From the Loch a Tuath News February 2000

My recent visit to England was an exciting and yet a sobering one. It was exciting to the extent that preaching the Gospel in a new place is always thrilling, and because Yorkshire is one of the most beautiful counties in all England. I was enthusiastically welcomed, and it was good to meet up with old friends and meet many new ones. For a Presbyterian minister to have been so warmly received into independent evangelical, and even Strict Baptist, congregations, says much about the true unity that Christians have in Jesus Christ. What they have in common is far greater than what divides them.

But it was a sobering visit also. In towns of 70,000 people and upwards, the evangelical cause is pitifully and lamentably small. Congregations of 80 to 100 people, representing less than 1% of the population in some cases, meet to worship God and to share in the fellowship of the Gospel. Although the Gospel is preached in many Anglican circles, it is predominantly in the nonconformist congregations of independent and evangelical believers that it is faithfully and consistently maintained.

We ought to thank God for men with a vision for lost souls and for a perishing world who struggle to maintain such a witness to the truth. The pastor of the congregation where I preached on the Lord's Day has accepted a call to Haworth (read Faith Cook's thrilling biography of William Grimshaw of Haworth if you can), to a congregation of FOUR members. He is going there with a burden for the unchurched, and a desire to see God's truth and God's cause maintained. He was telling me that he cannot recommend any church in nearby Huddersfield -- a University town with a huge student population -- to any enquiring student or visitor looking for an evangelical church.

Men like that are a credit to the Gospel and to the vision of the kingdom of Christ. They may sing hymns and use organs, but they put me to shame. They would not let me have communion in their church because I have not been baptised by total immersion, but I still pray for them that their ministries will be richly blessed by God.

Surely we need to learn lessons for ourselves from all of this. First, that we ought to appreciate what we have. A God-honouring, Bible-centred, Christ-exalting ministry is the greatest thing we can possibly have in this world. I have no doubt at all that if the recent troubles in the Free Church have done anything, they have brought the ministry of the word into disrepute, and served to distract from the glory and preciousness of a faithful gospel witness. We need to re-open our eyes, lest we appreciate the value of having a dominant evangelical witness in our community only when it is removed from us.

Second, we need to learn that we are not alone in the work of the Gospel. Troubles and difficulties often cause us to think, as they did Elijah long ago, that only we are left, and that what we have left is worth little. But we need to learn that there are others who have not bowed to Baal, and who love the same doctrines of grace and the same teachings of our Saviour just as we do ourselves. For that reason alone, we ought to re-capture the vision of the glory of the gospel and the glory of the Church of Christ.

Third, we must learn that the success of the church is not measured in terms of quantity. If it was a sin for David to count the people, it can be a sin for ourselves also. We can be obsessed with how many were in attendance at a given time or in a stated meeting. Our obsession can often lead to despair. Don't get me wrong -- I still dream of a full church, and rejoice to see young and old meeting together, as many as possible of them, as often as possible. Yet there is room.

But at the end of the day, what we are is infinitely more important than how many we are. Let us make sure that we are most in the main things. Even in Back.