It is often said that too many people in Corinth wanted to be tongue speakers. What confusion! How useful is the church where all have the same gift? If the whole body were an eye, it would be a monster, and how could it ever function? Certainly it is the case that often there has been a tendency for people to think the church is a preacher, and that is very sad. Perhaps in the Victorian era this was quite common: only the preacher was appreciated; nothing else mattered very much, and there were some preachers who considered themselves to be God’s gift to the church. There was a church in London, not so very many years ago, which was a bit like that, and it had a fine preacher, and there is no doubt that he was a most marvellous preacher. There was the pulpit and the preacher, and the church was crowded, and it was a large church, but there was nothing much else in the church, not many other gifts being exercised, not a big Sunday school, not lots people all pulling their weight and sharing and exercising their different God-given roles. He was a very good preacher, and he preached the right things, and souls were saved and were nourished, but when he retired, the church very rapidly declined. And this magnificent church began to tumble at a great rate downhill. And within about 15 years, it was not only very much smaller, but error had come in, and had become a pretty wild charismatic church, and a fraction of its original size. How did that happen? It was because although there was a fine preacher, the church was only a preacher.
Charles Spurgeon was also a preacher, and what a great preacher, and what a vast crowd came to the Metropolitan Tabernacle. But there was more than the preacher. There was a working church, and there were hundreds and hundreds of people who did other things; and a vast Sunday School, and so much going on; and people who were shepherds and carers and compassionate work in the community, and many different ministries. When the great preacher died, there was a decline, but it was so much slower than the other church referred to. From 1892 the Tabernacle continued strong and pretty large, right up until the beginning of World War II. It was only when it was bombed out, and the whole area bombed and people moved away, that it really began to decline, and even then it kept the truth.