“I’ve got a word this group really needs to hear this morning. Do you mind if I give today’s message instead of you?” It was 6:00 in the morning. Men were already scooping up their scrambled eggs and biscuits and gravy for our church’s regular Tuesday men’s breakfast.

I wasn’t scheduled to share with the group this time, but at the previous Sunday’s church business meeting, one of our members had made an impassioned call for us all to work together to “save the church.” I was just a layman, but I knew his plea needed an answer. So I approached the morning’s designated leader and made this very unusual last-minute request to speak.

A Church in Crisis

There was nothing idle in my friend’s call to “save the church.” In the short space of just three or four years:

• Based on high hopes and a steep growth curve we built a new $4 million dollar sanctuary, but that growth leveled out right when we moved into the new addition and giving expectations went unmet. Result: we were becoming strapped for funds.
• Our construction coordinator embezzled funds from the church.
• Our greatly loved youth pastor had to admit to disqualifying issues in his life and resigned his position.
• He and his family had remained in the church, but one morning not long after that, an undiagnosed lung problem caught up with him and he stopped breathing and died. He was about 35 years old.

Speaking for the whole church, his resignation and especially his death hurt like absolutely crazy. But we went on:

• We hired an extremely dynamic new youth pastor.
• Then our senior pastor decided (wisely, in my view) that he had led the church as far as he could take it, so he resigned.
• The church split into ugly factions, first over his severance package, then over the interim leadership team taking his place. Church meetings were tension-filled nightmares.
• The worst meeting by far was also the shortest: our pastor both opened and closed it with the announcement that our youth pastor was under investigation by the sheriff’s department, and had been ordered not to have any contact with minors. He ended up in federal prison.

For me and many others, that last blow hurt the worst of all. I can’t begin to describe it. I don’t even really want to try. It was that bad.

Save the Church? Not Us!

So the church was reeling, no doubt about it. We were losing members, and having trouble making the budget, and a church across the river had just closed its doors after declaring bankruptcy, and people were wondering if we were heading the same direction, and — “We’ve got to pull together to save this church!”

That was what I knew I had to speak to that Tuesday morning. Save the church? No! Emphatically no! Not us! Jesus Christ saved the Church! He died on the cross for His Church. He rose again in victory for His Church. He sent His Holy Spirit to establish His Church as His body.

The same Spirit is still with us with the same life and power. Jesus’ Church was thoroughly saved once, and it remains thoroughly saved.

Our job is to follow our Lord faithfully in the light of His fully finished, perfectly complete salvation. The men there that morning already knew that, I’m sure — but it needed saying anyway.

As time went on and as we trusted Christ together, we saw Christ’s power among us. The church made it through, and it’s thriving beautifully today. The factions let go of their enmity. The surrounding community noticed our endurance through that trial, and recognized it as testimony to the powerful work of Jesus Christ.

I can’t tell you how deeply I miss the richness of the love and fellowship there, since moving to another state four years ago. My wife and I would go back in a minute if God called us.

We Don’t Need To Save the Church

There’s a message here for the wider Church in America, and indeed the whole Western world. We’re under unprecedented stress, to the point that it feels like we’re seriously in danger.

Massachusetts just passed regulations empowering the state to decide what counts as a true religious gathering and what doesn’t. If a church holds a meeting — a spaghetti supper, for example — that doesn’t fit the state’s religion standards, then it must accede to the state’s version of what counts as sexual morality — even inside the church building. Who’s going to save Massachusetts’ churches from that encroachment on their liberty?

Individuals across the country are being coerced into denying conscience to fulfill state-designated moral standards. Businesses have been told they must spend their own money to fund abortion. Who’s going to save them from those infringements?

Without discounting in any what they have lost, still it is true, and I’m sure they know it: Jesus has already saved His people.

God Didn’t Put the First Amendment In the Bible

I’m a firm believer in the U.S. Constitution. I am deeply grateful for the First Amendment. I’ve got friends serving as attorneys with the Alliance Defending Freedom, and I give my unreserved support to efforts like theirs to defend religious liberty. We need to stand firm on the ground our Founders established for us. Our legal and public information battles are indeed important. I fervently hope and pray we win every one of them.

And yet I think we may be in danger of seeing our Constitutional conflicts as if we were fighting to save the Church. That’s wrong. Neither the Church nor any individuals following Christ are ultimately at risk, for God has a perfectly good eternal plan for us.

What’s really at risk is a certain familiar way of living as Christians and as the Church. It’s a good way, a way of freedom — and because it’s good, it’s well worth fighting for — but it’s not the only good way.

God didn’t put the First Amendment in Holy Scripture, and (have we forgotten?) the Church grew for seventeen centuries without it. Christians through the ages and around the world stand as witness to the way oppressed and persecuted churches can shine bright in the darkness. We could lose every legal battle, and the Church would still have the resurrection life of Christ.

The Battle Is the Lord’s

So whatever battles we may be fighting, we must remember the hope on which we stand. Speaking to persecuted Christians, the book of Hebrews (verse 10:23) says, “Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful.”

One way we know whether we’re holding on to hope is whether we can keep smiling no matter what the world may bring against the Church. Jesus told those who would be persecuted (Matthew 5:12), “Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Meanwhile we must remember that the battle is the Lord’s. As Paul tells us:

For though we live in the world we are not carrying on a worldly war, for the weapons of our warfare are not worldly but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ (2 Cor. 10:3-5).

Saving the Church isn’t our responsibility. Jesus Christ has already done it, once and for all time, even for times like ours. Let’s hold on that hope with confidence and with joy, whatever may come.