[Originally posted at Redeemer.com.]

In a previous blog post I wrote about the 18th century pastor John Newton, who showed us that most Christians live out their lives with obvious character flaws that ruin both their joy and their Christian witness. But why is it that so many Christians live like this?

Our natural virtues, which come from inborn temperament and family nurture—such as our talents, aptitudes, and strengths—are good things. But they each have a dark side. People with prophetic gifts—that is, great directness, often good at public speaking or writing—can have problems listening to others and taking advice. People with priestly gifts—that is, sensitivity, often good at listening, giving counsel, showing mercy—often can be too concerned with making people happy. They may be cowardly, or overly sensitive to criticism. A person who is very generous may also be undisciplined and irresponsible in financial matters. Thus his generosity is really a facet of his too-impulsive character.

One of the reasons that the virtues of gifts and temperament have a corresponding “dark side” is that our gifts and natural temperament are bound up with the idols that dominate any heart not filled with the gospel of grace. Without a thorough knowledge of the gospel, we look to good things—human approval and relationships, the exercise of power and accomplishment, the control of our environment and self-discipline, the enjoyment of comfort, privacy, and pleasure—and make them into pseudo-salvations. So the person who makes an idol out of human approval may be a sensitive artist and the one who makes an idol out of power might be a courageous leader. But gifts and temperament in the service of idols—and this is our normal state—always are a mixed blessing. They have a good side—they produce virtuous behavior—but they lead the person into a corresponding sin or vice as well.

The final result of all this is that people cannot see their sins because they are looking only at their virtues. For example, someone may say: “I’m not abrasive, I just speak very directly.” It is true that a direct-speaking person may do good because direct, blunt comments are sometimes needed. But overall the abrasiveness is ineffective and the person’s boldness and confidence comes to some degree from pride and a lack of love. And for this reason, many (or perhaps most) Christians do not work on the supernatural graces of the spirit that are not natural to us, and that mitigate or eliminate the dark side—the besetting sins—of our nature.

So how can we be shaken out of our lethargy and awakened to our need to grow? Here are some principles that I have gleaned from Newton’s letters over the years.

1. Know that your worst character flaws are the ones you can see the least.

By definition the sins to which you are most blind, that you make the most excuses for, and that you usually minimize—are the ones that most have you in their grip. As we said before, one way we hide our blemishes is that we look at places that our natural temperament resembles spiritual fruit. For example, a natural aptitude for control and self-discipline can be read as ‘faithfulness’, and a natural desire for personal approval could look like ‘gentleness’ or ‘love.’ Or we mistake a bubbly, sanguine temperament for joy, and a laid-back, phlegmatic temperament for peace. We give ourselves spiritual credit for these things, when actually we aren’t growing spiritually at all. The lack of other fruit shows that real supernatural character change is not happening.

2. Remember that you can’t learn about your biggest flaws just by being told—you must be shown.

There are two ways we come to see our sins and flaws more clearly. One way is that we are shown them by troubles and trials in life. Suffering is God’s gymnasium—it reveals our spiritual weaknesses just as a workout reveals physical weaknesses.

Secondly, we learn by Christian role models. Sometimes the best conviction comes when you are brought near a person who is living as you should be living. You may not think of yourself as impatient, or abrasive, or over-sensitive until you are brought into close proximity to someone much more patient, irenic, and content than you. What this means is that we should make use of these opportunities to grow. They are painful—even being near very holy people can be uncomfortable! But it is at such times, when we most feel the need for grace, that we find God’s grace most desirable.

3. Be willing to listen to correction and critique from others.

We just said that no one ever learned about his or her sins by being told. We have too many layers of self-justification to grow without hard knocks. But in addition, as a complement, we need critique and accountability from brothers and sisters.

There are at least two kinds. First, you can create your own Hebrews 3:13 community. Hebrews 3:13 says we are to “exhort one another daily” so we are not “hardened by the deceptiveness of our sin.” Take some other believers that you trust and give them “a hunting license” to talk to you about where you need to grow.

Secondly, don’t forget the “Balaam’s donkey” principle (Numbers 22). You must learn how to profit from criticism even given by people who are badly motivated, or who you don’t respect. Even if only 20% of what they say is true, it may be God speaking to you.

But, you may ask, how do we actually make changes once we see where we need to change? We will look at that in a future blog post.

I recently gave a talk on revival, and I want to share some thoughts from it. It’s difficult to find the right word for what we mean when we talk about revival. “Renewal” is almost too soft a word, and “revival” has too many dated connotations nowadays. But the older definition of revival is helpful. It refers to a time when the ordinary operations of the Holy Spirit—not signs and wonders, but the conviction of sin, conversion, assurance of salvation and a sense of the reality of Jesus Christ on the heart—are intensified, so that you see growth in the quality of the faith in the people in your church, and a great growth in numbers and conversions as well.

In a revival, sleepy Christians wake up, nominal Christians get converted, and non-Christians get reached. A sleepy Christian may believe they’re a Christian, but they don’t have a real sense of God’s holiness, their own sin, or the depth of his grace. They may be a moralist or a relativist, or living inconsistent lives.

Nominal Christians may be going to church, but have never really been convicted of sin or received salvation personally. When sleepy and nominal Christians get revived, attractive and bold in their witness, people who would never have believed before begin to get converted.

So how do you wake up sleepy Christians and convert nominal Christians? Let me give you what I would call my modernized American versions of the kinds of questions I would ask people if I was trying to get them to really think about whether or not they know Christ. These questions are adapted from The Experience Meeting by William Williams, based on the Welsh revivals during the Great Awakening. He would ask people to share about these types of questions in small group settings each week:

How real has God been to your heart this week? How clear and vivid is your assurance and certainty of God’s forgiveness and fatherly love? To what degree is that real to you right now?

Are you having any particular seasons of delight in God? Do you really sense his presence in your life, sense him giving you his love?

Have you been finding Scripture to be alive and active? Instead of just being a book, do you feel like Scripture is coming after you?

Are you finding certain biblical promises extremely precious and encouraging? Which ones?

Are you finding God’s challenging you or calling you to something through the Word? In what ways?

Are you finding God’s grace more glorious and moving now than you have in the past? Are you conscious of a growing sense of the evil of your heart, and in response, a growing dependence on and grasp of the preciousness of the mercy of God?

Put together, that is a growing understanding of grace.

Recently, a couple of books and websites have referenced me as a good example of how to exegete and “engage culture” in the task of preaching. They include citations of certain cultural references in my sermons. While I know this is meant as a compliment, for which I am grateful, I also have some concerns about the way this practice has been described. I can easily imagine that some (especially younger) preachers will aspire to imitate the method and miss the underlying principle. 

I think it may be possible to say that every sermon should have three aspects or purposes. First, you need to preach the text in its Scriptural context; second, you need to preach Christ and the gospel every time; and finally, you need to preach to the heart. Put another way, you should preach the truth, not just your opinion; you should preach the good news, not just good advice; and you should preach to make the truth real to the heart, not just clear to the mind. The first is often discussed under the heading of expository preaching, the second is often called Christ-centered preaching, and the third is usually named “application” (though I think each aspect contains more than these traditional categories might imply).

In that schema, where does “cultural engagement” come into my sermons? Most people would say that it does not fit into the scheme—preach the text, preach Christ, and preach to the heart. They might be tempted to add a fourth category. But that might suggest that cultural references are principally there to give the preacher some personal credibility. That would be a mistake. To make references for that purpose would tempt you to basically show off your learning or maybe your cultural hipness. That is not what I’m trying to do. 

You might be surprised to hear me say that my use of cultural references is actually part of my effort to reach the heart. But, you may respond, aren't those references to Nietzsche or de Kooning highly intellectual, designed to appeal to the mind and not the emotions? Not exactly. One of the keys is in how we define “the heart.” Remember that according to the Bible, the heart is not primarily the emotions but rather the seat of our fundamental commitments and trusts, and therefore it is the control center of the whole life. So to preach to the heart means to go right for the commanding commitments of people’s lives that drive their desires, thinking, feeling, and action.

There are many working definitions of “culture,” but I think one of the best is that culture is a collective heart. It is a set of commanding commitments held and shared by a community of people. Now my hearers—both Christians and non-Christians—live in the highly secular, late modern (some would say postmodern) cosmopolitan culture of Manhattan. This ethos is pulling on the hearts of all its residents. It is the source of so many of their deep aspirations, unspoken fears, and inner conflicts.

The so-called “cultural references,” then, are simply my way of entering the world of my hearers, helping them understand at a deep level what is shaping their daily work, their romantic and family relationships, their attitudes toward sex, money, and power. I seek to make plain the foundations of our city’s culture in order to help people understand themselves more fully and imagine what it means (or would mean) to live a Christian life here.

So it would be a mistake to merely imitate any preacher who makes a lot of cultural references in his sermons. In many parts of the world, citing Kierkegaard is not all that unusual, and if done rightly can lead people to say, “Oh, so that’s why I tend to think and feel that way.” That’s what you want to achieve. But in many other parts of the world it might only make people think, “Wow, he’s really intellectual and smart.” If that latter response is what you get from people (or worse yet, what you want from them) then you need to make some changes. The universal principle is found in Acts 2:37—preaching must “cut to the heart.” The means and methods we take to get to that end depend a lot on, well, your culture.

For years I’ve been haunted by one of John Newton’s letters, which was later titled “Blemishes in Christian Character.” Newton was an 18th century Anglican minister who had once been a slave trader. After a dramatic conversion, he went into the ministry and became one of the wisest and most insightful pastors of his time. His hundreds of pastoral letters are masterful and many are in print to this day.

In the letter I’ve referred to, Newton points out that while most Christians succeed in avoiding the more gross external sins, many nonetheless overlook blemishes on their character by passing them off as mere “foibles.” They “may not seem to violate any express command of Scripture” and yet, they are “properly sinful” because they are the opposite of the fruit of the Spirit that believers are supposed to exhibit. While our faults always seem small to us due to the natural self-justification of the heart, they often don’t look so small to others. As a result, these “small faults” cause large swaths of the Christian population to have little influence on others for Christ. Newton lists these faults that we tolerate in ourselves, and which do great damage to our public witness as well as to our relationships within the Body of Christ.

Over the years I’ve gone back again and again to this list in the manner he directs—for self-examination, not as a way to find fault with others. As I have done so I’ve seen things in myself that I’ve sought to stamp out with God’s grace. And as I’ve worked through the list I’ve expanded it—often breaking some of his larger categories into smaller ones for better discernment. Here I’ll share my expanded list—based heavily on Newton’s original one. Since Newton gave each case study a slightly humorous Latin name, I’ve done the same.

Austerus is a solid and disciplined Christian, but abrasive, critical and ungenerous in dealing with people, temperamental, seldom giving compliments and praise, and almost never gentle.

Infitialis is a person of careful and deliberate character, but habitually cynical, negative, and pessimistic, always discouraging (“that will never work”), unsupportive and vaguely unhappy.

Pulsus is passionate, but also impulsive and impatient, not thinking things through, speaking too soon, always quick to complain and lodge a protest, often needing to apologize for rash statements.

Querulus is a person of strong convictions, but known to be very opinionated, a poor listener, argumentative, not very teachable, and very slow to admit they were wrong.

Subjectio is a resourceful and ambitious person, but also someone who often shades the truth, puts a lot of spin on things (close to misrepresentation), is very partisan, self-promoting, and turf-conscious.

Potestas gets things done, but needs to control every situation, has trouble sharing power, has a need to do everything him or herself, and is very suspicious and mistrustful of others.

Fragilis is friendly and seeks friends, but constantly gets his or her feelings hurt, easily feels slighted and put down, is often offended and upset by real and imagined criticism by others.

Curiosus is very sociable, but enjoys knowing negative things about people, finds ways of passing the news on, may divulge confidences, and enjoys confrontation too much.

Volatilis is very kind-hearted and eager to help, but simply not reliable—isn’t punctual, doesn’t follow through on promises, is always over-extended, and as a result may do shoddy work.

Let’s end this post as Newton does his letter: “Other improprieties of conduct, which lessen the influence and spot the profession of some who wish well to the cause of Christ, might be enumerated, but these may suffice for a specimen.”

I’ve had some busy people pick up Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work, look at the subtitle, and ask: “OK, so, in a nutshell, how does God’s work connect to our work?” Always a good exercise for an author, to be asked to explain your book in just a few minutes! Here are four ways Christian faith influences and shapes our work.

First, the Christian faith gives us a moral compass, an inner GPS giving us ethical guidance that takes us beyond merely the legal aspects or requirements in any situation. A Christian on the board of a major financial institution—recently publicly embarrassed by revelations of corruption—told me about a closed door meeting there between top executives. Someone said, “We have to restore moral values.” Immediately someone asked, “Whose values? Who gets to define what is moral?” And there’s our problem. There once was a habitus of broadly felt moral intuitions that governed much behavior in our society. It went well beyond the legal. Much of the ruthlessness, the lack of transparency, and lack of integrity that characterizes the marketplace and many other professions today come because consensus on those moral intuitions has collapsed. But Christians working in those worlds do have solid ethical guidance and could address through personal example the values-vacuum that has now been recognized by so many.

