Dangerous Doctrines Destroying the Church

November 25, 2025

Host: Dr. Jamie Mitchell

Guest: Richard Bargas

Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 11/25/25. To listen to the podcast, click HERE.

Jamie Mitchell:

Good afternoon and welcome to another hour of Stand in the Gap. Today I am your host, Jamie Mitchell, director of church culture at the American Pastor’s Network. Here’s a question to start off your Thanksgiving week, what constitutes a church? Now, don’t answer too quickly because the answer may not be as clear as you might think. Some might say People who love Jesus, well, that’s a great start, but is there more? Some may become very practical and say, well, we have to have a building or an IRS 5 0 1 C3 status, incorporation papers, and for the administrative side of things. That’s very helpful and it also keeps us out of legal trouble. And then there are those who start describing some of a church’s programs. What is interesting is that today many trying to explain the church leave out an essential aspect of what makes a church distinct, and that is doctrinal clarity like an agreed upon statement of faith.

You see, 20, maybe 30 years ago knowing what a church believes its theological framework that the church would have, that would’ve been paramount. It would’ve been a key distinction when finding and joining a church, but not today, either asking for a church’s statement of faith or publishing or making some public notice of it is a thing of the past. And to be honest, much of the turmoil and mission drift that we see in many evangelical churches today are directly tied to their unwillingness or even avoidance of providing doctrinal clarity. Let me give you a personal example. This past summer, my wife and I, we moved and we went looking for a new church. We were shocked by how many churches did not have their doctrinal statement available for potential attenders to examine. It was literally like trying to find the holy grail. The result of this aversion to doctrinal clarity is that there are many theological issues that are rising up and causing divisions and factions in churches today. Today with the help of my friend Dr. Richard Bargas, who is the executive director of IFCA International, we want to explain these dangerous doctrines that are dividing churches today. Well, welcome back, Richard to stand in the gap today and have a very happy Thanksgiving. So glad that you could be with us this special week.

Richard Bargas:

Hey, Jamie, thanks. It’s great to be with you and with your listeners and happy Thanksgiving to you as well.

Jamie Mitchell:

Richard, you heard my opening and having discussed some of this together before the broadcast. I know you have some similar concerns, especially with somebody who is the executive director of a whole fellowship of churches. With this in mind, why have churches deemphasized this whole idea of having doctrinal clarity and from what you have seen, how problematic is it?

Richard Bargas:

Yeah, that’s a major issue I see as well, and I think maybe two reasons. The first one is that churches naturally are wanting to attract more people, and so if you have less friction so to speak, for a couple, a family, an individual that join your church, by not putting all these specifics in that maybe people won’t align with, then you might draw in more people, so get more generic and you probably will find more people attracted to your church. But I think there’s a second reason it’s probably worse and it’s the church is struggling with the fact that they don’t see doctrine as a thing that needs to be precise, so there’s less precision in the church regarding doctrine. So there’s kind of this laissez faire attitude about doctrine. They want to move from splitting hairs over cultural stuff, the length of skirts and hair length and all of that to it’ll all pan out in the end type of theology. We don’t need to be specific. Let’s just love one another, sing kumbaya around the fireplace and everybody will be happy and get along. And that’s really not true because when you have less precision, then you often have more problems that come because people within the same church don’t always agree on some really important doctrinal issues.

Jamie Mitchell:

Richard, as I was getting ready today and thinking about this program, one of the observations I have made, and I want you to weigh in on this is that over the last, let’s say 15, 20 years, churches have been hiring more people from within their church instead of hiring seminary trained or Bible college trained people to be in pastoral roles. Are you seeing that as you look around at churches today?

Richard Bargas:

I see it a little bit. There’s some really good things about hiring somebody from within. They know the church, they love the church, the people know them. It’s better than have a guy preach a couple times and then hire him to be the shepherd of your church. Part of it is because men to fill pulpits, good pastors are really in short demand and there’s just not a lot of them coming out of seminaries. And I think it’s great that churches disciple, but I think sometimes you’re right when we get men that are not quite yet ready, we’re grabbing them before they’ve matured, we’re before they’ve developed theology, and we’re just kind of hoping that they’ll get in line with it. There are whole associations of churches that that’s the way they do things and their turnaround by these men of getting burned out and really not knowing how to handle things, backing into theology instead of learning it upfront and then going into a church is pretty devastating to the church.

