The Pattern for the Church

From The Sword & Trowel 2013   

This article about the sufficiency of Scripture presents Bible texts showing that the apostles established a pattern, standard or model for the church of all ages.

When we speak of the sufficiency of Scripture, we mean that the Word of God provides all that we need to know in order to be saved, to be sanctified, to worship, and to organise and operate the church of God (2 Timothy 3.16-17).
   Historically, Baptists, Independents, and Brethren have been notably keen to take account of the last part of this definition, believing that there is a ‘pattern’ church in the New Testament, the apostles having consciously left an authoritative blueprint for churches to the end of the age.
   It is true that the pattern church of the New Testament has never been popular with denominations that reflect the very earliest stage of the Reformation, such as Lutherans and Anglicans, who inherit their clerical and liturgical systems (cleaned up doctrinally) from the Church of Rome. They took the view that Christians may devise for themselves church organisation, methods and manner of worship, limiting the sufficiency of Scripture to salvation and sanctification. (Evangelical Anglicans still hold this limited view.)
   Most evangelicals, however, until recently, believed they should seek to identify and follow the New ­Testament prescription for the church. But times change, and now we hear the voices of those who know better than the Lord, and who abandon the sufficiency  of Scripture and its authority on church matters.
   They tell us we should be ‘doing church’ (their term) differently, and reorganising everything to suit the culture of the world. The wheel of the church is to be re-invented. Congregations will never look the same. There is, they insist, no pattern church set out in the Bible.
   The Saviour said, ‘The scripture cannot be broken,’ but today’s ‘reformers’ think the traditional church found in the New Testament is out-of-date and unsuitable for the present age. They favour innovations that bring the world into the church in many ways.