Second, your Christian faith gives you a new spiritual power, an inner gyroscope, that keeps you from being overthrown by either success, failure, or boredom. Regarding success and failure, the gospel helps Christians find their deepest identity not in our accomplishments but who we are in Christ. This keeps our egos from inflating too much during seasons of prosperity, and it prevents bitterness and despondency during times of adversity. But while some jobs seduce us into over-work and anxiety, others tempt us to surrender to drudgery, only “working for the weekend,” doing just what is necessary to get by when someone is watching. Paul calls that “eye-service” (Colossians 3:22–24) and charges us to think of every job as working for God, who sees everything and loves us. That makes high-pressure jobs bearable and even the most modest work meaningful.

Third, the Christian faith gives us a new conception of work as the means by which God loves and cares for his world through us. Look at the places in the Bible that say that God gives every person their food. How does God do that? It is through human work—from the simplest farm girl milking the cows to the truck driver bringing produce to market to the local grocer. God could feed us directly but he chooses to do it through work. There are three important implications of this. First, it means all work, even the most menial tasks, has great dignity. In our work we are God’s hands and fingers, sustaining and caring for his world. Secondly, it means one of the main ways to please God in our work is simply to do work well. Some have called this “the ministry of competence.” What passengers need first from an airline pilot is not that she speaks to them about Jesus but that she is a great, skillful pilot. Third, this means that Christians can and must have deep appreciation for the work of those who work skillfully but do not share our beliefs.

Fourth, the Christian faith gives us a new world-and-life view that shapes the character of our work. All well-done work that serves the good of human beings pleases God. But what exactly is “the common good”? There are many work tasks that do not require us to reflect too much on that question. All human beings need to eat, and so raising and providing food serves people well. But what if you are an elementary school teacher, or a playwright? What is good education (i.e. what should you be teaching children)? What kinds of plays should you write (i.e. what kinds of stories do people need)? The answers to these questions will depend largely on how you answer more fundamental questions—what is the purpose of human life? What is life about? What does a good human life look like? It is unavoidable that many jobs will be shaped by our conscious or semi-conscious beliefs about those issues. So, finally, a Christian must think out how his or her faith will distinctly shape their work.

How wonderful that the gospel works on every aspect of us—mind, will, and feelings—and enables us to both deeply appreciate the work of non-believers and yet aspire to work in unique ways as believers. Putting all of these four aspects together, we see that being a Christian leads us to see our work not as merely a way to earn money, nor as primarily a means of personal advancement, but a truly a calling—to serve God and love our neighbor.

In my final post on catechesis, I'd like to add a few final thoughts on the New City Catechism.

First, it is important to understand the purpose of NCC—its goal is to introduce the almost-lost pedagogical method of catechesis to a new generation, and to direct and motivate far more people to study and learn the longer and historic catechisms than are doing so now. There are three features of NCC that we hope will accomplish this. One is its form as a free app. It means that people will be able to study and memorize the catechism within the fabric of their current, overly busy daily lives. It means that pastors and leaders who want to take a group or class or church through it will not need to make any purchases at all, but will only need to work out ways to use the catechism within their church's pathways of discipleship and training. A second feature is the language. We carefully sought to use modern but not colloquial language, seeking to be accessible but also graceful in style, but also harking back and using the style and language of the historic catechisms where possible.

The other crucial feature of NCC is its brevity. It is an intermediate catechism. It distills older catechisms but, by necessity, leaves a great deal out. While some might find it disconcerting that there is not more information about various subjects, to have a longer catechism would undermine its very purpose. NCC exists to draw in the masses of people who would never taste the richness of the catechism if they didn't have one that is far more economical in words and style. Having tasted NCC, we trust many will go on to at least read and study the historic catechisms. In part because of its brevity, NCC is less detailed than older catechisms and therefore can be used in a variety of churches.

Second, to appreciate NCC it will be critical to remember that catechisms are primarily instructional instruments, not creedal standards. So it shows no more disrespect to the Westminster Catechisms to write a new catechism than, for example, to write a new Sunday school curriculum. In the centuries after the Reformation in Britain hundreds and hundreds of catechisms were produced. While the Heidelberg and Westminster catechisms were intentionally written to be confessional documents, binding doctrinal standards, the vast majority of catechisms were designed to do Christian formation.

The formative, educational genius of catechesis is largely lost today. Learning a catechism is sometimes seen as "mechanical," as "rote learning" that some would say belongs to an earlier era. However, those who use catechesis have come to see the enormous benefits. Catechesis teaches basic mental discipline. Mastering and memorizing a body of content is usually not immediately rewarding. That in itself is a way of practicing the reality that God's truth is true whether it is personally fulfilling at the moment or not. Also, catechism teaches a lost art—the art of meditation and slow reflection. Memorization requires you to pay attention to every word, even every comma. The slow turning over of every word leads to depths of new insight.

Another powerful feature of catechesis is that it teaches us not only the right answers but also, more fundamentally, the right questions. Thomas Torrance observes that the less conversant we are with a body of knowledge, the less we even know what questions to ask. Knowing enough to ask the right questions then moves us down into the truth more swiftly and surely. Here is where catechesis excels.

[T]he Catechism . . . is an invaluable method in instructing the young learner, for it not only trains him to ask the right questions, but trains him to allow himself to be questioned by the Truth, and so to have questions put into his mouth which he could not think up on his own, and which therefore call into questions his own preconceptions. In other words it is an event of real impartation of the Truth.
—Thomas Torrance, The School of Faith: The Catechisms of the Reformed Church, Wipf and Stock: 1996,xxvi.

Last, it would be helpful to understand that NCC is written with a view to 17th-century British pastor Richard Baxter's vision for the role of catechesis—as not something only for the ambitious few or for children but as a normal feature of Christian life. In Reformation Pastors: Richard Baxter and the Ideal of the Reformed Pastor (Paternoster, 2004), J. William Black tells how Baxter and the Worcestershire association of pastors had put into place a program of vigorous expository preaching, only to be disappointed with the results in people's lives. Baxter wrote, "We finde by sad experience, that the people understand not our publike teaching, though we study to speak as plain as we can, and that after many years preaching, even of these same fundamentals, too many can scarce tell anything that we said" (Black, 174). Baxter began his famous program in which every family in the church participated in catechesis under regular pastoral care, discipleship, and visitation.

Black shows that Baxter's success was not reproduced elsewhere, because no one other pastor could pull off the Herculean feat of effectively, personally catechizing 16 families a week, year after year (188-189). But while the details of Baxter's system need not be reproduced, his basic idea is sound—catechesis should be used as broadly as possible in the congregation as a foundational way to instruct and form people. New City Catechism is designed to help churches realize this way of instructing people in the way of Christ.

New City Catechism is a joint project between The Gospel Coalition and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. It is available for iPad and online, and is an excellent way to fill the time during a hurricane.

In my previous post on this subject, I outlined how crucial the practice of catechesis is for the church, particularly when it is surrounded by a culture antagonistic to Christian teaching and truth. But, we may ask, “Why write new catechisms? What’s wrong with the older ones?”

After the high tide of the early centuries, the ministry of catechism diminished until the Reformation, when there was literally an explosion of catechism writing. T.F. Torrance edited a book that contains only catechisms that were used widely in the Reformed Churches of Scotland in the 16th and 17th centuries, and he provides ten. (See The School of Faith: The Catechisms of the Reformed Church, James Clarke, 1959.) A first thought of a reader of this volume may be, “They all agree on basic doctrine—then why so many?” The answer is in the first lines of Torrance’s introduction: “The Catechisms set forth Christian doctrine at its closest to the mission, life, and growth of the Church from age to age, for they aim to give a comprehensive exposition of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the context of the whole Counsel of God and the whole life of the people of God.”

So the first reason to produce multiple catechisms is that they must serve the whole people of God, and that has always meant catechisms for beginning, intermediate, and advanced learners. There were simple catechisms for very young children, more intermediate ones for those being admitted to the Lord’s Supper, and advanced ones for adults and Christian ministers. For example, Calvin’s Geneva Catechism (1541) was accompanied by the Little Catechism (1556).

A second reason is that catechisms have always been connected to the “mission of the church.” This may be surprising, since today we think of catechesis as strictly a form of education for Christians. It is that, but of necessity catechisms are selective in how much time is devoted to each aspect of Christian teaching, and it is quite evident—if you take the time to read through many catechisms—that each seeks to fortify against the ascendant theological errors in the culture at the time.

Richard Baxter and others of his time saw catechesis as a way not merely to disciple but also to bring people to conversion. So new catechisms were always needed, not in order to change basic doctrine, but to present doctrine in ways that most equipped people to address the idols and answer the errors of the age.

When the church has gone through a period of reformation there has always been a renewal of catechesis. If we are going to see our people live holy lives in the midst of a post-Christian and anti-Christian culture, we will need to write new catechisms that fit their capacities and equip them for Christian living in the world. We should be frank with ourselves that the even the “shorter” catechisms of the past—such as the Westminster Shorter Catechism (1648) and the Heidelberg Catechism (1563)—are now too long for the average contemporary adult to master, and even in Presbyterian and Reformed churches where these are official standards, relatively few people are being immersed in them.

One of the reasons to develop intermediate catechisms like New City Catechism is to fill a gap between children’s catechisms and the longer and more extensive older ones. New City Catechism is short—52 questions and answers, one for every week of the year. It is based on Calvin’s Geneva, and the Westminster Catechisms, and perhaps most of all on the Heidelberg. As such it gives people a strong dose of each, introducing them to the practice of catechesis, and developing in them an appetite and capacity for going deeper. It can therefore be used by church leaders as a bridge toward teaching members the older and more extensive catechisms of their respective denominations.

John H. Westerhoff, the editor of a book tracing the history of catechesis, argues that we are in the midst of a change period in history as significant as those of the first, fourth, and sixteenth centuries—all times when new catechisms were written. He concludes that it is time for catechesis again. I believe he is right.

New City Catechism is a joint project between The Gospel Coalition and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. It is available for iPad and online.

On October 15, The Gospel Coalition in partnership with Redeemer Presbyterian Church will launch New City Catechism—a joint adult and children's catechism consisting of 52 questions and answers adapted from the Reformation catechisms, available on iPad and online.

The church in western culture today is experiencing a crisis of holiness. To be holy is to be set apart, different, living life according to God’s Word and story, not according to the stories that the world tells us are the meaning of life. The more the culture around us becomes post- and anti-Christian, the more we discover church members in our midst, sitting under sound preaching, yet nonetheless holding half-pagan views of God, truth, and human nature, and in their daily lives using sex, money, and power in very worldly ways. It’s hard to deny what Gary Parrett and J.I. Packer write:

“Superficial smatterings of truth, blurry notions about God and godliness, and thoughtlessness about the issues of living—careerwise, communitywise, familywise, and churchwise—are all too often the marks of evangelical congregations today….” (Grounded in the Gospel: Building Believers the Old-Fashioned Way, Baker, 2010, p.16.)

This is not the first time the church in the west has lived in such a deeply non-Christian cultural environment. In the first several centuries the church had to form and build new believers from the ground up, teaching them comprehensive new ways to think, feel, and live in every aspect of life. They did this not simply through preaching and lectures, but through catechesis. Catechesis was not only something for children, but for adult converts and even for leaders—all of whom were grounded in gospel truth by mastering, in dialogical community, material composed for their particular capacities and needs.

In the heyday of the Reformation, church leaders in Europe again faced a massive pedagogical challenge. How could they re-shape the lives of people who had grown up in the medieval church? The answer was, again, many catechisms produced for all ages and stages of life. Martin Luther and John Calvin both produced two, as did John Owen. The Puritan Richard Baxter produced three.

But in the evangelical Christian world today the practice of catechesis, particularly among adults, has been almost completely lost. Modern discipleship programs are usually superficial when it comes to doctrine. Even systematic Bible studies can be weak in drawing doctrinal conclusions. In contrast, catechisms take students step by step through the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer—a perfect balance of biblical theology and doctrine, practical ethics, and spiritual experience.

Catechesis is a very intense way of doing instruction. The catechetical discipline of memorization drives concepts in deep, encouraging meditation on truth. It also holds students more accountable to master the material than do other forms of education. Some ask: why fill children’s heads—or for that matter, new converts’—with concepts like “the glory of God” that they cannot grasp well? The answer is that it creates biblical categories in our minds and hearts where they act as a foundation, to be gradually built upon over the years with new insights from more teaching, reading, and personal experiences. Catechesis done with young children helps them think in biblical categories almost as soon as they can reason. Such instruction, one old writer said, is like firewood in a fireplace. Without the fire—the Spirit of God—firewood will not in itself produce a warming flame. But without fuel there can be no fire either, and that is what catechetical instruction provides.

Catechesis is also different from listening to a sermon or lecture—or reading a book—in that it is deeply communal and participatory. The practice of question-answer recitation brings instructors and students into a naturally interactive, dialogical process of learning. It creates a true community as teachers help students—and students help each other—understand and remember material. Parents catechize their children. Church leaders catechize new members with shorter catechisms and new leaders with more extensive ones. All of this systematically builds relationships. In fact, because of the richness of the material, catechetical questions and answers may be incorporated into corporate worship itself, where the church as a body can confess their faith and respond to God with praise.