I think that’s a major problem. I hope it’s not as widespread as you’ve seen it. I haven’t seen it as much, but out of the desperation that people have because they can’t find a pastor, that may be happening more and more and I think we really need to consider how deep that discipleship is. We need to make sure our guys that are leading our churches really, really know their stuff because the enemy’s going to come at them and if they don’t know the word, they’re going to have some serious challenges and they’re going to drag the church through it. So I think you’re right,

Jamie Mitchell:

Richard, 30, 40 years ago in a given year, I would attend three, maybe four ordination councils for men who wanted to be tested and like my ordination was four and a half, five hours long and they took me through the wringer, but there was something comforting about that because you really had to prepare and have some of your peers ask you hard theological questions. I mean, I haven’t been to an ordination council in probably 15 years. How about yourself?

Richard Bargas:

Yeah, I’ve been blessed to be able to participate in some, and there are some thorough ordinations out there. I’m involved in one in a church in Leavenworth, Kansas right now that’s very thorough, so I’m really encouraged by that. There are lots of churches that are faithful and still doing it, but there are some that just don’t take that seriously. And I think you’re right down the road when the warfare gets really heated that it’s easy for a man to start questioning his call and say, I don’t know if I’m fit for this. I don’t know if I’m cut out for this. Maybe I’ll go back to selling insurance or working in the supermarket because it’s getting tough out here. So I think you’re right.

Jamie Mitchell:

Well, friends, if I have said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times, clarity is not our enemy. Nevertheless, throughout evangelical Christianity there is a pursuit of ambiguity to keep things cloudy, fuzzy, non-committal, and it may be for, as Richard said, to attract more people. When we return, we want to dig into some specific doctrines that we see that are dividing churches today. Our topic today, dangerous doctrines destroying the church. Don’t go anywhere. Stay with us here and stand in the gap today. Well welcome back to our program today that we’ve entitled Dangerous Doctrines that are Dividing churches. Richard Bargas, who heads up IFCA, internationals are our guest. Richard, we might as well just jump right into the fire. When talking about doctrinal sloppiness in churches today, I want to talk about Christian liberty. Is it me or has there been a real loosening of our idea of sanctification, Christian liberty and the pursuit of holiness and a much more slide towards worldliness and is that just an issue of practice of the Christian life or is there some doctrinal issues that are being neglected?

Richard Bargas:

Yeah, there’s definitely in some sectors of the church, this again, I think some of it is at attractional, you add Jesus to your lifestyle. It’s the Instagram Christian life where you can have all your fun, you can look trim and fit and live whatever life the unbelieving world out there is. Plus you’ve got Jesus on top of it. There is this kind of rising of antinomianism, some areas of hyper grace teaching. I’ve heard some teachers say, we need to focus on what the scripture says in the indicatives, what Jesus has done. We don’t need to emphasize the imperatives. What I must do, and the danger of that is that scripture teaches both indicatives and imperatives. It is what Jesus has done and because of what he has done, I am set free and given liberty so that I might follow Christ because without holiness, no one will see God.

Scripture says, but that’s been painted over in some places where people really want to draw in. It’s very attractive to the younger crowd, especially if they’ve come from a form of Christianity, and I’ll put that in air quotes where it’s works-based, maybe Mormonism or a hyper fundamentalism where they’ve been told Jesus doesn’t love you if you don’t do the right things or you’re not saved if you don’t do these things. And of course salvation is by grace alone. It always has been. It’s never been anything other than that and responding to those perversions of a false gospel. There are some sectors, some churches that have been emphasizing freedom to live however you’d like, and unfortunately in that overemphasis of grace, they have now overcome what the scriptures call us to, which is to be like Jesus, to live like Jesus, even if it’s imperfect, and that produces a lot of worldliness and a lot of heartache really in the church when people are living in ways that are very destructive that the Lord doesn’t want them to live in and yet they’re stamping it with the approval of their local church, which is sad to watch.

