Church dynamics

From Ray Ortlund:

“Some preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from good will. . . . What then?  Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice.”  Philippians 1:15, 18

A church can be controlled by a horizontal dynamic of winners-and-losers, the people focused on each other, disappointed with each other, grumbling about each other — self-righteousness bumping up against self-righteousness, hurting and getting hurt.

Or a church can be controlled by a vertical dynamic of response to Christ, the people looking upward, amazed at him and his grace — broken but grateful sinners coming together because all they need to be happy is Christ himself.

Your church might be dysfunctional.  But if Christ is being preached, even with impure motives, that should be enough to make you happy.  It might be all you’re going to get out of your church.  And if you require more, who gave you the right to overrule the Lord Jesus Christ as your only treasure and satisfaction and sufficiency?

Mercy: Who God Is, What He Does, What You Need

From a letter from David Powlison to a 13 year old (C.J. Mahaney’s son):

Don’t ever forget: God is merciful to you.

Mercy is who he is. “The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Exodus 34:6).

Mercy is what he does. “If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but delivered him over for us all, how will he not also with him freely give us all things?” (Romans 8:31-32).

Mercy is what you need. “Lord, hear my voice. . . . If you, Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with you, that you may be feared” (Psalm 130:3-4).

God’s mercy is not a theory, a bunch of words, or stories from a long time ago. It is the reality upon which your life depends. Mercy is a reality that anchors you into the life and death of Jesus Christ. He has come for us. He has come for you. You need help from outside yourself. Ask for help.

(HT: Justin Taylor)

Theology Matters – a lot!

DugDownDeep_Carnahan.mov from Covenant Life Church on Vimeo.

How To Wreck Your Church in Three Weeks

From Ray Ortlund:

How to wreck your church in three weeks:

Week One: Walk into church today and think about how long you’ve been a member, how much you’ve sacrificed, how under-appreciated you are.  Take note of every way you’re dissatisfied with your church now.  Take note of every person who displeases you.

Meet for coffee this week with another member and “share your heart.”  Discuss how your church is changing, how you are being left out.  Ask your friend who else in the church has “concerns.”  Agree together that you must “pray about it.”

Week Two: Send an email to a few other “concerned” members.  Inform them that a groundswell of grievance is surfacing in your church.  Problems have gone unaddressed for too long.  Ask them to keep the matter to themselves “for the sake of the body.”

As complaints come in, form them into a petition to demand an accounting from the leaders of the church.  Circulate the petition quietly.  Gathering support will be easy.  Even happy members can be used if you appeal to their sense of fairness – that your side deserves a hearing.  Be sure to proceed in a way that conforms to your church constitution, so that your petition is procedurally correct.

Week Three: When the growing moral fervor, ill-defined but powerful, reaches critical mass, confront the elders with your demands.  Inform them of all the woundedness in the church, which leaves you with no choice but to put your petition forward.  Inform them that, for the sake of reconciliation, the concerns of the body must be satisfied.

Whatever happens from this point on, you have won.  You have changed the subject in your church from gospel advance to your own grievances.  To some degree, you will get your way.  Your church will need three or four years for recovery.  But at any future time, you can do it all again.  It only takes three weeks.

(Via Erik Kowalker)

Tim Keller’s impressions of The Shack

From The Gospel Coalition.

Over the holidays I read a good (and devastating) review of William P. (Paul) Young’s The Shack in the most recent print edition of Books and Culture: A Christian Review (Jan/Feb 2010.)  It was a reminder that I was one of the last people on the planet not to have read the book. So I did. So why write a blog post about it? It had sold 7.2 million copies in a little over 2 years, by June of 2009. With those kinds of numbers, the book will certainly exert some influence over the popular religious imagination. So it warrants a response. This is not a review, but just some impressions.