Our people desperately need richer, more comprehensive instruction. Returning to catechesis—now—is one important way to give it.

One reason I wrote my new book Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City is that I believe there is a common misunderstanding of the relationship between doctrine and ministry.

Let me illustrate. A puzzling but common sight today is that many churches share the same doctrinal foundations, yet go about ministry in radically different ways. For example, consider two Presbyterian churches that both subscribe wholeheartedly to the Westminster Confession of Faith and catechisms. The first church uses contemporary music and very little discernible liturgy, employs lay ministers to lead meetings and ministries as well as pastors, and deploys the latest marketing and media strategies. The second church operates in almost the opposite way, using classical music, traditional liturgy, and emphasis on the ordained clergy. They also vigorously criticize the methods of the other church as a betrayal of the Reformed faith, and perhaps even of the gospel itself.

The same doctrinal foundations seem to be producing two completely different sets of ministry expressions. How can that be? And is it even a bad thing? Because the answers are not obvious, we draw two common but wrong inferences.

One mistake is to conclude that the first church is not holding to its doctrinal foundation firmly enough, and therefore it has “gone contemporary.” Traditional churches often say, “While they may subscribe to the Confession with their mouths, they don’t really believe it thoroughly.” The problem is that the foundational doctrinal statements (in this case the Westminster standards) do not speak directly to these matters of method and style. You could argue that the Confession implies this or that style of ministry, but proving the presence of these subtexts and implications is hard. There’s no reason to conclude that the contemporary-styled church must necessarily be untrue to the doctrine to which it subscribes just because of the style of its practices.

The opposite mistake is to conclude that the second church is traditional in style because it is holding firmly—possibly too firmly, depending on your point of view—to its doctrinal foundation. More innovative churches often assume, “they are backward and narrow because their doctrine and theology makes them so.” The dangerous conclusion is that, in order to do ministry that “really engages our culture today,” we need to re-engineer classic evangelical doctrine, such as substitutionary atonement, forensic justification, inerrancy, the holiness and wrath of God, and the necessity of ordained ministry. So some church leaders—who don’t like the form these ministries take—think the answer is to de-emphasize or even rework the traditional doctrines these ministries defend.

I believe neither side is seeing the true cause of the differences—the “hinge” between doctrinal foundation and ministry expression.

Rick Lints, to whom I owe much of my thinking on this topic, explains in The Fabric of Theology that once we settle our doctrinal foundations, we still haven’t answered the question of how exactly we are going to communicate and live out our doctrine in our place and time. He observes, for example, that churches have different readings of what in a culture should be affirmed and what should be criticized.

So let’s look at the question of the use of contemporary music forms. Wherein lies the difference? The Westminster standards don’t speak to timbre, rhythm, volume, melodic line, and tempo of music. They may speak indirectly, but certainly not directly, to emotional expressiveness. The divide is not over how the Confession is read, but over how the culture is read. One church sees contemporary popular culture as toxic (or perhaps as very thin and shallow) and therefore inappropriate for use in worship. The other church sees contemporary culture in more positive, or at least neutral, ways. So two churches with the same basic doctrine, but different attitudes toward the surrounding culture, will choose different ministry expressions to communicate that doctrine.

It’s not just readings of culture that shape a church’s ministry expression. Churches also have different understandings of Christian tradition—how much from the past should be kept, how much discarded, and why. They also have different understandings of the role of reason and persuasion—in comparison with the roles of emotion and community—in our preaching, evangelism, and discipleship. None of these questions are directly addressed in most confessions or statements of faith, yet it is clear that where we come down on these issues has a huge impact on how we do ministry. And so Christian ministry will still look different in various times and places, just as the universal Biblical principles of marriage take an infinite variety of particular forms in the unique personalities of millions of Christian couples.

When we’ve reflected on our contemporary culture and, on that basis, determined the basic shape of how we are going to practice and communicate our unchanging doctrine, we have arrived at what Lints calls a “theological vision.” Two churches with the same doctrine, yet holding different views of culture, tradition, and reason, will see different theological visions. Those different visions will in turn lead them to adopt different ministry expressions, methods, and programs.

To continue our example, the Reformed thinkers of the Puritan era produced the Westminster Confession. Many who subscribe to the Confession also greatly revere that time in history and so have largely adopted Puritan ways of preaching and doing ministry. They may naturally assume that anyone who subscribes to the Westminster Confession should also emulate the ministry practices of its writers. But that assumption is based on presuppositions about the nature of culture and the role of tradition, not on the Confession itself.

Still, these assumptions will matter deeply in the end. For to have a low view of contemporary culture but a very high view of the Puritan era will produce a very different theological vision—and consequently a different blend of ministry—than you will produce if you see common grace in culture and are highly sensitive to any distortions in the Puritans’ ecclesiastical practices and views. Either way, it is important to notice that no assessment of modern culture, or of the role of tradition, or even of the specific practices of the Puritans, is enshrined in the confessional standards themselves.

It has become clear to me that while most Christian leaders do very deliberate, conscious study and thinking to arrive at their doctrinal beliefs, they are almost blind to the process of developing a theological vision. They often just “catch” their convictions about culture, reason, and tradition without really thinking them out. They come upon a ministry that they admire or that helps them personally and then they adopt it wholesale without recognizing the presuppositions, convictions and decisions that went into it.

To be faithful and fruitful, more Christian leaders should pay attention to this “middle space” between believing doctrine and choosing methods. The vast majority of resources on “how to do church” discuss either the Biblical basics of church belief and practice or specific ways to adopt certain ministry programs. I don’t know of any book that, instead of asking “what should our doctrine be?” or “what should our programs look like?” instead asks “what is our theological vision for ministry in our time and place?” That’s why I wrote Center Church.

This article first appeared in edited form on CNN and is printed below in its entirety.

When I was diagnosed with cancer, the question "Why me?" was a natural one. Later, when I survived but others with the same kind of cancer died, I also had to ask, "Why me?"

Suffering and death seem random, senseless. The recent Aurora shootings—in which some people were spared and others lost—is the latest, vivid example of this, but there are plenty of others every day: from casualties in the Syria uprising to victims of accidents on American roads. Tsunamis, tornadoes, household accidents—the list is long. As a minister, I’ve spent countless hours with suffering people crying: “Why did God let this happen?” In general I hear four answers to this question—but each is wrong, or at least inadequate.

The first answer is, "This makes no sense—I guess this proves there is no God." But the problem of senseless suffering does not go away if you abandon belief in God. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, said that if there was no higher divine Law, there would be no way to tell if any particular human law was unjust or not. If there is no God, then why have a sense of outrage and horror when suffering and tragedy occur? The strong eat the weak—that’s life—so why not? When Friedrich Nietzsche heard that a natural disaster had destroyed Java in 1883, he wrote a friend: “Two hundred thousand wiped out at a stroke—how magnificent!” Nietzsche was relentless in his logic. Because if there is no God, all value judgments are arbitrary. All definitions of justice are just the results of your culture or temperament. As different as they were in other ways, King and Nietzsche agreed on this point. If there is no God or higher divine Law, then violence is perfectly natural. So abandoning belief in God doesn’t help with the problem of suffering at all, and as we will see, it removes many resources for facing it.

The second answer is, “If there is a God, senseless suffering proves that God is not completely in control of everything. He couldn’t stop this.” As many thinkers have pointed out—both devout believers as well as atheists—such a being, whatever it is, doesn’t really fit our definition of God. And this leaves you with the same problems mentioned above. If you don’t believe in a God powerful enough to create and sustain the whole world, then the world came about through natural forces, and that means, again, that violence is natural. Or if you think that God is an impersonal life force and this whole material world is just an illusion, again you remove any reason to be outraged at evil and suffering or to resist it.

The third answer to seemingly sudden, random death is, "God saves some people and lets others die because he favors and rewards good people." But the Bible forcefully rejects the idea that people who suffer more are worse people than those who are spared suffering. This was the self-righteous premise of Job’s friends in that great Old Testament book. They sat around Job, who was experiencing one sorrow in life after another, and said, "the reason this is happening to you and not us is because we are living right and you are not." At the end of the book, God expresses his fury at Job’s "miserable comforters." The world is too fallen and deeply broken to issue in neat patterns of good people having good lives and bad people having bad lives.

The fourth answer is, "God knows what he’s doing, so be quiet and trust him." This is partly right, but inadequate. It is inadequate because it is cold and because the Bible gives us more with which to face the terrors of life.

God did not create a world with death and evil in it. It is the result of humankind turning away from him. We were put into this world to live wholly for him, and when instead we began to live for ourselves everything in our created reality began to fall apart—physically, socially, and spiritually. Everything became subject to decay. But God did not abandon us. Of all the world's major religions, only Christianity teaches that God came to earth (in Jesus Christ) and became subject to suffering and death himself—dying on the Cross to take the punishment our sins deserved—so that some day he can return to earth to end all suffering without ending us.

Do you see what this means? Yes, we don’t know the reason God allows evil and suffering to continue, or why it is so random, but now at least we know what the reason isn’t—what it can’t be. It can’t be that he doesn’t love us! It can’t be that he doesn’t care. He is so committed to our ultimate happiness that he was willing to plunge into the greatest depths of suffering himself.

He understands us, he’s been there, and he assures us that he has a plan to eventually to wipe away every tear, to make "everything sad come untrue," as J.R.R. Tolkien put it at the end of his Christian allegory The Lord of the Rings.

Someone might say, "But that’s only half an answer to the question 'Why?'" Yes, but it is the half that we need.

If God actually explained all the reasons why he allows things to happen as they do, it would be too much for our finite brains. Think of small children and their relationship to their parents. Three-year-olds can’t understand most of what their parents allow and disallow for them. But though they aren’t capable of comprehending their parents’ reasons, they are capable of knowing their parents’ love, and therefore capable of trusting them and living securely. That is what they really need. Now the difference between God and human beings would be infinitely greater than the difference between a thirty-year-old parent and a three-year-old child. So we should not expect to be able to grasp all God’s purposes, but through the Cross and gospel of Jesus Christ, we can know his love. And that is what we need most.

In Ann Voskamp’s book One Thousand Gifts, she shares her journey to understand the senseless death of her sister, crushed by a truck at the age of two. In the end, she concludes that the primary issue is whether we trust God’s character. Is he really loving? Is he really just? Her conclusion:

"[God] gave us Jesus... If God didn’t withhold from us His very own Son, will God withhold anything we need? If trust must be earned, hasn’t God unequivocally earned our trust with the bark on the raw wounds, the thorns pressed into the brow, your name on the cracked lips? How will he not also graciously give us all things He deems best and right? He’s already given the incomprehensible.”

In my last post, I made an argument for why we still need apologetics. Believing has both a head and a heart aspect, so while some non-Christians will need more help with one than the other, we can’t ignore either one.

So what can we say when we are called upon to present the reasons why we believe?

First, I try to show that it takes faith to doubt Christianity, because any worldview (including secularism or skepticism) is based on assumptions. For example, the person who says, “I can only believe in something if it can be rationally or empirically proven” must realize that that in itself is a statement of faith. This “verification principle” cannot actually be proven rationally or empirically, making it an assertion or a claim, not an argument. Furthermore, there are all sorts of things you can’t prove rationally or empirically. You can’t prove to me that you’re not really a butterfly dreaming you’re a person. (Haven’t you seen The Matrix?) You can't prove most of the things you believe, so at least recognize that you have faith.

I normally make this point by considering an objection to Christianity, to show that at the heart of it is some sort of faith assumption. Let’s take the example of suffering; someone will say, “I can’t believe in God, because how could a good God allow such suffering?”

Put another way, they are saying, “I know for a fact that there can’t be any good reason that a good God would allow this specific thing to happen.” Really? There could be all sorts of good reasons why God allowed something to happen that caused suffering, despite our inability to think of them. If you’ve got an infinite God big enough to be mad at for the suffering in the world, then you also have an infinite God big enough to have reasons for it that you can’t think of.

You have to show people that it takes faith to doubt Christianity. C. S. Lewis’ pre-conversion argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But then he asked himself, “But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? …Atheism turns out to be too simple” (Mere Christianity, Book 2, Part 1). In the natural world the strong eat the weak, and there’s nothing wrong with violence. Where do you get the standard that says the human world shouldn't work like that, that says the natural world is wrong? You can only judge suffering as wrong if you’re using a standard higher than this world, a supernatural standard. If there’s no God, you have no reason to be upset at the suffering in this world. That’s just the way it is. It takes faith to get mad at this world.

You see, a gospel-shaped apologetic starts not with telling people what to believe, but by showing them their real problem. In this case we are showing secular people that they have less warrant for their faith assumptions than we do for ours. We need to show that it takes faith even to doubt.

British critic and former atheist A.N. Wilson wrote about losing his faith as a young man, influenced by British intellectual society, which had all but accepted that only stupid people actually believe in Christianity. "As a matter of fact however,” he argues, “it is materialist atheism that is not merely an arid creed but totally irrational. Materialist atheism says we are just a collection of chemicals, and it has no answer whatsoever to the question of how we should be capable of love, or heroism, or poetry if we are simply animated pieces of meat.”

