Dr Lloyd-Jones: Are All Disciples Ministering?

"Are our churches corresponding to the life of the New Testament church or is there too much concentration in the hands of minister and clergy?  Someone may say, "We provide opportunity for the gifts of others in week-night activities."  But I still ask, "Do we manifest the freedom of the New Testament church?"

      In other words, this is another reason why we must come back and consider the whole doctrine of the nature of the Church, and the marks of the Church.  By doing so we shall be solving, in detail, many of these particular points and problems which need to be reconsidered among us.

     When one looks at the New Testament church and contrasts the church today, one is appalled at the difference.  In the New Testament church one sees life and vigor and activity; one sees a living community, conscious of its glory and of its responsibility, with the whole church, as it were, an evangelistic force.  The notion of the people belonging to the Church in order to come to sit down and fold their arms and listen, with just two or three doing everything is quite foreign to the New Testament, and it seems to me it is foreign to what has always been the characteristic of the Church in times of revival and reawakening.

    We cannot just go on in the position we have inherited, which we inherited from mid and post-Victorianism and Edwardianism.  This machine is still running so many of these things, but is it running to any good purpose?  It is for us to call a halt and to stop."

- Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, was the primary teaching-elder at Westminster Chapel in London, England for 30 years.  This is an excerpt from Knowing the Times: Addresses Delivered on Various Occasions
(Banner of Truth Trust, 1989, pages 195-96)