning you,

and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not

strike your foot against a stone. Okay, that's the best smarmy Satan voice

I could come up with. But Jesus replies, it's also written, do

not put the Lord your God to the test. Satan tempts Jesus with the

words of God. Okay, we have to know that they're misapplied, and

they're misappropriated, and then Jesus rebukes him also with the words of God correctly

applied. So our fourth observation is this, if you want to fight off

the enemy in your life, you have to be connected to God's word.

Do you ever feel like you're being attacked by Satan? Anybody? Anyone,

anyone, bueler. We all feel that, Okay, sometimes we feel like

we're being attacked by saying, well we are okay. It's kind of like

the earth was described earlier in what we were re at as being surrounded by

darkness before it was impacted by God's word. We all feel that sometimes that

we're surrounded by darkness. If you feel that, then maybe the answer for

us is to jump into God's way. Okay, it's all here, the

answers to the questions that we're all trying to answer in life, they're all

here. And I'm not saying that it's not hard to sometimes understand what the

Bible's trying to tell us. It can be challenging to understand that. But

if you want to hear God speak to you, then open the book.

Too. Many people are looking for a miraculous sign or this audible voice coming

out of out of heaven, and sometimes God does those things, okay,

But for most of life's questions, you simply need to dive in to His

word and you're gonna find some answers. You got questions about money and finances,

Well, there's two thousand verses about that in the Bible. Maybe we

should take a look. You're wondering if it's okay to live a life filled

with consumption and focused on yourself, because after all, the housewives of Beverly

Hills look so happy, don't they. God has something to say about that

in his word? Are you living in fear of something? In this moment?

God talks about that in his word? Do you wonder if you have

to go through life all alone. Well, he addresses that in the book.

You get the point for any of the things that we are wrestling with

at almost any given moment. God addresses that in his word. Okay,

let's keep moving. So we talked about the fact that it's God's word that

creates order and peace out of this chaos and this nothingness, and that He's

with us even when we're surrounded by darkness. We talked about that, but

we also want to explore this idea that our part of this thing called governance

is to lead his creation. Okay, how do we do that? How

do we lead? Well, there's really no greater example of leadership than Jesus.

So let's look and see what he has to tell us about leadership.

I told you all the answers were in here, so we're gonna keep looking

in the book. Matthew twenty, you know that the rulers in this world

lord it over their people, and officials flaunt their authority over those under them.

But among you it will be different. Whoever wants to be a leader

among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you

must become your slave. For even the Son of Man came not to be

served, but to serve others, and to give his life as a ransom

for many. So what stands out to me in this passage is is this

first phrase. You know that the rulers in this rule lord it over their

people. Isn't that true? Haven't we all experienced people who wanted to kind

of lord over us bosses around. There may be a new term for this

sort of mindset now, but when I was a kid, you called it

being on a power trip. Right. So, there are a few examples

I can think of of notable power trippers throughout the ages. This guy Darth

Vader no surprise there. If you cross him, he's gonna put you in

an invisible chokehold, right, So he's on a power trip. And then

there is this guy Dtryvil, maybe my favorite power tripper. You go against

him and he's gonna press the button and you're gonna fall into his own little

magic fiery furnace there. And then this is a true story off the Internet

from a guy named Surprise Face Clown, and he said this, the dude

who runs my HOA is a maniac. I believe he thinks the death penalty

would be justified if people don't powerwash the curb. That's pretty funny, right.

These are examples that show us that people do want to lord over others.

But Jesus said, leadership, which by the way, is the activity

of governance. That's leadership, is supposed to be different for those of us

who follow Christ. It's supposed to be different. In the Church. We

aren't supposed to be on a power trip. And so what Jesus is doing

here in these verses that we just read, I'm going to leave him up

on the screen, is he's flipping the idea of leadership completely on its head.

Right. See, many of the religious leaders had it in there in

their minds that they had been elevated to their position because they were smarter and

better than everyone else, and they had a false sense of righteousness. Excuse

me. They came from their adherence to the Jewish law, the Jewish regulations,

the Jewish customs. But Jesus said, the way you govern and the

way you lead in his kingdom would be about serving other people, so much

so that he would even give up his own life in service to others.

John thirteen tells us this story, it's passover time and Jesus is about to

be betrayed and executed, so let's pick it up in verse five. Then

he began to wash the disciples feet, drying them with the time he had

around him. And Peter said to him, Lord, are you gonna wash

my feet? And Jesus replied, you don't understand now what I'm doing,

but someday you will know. Peter protested, you will never wash my feet,

and Jesus replied, unless I wash you, you will not belong to

me. So again we see Jesus acting as the servant leader, the one

who's thinking about his friends more than he's thinking about himself, and symbolically he's

making them clean by washing their feet. It's a little bit of foreshadowing about

what's getting ready to happen in just a few hours as he's executed. The

remarkable thing here to me is that Jesus knows that he's only hours away from

facing this incredibly tortuous and brutal death. It's easy to think about Jesus's fully

God, but the scripture tells us that he was both fully God and fully

human. Then the human part of Jesus must have been scared to death about

what he was getting ready to face. It wasn't going to be a quick,

painless death. It was going to last the better part of a day.

By the end, Jesus had been beaten so badly that, just like

Isaiah said seven hundred years before, Jesus many were amazed when they saw him.

His face was so disfigured he seemed hardly human, and from his appearance

one would scarcely know he was a man. This is about one of four

hundred prophetic scriptures about the life and death and resurrection and second return of Jesus,

and it's in this context that we really best understand what Jesus is telling

us about leadership in the Kingdom of God. That we would serve even those

who hate us, that we would sacrifice for those who would do his harm

right, and that even as they have falsely use us, that our activity

would be about planning and plotting, not for their destruction, but for their

salvation. So my last observation is this God's word isn't just for us,

It's even for those who despise us. So as we wrap up here,

as we think about how to church, we have to think beyond what we

do here on Sunday mornings or at a growth group or at a discipleship group.

We have to think beyond what the goal of just making this effective and

inviting for us. We have to get to the ultimate purpose of Jesus coming

to earth. And he summed that up in Luke nineteen when he tolds Zi

Kis the chief tax collector. Hey, I came to seek and save the

laws. That's why I'm here. From the very beginning, God offered us

this order and peace, and he invited us in to the amazing task of

managing all that he had created. Okay, but the enemy was right there.

He was whispering in the ears of Adam and Eve, and he's still

whispering to us today. But we can rebuke those whispers. We have the

ability to push Satan away from us. Maya, this is where you might

want to say, Amen, we have the ability to rebuke Satan. If

we have the word of God sealed in our hearts and in our minds,

we have the ability to push Satan away. And remember that God invites us

into his great plan for the world to lead it not toward destruction, but

towards salvation. And it's Jesus who shows us how to lead a disordered and

lost people back into a right relationship with Him. So what's God leading you

to do next? And how can we help? Would you send us an

email to info at Movementchurch dot co and tell us how we can pray for

you and help you take the next step in your spiritual journey. If you'd

like to contribute financially to our ministry, text the amount you'd like to give

to the number eight four three two one, or look us up online at

Movementchurch dot c. You can find the Movement Church on all social media platforms,

and we hope that you'll give us a follow God bless you, and

remember God is for you and so are we.