A campus evangelist I once heard during the Vietnam protests pushed atheist students to recognize the clash between their moral relativism in regards to sex, and their moral absolutism with regards to international genocide. They had no answers. If there’s no God, everything is permitted. Without God we’re left with no basis for all that is most important to our lives: human dignity, compassion, justice. We have a problem.

Which brings us to the final point, the solution to our problem. At some point you need tell the Christian story in a way that addresses the things that people most want for their own lives, the things that they are trying to find outside of Christianity, and show how Christianity can give it to them. Alasdair MacIntyre said this about narratival apologetics: “That narrative prevails over its rivals which is able to include its rivals within it, not only to retell their stories as episodes within its story, but to tell the story of the telling of their stories as such episodes.” Read that sentence again.

There is a way of telling the gospel that makes people say, “I don’t believe it’s true, but I wish it were.” You have to get to the beauty of it, and then go back to the reasons for it. Only then, when you show that it takes more faith to doubt it than to believe it; when the things you see out there in the world are better explained by the Christian account of things than the secular account of things; and when they experience a community in which they actually do see Christianity embodied, in healthy Christian lives and solid Christian community, that many will believe.

Apologetics is an answer to the “why” question after you’ve already given people an answer to the “what” question. The what question, of course, is “What is the gospel?” But when you call people to believe in the gospel and they ask, “Why should I believe that?” —then you need apologetics.

I’ve heard plenty of Christians try to answer the why question by going back to the what. “You have to believe because Jesus is the Son of God.” But that’s answering the why with more what. Increasingly we live in a time in which you can’t avoid the why question. Just giving the what (for example, a vivid gospel presentation) worked in the days when the cultural institutions created an environment in which Christianity just felt true or at least honorable. But in a post-Christendom society, in the marketplace of ideas, you have to explain why this is true, or people will just dismiss it.

There are plenty of Christians today who nevertheless say: “Don’t do apologetics, just expound the Word of God—preach and the power of the Word will strike people.” Others argue that “belonging comes before believing.” They say apologetics is a rational, Enlightenment approach, not a biblical one. People need to be brought into a community where they can see our love and our deeds, experience worship, have their imaginations captured, and faith will become credible to them.

There is a certain merit to these arguments. It would indeed be overly rationalistic to say that we can prove Christianity so that any rational person would have to believe it. In fact, it dishonors the sovereignty of God by bowing to our autonomous human reason. Community and worship are important, because people come to conviction through a combination of heart and mind, a sense of need, thinking things out intellectually, and seeing it in community. But I have also seen many skeptics brought into a warm Christian community and yet still ask, “But why should I believe you and not an atheist or a Muslim?”

We need to be careful of saying “Just believe,” because what we’re really saying is, “Believe because I say so.” That sounds like a Nietzschean power play. That’s very different from Paul, who reasoned, argued, and proved in the book of Acts, and from Peter, who called us to give the reason for our hope in 2 Peter 3:15. If our response is, “Our beliefs may seem utterly irrational to you, but if you see how much we love one another then you’ll want to believe too,” then we’ll sound like a cult. So we do need to do apologetics and answer the why question.

However, the trouble with an exclusively rationalistic apologetic (“I’m going to prove to you that God exists, that Jesus is the Son of God, the Bible is true,” etc.) is that it does, in a sense, put God on trial before supposedly neutral, perfectly rational people sitting objectively on the throne of Reason. That doesn’t fit with what the Bible says about the reality of sin and the always prejudiced, distorted thinking produced by unbelief. On the other hand, an exclusively subjectivist apologetic (“Invite Jesus into your life and he’ll solve all your problems, but I can’t give you any good reasons, just trust with your heart”) also fails to bring conviction of real sin or of need.

There will be no joy in the Grace of Jesus unless the person sees they’re lost. Thus a gospel-shaped apologetic must not simply present Christianity, but it must also challenge the non-believer’s worldview and show where it, and they, have a real problem. This is what I usually try to do, and in my next post I’ll lay out what I would say if I had an hour to give the whole case for Christianity.

[This was previously posted on Redeemer.com.]

I find it frustrating when I read or hear columnists, pundits, or journalists dismiss Christians as inconsistent because “they pick and choose which of the rules in the Bible to obey.” What I hear most often is “Christians ignore lots of Old Testament texts—about not eating raw meat or pork or shellfish, not executing people for breaking the Sabbath, not wearing garments woven with two kinds of material and so on. Then they condemn homosexuality. Aren’t you just picking and choosing what they want to believe from the Bible?"

It is not that I expect everyone to have the capability of understanding that the whole Bible is about Jesus and God’s plan to redeem his people, but I vainly hope that one day someone will access their common sense (or at least talk to an informed theological advisor) before leveling the charge of inconsistency.

First of all, let’s be clear that it’s not only the Old Testament that has proscriptions about homosexuality. The New Testament has plenty to say about it as well. Even Jesus, in his discussion of divorce in Matthew 19:3-12, says that the original design of God was for one man and one woman to be united as one flesh, and failing that, (v. 12) persons should abstain from marriage and from sex.

However, let’s get back to considering the larger issue of inconsistency regarding things mentioned in the OT that are no longer practiced by the New Testament people of God. Most Christians don’t know what to say when confronted about this. Here’s a short course on the relationship of the Old Testament to the New Testament:

The Old Testament devotes a good amount of space to describing the various sacrifices that were to be offered in the tabernacle (and later temple) to atone for sin so that worshippers could approach a holy God. As part of that sacrificial system there was also a complex set of rules for ceremonial purity and cleanness. You could only approach God in worship if you ate certain foods and not others, wore certain forms of dress, refrained from touching a variety of objects, and so on. This vividly conveyed, over and over, that human beings are spiritually unclean and can’t go into God’s presence without purification.

But even in the Old Testament, many writers hinted that the sacrifices and the temple worship regulations pointed forward to something beyond them. (cf. 1 Samuel 15:21-22; Psalm 50:12-15; 51:17; Hosea 6:6). When Christ appeared he declared all foods ‘clean’ (Mark 7:19) and he ignored the Old Testament clean laws in other ways, touching lepers and dead bodies.

But the reason is made clear. When he died on the cross the veil in the temple was ripped through, showing that the need for the entire sacrificial system with all its clean laws had been done away with. Jesus is the ultimate sacrifice for sin, and now Jesus makes us “clean.”

The entire book of Hebrews explains that the Old Testament ceremonial laws were not so much abolished as fulfilled by Christ. Whenever we pray "in Jesus name," we "have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus" (Hebrews 10:19). It would, therefore, be deeply inconsistent with the teaching of the Bible as a whole if we were to continue to follow the ceremonial laws.

The New Testament gives us further guidance about how to read the Old Testament. Paul makes it clear in places like Romans 13:8ff that the apostles understood the Old Testament moral law to still be binding on us. In short, the coming of Christ changed how we worship but not how we live. The moral law is an outline of God’s own character—his integrity, love, and faithfulness. And so all the Old Testament says about loving our neighbor, caring for the poor, generosity with our possessions, social relationships, and commitment to our family is still in force. The New Testament continues to forbid killing or committing adultery, and all the sex ethic of the Old Testament is re-stated throughout the New Testament (Matthew 5:27-30; 1 Corinthians 6:9-20; 1 Timothy 1:8-11.) If the New Testament has reaffirmed a commandment, then it is still in force for us today.

Further, the New Testament explains another change between the Testaments. Sins continue to be sins—but the penalties change. In the Old Testament things like adultery or incest were punishable with civil sanctions like execution. This is because at that time God’s people existed in the form of a nation-state, and so all sins had civil penalties.

But in the New Testament the people of God are an assembly of churches all over the world, living under many different governments. The church is not a civil government, and so sins are dealt with by exhortation and, at worst, exclusion from membership. This is how a case of incest in the Corinthian church is dealt with by Paul (1 Corinthians 5:1ff. and 2 Corinthians 2:7-11.) Why this change? Under Christ, the gospel is not confined to a single nation—it has been released to go into all cultures and peoples.

Once you grant the main premise of the Bible—about the surpassing significance of Christ and his salvation—then all the various parts of the Bible make sense. Because of Christ, the ceremonial law is repealed. Because of Christ the church is no longer a nation-state imposing civil penalties. It all falls into place. However, if you reject the idea of Christ as Son of God and Savior, then, of course, the Bible is at best a mish-mash containing some inspiration and wisdom, but most of it would have to be rejected as foolish or erroneous.

So where does this leave us? There are only two possibilities. If Christ is God, then this way of reading the Bible makes sense and is perfectly consistent with its premise. The other possibility is that you reject Christianity’s basic thesis—you don’t believe Jesus was the resurrected Son of God—and then the Bible is no sure guide for you about much of anything. But the one thing you can’t really say in fairness is that Christians are being inconsistent with their beliefs to accept the moral statements in the Old Testament while not practicing other ones.

One way to respond to the charge of inconsistency may be to ask a counter-question—“Are you asking me to deny the very heart of my Christian beliefs?” If you are asked, “Why do you say that?” you could respond, “If I believe Jesus is the the resurrected Son of God, I can’t follow all the ‘clean laws’ of diet and practice, and I can’t offer animal sacrifices. All that would be to deny the power of Christ’s death on the cross. And so those who really believe in Christ must follow some Old Testament texts and not others.”

[Continued from Part 1]

Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion attributes Christianity’s decline in the U.S. to: 1) the political polarization which has sucked churches into its vortex, 2) the sexual revolution that has undermined the plausibility of Christian faith and practice for an entire generation, 3) the globalization that has made the exclusive claims of Christianity seem highly oppressive, 4) the materialism and consumerism that undermines commitment to anything higher than the self, and 5) the alienation of the cultural elites and culture-shaping institutions from Christianity.

What can we do about the decline of Christianity—if anything? This question has literally triggered an entire generation of books and blogs. Douthat’s book is mainly descriptive and critical. He even admits that the book was “written in a spirit of pessimism.” Yet he rightly responds that for any Christian, “pessimism should always be provisional.” So in his last chapter he very briefly proposes four factors that could lead to the “Recovery of Christianity.”

First, he speaks of the “postmodern opportunity”—the same relativism and rootlessness that has weakened the church is also proving exhausting rather than liberating to many in our society. Even in the academy, postmodern theory is now widely seen as being in eclipse and there is no “next big thing" on the horizon. Douthat wonders about the possibility of a kind of revolution from above, that is, a revival of Christianity among cultural elites.

Second, he notes the opposite impulse at work, the “Benedict option” being put forward by many—a new monasticism that does not seek engagement with culture but rather the formation of counter-cultural communities that “stand apart…and inspire by example rather than by engagement.” Ross suggests that these first two measures should not be seen as completely opposed and, indeed, could benefit by being paired with one another, otherwise engagement can become accommodation and being an "example" can become separatism and sectarianism.

His third factor he calls “the next Christendom.” By this he means that the explosively growing Christian churches of the former Third World could evangelize the West. Under the first two proposals Ross can name some existing efforts that hold promise, but this factor is much more than a dream. In European and North American cities there are already literally thousands of new churches and missions beginning under the leadership of African, Latin American, and Asian Christians.

His last proposal is that “an age of diminished [economic] expectations”—along with the devastation of the sexual revolution and the exhaustion of postmodern rootlessness—could lead to the masses again looking to Christianity for hope and help. A church that could welcome them, he warns, would have to have three qualities. First, it would have to be political without being partisan. That is, it would have to equip all its members to be culturally engaged through vocation and civic involvement, without identifying corporately with one political party. Second, it would have to be confessional yet ecumenical. That is, the church would have to be fully orthodox within its theological and ecclesiastical tradition, yet not narrow and harsh toward other kinds of Christians. It should be especially desirous of cooperation with non-Western Christian leaders and churches. Third, the church would not only have to preach the Word faithfully, but also be committed to beauty and sanctity, the arts, and human rights for all. In this brief section he sounds a lot like Lesslie Newbigin and James Hunter who have described a church that can have a “missionary encounter with Western culture.”

What do we think of his proposals? It is worth noting that each of these positive measures takes aim at one or two of the factors that have led to decline. The Benedictine option seeks to break the hold of political polarization on the church. The postmodern opportunity aims to re-engage the cultural elites. The next Christendom has already strongly undermined the contention that Christianity is just an extension of Western culture and imperialism. And if there is an “age of diminished expectations,” it could erode both the materialism and even the sexual licentiousness (which always works best in the midst of material plenty) that has undermined faith.

But how successful will these be? I don’t know, but I think these are the right strategies and responses to make. Why? First, each of the proposals addresses one of the five barriers to faith in our culture, and so we should at least attempt to deal with them. Second, though treated briefly, these are essentially the same ideas that others such as Newbigin and Hunter have proposed. That confirms them in my mind. Third, as many readers know, I simply think these are features of a Biblical ministry.

