Nuakh, July 6, 2023
When reading through 2 Timothy with some folk a few weeks back, I got a number of questions about some of Paul’s instructions that seemed very strange to my fellow readers.
There are a number of people that Paul seems to not want Timothy to associate with. He lists some individuals but then at the start of chapter 3 describes a long list of character traits before saying ‘avoid such people’ in verse 5.
The question as people framed it was ‘why should we not associate with them, surely we want them to hear the gospel?’
I answered the question briefly, for the sake of time, explaining that you might go in thinking you’re going to pull other people out but actually you will be pulled in. For our own sakes we should be careful who we eat with (1 Corinthians 10).
I could have gone on to describe that in our day the most winning ‘strategy’ for the gospel is institutional subcultures… but I didn’t and I don’t want to write that post today either.
I’d like to draw out two threads that the questions revealed in people’s thinking, that I suspect are quite common.
Who are these people?
The assumption is that these people need to be preached the gospel, because they’re sinners. That’s a reasonable inference. What I think we miss is that, most likely, these people—these lovers of self and of money, proud, arrogant, disobedient to parents, abusive… he goes on at length—are within the church.
How do we know that? Context helps, Paul is instructing Timothy on how to deal with false teachers and quarrelling within the church. Beyond that though, the passage directly tells us: one of the dispositions listed is ‘having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power.’
To have the appearance of godliness, you need to be within the visible church.
Now, you might want to say that these apparent sinners within the church need to be called to repentance in the gospel. You’re right that they do. It’s fascinating then that Paul’s advice to Timothy is to avoid them.
What does he mean? In this instance something slightly different to his instructions to not share a table with demons (1 Corinthians 10). The context is Timothy passing on the deposit to others, so these are not the people to invest in as elders and deacons and teachers and pastors of the future. These aren’t the guys to stick on your leadership development programme.
Those of us who aren’t making those decisions should be careful in the same way though: don’t use all your time associating with Christians who don’t build you up in the love and worship of the Lord Jesus.
’For the gospel’
I like that Christians want to tell people the gospel. Evangelism is good. In 2 Timothy Paul tells Timothy to ‘do the work of an evangelist,’ (4.5).
The problem is when it becomes the only lens we can look through. Is the church supposed to grow through conversion? Yes!
Is God’s mission to fill the cosmos with the image(s) of his Son? Yes!
Are Christians therefore here to tell other people about Jesus? No. No, we’re not. Not primarily. We’re here to worship Jesus, that’s what the church is for, and to build the kingdom around us, which will include some evangelism but also includes a whole bunch of other stuff under the heading of ‘make disciples.’
It’s always worth noticing that the command to make disciples is not just make lots of new Christians, but also therefore to grow all those Christians up into maturity. Maturity might include sometimes not associating with certain people for your own sake—immaturity definitely should.
Churches are here for Christians—I’m just not convinced that the classic quip that the Church is the ‘only organisation that exists for the sake of it’s non-members’ is true. We exist for the sake of God.
We aren’t here for the sake of the gospel, but for Jesus.
If you encountered a faithful church that preached the word but didn’t grow numerically through conversion of outsiders (it might grow through the conversion of children, perhaps), even over the course of many years, I suspect many of us would think that church was failing. I want to say that we need more information to make that judgement.
If instead everyone is growing up into maturity through the ministry of Word and Sacrament, through eating and crying and living together, then that church is succeeding. Now if no outsiders are coming in because they are so insular that no one is telling their friends about Jesus at all, then there are some problems here (though no more so than in the church that does lots of telling about Jesus and sees conversions, but no one progresses to maturity). But if instead they do some evangelism, but it hasn’t as yet yielded fruit in conversions, but they grow in faith nevertheless—I suspect many of us want to see this is failure, I think I want to see it as failure, but it isn’t.
What’s the takeaway here? Maturity matters. Worshipping Jesus matters. That’s the church’s calling and purpose.
“Avoid such people”