At the heart of the book is a noble effort — to help modern people understand why God allows suffering, using a narrative form. The argument Young makes at various parts of the book is this. First, this world’s evil and suffering is the result of our abuse of free will. Second, God has not prevented evil in order to accomplish some glorious, greater good that humans cannot now understand. Third, when we stay bitter at God for a particular tragedy we put ourselves in the seat of the ‘Judge of the world and God’, and we are unqualified for such a job. Fourth, we must get an ‘eternal perspective’ and see all God’s people in joy in his presence forever. (The father in the story is given a vision of his deceased daughter living in the joy of Christ’s presence, and it heals his grief.) This is all rather standard, orthodox, pastoral theology (though it’s a bit too heavy on the ‘free-will defense’).  It is so accessible to readers because of its narrative form. I have heard many reports of semi-believers and non-believers claiming that this book gave them an answer to their biggest objections to faith in God.

However, sprinkled throughout the book, Young’s story undermines a number of traditional Christian doctrines. Many have gotten involved in debates about Young’s theological beliefs, and I have my own strong concerns. But here is my main problem with the book. Anyone who is strongly influenced by the imaginative world of The Shack will be totally unprepared for the far more multi-dimensional and complex God that you actually meet when you read the Bible. In the prophets the reader will find a God who is constantly condemning and vowing judgment on his enemies, while the Persons of the Triune-God of The Shack repeatedly deny that sin is any offense to them. The reader of Psalm 119 is filled with delight at God’s statutes, decrees, and laws, yet the God of The Shack insists that he doesn’t give us any rules or even have any expectations of human beings. All he wants is relationship. The reader of the lives of Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and Isaiah will learn that the holiness of God makes his immediate presence dangerous or fatal to us. Someone may counter (as Young seems to do, on p.192) that because of Jesus, God is now only a God of love, making all talk of holiness, wrath, and law obsolete. But when John, one of Jesus’ closest friends, long after the crucifixion sees the risen Christ in person on the isle of Patmos, John ‘fell at his feet as dead.’ (Rev.1:17.) The Shack effectively deconstructs the holiness and transcendence of God. It is simply not there. In its place is unconditional love, period. The God of The Shack has none of the balance and complexity of the Biblical God. Half a God is not God at all.

There is another modern text that sought to convey the character of God through story. It also tried to ‘embody’ the Biblical doctrine of God in an imaginative way that conveyed the heart of the Biblical message. That story contained a Christ-figure named Aslan. Unlike the author of The Shack, however, C.S. Lewis was always at pains to maintain the Biblical tension between the divine love and his overwhelming holiness and splendor. In the introduction to his book The Problem of Pain, Lewis cited the example from the children’s text The Wind in the Willows where two characters, Rat and Mole, approach divinity.

“Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. “Afraid? of Him? O, never, never. And yet — and yet — O Mole, I am afraid.”

Lewis sought to get this across at many places through his Narnia tales. One of the most memorable is the description of Aslan.

“Safe?…Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

That’s better.

Mark Driscoll’s Sermon on Haiti

(HT: Justin Taylor)

“God’s reconciling project”

From Tony Reinke:

Graham A. Cole, God the Peacemaker: How Atonement Brings Shalom (Downers Grove, Ill: IVP, 2009), 229-230:

The God of the Bible is the righteous God of holy love. The trouble is, however, that we have become paradoxically the glory and garbage of the universe. Our great need is peace with God, and not just with God but also with one another. …

There is no shalom, however, without sacrifice. Peace is made through the blood of the cross. The atoning life, death and vindication of the faithful Son bring shalom by addressing the problem of sin, death the devil and wrath definitively. Sacrifice, satisfaction, substitution and victory are key terms for understanding God’s atoning project in general and the cross in particular. Eschatologically speaking, the realization of the triune God’s reconciling project will see God’s people in God’s place under God’s rule living God’s way enjoying shalom in God’s holy and loving presence to God’s glory. …

The broad notion should humble us at the thought of a righteous God of holy loving purpose who, in love, has never abandoned his wayward creatures but in a plan of rescue has begun to reclaim the created order and will in the end restore creation to himself and to his glory. Love is the motive, glory the goal. The narrow one brings us to Christ and his cross. He is the linchpin of the plan. We are brought to a real Christ, to a real cross, to a real cost.