Jamie Mitchell:

Richard, you’ve picked up something, and I think you’ve said it a couple of times, that they’re out of fear of losing people or not attracting people. Pastors because we control the pulpit. We are the mouthpiece of the church. We either ignore or avoid or play down certain things. I know as a young man growing up in the church, it was taught that we are to, as Romans 14 and 15 lays out for us we’re to be concerned for other brothers. We’re never to do something in our liberty or freedom that would cause somebody who’s weaker and not established and doesn’t have those freedoms to get caught up in sin where they can’t handle it. But I mean that message of being concerned for another brother and deciding out of love not to do certain things, boy, we just don’t hear that from the pulpit much these days and I think it’s a detriment to the maturing of a church. How about, is that what you’re seeing?

Richard Bargas:

Yeah, I think you’re right that we have forgotten that one of the aspects of the fruit of the spirit is self-control. And we see in Matthew 18 where Jesus tells his disciples, this is what you need to do when a brother sins against you. And it goes through those, that process of what we call church discipline, but I think not in that passage but elsewhere taught in scripture, what we often forget is there is the aspect of self-discipline that comes if you discipline yourself, if you buffet your body so that you are pleasing to the Lord and not to yourself, then you won’t have to have people come to you and confront you in your sin. John taught this very clearly in one John two where he tells us not to love the world or the things in the world, but that’s a very different message.

And you’ll hear in many churches, they’ll say, well, it’s not that big of a deal. We are free in Christ. And when you see what Paul writes about what the Corinthians were doing, you recognize there was a lot of danger in that mentality that said, I can do whatever I want and then if it starts to harm, I’m going to back away a little bit because once sin gets good control of us and it tempts us into these things, James tells us that that leads to death and we want to stay not as close as we can to sin, but as far as we can from sin. And that message is just not being taught like you said, and there are people out there faithfully doing that. And for your listeners that are preaching, holiness is of the Lord, I commend them, they need to keep doing it. Don’t buy into the lie. Don’t worry if your churches start to see. They never get really big. Some of the big, not all big churches, but some of the big churches are compromising in serious areas, and that’s concerning to all of us. It should be

Jamie Mitchell:

Richard, if the liberty issue didn’t get us in trouble. The next topic will, and that’s about sexuality. Obviously issues like homosexuality, acceptance, fear of speaking against transgender and related issues are being both avoided and compromised today in many evangelical churches. Again, is that happening because pastors and leaders are sloppy when it comes to theological clarity in their churches?

Richard Bargas:

Yeah, I would say that when I use the word sloppy, I usually think of somebody that’s not taking care that’s being careless, and I wish it was more a carelessness, but I think instead it’s an intentionality amongst leaders in the church who are being careless with doctrine and having low views of scripture for specific reasons because they do want to allow these things. Again, I don’t want to keep beating this dead horse about being attractional, but that’s what we’re seeing is we want big churches, we want mega churches, we want lots and lots of people, and so we keep lowering the scriptural standards of what does the gospel say a true believer is so that we are accepting the worst sins into the church and not calling people to embrace the gospel, which would lead to a true heart change, which would lead to a true lifestyle change.

So a low view of theology and doctrine leads to all sorts of problems including apostasy into these sexual sins that you mentioned. And if a church is too timid to say what it believes, which goes back to the well, they don’t say anything in their doctrinal statement because their doctrinal statement is the apostle’s creed or something incredibly short. We can’t expect that it will address sin in a biblical way if they’re so ashamed right at the front door in the yellow pages of the 21st century on their website. If they won’t even tell you what they believe there, then they’re already timid about doctrine. They’re already ashamed about what the Bible says because they don’t want to lose any prospective clients or customers, if you will. Instead of saying, we want you to know what we believe because we want you to be an informed believer. We want you to come to our church, we want you to fit in well. We want you to know that we call sin sin and we want to welcome you in because we worship a holy God here. It’s more of a marketing tactic, which is really disturbing. I got to wonder if Jesus would even recognize churches the way that sometimes they market themselves in ways that are, I think very anti-Christian and not very much like Jesus would have our church’s look,

Jamie Mitchell:

Richard, the late John MacArthur, I think he used to say something like this, I’m not quoting him exact, but he used to say, why in the world would the world want to be a part of the church that isn’t any more different than what the world that they’re in? There would be absolutely nothing different to the world, but in the church, especially if we get our theological ducks in order, the world will see what we believe and why we believe it and held to that. Here’s another thought, Richard about this a couple of years ago. It was really important to have a lot of these doctrinal issues like your view of homosexuality and change, gender and marriage and abortion actually written out so that you wouldn’t get yourself in legal trouble. We got about a minute left. That is still a real concern why churches better have their theological ducks in order.

