As a friend of mine and I was talking about such things a few days a go, I got to wondering about the kind of impact a person's soteriology has on church model. I mean why are most home church guys calvinists. What about the missional movement? It is similar. Is it just because the early leaders of these models and movements were themselves a part of a particular theological brand or is there a deeper connection between theology and methodology?
A brief review:
Calvinistic Soteriology: Calvinists (who like to be referred to as reformed) emphasize God's sovereignty in the salvation process. Man has nothing to do with getting saved. God chose whom He will regenerate in eternity past and each individual discovers his or her election in life. This discovery is made through a person's faith and obedience.
How does this affect a church model? It doesn't (as has been accused) usually mean that the church is not evangelistic. Some of the fastest growing most effective churches in the world would consider themselves reformed.
It may however affect how the salvation event is motivated. For example, a Reformed church may not feel any disregard for presenting the gospel in obedience terms since that is a part of the process of discovering your regeneration. One well known Reformed teacher, John Piper encourages pastors to "keep his people saved" by which he means that the pastor should regularly challenge the people on matters of holiness and obedience so that they are compelled to live in righteousness out of fear that if they don't, then they aren't genuinely saved. I am not here to debate whether this is logical or biblical (or even traditionally reformed), but only to point out that such a tactic would throughly affect one's church model.
In such a case (or anywhere obedience is emphasized as a part of discovering, proving or acquiring salvation) I can see where any attractiveness to an event might get in the way. The attractiveness may have a tendency to be replaced with "if you are really saved then you won't need all that wow and flash to be lured to Christ". Again, this doesn't necessarily fit reformed churches that I know about, but I can see how this may be an affect.
On the positive side (at least to me), this mentality may free the church from being real pushy with gospel which usually results in a church being more effective in getting people to respond to it since people don't want to be berated by persuasion. Many of the top-tier churches (top tier in growth, conversions, baptisms, etc.) do not have a public altar call any more because they think it falsifies the conversion experience.
Non-Calvinist Soteriology: It may be a little hard to discuss such a broad category. Everything from "total works based" to the "social gospel" to simple, non-predetermined faith can be placed in this category.
From the "it is all up to man" category, you can see where a church may turn into a "self-help seminar" every weekend with its leaders trying to persuade the crowd to start being better people. Salesmanship is at its highest in this category.
The social gospel guys would be similar except that they would need to turn the issue into a social concern and community service factory. That is what they would have to sell.
As far as the people who understand salvation to be by faith alone, but that the faith is not predetermined... well that will be covered in the topic "Free Grace" below.
Lordship Soteriology: This position is basically the same as the reformed position, though not all adherents of one are adherents of the other. People who hold to this view are characterized by the belief that people must submit to Jesus as the Boss of their life before they are saved (in addition to simple faith) or, another way to put it, commit to do what Jesus says. You can easily see the similarities between the reformed position and the works position. (It could be argued that it is simply a works salvation soteriology.)
This perspective likes to challenge people often emphasizing the difficulty of being a Christian. Methodologically, what might happen is that the church focuses often on challenging the authenticity of a persons salvation leaving not so much a mark on the methodology impact but an imprint on the atmosphere. Sometimes the public invitation is emphasized as a way to "prove" your sincerity.
There could also be more emphasis on getting saved in these churches as opposed to discipleship since they often consider a person who is not growing as not genuinely being saved so they focus on helping people getting "really" saved.
Free Grace: This position suggests that a person is converted simply by trusting in Christ to do everything it takes for them to be saved. It emphasizes faith in Christ as the only prerequisite for salvation.
These churches often allow a person to be saved at any point in their journey without requiring any additional proof. They often do not have a public invitation and sometimes simply ask people to acknowledge if they have been saved at some point during the year in periodic services that emphasize this.
Often in these churches discipleship is the emphasis of the ministry since salvation is so simple and easy, they expect that people are getting saved and so they need to help them take the next steps (which aren't as connected to the legitimacy of conversion as in some of the systems above).
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Ultimately, the main areas that seem to be affected by your salvation doctrine are how you might move a person through a discipleship process in your church, how you might ask people to respond to a service and/or acknowledge their decision. If a church considers the stages of discipleship something very concrete then they might have more of tendency to develop the church along the lines of a process to help move people along the steps in this process. Whereas if a church believes that conversion fixes everything they may simply re-emphasize salvation over and over.
What do ya'll think?
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