The missionaries raised up a plurality of men called elders who would preserve the way for those to come. This work of equipping and entrusting the churches to these elders was so important the the work wasn’t considered fulfilled until they had done so. Paul understood that he had to ensure that the churches be well established under faithful men that the church might stand firm as a pillar and buttress of the truth. This would allow the missionary team to continue on its way into new cities, new fields, because the churches were left in good hands. Those who stayed behind and led the churches were to guard the deposit of faith that was entrusted to them and pass it on to others, preserving the way for those to come.
We are being sent to a new mission field - does that mean that we need to change our message? You hear this a lot in ministry, "If we want to reach people, we need to adjust the message to match our modern sensibilities." They were saying this 100 years ago. "Modern man doesn’t believe in these myths." The german school of theology sought to de-mythologize the texts. Theological liberalism battled the fundamentalists in the early 1900’s but while they won some of the seminaries like Harvard and Princeton, they lost the pews. 20 years ago it was John Shelby Spong, “Why Christianity Must change or Die” meaning why we must rid ourselves of the surface meaning of the texts of Scripture and our tradition and find the deeper truer truths - which of course were the same ones of the theological liberals 100 years before. In the past decade you have Brian McClaren’s “A New Kind of Christianity”. Today, you have calls for the church to change its sexual ethics, and emphasize the red-letter social justice-y parts of the Bible and not focus so much on the individual sin, and heaven and hell stuff. All of these movements sought to rebrand Christianity and repaint it in the image of the modern ethic. Amazingly, even though the stated motivation of each of these movements was to save the church for the next generation, each of these movements shared one thing in common, and that is … I’ll tell you at the end of the sermon.