Richard Bargas:

Yeah, it is increasingly important. Now, if you’re going to just compromise left and right, then you’re not going to have legal issues. You’re going to welcome everybody in and there’s not going to be a problem because you’re never going to oppose anybody. I suppose at some point you would want to draw a line, but I think those that are the warm and welcoming, they just want to bring everybody in. They’re flying the multicolored flags and all of that, they’re probably not going to get sued as much. But for our conservative churches that want to do what scripture says and they want to live according to the Bible, and maybe they’re trying to bring in as many people, but they don’t really want to compromise, then that is a big warning sign for them. They need to beware that if they don’t put that stuff right out there, if they don’t preach those messages that teach their views and they do get taken to court, then it’s going to be hard for them to prove that that is what they truly believe that’s a conviction, not just something that they kind of loosely hold to and feel strongly about, but aren’t willing to go to the map for it.

So I think those are really, really important things for churches to think about.

Jamie Mitchell:

Churches are getting weak and fuzzy on these issues that the Bible speaks clearly about. When Richard comes back, we’re going to talk about how your church is handling the issue of Israel and antisemitism, a major doctoral issue that’s dividing churches. Well, I know that theology and topics that are more doctrinally bent are maybe not what the stand in the gap is known for. We don’t talk a lot about it, but we do believe that if churches drift away from their conservative biblical orthodoxy roots, churches will lose their ability to speak the truth on other areas and more of say the topics that we do deal with here at Standard the Gap. That’s why this program is important. We’re talking about doctrines that are dividing churches are dangerous where there’s a drift happening. Richard, I want you to speak on the issue of Israel. It, it’s in the news a lot, and I’m concerned because I think the Evangelical church is losing its voice. How is it that many evangelical churches are moving in the realm of looking like they’re antisemitic, and how does this happen? What do we need to watch for in our churches?

Richard Bargas:

Well, I think we need to always be careful not to broad brush those that have differing views from us. And so coming from a dispensational point of view, I don’t want to say that all of my brothers that are covenantal agree on this. Many of them see that there is a future plan for Israel, and I recognize that many of them do see that in scripture and they don’t deny that. So I want to be careful not to broad brush, but I think that what we have to watch for in our churches is we have to be making sure that our churches stick to the Bible, not to our political views. Our political views should be held captive to Christ. So if we teach the Bible, what I’ve found is that whatever stripe you might be of Christian, if you believe the Bible and you understand the Bible in its normal sense, you’re not spiritualizing it and allegorizing it, you’re saying this is what it means you’re sticking close to its literal sense, then you’re probably going to understand that God loves his people Israel, even though they are disobedient, even though they’ve rejected their Messiah, we know that in the end that they will see the error of their ways.

They’ll look upon him whom they have pierced and they will come to Christ. And so I think if we stick to the Bible, then we will be way ahead of those that have drifted because they’ve begun to make the Bible say something other than what it clearly says. God’s word is clear. He has a future plan for Israel. And so those often of the reformed covenantal stripe, those pastors, they believe that because it’s what the Bible says, those that reject it, those that reject the future for Israel and some not a lot, but enough, and they’re vocal enough that have gone to the extreme and have even become antisemitic that they are not reading the Bible for what it says. They’re making the Bible say something absolutely different than what it says. Some of them are using excuses from history. Some of them are using alternate ways of interpreting the Bible so that it says something different than what it says.