Piper on why we need each other

Individual and Cosmic Redemption

Tullian Tchividjian writes in his book Unfashionable:

Jesus is the divine curse-remover and creation-renewer. Christ’s substitutionary death on the cross broke the curse of sin and death brought on by Adam’s cosmic rebellion. His bodily resurrection from the dead three days later dealt death its final blow, guaranteeing the eventual renewal of all things “in Christ.”

Of course none of this is available for those who remain disconnected from Jesus. Sin’s acidic curse remains on everything that continues to be separated from Christ. We must be united to Christ by placing our trust in his finished work in order to receive and experience all the newness God has promised. For, as John Calvin said, “As long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us.” But for all that is united to Christ, everything false, bad, and corrupting will one day be consumed by what is true, good, and beautifying—and this includes the material world.

The dimensions of Christ’s finished work are both individual and cosmic. They range from personal pardon for sin and individual forgiveness to the final resurrection of our bodies and the restoration of the whole world. Now that’s good news—gospel—isn’t it? If we place our trust in the finished work of Christ, sin’s curse will lose its grip on us individually and we will one day be given a renewed creation. The gospel isn’t only about reestablishing a two-way relationship between God and us; it also restores a three-way relationship among God, his people, and the created order. Through Christ’s work, our relationship with God is restored while creation itself is renewed. This is what theologians mean when they talk about redemption. They’re describing this profound, far-reaching work by God.

Wrong Reasons to Love the Church

From Josh Harris:

Acts 20:28 tells us that Jesus obtained the church with his own blood. Is this what your love for the church is based on? If it’s anything less, it won’t last long.

• Don’t love the church because of what it does for you. Because sooner or later it won’t do enough.

• Don’t love the church because of a leader. Because human leaders are fallible and will let you down.

• Don’t love the church because of a program or a building or activities because all those things get old.

• Don’t love the church because of a certain group of friends because friendships change and people move.

Love the church because of who shed his blood to obtain the church. Love the church because of who the church belongs to. Love the church because of who the church worships. Love the church because you love Jesus Christ and his glory. Love the church because Jesus is worthy and faithful and true. Love the church because Jesus loves the church.

(HT: Erik Kowalker)

That sons of men could become sons of God

…the work to be performed by the Mediator was of no common description: being to restore us to the divine favour, so as to make us, instead of sons of men, sons of God; instead of heirs of hell, heirs of a heavenly kingdom. Who could do this unless the Son of God should also become the Son of man, and so receive what is ours as to transfer to us what is his, making that which is his by nature to become ours by grace? Relying on this earnest, we trust that we are the sons of God, because the natural Son of God assumed to himself a body of our body, flesh of our flesh, bones of our bones, that he might be one with us; he declined not to take what was peculiar to us, that he might in his turn extend to us what was peculiarly his own, and thus might be in common with us both Son of God and Son of man. Hence that holy brotherhood which he commends with his own lips, when he says, “I ascend to my Father, and your Father, to my God, and your God,” (John 20:17). In this way, we have a sure inheritance in the heavenly kingdom, because the only Son of God, to whom it entirely belonged, has adopted us as his brethren; and if brethren, then partners with him in the inheritance (Rom. 8:17). Moreover, it was especially necessary for this cause also that he who was to be our Redeemer should be truly God and man. It was his to swallow up death: who but Life could do so? It was his to conquer sin: who could do so save Righteousness itself? It was his to put to flight the powers of the air and the world: who could do so but the mighty power superior to both? But who possesses life and righteousness, and the dominion and government of heaven, but God alone? Therefore, God, in his infinite mercy, having determined to redeem us, became himself our Redeemer in the person of his only begotten Son.

Calvin, Jean ; Beveridge, Henry: Institutes of the Christian Religion. Oak Harbor, WA : Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1997, S. II, xii, 2

Preaching and Leadership

By Dr. Stanley Jebb (My former pastor, theological educator, colleague, and still my friend!)

When I mentioned to a retired minister that I was starting another leadership training course he asked me if I was going to teach them to preach.  I replied that I was not.  Preaching (in the modern sense) is a separate subject.  Ideally, I suppose, all leaders should be preachers and all preachers should be leaders, but it does not always work out like that.  Spiritual leadership is a separate subject from preaching techniques.

