Here we are, churches often are penetrated by false teachers, false ideas come along. You see this in the history of denominations in this country. Fine groups of churches begin to go downhill, error comes in and sooner or later somebody will appeal and say, ‘We can’t fellowship with this. We shouldn’t be standing shoulder to shoulder with these heretics.’ For example, if churches are in the so-called Baptist Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the vast majority of churches and ministers in that Union of churches are not evangelical believers at all. They are liberal, as we say, theological liberals, they deny the infallibility and the inspiration from cover to cover of the Bible. They deny some of the basic demands and truths of the gospel. Now there will be those who arise as C H Spurgeon did in the 19th century and they will say, ‘We will have no fellowship with those people. We will try to win them for the Lord but we must not recognise them as fellow Christians and work with them’, and the reasoning will come, ‘Wherefore come out from among them and be ye separate’ from this and other passages of Scripture. ‘Oh no,’ say some interpreters, ‘that has nothing to do with separating from people, say, in a denomination of churches, this is exclusively about idolatry.’ In other words, if somebody says he is a Christian, even though he rejects most of the basic tenets of the Christian faith, you don’t have to separate from him because he isn’t an idolater, you see. He is not actually worshipping idols. This is only about separating from the worship of idols and people like that. That is how this exhortation of Scripture is got rid of by so many people and so you’ll find those evangelical people often have stayed in those denominations while they have been just taken over by theological liberalism and their institutions and their colleges have been seized by unbelievers. It’s rather like the church at Corinth. Did they have a weakness? Yes, they had too little sense of danger, too little readiness to recognise things that are against the gospel of Christ and have nothing to do with them and that is why 200 years ago, 150 years ago, even 100 years ago, the vast majority of people in our historic denominations – the old Congregationalists, the Baptists, the Methodists and so on – were Bible believers, but now in this country there are hardly any left.
What does Scripture teach about the duty of separation? Although we often apply those words to marriage, the primary meaning of the passage is not about marriage. It is not about one person being joined to another person, but about Christians – plural – joining with unbelievers, with people who are not true Christians. It applies to churches, to congregations, to fellowships: we are not to have association with unbelievers. We cannot work with, cooperate with, partner with unbelievers. That is why evangelical churches must not be part of the ecumenical movement.
Now the problem comes when we talk about secondary separation. Secondary separation is this: it is separating from people – they may be true Christians, or they may claim to be – who themselves disobey God, because they do partnership with unbelievers. Now that is controversial. ‘Oh yes,’ we may say, ‘we cannot have fellowship, partnership, sharing, with unbelievers in spiritual things. Of course you can in the office, as colleagues, as co-workers, or in your family. God does not expect us to go out of the world where these relationships must be maintained. We can invite all unbelievers into our services, but we cannot recognise and relate with unbelievers in the things of God. But secondary separation is different. Here is my friend. He believes in the Lord. He has a Bible profession of faith, but he says, ‘I'm not going to take any notice of that, I am going to be ordained, say, into a world council of churches denomination, which is largely liberal. I'm going to work within it; I'm going to belong to this group.’ Now secondary separation says, if you can't persuade him and he is wilfully disobedient, and he won't apply God's rule for separation from error, then you must separate from him too, and that has been called secondary separation.
Nevertheless, there is scope for discretion. Supposing there is somebody like the late John Stott, who was Rector at All Souls. He believed that the Church of England should get together with Rome. He was an ecumenist. He believed that essentially we are all the same. He wrote that all people in good standing with the Catholic Church are to be regarded as true Christians. Dr Martyn Lloyd Jones in his lifetime separated from him because he said he denied the gospel. While John Stott said he believed the gospel, at the same time he thought that worship of Mary and all the ways of Rome were equivalent routes to salvation. So he denied the exclusive soul-saving efficacy of the gospel evangelically understood: repentance and faith, belief in Christ and the shed blood, and necessary conversion. But then there are many other people who are in the Church of England, who are converted people. They are earnest people, and even some clergy, and they’ve never thought about these things. They have just never realised that they shouldn't be in this compromised situation, or if they have, they are bothered about it and they are winnable. Now they are not as responsible. So you see there's room for discretion. Now if the man was a clergyman, I couldn't actually ask him to come and preach to me. I couldn't have public fellowship with him, and give him recognition. That would be just to create utter confusion and to mislead the people, but I could have private fellowship. So separation isn't so rigid that it doesn't take account of differences between people: some who are determined to disobey God, and others who just have not thought about these things.
But now there is a new issue. Years ago, these things were relatively straightforward. The problem was: theological liberals, deniers of the gospel. Yes, it's clear we should separate from them, and it's clear that we should be very cool towards Christians who fail to separate from them, because that’s obedience to God. But now there is a new cause for separation and that is this: worldliness in the church; people who don't deny essential doctrines – they say I am an evangelical, I believe the Bible, I believe in the shed blood of Christ; many of them say, I'm a Calvinist; I am Reformed – but then they go and spoil it all by saying, I believe though that we can use all sorts of worldly things. I disagree with the old tradition of Bible believing Christians that we should be separate from the world. I believe you can use all the worldly music; you can do worldly things. Now we find we are having to separate from people, not because they believe the wrong things, but because they do harmful and contradictory things, which are running churches and ruining Christian lives. They may be brethren but they're doing wrong and dangerous things. They've made the world right. They have adopted it, and they have employed it. So somebody says, ‘Oh, they're not enemies.’ No, but they are using the enemy's weapons. They are using the enemies’ teachings. They are making these things right. Effectively, their message is, ‘God doesn't mind booze; God doesn't mind worldliness; God doesn't mind all the counterculture that the world has produced which is antagonistic to biblical morality. God is not so holy; he doesn't mind all this kind of thing. He doesn't mind how you speak, how you behave, how worldly you are; he is not troubled.’ That is terrible, and they are coming into churches and campaigning to get churches to be turned into worldly places.
A few years ago the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical churches, which is quite a big group of independent churches in this country, which is evangelical, held along with others a tremendous big conference or assembly of sorts, and they asked well known entertainer singers, right out of the Charismatic constituency, to lead all the worship sessions. They brought in the Charismatics. The man they chose to be the chief entertainer, singer, Charismatic worship leader, for the whole conference of mostly non-charismatic churches; the man they brought in was a man who campaigns for extreme Charismatic teaching. He is opposed to and he ridicules and lampoons traditional godly reverent worship. He tries to persuade people away from it. They brought him in. They shouldn't have done that. He is using the enemy's tools, the enemy’s message. He makes himself, he takes the side of the enemy, to try to corrupt and loosen up churches so that they don't know the difference anymore between godliness and worldliness, and bring these things in. Separation now has to take account of all the harm done to the churches through all worldliness brought into the churches.