Near the very end of this book, Ross Douthat (whom I have not met as of this writing) very kindly used our Redeemer Presbyterian Church as a good example of some of the things he was proposing for the church in our time. When I read it I was startled, then humbled, then strongly overwhelmed by a sense that, for all God’s kindness to us over the years, we at Redeemer were so far from realizing our goals and aims. It actually discouraged me for several days until I noticed a little quote by G.K. Chesterton that Douthat cites near the end of his book. In The Everlasting Man Chesterton surveys the many forces over the last 2000 years that threatened and should have destroyed Christianity. “’Time and again,’ Chesterton noted, ‘the Faith has to all appearances gone to the dogs.’ But each time, ‘it was the dog that died.’”

All quotes taken from Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (Free Press, 2012)

Ross Douthat’s new book, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, is very helpful for Christians seeking to understand why the Church is in decline in the U.S. Before the book’s publication I gave a high-level look at its basic theses. In these next posts, I’ll share more details of Ross’s proposals and interact somewhat with his material.

Ross Douthat speaks of “five major catalysts” for the decline. First, he points to the political polarization between Left and Right that drew many churches into it. Mainline Protestants and some Catholics were pulled into line with the political positions of liberalism, while the evangelical churches (and again, some Catholics) became instruments of conservative political policy. He writes: “Issues that were swiftly turned to partisan ends by politicians in both parties…divided churches against one another as no controversies had since slavery.” As Robert Putnam has demonstrated in American Grace, this has greatly weakened the credibility of Christianity in the culture. Since so many parts of the Christian church are now strongly tied to one end of the political spectrum or the other, it means each branch of Christianity can be dismissed by a majority of the population (moderates and those on the other end of the spectrum) as partisan pawns. It has been particularly damaging to see white evangelicals voting overwhelmingly in the opposite way as black evangelicals. This has all given rise to a broadly held perception that religion is really not about God and the Bible but about politics.

We should keep in mind that in the 1950s, the two great enemies were the fascism of Hitler and the Communism of Stalin and Mao—both movements that had severely persecuted their national churches. Marxism was of course intensely atheist. And so in the average American’s mind, religion and Christianity were associated with freedom and democracy while secularism and atheism were not. Today, post 9-11, that has been completely reversed. In the average American’s mind religion and fundamentalism are associated with political extremism and terrorism. They are now seen as the enemies of pluralistic, western society.

Second, he points to the sexual revolution and the birth control pill that made it possible. “Before the sexual revolution,” Douthat writes, “a rigorous ethic of chastity and monogamy had seemed self-evidently commonsensical even to many non-Christians.” Why? The fear of “illegitimacy, abandonment, and disease.” But the pill changed all this. “Over the course of a decade or so, a large swath of America decided that two millennia of Christian teaching on marriage and sexuality were simply out of date.” The arguments against the traditional ethic had been around for centuries, but the hard reality was that sex produced babies and so the only really safe sex was married sex. The pill swept that argument away. Now far more people wanted (and were free) to believe these arguments for extra-marital sex because of “the new sexual possibilities” that the birth control pill afforded.

The importance of the sexual revolution for the loss of Christianity’s credibility can’t be over-estimated. For centuries individuals have justified and rationalized sex outside of marriage, but this had never occurred on a culture-wide basis as it now did in the West. Today there are enormous numbers of professing Christians, including card-carrying evangelical believers, who simply have stopped practicing the Christian sex ethic. It is seen as unrealistic and even perverse by thousands of people who identify as believers. This is massively discrediting and makes Biblical faith implausible to hundreds of millions both inside and outside the church.

The new sexual view of the world is one of the main barriers today to belief in historic Christianity. Most apologetics books (including mine!) give a chapter to each of the main objections to the faith, and yet few address what is almost the number 1 “defeater” for young skeptics—the regressive and supposedly unrealistic Christian view of sex and homosexuality.

The third factor has been the dawn of globalization and the impression that Christianity was imperialistically "western". After World War II, the "Third World" de-colonialized—dozens of former Western colonies were given their freedom. “To celebrate the new global civilization was to celebrate the eclipse of European dominance…[and] to cast a cold eye across the many sins of Western civilization.” This occurred during the 1960s through the 1980s with the rise of academic studies of colonialism and western imperialism, through books about U.S. genocide toward Native Americans (e.g. Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee), through discovery of southern white churches’ resistance to Civil Rights (e.g. The 1988 film Mississippi Burning), and to the uncovering of the history of the European church’s support of anti-Semitism in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust. Meanwhile “the more the world was swept up in the drama of decolonialization and Third World empowerment, the more tainted Christianity seemed by its centuries of association with the now-discredited imperial projects of the European West.” Out of “Christian guilt” over all this, the number of professing Christians who were willing to say that their faith is the one, true faith plummeted. Globalization has seemed to support those who attack Christianity’s claims to uniqueness.

The fourth factor in Christianity’s decline, according to Douthat, is the enormous growth in the kind of material prosperity that generally works against faith. This explanation was striking to me personally. Most religious-cultural analysts do not go here, but I found this argument persuasive. John Wesley was famous for his insistence that whenever a society (or a portion of society) becomes more wealthy, Christianity loses its power. Why? One underrated reason for the decline in the quality and quantity of those pursuing the ministry as a vocation is that other professions now provide far more wealth and status (as they did not 50 years ago). Another is that Biblical Christianity actually contains a very trenchant, powerful critique of greed and acquisition, as it does of sexual immorality. Just as the sexual revolution makes it hard for people to stomach one part of Biblical wisdom, so a highly materialistic society makes it hard to stomach the other. In addition, the consumerism of our culture is so pervasive and powerful that it has shaped American Christians’ attitude toward the church—namely, it makes the church irrelevant. Americans are conditioned to think of themselves as customers of goods and services, and churches as vendors that can be used or discarded on the basis of cost-benefit analysis. Douthat adds that in a materialistic society people are extremely mobile and they tend to commute long-distances to work. “Religious community proved harder to sustain in the new commuter society than it had been in an America of small towns and urban neighborhoods.” That’s right. In a society of increasing wealth, human community becomes less important for sustaining your life. Both church and neighborhood becomes superfluous.

The fifth and final factor in Christianity’s decline is the loss of the elites and the academic and cultural institutions they control. In some ways all of the other four factors have had their most powerful impact on what Christopher Lasch called the "knowledge classes"—the most educated and affluent, and this in turn magnifies secularization, because this class controls the media, newspapers, and networks, the academy, publishing, the arts, the most powerful and rich foundations, and much of the government and business world. Here Ross sounds a lot like Lasch (The Revolt of the Elites: And the Betrayal of Democracy) or James Hunter’s To Change the World. He argues that the educated and affluent have “gained the most from the new sexual freedoms and…suffered the least from their darker repercussions.” They were more cosmopolitan, multi-cultural, and well-traveled, and so they held more intensely to the view that religion was culturally narrow and imperialistic. The result is that the cultural elites have not merely “rejected” the faith. “Orthodoxy was less rejected than dismissed, reflexively, as something unworthy of an educated person’s intellect and interest.”
________________________
All quotes taken from Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (Free Press, 2012) pp.65-81

Next blog: Ross Douthat on the Character of Christianity’s Decline, Part 2

I had the pleasure of reading the manuscript of Ross Douthat’s new book Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (The Free Press, 2012), slated to be released April 17 of this year. I am going to honor the publisher’s request that I not quote or review the book until it is published because it is still being edited. Nevertheless, I want to interact with Ross’s basic ideas because I think they are provocative and because this is essential reading for all Christians seeking to understand Christianity’s relationship to culture in the U.S.

Everyone agrees that our culture has become far more secular and hostile to Christian faith over the past two generations, but what are the factors causing that change? Many in the evangelical and Reformed world see the decline starting in the early 20th century when most of the mainline denominations and their affiliated academic institutions and foundations fell into the hands of theological modernists and liberals. But it can’t be as simple as that. In his first chapter Douthat looks at four figures—Reinhold Niebuhr for powerful mainline Protestantism, Billy Graham for rising Evangelicalism, Fulton Sheen for popularly engaged Catholicism, and Martin Luther King, Jr for the prophetic African-American Church of the Civil Rights era—who at mid-20th century showed the cultural and institutional strength of nearly all branches of Christianity. But by the beginning of the 21st century all four branches of Christianity are fragmented, declining, and in disarray, while the number of Americans who say they have no religious affiliation or even belief in God steadily climbs. Robert Putnam nuances this a bit in American Grace when he argues that the mainline church began declining first, in the late 60s and 70s, while the Evangelical church began doing so by the 90s. Catholics have been battered with a different set of problems and so has the African-American church, but they are also definitely losing influence and people.

In his second chapter, Douthat attributes the change to five major social catalysts that have gained steam since the 1960s: 1) First, the political polarization that has occurred between the Left and Right drew many churches into it (mainline Protestants toward the Left, evangelicals toward the Right). This has greatly weakened the church’s credibility in the broader culture, with many viewing churches as mere appendages and pawns of political parties. 2) Second, the sexual revolution means that the Biblical sex ethic now looks unreasonable and perverse to millions of people, making Christianity appear implausible, unhealthy, and regressive. 3) Third, the era of decolonization and Third World empowerment, together with the dawn of globalization, has given the impression that Christianity was imperialistically “western” and supportive of European civilization’s record of racism, colonialism, and anti-Semitism. 4) The fourth factor has been the enormous growth in the kind of material prosperity and consumerism that always works against faith and undermines Christian community. 5) The fifth factor is—that all the other four factors had their greatest initial impact on the more educated and affluent classes, the gatekeepers of the main culture-shaping institutions such as the media, the academy, the arts, the main foundations, and much of the government and business world.

How does Ross Douthat’s analysis compare with some older thinkers? Lesslie Newbigin blames the marginalization of Christianity in the West on the outworking of the 18th century Enlightenment—which promoted the sufficiency of individual human reason without faith in God—for a great deal of the shift. In this he understands historical patterns as being caused by ideas and intellectual trends working their way out through a society’s institutions. I see no reason why Newbigin’s history-of-thought approach and Douthat’s sociology-of-knowledge approach cannot both be right. A third kind of analysis could easily find the faults within the church itself. As H. Richard Niebuhr points out in his essay, “The Independence of the Church”, the church becomes weak and even corrupt whenever it becomes successful in a culture. This is an important factor to add. For example, why did the mainline and the evangelical church get co-opted by American political parties and lose credibility? Wasn’t this due to a lack of robust, vital orthodoxy within them? If all these approaches are right and complementary, Christianity in the West has been the victim of “a perfect storm” of trends, factors, and forces.

Next blog: Ross Douthat on the Character of Christianity’s Decline

In the last post, we talked about a number of recent books that critique both the Cultural Transformationist and the "Two Kingdoms" approaches to Christ and culture. But for many churches and Christian leaders the issues are more practical. Is the mission of the local church to evangelize and produce disciples? Or is it to do justice and transform culture? Or is it an equal emphasis and combination of both?

Those who talk more of justice and cultural engagement are fearful of social marginalization. Without that emphasis, they believe, non-Christians in their settings will see the church as a useless and divisive institution that should not be tolerated. Those who stress evangelism and discipleship talk instead of the reality of limited resources. It would simply overwhelm the local church to try to meet the endless economic and material needs of the city, they say. Besides there are plenty of agencies doing that, while the church alone is calling people to conversion through faith in the gospel. So the church should use its limited financial resources almost exclusively on evangelism and the ministry of the Word.

How do we resolve this? First, we should establish that the ministry of the Word is the priority for the local church. The first thing I need to tell people when they come to church is "believe in Jesus," not "do justice." Why? First, because believing in Jesus meets a more radical human need and, second, because if they don't believe in Jesus they won't have that gospel-motivation to do justice in the world. So the first priority of the local church under its elders is to make disciples, not to do housing rehabilitation or feed the poor.

However, the church must disciple and support its members so they “love their neighbor”, integrate their faith in their work, and seek a more just and wholesome society and culture. This means that within the church there must be a great deal of teaching, preaching, and emphasis on how to be Christian in the public sphere and how to be loving servants in our neighborhood. And of course there should be strong “diaconal” or mercy ministry within the congregation to meet the economic and material needs of members. Nevertheless, while the church disciples its people to help the poor and be Christian film-makers, the congregation should not, for example, own low income housing nor start a film production company. So, we hold that the institutional church should give priority to Word ministry. However, we also teach that Christians must do both word and deed ministry in the world, and the church should equip them to do so.

What about the idea of “limited resources”? Most of the money Redeemer members give for mercy ministry within the congregation and service to the needy out in the city comes through annual special offerings and designated giving. One special offering is taken at Christmas and goes to diaconal ministry within the church. Another special offering is taken at Easter and goes to Hope for New York, a Christian 501(C)3 birthed out of Redeemer that does all sorts of mercy and justice ministry in the city. A lot of other giving to mercy and justice comes from our membership through individual gifts. Many Reformed churches have funded diaconal ministry this way over the centuries, with second or “special” offerings taken on communion Sundays or on other special occasions for the diaconal fund. The money was then used to meet needs inside the congregation and in the neighborhood. Meanwhile basic Word ministry is funded from regular offerings and not from special or designated giving.

