Your Theology Determines Your Practice

“We don’t change our message, we do change our method,” is the tagline many churches and church leaders chant as their banner to signal their views that anything in the church that is archaic, traditional, old-school, boring, antiquated, and “doesn’t work, let’s do something different,” should be donated to the museum of ancient church history. But how true is this statement? Is it biblical? Is it sound? To answer this question properly, we must understand the relationship between theology (what one believes) and practice (what one does), and we must also understand what is intended by churches when they use this tagline as their rally call to influence change within their churches’ ministries.

First, there must be a clear understanding that theology and practice cannot be divorced. How often I would hear church members plea with passion in their voice, “I don’t care about theology. Leave that in the seminary. The church is the trenches. We must win people at all cost to Jesus Christ.” While their heart for the lost is commendable, their motive that fuels their heart is based on their theology of Christ’s universal atonement. However, one will never hear these words from a Reformed believer (Christ’s limited atonement). For the Reformed believer, it is the continueing witness and evangelism that is marked by living a life that is obedient to the word of God and expressing and sharing that good news with others. Any winning of souls to Christ is the work of the Lord through the medium of His children. The motive, then, for being a part of and doing Kingdom work is not based on “how many can we win to Christ,” but “have we obeyed the word of God in our lives.”

This tagline also opens the door widely for pragmatism to be the predominant driving force of how churches consider successful ministries. No longer is ministry success gauged by patience, longsuffering, obedience, prayer, growth in knowing God’s word that leads to clearer and better understand and relationship of God, etc., but is instead determined by such shallow and vain celebrations over numerical growth, number of baptisms, revenue growth, new building projects, and the such. Often you will hear someone say, “Praise God, during summer camp, 50 youths received Christ into their lives.” But the rebuttal questions are never answered, “How true is their conversion? How many of these 50 or 100 or whatever the number of youths is… how many of them have signs of genuine conversion by studying His word? How many of those “converted” youths have remained in the local church when they had taken off to college or the work force?” And to these questions, the typical reply by church experts is, “Well, we don’t know. We leave that in the hands of the Lord.” It’s truly amazing to see how when it comes to evangelism, these pragmatic Christians want to flaunt and boast record numbers, yet when it comes to Christian growth and discipline and nurturing and undertaking a new born Christian into a full-grown warrior of Christ, there is no flaunting or boasting. There is no gauging or measuring.

But churches and church leaders who claim to uphold the Puritan and Reformed beliefs must not succumb to this Finneyistic notion. Your theology will always determine your practice. And what you practice is always based on what you believe (theology). For those who claim that they don’t lean to any particular theology because theology is too divisive, they must come to realize that they may not claim to uphold any theology, but the way they live their Christian life, the passion and motive for them to do the work of the Lord, and their understanding of God, His word, salvation, and Christian growth clearly shows what theology they have chosen.