According to the New Testament records Jesus never taught his apostleshow to preach.  Likewise, although Paul exhorted Timothy to ‘preach the word’, he seems not to have instructed him in homiletics.

In the New Testament there are about ten different words translated ‘preach’ in various forms, such as ‘preached’, ‘preaching’ , and so on.  One of them is the ordinary word ‘to talk’ (laleo).  Nowadays when we discuss preaching we more often than not have a formal discourse from a pulpit or platform in mind.  For this activity a measure of skill and normally some training is expected.  But in the days of the early church, for at least a couple of centuries, there were no church pulpits.  In any case, our Lord did not seem to have that kind of preaching in mind when he told the apostles to go out and tell people the good news.  No training in public speaking was required for that.

From time to time one hears of preaching courses being held, and that raises a question in my mind.  Why?  Because I am afraid that the emphasis will be upon techniques and know-how rather than on the quality of the preachers life, his character.  For example, one excellent Christian missionary charity specializes in training third-world men to preach.  Those who attend such a course will be given a small library of basic books.  On the surface this seems to be very commendable.  If the men concerned are truly converted, called of God, consecrated, prayerful, living godly lives, separate from worldliness and Spirit-filled, that can only be good.  But if they are not so qualified, not prepared in those qualities, they may be simply learning techniques which may result in seeking status and position, and end up being blind leaders of the blind.  This applies equally in the West, of course.

E. M. Bounds, in Power Through Prayer, wrote, ‘The church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men.’   He also wrote that it takes twenty years to make a sermon because it takes twenty years to make a preacher.  The saintly Robert Murray McCheyne remarked that his people’s greatest need was his own holiness.  On the same theme, Professor James S. Stewart, in his book on preaching quoted a certain bishop Quayle as asking and answering this question: ‘Preaching is the art of making a sermon and delivering it?  Why, no, that is not preaching.  Preaching is the art of making a preacher and delivering that.  It is no trouble to preach, but a vast trouble to construct a preacher.’

The point I am driving at should be clear by now.  Emphasis on techniques alone may result in producing doctrinally weak, unspiritual, or even unconverted, men in the pulpit.  It need hardly be pointed out that there are many men in secular life who are fine, compelling, even brilliant public speakers, who are not preachers of the gospel.   So, for a preacher, while technique may be helpful, and in formal public services, very desirable, the primary emphasis for a preacher must be upon character, godliness, sincerity, prayerfulness, living the life.  This is why men need to grow in grace and if possible, learn the principles of spiritual leadership.  It is surely most significant that in that classic by J. Oswald Sanders, Spiritual Leadership, which every minister and Christian leader should read often, there is no chapter on preaching.

This is why, when considering a possible preacher such as when calling a pastor, we should be concerned with his character, his spirituality, his lifestyle, his godliness, and whether he is a man of prayer, not just his pulpit skills.  This is also why we must aim, not just at converts, but disciples.  But that is another story.

Two mistakes in thinking about the redeemed life

Another example of the importance of understanding the Already, but Not Yet:

Cornelis Plantinga Jr., Beyond Doubt (p. 89):

People tend to make two mistakes when they think about the redeemed life.

The first is to underestimate the sin that remains in us; it’s still there and it can still hurt us.

The second is to underestimate the strength of God’s grace; God is determined to make us new.

As a result, all Christians need to say two things.

We admit that we are redeemed sinners.

But we also say boldly and joyously that we are redeemed sinners.

(HT: Justin Taylor)

Christ alone

“Remember, sinner, it is not thy hold of Christ that saves thee – it is Christ; it is not thy joy in Christ that saves thee – it is Christ; it is not even faith in Christ, though that is the instrument it is Christ’s blood and merits; therefore, look not to thy hope, but to Christ, the source of thy hope; look not to thy faith, but to Christ, the author and finisher of thy faith; and if thou doest that, ten thousand devils cannot throw thee down.” (The Forgotten Spugeon, Iain Murray, 42.)

(HT: Monergism)

How Will They Hear Without a Preacher?

By Al Mohler.