This works very well. The special offerings do not cut into the regular offerings very much. They are generally new monies over and above regular giving. The existence of dynamic and compassionate ministry to the needy draws out giving that would not come if you did not give people the opportunity to give as their hearts direct. So Word ministry and acts of service are not an "either-or." It is not a zero sum game. In fact, I have seen that when people see a church caring about its community in tangible ways, there is a lot of goodwill, and it makes people more willing to give to the regular offerings as well. So there is no trade-off. We have found that if you fund mercy-justice in this way, it only increases the overall giving to Word ministry.

What about the charge that "we don't have the money or resources to feed all the hungry"? But we do not have the money or resources to "take the gospel to every creature" in the city either. We do what we can with what we have.

What about the concern for "relevance"? If the church is giving a priority to Word ministry, will our city think us useless? No. We have shown how a church can give priority to the Word and nonetheless show great concern for the poor in its message and raise lots of financial and human resources for the poor in its ministry. And the better the church's ministry of the Word, the more it will fill the city with mature Christians doing “salt and light” work, tackling the needs of the needy in sympathy and service. The local church and its Lord can and should get a lot of credit for that.

[This was posted today on Redeemer.com.]

I am grieved that New York City is planning to take the unwise step of removing 68 churches from the spaces that they rent in public schools. It is my conviction that those churches housed in schools are invaluable assets to the neighborhoods that they serve. Churches have long been seen as positive additions to communities. Family stability, resources for those in need, and compassion for the marginalized are all positive influences that neighborhood churches provide. There are many with first-hand experience who will claim that the presence of churches in a neighborhood can lead to a drop in crime.

The great diversity of our city means that we will never all agree completely on anything. And we cherish our city’s reputation for tolerance of differing opinions and beliefs. Therefore, we should all mourn if disagreement with certain beliefs of the church is allowed to unduly influence the formation of just policy and practice.

I disagree with the opinion written by Judge Pierre Leval that: “A worship service is an act of organized religion that consecrates the place in which it is performed, making it a church.” This is an erroneous theological judgment; I know of no Christian church or denomination that believes that merely holding a service in a building somehow “consecrates” it, setting it apart from all common or profane use. To base a legal opinion on such a superstitious view is surely invalid. Conversely, I concur with Judge John Walker’s dissenting opinion that this ban constitutes viewpoint discrimination and the use of public schools raises no legitimate Establishment Clause concerns.

A disproportionate number of churches that are affected by this prohibition are not wealthy, established communities of faith. They are ones who possess the fewest resources and many work with the poor. Redeemer has many ties with those churches and their pastors, and our church community invests time and resources to assist them to be good neighbors in their communities.

Let them be those good neighbors. I am hopeful that the leaders of New York City and the legislators of New York State will see the value of a society that encourages all spheres of culture—the church, government, education, business, etc—to work together for human flourishing.

Dr. Timothy Keller
Senior Pastor
Redeemer Presbyterian Church

In my last blog post, Coming Together on Culture, Part 1: Theological Issues, I said that, despite all the division over Christ and culture in the Christian church today, I perceived that some people in each camp were listening to the critiques and were incrementally making revisions that moved them closer toward the other camps and positions. I highlighted the Transformationist and Two Kingdoms views, arguing that each model had some imbalances, but that many were recognizing them and incorporating insights from other models. You can see what I wrote here. Most of the critiques I gave the Transformationist side came from the Kuyperians themselves. (See James K.A. Smith’s recent book Desiring the Kingdom and the exchanges in Perspectives: A Journal of Reformed Thought here.)

The post generated some resistance. Michael Goheen, a noted author from the Kuyperian movement, made a comment on our website. He said that he and co-author Craig Bartholomew (along with others), while solidly in the Transformationist camp, had “appropriated the work of Newbigin and would espouse a more missional Kuyperianism. That is social engagement is not first of all to change society—that may happen but…the goal…is to witness to the Lordship of Christ over all areas of public life and to love our neighbor as we struggle against dehumanizing idolatry.”

Meanwhile, Michael Horton, a prominent Two Kingdoms (or 2K) theologian, posted a blog in response to mine, similarly resisting my depiction of the Two Kingdoms position. Although six years ago he wrote: “There is no difference between Christians and non-Christians with respect to their vocations….” and “there is no ‘Christian politics’ or ‘Christian art’ or ‘Christian literature,’ any more than there is ‘Christian plumbing,’” he now writes: “Nothing in the 2K view entails that ‘Christians do not, then, pursue their vocation in a ‘distinctively Christian way’ or ‘that neither the church nor individual Christians should be in the business of changing the world or society.’” Then, after reminding us that no political movement can “transform the kingdoms of this age into the kingdom of Christ” he added that nevertheless Christian-led social reforms were good things. Horton confirmed the importance of Kuyper’s distinction between the church as organization and organism, and finally expressed appreciation for the conversation.

These two writers, despite their valid concerns about caricature, seem to me to provide evidence that indeed there may be a “coming together on culture” among Christians. Mike Goheen’s emphasis, still clearly within a Kuyperian model, has incorporated many insights and critiques from other sources and brought a balance to the whole “Christian worldview” way of engaging culture. And Michael Horton’s comments either clarified or slightly modified the often-heard 2K remarks that there is no distinction between the way Christians and non-Christians work in the world. His gracious spirit shows that this conversation can go on and the various approaches can learn from each other.

I don't think you can tell it from reading on the internet, but among many younger leaders with Reformed and evangelical convictions there may be a slow convergence coming on the subject of the mission of the church and the relationship of Christ and culture.

On the surface, the Reformed and evangelical world seems divided between "Cultural Transformationists" and the "Two Kingdoms" views of these things. Transformationists fall into fairly different camps, including the neo-Calvinists who follow Abraham Kuyper, the Christian Right, and the theonomists. Though different in significant ways, they all believe Christians should be about redeeming and changing the culture along Christian lines.

On the other hand, the Two Kingdoms view believes essentially the opposite—that neither the church nor individual Christians should be in the business of changing the world or society. Again, there are very different camps within this stance. The Reformed and Lutheran proponents of the "2K" view believe that Christians do their work in the world along side of non-believers on the basis of commonly held moral standards "written on the heart" by natural revelation. Christians do not, then, pursue their vocation in a "distinctively Christian" way. The Neo-Anabaptists are much more pessimistic than Reformed 2Ks about the systems of the world, which they view as "Empire", based on violence and greed. However, both groups reject completely the idea that "kingdom work" means changing society along Christian lines. Both groups believe the main job of Christians is to build up the church, a counter-culture to the world and a witness against it.

However, over the last two or three years, several publications have been produced that critique both the Two Kingdoms and Transformationist views. And these books and articles are pointing in a similar direction and are being carefully read and discussed by a wide number of younger leaders. I'm thinking of Don Carson's Christ and Culture Revisited, James Hunter's To Change the World, Dan Strange's articles (the latest being "Not Ashamed! The Sufficiency of Scripture for Public Theology" in Themelios, vol 36 issue 2) and Miroslav Volf's Public Faith. All these works consider the two positions, as they are commonly held today, to be seriously unbalanced.

Transformationism is seen as too triumphalistic, coercive, naïve about sin, and often self-righteous. It does not appreciate sufficiently God's common grace given to all people. It may not prepare Christians well to make common cause with non-believers for the common good, or to appreciate the goodness of all work, even the most "menial" kind. It is criticized for putting too much emphasis on the intellect—on thinking out your philosophical world view—and not enough on the piety of the heart and the reordering of our loves. It is critiqued for putting too much hope in and emphasis on Christians taking political power and not enough on their being a faithful presence in the professions and existing cultural institutions.

The Two Kingdoms approach is seen as too pessimistic about the possibility of social change. Paradoxically, many holding this position are also too naïve and optimistic about the role of common grace in the world. They argue that Christians can work beside non-believers on the basis of common moral intuitions given to all by natural revelation. But Dan Strange in Themelios writes that this idea of common standards does not work well in cultures that have never known Christian influence, and, therefore, "What is often taken as evidence of general revelation…in our Western culture may actually be rather the historical influence of special revelation, biblical law, and the gospel." In short, the Two Kingdoms approach gives too little weight to the fact that every culture is filled with idols, that sin distorts everything, that there can be no final neutrality, and that we need Scripture and the gospel, not just natural revelation, to guide us in our work in the world.

The aforementioned writers call Christians to new balances that honor the insights of both views and avoid the mistakes. One of the balances is between the church and Christians living in society. While the mission of the institutional church is to preach the Word and produce disciples, the church must disciple Christians in such a way that they live justly and integrate their faith with their work. So the church doesn't directly change culture, but it disciples and supports people who do. Another balance has to do with society's cultural institutions. Rather than taking them over, or avoiding them as a corrupting influence, or treating them with indifference—Christians are to be a faithful presence within them.

As I said, if you look at the internet you get the strong impression that the Reformed and evangelical world is divided over this issue. I'm sure that is true to some degree, but I'm not sure how sharp the division really is. Many already stand in a middle space between the two, and the authors who have argued for the middle way are being read widely and carefully by the younger Christian leaders I meet. And even though the authors I've named do not have identical positions—some are more friendly to one end of the spectrum or the other—my informal analysis of the situation is that these books are slowly bringing churches toward one another not only in their theorizing on this subject, but also in their practice. We'll look at the practical aspects in the next post.

7. Everybody’s Rule: Only God sees the heart—so remember the gospel and stick to criticizing the theology.

As I read through what these men and others have said about the importance and the danger of polemics, one theme came up so continually across their statements that I could not attribute it to any one person. That theme is about the evil of ad hominem arguments, the strategy of passionately attacking the person himself rather than engaging his doctrine and views. Gillespie warned against “acrimony… in the manner of expression.” If you have zeal, Gillespie, said, let it be expressed in the overwhelming force and power of your Biblical and logical arguments. “It is but in vain for a man to help the bluntness of reason with the sharpness of passion… let not a man cast forth a flood of passionate words when his arguments are like broken cisterns that can hold no water.” Much criticism today is filled with scorn, mockery, and sarcasm—“sharpness of passion”, rather than careful exegesis and reflection. Gillespie says such an approach is not persuasive.

But no one has written more eloquently about this rule than John Newton, in his well-known “Letter on Controversy.” Newton says that first, before you begin to write a single word against an opponent, “and during the whole time you are preparing your answer, you may commend him by earnest prayer to the Lord's teaching and blessing.” This practice will stir up love for him and “such a disposition will have a good influence upon every page you write.” Later in the letter Newton says, “Be upon your guard against admitting anything personal into the debate. If you think you have been ill treated, you will have an opportunity of showing that you are a disciple of Jesus, who ‘when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not.’ ” It is a great danger to aim to “gain the laugh on your side,” to make your opponent look evil and ridiculous instead of engaging their views with “the compassion due to the souls of men.”

In the end, Newton strikes this same balance that we saw in Lloyd-Jones and others. He says that it is “a laudable service to defend the faith once delivered to the saints: we are commanded to contend earnestly for it, and to convince gainsayers.” But almost immediately he added, “yet we find but very few writers of controversy that have not been manifestly hurt by it.” Why? He answers: “Either they grow in a sense of their own importance, or imbibe an angry, contentious spirit, or they insensibly withdraw their attention from those things which are the food and immediate support of the life of faith, and spend their time and strength upon matters which are at most but of a secondary value. This shows, that if the service [of doing polemics] is honorable, it is dangerous. What will it profit a man if he gains his cause and silences his adversary, if at the same time he loses that humble, tender frame of spirit in which the Lord delights, and to which the promise of his presence is made?”

In short, our purpose in controversy should be to persuade our opponents, lovingly but forthrightly challenging them. What we often see instead is a form of polemics in which opponents are caricatured and mocked, and base motives are imputed to them. Those taking more theologically conservative views are branded ‘self-righteous’ and those with less conservative views are called ‘sell-outs.’ In this approach, persuasion is not the purpose at all. Rather, the goal of polemics is to “rally the troops”—to gain stature in the eyes of some constituency, and maybe to grow your fan-base—by objectivizing and marginalizing your opponent. While many people conduct this kind of polemic in the name of Biblical truth, it is ironically more in line with Nietzschean postmodernism, which sees all discourse as not about truth and persuasion but about the accrual of power.

Is it possible for the Christian church today to get past this division between people who do polemics destructively and those who want to avoid polemics altogether? One way to do it is to go back to these authors that I have perused so lightly. I would even ask seminaries to consider at least one course in “Polemical Theology” which would not simply list the errors that need to be refuted, but which would teach students how to go about theological dispute in a way that accords with Biblical wisdom and the gospel.

Yes, the gospel. John Newton puts his finger on the main reason that polemics go wrong. We do not think out the implications of the gospel of grace for the way in which we go about our disputes:

Self-righteousness can feed upon doctrines as well as upon works; and a man may have the heart of a Pharisee, while his head is stored with orthodox notions of the unworthiness of the creature and the riches of free grace. Yea, I would add, the best of men are not wholly free from this leaven; and therefore are too apt to be pleased with such representations as hold up our adversaries to ridicule, and by consequence flatter our own superior judgments. Controversies, for the most part, are so managed as to indulge rather than to repress his wrong disposition; and therefore, generally speaking, they are productive of little good. They provoke those whom they should convince, and puff up those whom they should edify. I hope your performance will savor of a spirit of true humility, and be a means of promoting it in others.