And if your church is not teaching you what the Bible says, if they read a passage and they say, now it looks like it says that, but really let me explain it to you. And then they spiritualize it, they change the clear meaning of it, they plug and play where they take Israel out and they drop the church in there, things like that. Then I would say, you need to be cautious. Watch what they’re doing, you believe or stick close to what the Bible says, and that will help you from moving in that same direction. And if it gets bad enough, you have some conversations with your pastor and it seems like they’re pretty hardcore going to stay with that view, then you might want to think about looking for a church that you might fit in better.

Jamie Mitchell:

Richard, a couple of the reasons that I think that this has gone in a bad direction is again, something we’ve talked about numbers of times on this program, and this is the whole attraction mindset, reaching the loss, not offending people who are maybe unchurched or unsaved and they’re unfamiliar with the church. I saw it 15, 20 years ago when there was this aversion to talk about prophecy at any level, pastors would say, oh, we don’t want to get into that. That’s going to scare people. Or it sensationalizes the Bible and yeah, I believe these things, but to the common unsaved person, it’s weird. And so they began to deemphasize the issues of prophecy. And once you do that, you really take Israel and the future of Israel out of the conversation of the church. That would be a big red flag. Wouldn’t you say that if a pastor just doesn’t want to preach on prophecy, avoids it and even downplays it to the point of saying, Hey, it’s not necessary. That would be a step in a direction away from their concerns of Israel.

Richard Bargas:

Yeah, I mean, if a pastor doesn’t want to teach any major doctrine, that should be a red flag to us. But if they have these kind of laissez-faire attitudes of any doctrine, including eschatology where they say, yeah, I’m not going to touch that, it’s too hard. I mean, if they’re trained, they have the tools, they should be able to teach those things. And sometimes they don’t want to be controversial. They want to have a whole bunch of different views represented in their church, which is fine, but you should teach according to your conviction of what the word of God says so that everybody is taught that Oftentimes a pastor will say, I don’t really have an opinion, or I haven’t developed it yet, and it’s all under a guise of humility and just want to be humble in my orthodoxy and say, there’s so many men that have great minds throughout church history that have just disagreed on this, so I’m not even going to touch it.

That’s not humility, honestly. I think that’s cowardice in many ways because they don’t want to touch something that they know might be unpopular, but they need to dig into the word and just like every part of the word of God is precious, and it’s all useful for teaching and correction and training and righteousness. So the man of God would be adequately equipped. They shouldn’t avoid it. If you avoid teaching eschatology, it’s not just a book of revelation. You avoid massive pieces of the Bible all through the old and New Testament, and if you avoid those parts of the Bible because of your hermeneutic, because of your rules of interpretation, you know what it’s going to impact other non eschatological sections as well, those passages that don’t talk about the end times. If you come with a different hermeneutic, a different set of rules, you’re going to come up with a different interpretation, so you can’t get out of it by just not teaching it.

And in some ways, not being honest, I told some people when I was growing up, if me and my brothers were playing soccer and I had a different set of rules than my brothers had, and I won the game every single time because I changed the rules at the crucial moment when they were going to score a point that wouldn’t be called sophisticated, that would be called cheating. You can’t cheat when the results are going to be something that you don’t want when the outcome is going to be different than you want. So you change the rules. And unfortunately, that’s really what happens when we’re talking about eschatology, and that’s the reason why it gets controversial is because some interpreters will look at it and go, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But right there in Revelation where it lays out 12,000 tribes over and over and over and over and over again 12 times, then that equals 144 thousands representing all of Israel.

That doesn’t mean Israel. It says 12,000, and it names an Israelite tribe and it says that it’s Israel, but it doesn’t really mean Israel. Well, you’ve just changed the rules, and if you change the rules to mean something because you don’t like the interpretation, well, in my book, that’s cheating. That makes it easy on you bend the scriptures to say what you want it to say, and that is very dangerous. So I think that’s part of the problem is it’s just people not wanting to commit to the proper teaching of the word of God. And there’s a lot of people that say, well, I used to believe that I don’t anymore, but they don’t have any valid reasons for it. And I think we can stand firmly on the literal interpretation of the scriptures and be confident that God who speaks clearly in all the other passages can speak clearly and does speak clearly through those passages. Eschatology,

Jamie Mitchell:

Richard, you may or may not have an answer for this, and that’s fine, but we’re finding that pastors who used to hold a very pro-Israel theological position like we have here at a PN and like I know you do at IFCA have slid away from that. They’ve embraced replacement theology. They see no redemptive future for Israel. Why is that happening? I know churches that woke up one day, they asked for the church’s doctoral statement only to be shocked that the position on Israel have changed sometimes in the past, and no one gave them heads up on that. Why is that happening?