Preaching has fallen on hard times. So suggests a report out of Durham University’s College of Preachers. The British university’s CODEC research center, which aims to explore “the interfaces between the Bible, the digital environment and contemporary culture,” conducted the study to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the College of Preachers. The report is not very encouraging.

As Ruth Gledhill of The Times [London] reports, “Sermons, history shows, can be among the most revolutionary forms of human speech. From John Calvin to Billy Graham, preaching has had the power to topple princes, to set nation against nation, to inspire campaigners to change the world and impel people to begin life anew.”

Indeed, preaching is the central act of Christian worship, but its great aim reaches far above merely changing the world. The preaching of the Word of God is the chief means by which God conforms Christians to the image of Christ. Rightly understood, true Christian preaching is not aimed only at this earthly life, but is the means whereby God prepares his people for eternity.

Yet, you wouldn’t know this if you judged the importance of preaching by its place in many of today’s congregations. Gledhill observes, “In many churches this most vibrant of moments has withered to little more than 20 minutes of tired droning that serves only to pad out the gap between hymns and lunch.”

The withering of preaching is not uniform in all congregations and denominations. Evangelicals were most enthusiastic about preaching, while others registered less appreciation for the preached Word. Interestingly, Gledhill reports that “Baptists and Catholics were also more enthusiastic about the Bible being mentioned in sermons than were Anglicans and Methodists.”

The Anglicans also expressed a desire to be entertained, rather then educated. The Rev. Kate Bruce, Fellow in Preaching and Communication at the CODEC center, said that “in a culture which values entertainment and likes stand-up, over a quarter [of respondents] said they want preaching to be entertaining, too.”

Well, they will have to be quick about the entertainment. Many Anglicans indicated that they wanted the sermon to be less than ten minutes long. As Gledhill remarks, they might be willing to allow up to twenty minutes “if there was no ‘waffle.’”

Perhaps the biggest question raised by the report is why so many British churchgoers (96.6%) said they “look forward” to the sermon. Ruth Gledhill comments:

In their report the Durham researchers admit to puzzlement that so many people looked forward to the sermons, and confess that more work was needed to find out why.

The report questions whether people look forward to the sermon so much for the content, the engagement, the entertainment, the theology or simply that it gives them time to switch off.

Time to switch off? According to the report, Britain has only 3.6 million “regular churchgoers” out of a population of over 60 million. That is, only about five percent of Britons even attend church services on any regular basis. Evidently, many of those who do attend “look forward” to a very short message from a preacher that entertains them.

England, of course, is the nation that once gave us preachers the likes of Charles Simeon, Charles Spurgeon, and Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Now, with the rare and blessed exception of some faithful evangelical churches, preaching has fallen on desperate times.

Some observers of British life now estimate that in any given week Muslim attendance at mosques outnumbers Christian attendance at churches. That means that there are probably now in Britain more people who listen to imams than to preachers.

This raises an interesting question: Is the marginalization of biblical preaching in so many churches a cause or a result of the nation’s retreat from Christianity? In truth, it must be both cause and effect. In any event, there is no hope for a recovery of biblical Christianity without a preceding recovery of biblical preaching. That means preaching that is expository, textual, evangelistic, and doctrinal. In other words, preaching that will take a lot longer than ten minutes and will not masquerade as a form of entertainment.

Time and time again, God’s people have been rescued by a recovery of biblical teaching and preaching. The right preaching of the Word of God is the first essential mark of the church. As the Reformers made clear, where that mark is absent, there is no church at all.

The study conducted for the College of Preachers is interesting, if also frightening. But little is gained from asking confused people what kind of preaching they want. The faithful preacher takes as his first and most sacred responsibility the charge to give the congregation the preaching it needs.

Six New Testament metaphors for preachers

From Jude St. John:

In chapter four of Between Two Worlds ((Stott, John R. W. Between Two Worlds The Challenge of Preaching Today. Boston: Wm. B. Eerdmans Company, 1994), author John Stott presents 6 different images that the Bible uses to illustrate what a Christian preacher is.