Archibald Alexander, the first faculty member at Princeton Theological Seminary, was given the title “Professor of Didactic and Polemic Theology.” That seems a bit startling to us, because the term “polemical” in our day has an almost purely negative connotation. However, in the original plan of Princeton seminary, Polemical theology was seen as a discipline separate from the positive exposition of systematic theology.

Alexander taught this as a distinct course that distinguished orthodoxy from all opposing views. If you look at the list of the subjects he covers, it is striking how much effort was given to help students discern and refute theological error. It is also striking that Alexander included in his course a lecture on “The evils of theological controversy.” In other words, he was concerned about two opposite errors—either refraining from polemics altogether or conducting it in an ungodly manner.

George Gillespie was a Scottish minister, a member of the Westminster Assembly, and a prominent controversialist, contending for Presbyterianism as the Biblical model for church government. And yet in the forward to “The Presbyterian’s Armoury” he wrote, “I have often and heartily wished that I might not be engaged into polemic writings, of which the world is too full already…” Again we see neither a shrinking from polemics nor any relish in it. Indeed, Alexander and Gillespie indicated that anyone who enjoys theological controversy, who makes it their main purpose and who feels virtuous as they do it, is in a bad spiritual state.

D.M. Lloyd-Jones once had a memorable encounter with T.T. Shields, the pastor of Jarvis Street Baptist Church in Toronto, and a leading defender of orthodoxy against the growing liberal theology of the churches in Canada. Shields regularly attacked other church leaders in both his preaching and his writings. Lloyd-Jones shared virtually the identical theological positions with Shields, but he believed “that the Baptist leader was sometimes too controversial, too denunciatory and too censorious. Rather than helping young Christians by the strength of his polemics against liberal Protestants and Roman Catholics, Lloyd-Jones believed that Shields was losing the opportunity to influence those whose first need is positive teaching.” (I. Murray, D.M. Lloyd-Jones: The First Forty Years, p.271). We should recall that Lloyd-Jones was quite willing to engage in polemics himself. He and John Stott clashed publicly over whether evangelicals should remain in the Church of England. (Lloyd-Jones said they should not.) And yet Lloyd-Jones opposed making polemics a major part of one’s ministry, and challenged Shields.

In their meeting, Shields asked Lloyd-Jones if he enjoyed reading the works of another contemporary defender of orthodoxy. Lloyd-Jones said that he seldom read the author, because, “he doesn’t help me spiritually.” Shields responded: “Surely you are helped by the way he makes mincemeat of the liberals?” Lloyd-Jones responded: “You can make mincemeat of the liberals and still be in trouble in your own soul.” This touched off an extended debate. At one point Shields said that he was only doing what Paul did to Peter—contradicting and opposing him. Lloyd-Jones responded “The effect of what Paul did was to win Peter round to his position and make him call him ‘our beloved brother Paul’ [2 Peter 3:15]. Can you say the same about the people whom you attack?” For this Shields had no answer. The simple fact was that his polemics were really designed simply to stigmatize and marginalize his opponents, not persuade them. Suddenly the younger Lloyd-Jones appealed to Shields in a bold way. In the 1920s, Shields had expected an appointment to McMaster University, but theological liberals blocked it. Lloyd-Jones pointed out that from that time it had changed the tone of his ministry. “Dr Shields, you used to be known as the Canadian Spurgeon, and you were…but over this McMaster University business in the early twenties you suddenly changed and became negative and denunciatory. I feel it has ruined your ministry. Why don’t you come back! Drop all this, preach the gospel to people positively and win them!” (Murray, p.273)

On the lips of someone else, this could be seen as an appeal to “just preach Jesus” and not care about sound doctrine. But it is hard to accuse Lloyd-Jones of that. Rather, Lloyd-Jones was standing in the tradition of Gillespie and Alexander. Polemics is medicine, not food. Without medicine we will surely die—we can’t live without it. This is why “polemical theology’ must be a required part of every theological curriculum. Yet we cannot live on medicine. If you engage in polemics with relish and joy—if polemics takes up a significant percentage or even a majority of your time and energy—it is like trying to live on medicine alone. It won’t work, for the church or for you. That was Lloyd-Jones’s message.

I fear that we are in a period in which many in the Christian church are dividing into extreme positions over the very conduct of polemics. On the one side there are seemingly more people than ever, especially through the Internet, engaging in polemics, and yet it looks to me like there is a large number of younger Christians leaders who are reacting to this as if polemics is a pure evil. We want “conversation”, never argument or apologetics.

In the next post I'll give some ideas for a way that I hope could help some avoid the polarization that is occurring.

[Skip to Part 3, Part 4]

Dr Lloyd-Jones taught that we should evangelize with the gospel even as we teach and edify believers. Why? We must not preach as if everyone is a Christian, and we shouldn't think that believers no longer need the gospel, but only more "advanced" instruction. He believed that church members needed to be exposed to the Gospel not only because some of them needed to realize they had never repented, but also because "all the people who attend a church need to be brought under the power of the Gospel." (p.153)

There is a flip side to this. Lloyd-Jones not only calls us to evangelize as we edify, but also insists that we can edify Christians as we evangelize. Lloyd-Jones preached sermons in the evening that were primarily evangelistic and sermons in the morning that were primarily edificatory, but he insisted that his members come to both, and that preachers not make "too rigid" a distinction, because the gospel edifies and evangelizes at the same time. He wrote:

"I have often had the experience of people who have been converted, and have then gone on and grown in the Church, coming to see me some time later and telling me about what happened to them. What they have so often said is, 'When we first came to the Church we really did not understand much of what you were talking about.' I have then asked them what made them continue coming, and have been told again and again that, 'There was something about the whole atmosphere that attracted us…we gradually began to find we were absorbing the truth…it began to have meaning for us more and more.'

….This is a very common experience; people at different levels seem to be able to extract, under the influence of the Spirit, what they need, what is helpful to them… [T]hey had continued to grow in their understanding until now they were able to enjoy the full service, the full message." (p.127-128)

Lloyd-Jones' Sunday sermons, even his more evangelistic ones, were very theologically rich, yet he was always careful to explain things with non-technical language. If you couldn't understand the concept, it wasn't because he was using technical language, but only because the Christian doctrine before you was unfamiliar and counter-intuitive to you. Why did he do it this way? Why were his evangelistic sermons not simpler; and why was it possible for people to slowly but surely find Christ through his edificatory sermons? It was because the basic way that he addressed believers' questions and problems was always by pointing in some way to the truths of the gospel. That way, as believers were edified, non-believers could hear a gospel presentation. What was good about this, as noted above, is that as non-believers came to faith, they didn't have to "graduate" to a whole different service. Yes, they might begin coming to the Friday night lectures on theology or Romans, but on Sunday they were able to both come to faith and grow in grace through rich expositions of the Bible.

When, in the early days of my ministry in NYC, I heard how expository and theological Lloyd-Jones' evangelistic preaching was, and how evangelistic and gospel-centered his edificatory preaching was, it was an epiphany for me. I realized that the then-popular Willow Creek strategy of light "seeker talks" every weekend was misguided. Non-believers, especially in New York City, did not simply want light fare designed exclusively for them. They really wanted to know how this Christianity "worked." Lloyd-Jones' kind of preaching, which used the gospel to grow Christians and evangelize non-believers simultaneously, was the answer.

I also saw that there was an over-reaction against Willow Creek. Many conservative evangelicals deliberately moved to lengthy, didactic, expository teaching that assumed all present were Christians. In a sense, they moved Lloyd-Jones' Friday night kind of teaching to Sunday morning and that was all that was offered. This was deadly too, as Lloyd-Jones himself argued (see the previous post). It produces smug, cold believers and confuses any non-believers who happen to show up. So the traditional American expository sermon was inappropriate for Manhattan as well. So many churches provided either sermons that were not theologically rich enough to convert anyone—or sermons that were not gospel- and heart-oriented enough to convert anyone.

In order to forge a new path—and knowing that New York City in the late 80s was more like mid-century London than anywhere else in the U.S.—I began listening to recordings of sermons by Lloyd-Jones and Dick Lucas, another London preacher who had a mid-week lunchtime service that included many non-believers. His evangelistic ministry was also expository, and his edificatory ministry also gospel-centered. (Dick attended the Doctor's evening services as a young rector in London in the early 1960s.) To these two men I owe a debt I can never repay.

Gradually I developed a preaching ministry based on similar concepts of the nature of edification, evangelism, and the gospel. (I've written more on this subject in an article called Evangelistic Worship.) This in no way means I am copying their style of preaching. I am, of course, a Baby Boomer American. That means tones, emotional expressiveness, approaches to humor, uses of illustrations—are all widely divergent. But the basic philosophy of how to use the gospel is the same. I urge my readers to consider embracing it. That in no way requires that you try to copy my personal style either. It does require you, as a preacher, to understand and apply the gospel to the hearts of every listener every time.

First, Dr Lloyd-Jones insisted that we use the gospel as we edify Christians. In Preaching and Preachers, Lloyd-Jones warns preachers not to "assume that all…who are members of the church, are…Christians. This, to me, is the most fatal blunder of all." (p.146) He goes on to say that many people have accepted Christianity intellectually but have never come under the power of the Word and the gospel and therefore have "not truly repented." (p.150)

This is very significant. It is at the heart of the difference between the Old Side/New Side, Old Lights/New Lights controversy during the revivals in 18th century America. The Old Side and Lights insisted that what made you a Christian was, essentially, that you were in the church as a baptized, confessing member. They thought it inappropriate to make baptized, professing Christians consider that perhaps they were not regenerate. But here Lloyd-Jones comes down firmly on the side of the revivalists. He says that under real gospel preaching there will always be a steady stream of church members who, every year, come forward and confess that they had never understood the gospel and had, over the past months, finally repented and believed truly. "One of the most exhilarating experiences in the life of a preacher is what happens when people whom everybody had assumed to be Christians are suddenly converted and truly become Christians. Nothing has a more powerful effect upon the life of a church than when that happens to a number of people." (p.152) Lloyd-Jones relates several intriguing cases. In one case, he tells of guest preaching at a church in Toronto in which an older lady, one of the biggest financial supporters and "pillars" of the congregation was led to see by his preaching that she was not a Christian. The preaching at that church had never revealed it to her, because the preaching was what the Doctor called "general expositions for believers", helping them live a good Christian life, but mainly appealing only to the will, never going down after the heart and conscience.

Therefore, the Doctor warns about only exposing Christians to what he calls "general expositions" meant to teach, or "preaching morality and ethics without the Gospel as a basis." (p.35) Not only have many professing Christians never truly repented and rested in grace, but regenerate Christians need to constantly feel the power of the Gospel, and "almost" go through the experience of conversion again and again. (p.151) He adds, "If our preaching is always expository and for edification and teaching it will produce church members who are hard and cold, and often harsh and self-satisfied. I do not know of anything that is more likely to produce a congregation of Pharisees than that." (p.153)

As I've said in previous posts, Lloyd-Jones' advice is largely being ignored today. The emphasis even within the Reformed world tends to bifurcate in two directions, neither of which follow the Doctor. On the one hand, many Reformed evangelicals are (rightly) enamored with expository preaching, but it tends to be highly doctrinal and exegetical—it is not very life-related and, while there is some general concern to preach Christ from Old Testament texts, does not regularly recapitulate the gospel the way the Doctor calls us to do. On the other hand, there are the more liturgically oriented, who follow (whether they know it or not) the high church Calvinism of John W. Nevin rather than his contemporaries Archibald Alexander and Charles Hodge of Princeton. Nevin was completely against assuming that baptized believers might not be regenerate. He stressed the long processes of liturgical worship and catechizing for shaping heart and mind, not preaching that called for self-examination and conversion. Lloyd-Jones is far more in line with the Princeton theologians.

In his Thoughts on Religious Experience, Archibald Alexander writes that Christians must be exposed to the gospel of grace versus works again and again, not only to bring people to justification, but to enhance sanctification.

When persons are truly converted they always are sincerely desirous to make rapid progress in piety….Why then is so little advancement made? First, there is a defect in our belief in the freeness of divine grace. To exercise unshaken confidence in the doctrine of gratuitous pardon is one of the most difficult things in the world, and to preach this doctrine fully without verging towards antinomianism is no easy task and is therefore seldom done. But Christians cannot but be lean and feeble when deprived of their proper nutriment.

It is by faith that the spiritual life is made to grow, and the doctrine of free grace, without any mixture of human merit, is the only true object of faith. Christians are too much inclined to depend on themselves and not to derive their life entirely from Christ. There is a spurious legal religion, which may flourish without the practical belief in the absolute freeness of divine grace, but it possesses none of the characteristics of the Christian's life. It is found to exist in the rankest growth, in systems of religion which are utterly false. But even when the true doctrine is acknowledged in theory, often it is not practically felt and acted on. "The new convert lives upon his frames rather than on Christ, while the older Christian is still found struggling in his own strength and, failing in his expectations of success, he becomes discouraged first, and then he sinks into a gloomy despondency, or becomes in a measure careless….[U]ntil religious teachers inculcate clearly, fully, and practically, the grace of God as manifested in the Gospel, we shall have no vigorous growth of piety among professing Christians….The covenant of grace must be more clearly and repeatedly expounded in all its rich plenitude of mercy, and in all its absolute freeness.