Richard Bargas:

Well, it’s happening for a lot of reasons. One is that churches aren’t guarding their church by who they hire as their pastor. Their pastor’s commitments were not to understand the literal interpretation of scripture, which would, if they understood scripture literally, then they would be committed to a pro-Israel theological position because that’s what scripture teaches. So if they didn’t watch the gates when they hired the man who stands in the pulpit, he may have been slowly teaching them something different and they didn’t recognize it. It’s the frog in the kettle. It’s slowly heating up and they don’t realize they’re boiling. It’s also because over time what has changed is we’ve seen that young restless reform movement where younger men were being drawn into more covenantal teaching and teachers, and as they started being drawn into these big conferences and more writing and books and things like that, they were swayed into thinking differently about these things. They went along with that group and said, well, they’ve rejected it. And if all of these men whom I greatly respect don’t believe this, then I don’t believe this. Not great theological arguments, not exegetical arguments, but oftentimes it was just an argument because they didn’t see anything different. And so you got to be careful with that kind of reasoning.

Jamie Mitchell:

Hey, Richard, when we finish up, we want to talk about polity in the church and other things that are messing with the church theologically. Don’t go anywhere. It’s always a joy to have Richard Bargas from IFCA International as a guest here at Stand In the Gap today, especially when we’re talking about issues like theology and doctrine. I can assure you an organization like IFCA takes that very seriously. Richard, can you take a moment and tell our audience how they can find out about A FCA and why it would be a great resource for a pastor or a church that may be listening today?

Richard Bargas:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Our motto is grounded in scripture advancing the cause of Christ, and we do that by proclaiming the scripture, equipping the saints, and defending the faith. We’re a network of local pastors, missionaries, Christian workers in general, and churches and organizations, and we network together. We’re not a denomination, but we network together so that we can advance the cause of Christ. If your listeners want to hear more about us and read up on us, you can find us on the web@ifca.org or you can listen to our podcast advancing the Cause. You can find that on your favorite podcast, streaming service, or we have a YouTube channel. You can watch it or listen to it on YouTube as well.

Jamie Mitchell:

That’s great. And would commend that to you, especially if as you’ve been listening today and you’re concerned about some of the doctrinal issues happening in your church, is Richard, one of my great concerns as I see the church today as I interact with pastors, as I visit churches, is the issue of polity. Now, when we say polity, we’re talking about how the church is governed, how it’s led, and part of the concern is the shift to allowing women to take on roles of elder or pastoral roles. How does this happen and why are we seeing this? And is this just another evidence of a theological drift happening in the churches today?

Richard Bargas:

Yeah, I think it is. I think some of it comes for pragmatic reasons. If a church is trying to draw in more people, if they’re being pragmatic in the way that they look at doctrine and say, is this helpful in bringing more people in? Is it not? So they pander to the feminist agenda that many evangelical churches have accepted this idea that the world is selling and they’ve bought it a hook, line and sinker. And so they’re saying, yeah, there’s no reason why. Another reason is they’ve compromised on the world. The world has distorted for its own desires. They’ve compromised on what the word teaches. And they said, it doesn’t necessarily have to mean that. It doesn’t say that. Well, that’s a cultural thing. They’ve got all the arguments down. But really, if you put it to the scrutiny of the word of God, it doesn’t stand.

It doesn’t hold water. It’s a very unpopular view to hold. There’s two views. There’s the egalitarian view that men and women are equal. And then there’s the complimentarian view, which I believe is the biblical view that says that God has created men and women and they complement each other, but they are not the same, and that the leadership of the church, the pastors and the elders are to be men. And then it’s debatable. It’s questionable whether or not the scripture teaches that you can have male deacons and female deacons or only male deacons, and they’re split. Conservatives are split on their view because of some evidence that may go one way or the other. But you won’t find that anybody is satisfied with just female deacons deaconess. They really want to push beyond that. And so when you make the scripture say whatever you want to say, when you can take the clear teachings of scripture and you can minimalize them, and you can allegorize them and let culture lay over the top of our interpretation of scripture along with all the identity politics that are in our world, then the scripture doesn’t mean anything at all.