1. The Christian preacher is a herald. (1 Corinthians 1:23)
2. The Christian preacher is a sower. (Luke 8:4-8)
3. The Christian preacher is an ambassador. (2 Corinthians 5:20)
4. The Christian preacher is a steward or housekeeper. (1 Corinthians 4:1)
5. The Christian preacher is a pastor or shepherd. (John 21:15-17)
6. The Christian preacher is an approved workman. (2 Timothy 2:15)

“What is immediately noticeable about these six pictures is their emphasis on the ‘givenness’ of the message. Preachers are not to invent it; it has to be entrusted to them. thus, good news has been given to the herald to proclaim, good seed to the farmer to sow and good food to the steward to dispense, while good pasture is available to the shepherd to lead his flock there. Similarly, the ambassador does not pursue his owm policy but his country’s, and the workman cuts a way for ‘the word of truth’, not for his own word. It is impressive that in all these New Testament metaphors the preacher is a servant under someone else’s authority, and the communicator of someone else’s word.” (136-7)

God’s self-exaltation

“Here is the end of the matter: God is the one being in the universe for whom self-exaltation is not the act of a needy ego, but an act of infinite giving. The reason God seeks our praise is not because he won’t be fully God until he gets it, but that we won’t be happy until we give it.

This is not arrogance. This is grace.
This is not egomania. This is love.”

- John Piper, Is Jesus an Egomaniac?

(HT: Of First Importance)

The preacher must impersonate the gospel

The preacher must impersonate the gospel. Its divine, most distinctive features must be embodied in him. The constraining power of love must be in the preacher as a projecting, eccentric, an all-commanding, self-oblivious force. The energy of self-denial must be his being, his heart and blood and bones. He must go forth as a man among men, clothed with humility, abiding in meekness, wise as a serpent, harmless as a dove; the bonds of a servant with the spirit of a king, a king in high, royal, in dependent bearing, with the simplicity and sweetness of a child.

The preacher must throw himself, with all the abandon of a perfect, self-emptying faith and a self-consuming zeal, into his work for the salvation of men. Hearty, heroic, compassionate, fearless martyrs must the men be who take hold of and shape a generation for God. If they be timid time servers, place seekers, if they be men pleasers or men fearers, if their faith has a weak hold on God or his Word, if their denial be broken by any phase of self or the world, they cannot take hold of the Church nor the world for God. –E.M. Bounds Power through Prayer

(HT: Erik Raymond)

The Meaning of All Misery

“The meaning of all misery in the world is that sin is horrific. All natural evil is a statement about the horror of moral evil. If you see a suffering in the world that is unspeakably horrible, let it make you shudder at how unspeakably horrible sin is against an infinitely holy God. The meaning of futility and the meaning of corruption and the meaning of our groaning is that sin — falling short of the glory of God — is ghastly, hideous, repulsive beyond imagination.

Unless you have some sense of the infinite holiness of God and the unspeakable outrage of sin against this God, you will inevitably see the futility and suffering of the universe as an overreaction. But in fact the point of our miseries, our futility, our corruption, our groaning is to teach us the horror of sin. And the preciousness of redemption and hope.”

- John Piper, “Subjected to Futility in Hope, Part 1” (sermon preached at Bethlehem Baptist Church on April 22, 2002)

(HT: Of First Importance)

Is Our Desire Too Weak?

From David Murray:

Why does heaven feel so far away? Why does Jesus seem so distant?

Recent research* by Emily Balcetis and David Dunning indicates that the desirability of an object influences its perceived distance. Thirsty students fed with pretzels perceived a water bottle to be nearer than those who had had their thirst quenched. Other students placed in front of a $100 bill they could win for themselves perceived it to be closer than those who were told that the bill belonged to the scientist conducting the test. A third set of students had their sense of humor graded and clipped to a stand in front of them. Those given positive feedback estimated the stand to be closer than those who could see their feedback was negative. Other similar experiments confirmed the finding that desire reduces the perception of distance.

Is this why heaven often seems so far away? We don’t desire it enough?

Is this why Jesus sometimes seems so distant? We don’t desire Him enough?

But if desire reduces the distance, “Lord Jesus, give the desire and reduce the distance.”

*Balcetis, E., & Dunning, D. (2009). “Wishful Seeing: More Desired Objects Are Seen as Closer.” Psychological Science.