You can make it to say whatever you want it to say. And so unfortunately, that is happening as well. And when a church doesn’t care as much about doctrine, whether it’s on eschatology or church polity or on a whole host of issues, well then you have no more guard. The scriptures act like a guardrail for the church. And when you discard that, then your church is going to go careening off a cliff one day and it’ll end up killing the church. Because down the road, if you’re going to live like the world, there’s no reason why you need to go to church to live like the world. You can be a full-blown feminist and never go to church. You can be a homosexual, a transgender, you can be whatever you want to be a drunkard. You can be a fornicator. Why would you ever want to go to church? You don’t need to go to church to do that. You can do that outside of the church. And those churches are just hollow shells. No longer the glory is left, and they’re no longer churches. They may have a cross on the building, but God is no longer there. So we could call ’em churches because of the building, but they really aren’t churches anymore.

Jamie Mitchell:

Richard, tell me if I am hitting the right note here. When I see a church having a crisis in regards to their view of polity and the exclusive nature of men being in those pastoral elder roles, it usually starts because they’re out of whack when it comes to household order and the family roles of husbands being the leader of the home, the wife being a submissive, and we even hate using that word, but it’s a biblical word, being a co-leader, but submitted to the husband and then together leading their children. When that household order breaks down theologically, it’s just one step away from the polity of the church being messed with. Isn’t that really an underlying theological issue?

Richard Bargas:

It is. And a lot of churches, the reason that ladies have stepped up to their credit is they recognize things aren’t getting done in the church, and there’s no men to do them. There’s no discipleship amongst men. There’s no training of men. The men are very passive, and many of them don’t even come. And it just kind of spirals because as the church becomes more feminine in its leadership, that is even less attractive to men. And so you have women that fill that role, and then the church just ends up becoming very unbiblical. We have had churches that have traditionally been okay with women in leadership. I know that we have received questions from United Methodist churches that have said, we’re leaving the Methodist denomination and we want to be biblical. We want to be in line with what scriptures teach. We want to be independent.

No longer belong to the domination. We’re in that fight on this side, but we want to know about your organization. IFCA. Can we become members of IFCA? It sounds great. We love everything we’re reading. We want to be biblical. And then we say, well, what about your women’s women elders and your woman pastor? Are you working on a plan to change that because that is out of line with scripture? Oh, no, no, no, no. Do you know of any organization that allows this but is biblical? Well, see, those are counter to each other and they won’t find anything that’s truly biblical. They want this one little compromise. It’s the little bit of leprosy that they want to keep hidden in their bosom that will end up killing the church down the road. The church has to be pure. Jesus wants a pure bride, and yet sometimes we just want our little pet, our pet sin, and let’s just allow a little bit of this.

Let’s not call these things out. Let’s be loving. Jesus was loving. Therefore, that means we should compromise with sin. And of course, that happens in this idea of allowing women to be pastors or even playing the games where you have a woman pastor over children, or she’s an elder, but she’s not a pastor, or she’s an associate pastor, but she’s not the senior pastor. All those are just games that are just a slippery slope that is going to completely give itself over to the full blown egalitarian view. And that is an egalitarian view, but it’s not recognized by those that aren’t aware of the schemes of how that works. But yeah, you’re right. And it’s a sad thing to watch because they may be biblical in many other areas, but if you’ve not obeyed the word of God in one point, you’re not going to obey the God in others. And that’s the same argument that’s used by homosexuals to gain entry into the church as well. It’s a cultural thing. It should be acceptable. Let’s be loving. Let’s allow it.

Jamie Mitchell:

Richard. Richard, thank you. You are always a great encouragement, my friend. Hey, I have homework assignment. Go talk to your pastor, elder, Deacon, ask him for your church’s doctrine statement. Pull it out, review it, affirm it. Hey, the church needs help being doctrinally strong until tomorrow. Live and lead with courage.