Do we preach the gospel so clearly even when we are seeking to edify that there are always at least a trickle of people within our church who come to see that they never really believed? The purpose of every sermon, according to Dr Lloyd-Jones, is not to give information and general instruction but to preach the gospel and make it real to the heart. There's a flip side to this, and we will look at it in the next post.

When I first came to New York City in the late 1980s, I realized that I had not come to a normal part of the United States. I remember reading at the time a brief religious comparison of Manhattan and the rest of the country. 30% of Manhattan residents said they had "no religious preference" compared with (at the time) 6% of U.S. residents. 5% of Manhattanites attended any Protestant church at all, compared with 25% of Americans. I realized that New York City was, religiously and culturally, more like secular and very post-Christian Europe. So I began to search for preaching ideas from the great preachers I knew who had labored in London.

One, of course, was D.M. Lloyd-Jones, and so I re-read his book Preaching and Preachers (which was a new volume when got to seminary.) In addition I listened to scores (eventually hundreds, I think) of his sermon recordings. Particularly I was fascinated with his evening sermons, which he designed to be evangelistic. In the morning, his main purpose was to edify the saints, to speak to his congregation and (as he put it) address their heart issues from the Bible. In the evening, however, he had the non-believer particularly in view. Until that time, like many others I had been mainly acquainted with his published Romans series, but those were preached on Friday nights and were, in his mind, more 'instructional' and more like lectures. Very different was his Sunday preaching. When I began to listen to his Sunday messages and especially compare the morning and the evening, it was something of an epiphany.

What was so striking to me as I listened to the recordings was how similar the morning and evening sermons were. The evening sermons, yes, usually had a more direct appeal to people to come to Christ and believe the gospel, but the sermons were richly theological and expository, and quite often from the Old Testament. On the other hand, the morning sermons, yes, generally assumed a bit more knowledge of Christianity, but they always got back to sin and grace and Christ, the gospel. Yet they too were expository and rich. It was most interesting that Lloyd-Jones insisted and urged that all his members come to both. While the evening service was ideal for bringing a non-believing friend, he wanted the professing Christians there regularly also for their own good. Nor was he concerned when non-believers showed up regularly at the morning services. In fact, he said, "We must be careful not to be guilty of too rigid a classification of people saying, 'These are Christians, therefore….' [or] 'Yes, we became Christians as the result of a decision we took at an evangelistic meeting and now, seeing that we are Christians, all we need is teaching and edification.' I contest that very strongly…" (p.151)

The lesson I eventually learned from him was—don't preach to your congregation for spiritual growth thinking everyone there is a Christian—and don't preach the gospel evangelistically thinking that Christians cannot grow from it. In other words—evangelize as you edify, and edify as you evangelize. These are two different by intimately related ideas, and we will tackle one in each of the next two posts.

This post resumes the series on D.M. Lloyd-Jones' classic book Preaching and Preachers.

When Lloyd-Jones says that people still will come to hear preaching in our contemporary culture, he adds two qualifications—or you might say he has two underlying assumptions. He says: "The answer is that they will come, and that they do come... when it is true preaching. This may be slow work... it is a long-term policy."

First, he says, it must be "real preaching," and he later explains that this means preaching done by someone who is gifted to speak to larger groups. And that is a rub. As someone who taught preaching in seminary, I know that only a fraction of the students coming through seminary showed promise of having such gifts.

There are indeed many "incarnational" approaches to ministry that do not require a gifted speaker, and we should use them all. In fact, I would argue that in a post-Christian culture, preaching will not be effective in the gathered assembly if Christians are not also highly effective in their scattered state. In our times, people will be indifferent or hostile to the idea of attending church services without positive contact with Christians living out their lives in love and service. Therefore the incarnational "dispersed" ministry of the church is extremely vital and necessary.

Nevertheless, it is a mistake to argue that people in our society will not come to hear "real preaching." The fact is that, even in a very post-Christian city, if the preaching is of high quality, people will be brought and will come back. They will be shocked at how convicting and attractive the gospel message is, and they will feel like they've never really heard it before (even if they have been raised in a church).

Is that all that the Doctor meant by "real preaching"—done by someone who is gifted? No, there's more. During a convalescence after surgery in 1968, he visited the churches of many of his ministerial followers to hear them preach, but was distressed by much of what he heard. In response he said, "Once evangelical preaching was too subjective—now it is too objective." (From Iain Murray in "Raising the Standard of Preaching" in Lloyd-Jones: Messenger of Grace, p. 99ff.) In their concern to avoid entertainment and story-telling, their preaching had become too intellectual; it now addressed only the mind "and not the whole man" (p.105). He went on: "We have got the curious notion, 'It's the doctrine that matters,' and ignore this. With the message we have got, it is tragic if we can be cold, lifeless, and dull" (p.106).

In other words, though Lloyd-Jones often warns against being too adapted to the culture, in the end the Doctor argues strongly that preaching must not be dry and intellectual but profoundly life-related, that the preacher's tone must not be affected and "parsonic" but genuine, passionate, and transparent. If you listen to the Doctor's evening sermons in particular, you learn that he was always referring to current events and intellectual trends, often expounding Scripture in order to answer the questions posed by the culture. So the preaching must not be just a "running commentary" or an overly-cognitive explanation of the text, but must have shape and passion and connect forcefully with the heart and life of the congregant.

But the Doctor's assurance that "people will come" rested on two assumptions. First, that it was "real preaching" and the second that "it is a long-term policy." He means an effective preaching ministry takes many years of hard work. Americans of course are impatient and don't like to hear this. But he is right, and I'd add that it takes years of work in two regards. First, it requires the creation of a community, a body of believers who understands not only how to profit from real preaching themselves, but who know how to leverage it in their own ministry to their friends and neighborhoods. The Doctor begins to address this, but not enough for my satisfaction. Second, it requires many years and hundreds of sermons before a preacher becomes as good as they have the capacity to be. Some of that means the preacher staying put and becoming involved enough in the lives of the people and city so as to be able to address their questions and issues well from the Scripture. Some of that means coming to understand the Bible well enough to always make it clear. Some of it means years of repentance and prayer that creates an increasingly holy, transparent character.

In conclusion, I believe that Lloyd-Jones has made his case. I too am willing to affirm the "primacy of preaching" though I think there are many conservative evangelicals who take that to mean that preaching is essentially the only thing a minister has to do and everything else takes care of itself. That is a disastrous mistake. A man who is not deeply involved in personal shepherding, evangelism, and pastoral care will be a bad preacher. A man who can't lead his church well, forming it into a cohesive community, will find (as we noted above) that his church can't really benefit from his preaching. To say that preaching is primary in the church is correct. To make it virtually solitary in practice is not. Some will say that the Doctor made this mistake in his own ministry, and they may be right. Thirty years from now, if anyone cares, they'll be able to point out my glaring errors, too. And yours. For now, I hope more people will accept and embrace what the Doctor has to say about the importance of preaching in our time.

[Also available en español]

Before continuing with my series on Lloyd-Jones' book Preaching and Preachers, the following is based on a recent quiet time/devotional I had. We will resume the series in my next post.

I have always found Jesus’ words in Matt 5:21-22 to be shattering. He begins by reminding his listeners that anyone who murders will be judged. But then he gives three case studies of actions that seem far less serious than murder. “I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, ‘Raca’ is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.” To be bitter and angry in your heart toward someone can lead to great evil, so that makes some sense. But the term "raca" means only something like "you air-head!" and the word translated "fool" is likewise not an outrageous or cutting insult. Jesus’ listeners would likely have been smiling as they heard these terms and would have been shocked as he ended the sentence threatening them with hell-fire! What was Jesus’ point? “The deliberate paradox of Jesus’ pronouncement is that ordinary insults may betray an attitude of contempt which God takes extremely seriously.” (R.T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, p. 201)

This passage helps me understand Numbers 20. As in Exodus 17, the children of Israel are in the desert wilderness facing parching thirst. They charge Moses with being, at worst, evil or, at best, an incompetent leader. Again, God tells Moses to go to “that rock.” This time however he tells him to speak to it, and the rock will pour out water sufficient for everyone (v.8). Moses gathers everyone at the rock, but instead of speaking to the rock, he angrily upbraids the people. “Listen, you rebels!” he cries. “Must we bring you water out of this rock [again]?” (v.10) Striking the rock with his staff in his fury, the water comes out. God, however, tells Moses that he now would not enter the Promised Land, because Moses “did not trust me enough to honor me as holy in the sight of the Israelites.” (v.12)

What did Moses do wrong? Of course he failed to follow instructions. He struck the rock instead of speaking to it, and that is disobedience. Nevertheless, God’s rebuke goes deeper. In calling them “rebels” Moses set himself up as their judge. In saying, “Must we bring you water?” he set himself up as their deliverer. Everything Moses did pointed away from God toward himself.

It is not hard to understand why. Leadership brings a steady drumbeat of criticism and misunderstanding, even when things are going well. When things go poorly, people vent their frustration and anger on those in charge. A newly ordained pastor once said to me, “I didn’t know that, once you become a leader, there’s always someone mad at you!”

This makes sense of Moses’ reaction. “His response is not only the striking of the rock, it is the answer of a man who under pressure has become bitter and pretentious.” (D. Carson, For the Love of God, vol 1, May 11th reading.) God was ready to be gracious, but Moses was in no mood for that. The relentless criticism had made him self-righteous. He held them in contempt. He had wrath but no compassion, and that is the mark of a man who is becoming less like God, not more. (See Isaiah 15-16 where God grieves even as he speaks in judgment.) Moses is a man who has forgotten grace, and the sign of it is a sanctimonious spirit along with words of denunciation without humility and compassion.

Leadership always involves conflict. John Newton’s famous letter on “controversy” observes how easy it is for criticism to create Pharisees. “Whatever it be that makes us trust in ourselves that we are comparatively wise or good, so as to treat those with contempt who do not subscribe to our doctrines, or follow our party, is a proof and fruit of a self-righteous spirit.”

All leaders, and especially Christian leaders, must be on guard against this inevitable temptation and this terrible sin. It is natural, when under criticism, to shield your heart from pain by belittling the critics in your mind. “You stupid idiots.” Even if you don’t speak outwardly to people like Moses did, you do so inwardly. That will lead to self-absorption, self-pity, maybe even delusions of grandeur, but the great sin is that the growth of inner disdain leads to pride and a loss of humble reliance on God’s grace. Moses treated God with contempt when he became contemptuous toward his people.

This is what leaders face. Is there any hope for us? Yes, because we are in a better position than Moses was for understanding the grace of God. Don Carson writes: “In light of 1 Corinthians 10:4, which shows Christ to be the antitype of the rock, it is hard to resist the conclusion that the reason God had insisted the rock be struck in Exodus 17:1–7, and forbids it here, is that he perceives a wonderful opportunity to make a symbol-laden point: the ultimate Rock, from whom life-giving streams flow, is struck once, and no more.”

In Preaching and Preachers, Dr Lloyd-Jones makes the case that the mainspring of the church's ministry should be Biblical preaching—preaching that expounds the meaning of the Biblical text in the assembled community.

The main objection to preaching in our time, however, is a pragmatic one. It is: "They will not come! People today simply will not come out to hear preaching." In our time a whole body of work has grown up around the distinction between "attractional" ministry versus "incarnational" ministry. The attractional model consists of Christians bringing people in to hear the gospel preached inside the church walls. The incarnational model is dispersing and going out beyond the walls of the church to love and serve in the community and talk to people about the gospel on their own turf. (See Alan Hirsch, Michael Frost, The Shape of Things To Come.)

We cannot treat this whole debate here. One obvious response to it is that it is quite possible to use both sets of methods to reach people, though there is more to the argument than a discussion of method. People who are dedicated to the incarnational model are anti-institutional, sometimes naively so. They not only eschew buildings but strong, central leaders, organization, and large-scale gatherings. But without some institutionalization there is no permanence or stability. (And indeed, the knock on churches in the incarnational model is that they are tiny and don't last more than a few years.) However, people dedicated in the American context to the attractional church can pander to our culture's consumerism, attracting people through lots of polished programs which provide the "customer" with an enticing selection of choices to meet felt needs.

For our purposes we should observe that in the incarnational model, preaching is sometimes re-engineered into non-didactic, dialogical, non-authoritative talks. And so it seems that to talk of the "primacy of preaching" is to vote de facto for an attractional model of the church. However, the preaching that Lloyd-Jones urged and practiced does not fit into the consumer-oriented seeker church model either. His sermons were very theological, serious, and demanding.

Nevertheless, in the end, if you make preaching central to your ministry, you are indeed expecting that the public ministry of the Word will be attractive and draw people in. At this point the Doctor takes the main objection—"they won't come"—head on. He says bluntly, "The answer is that they will come, and that they do come…" Now the Doctor was speaking of his own ministry at Westminster Chapel in central London after World War II. Church attendance throughout Europe plunged after the war, for a mixture of reasons. In that situation, he began preaching his long, theological, expositional sermons, and slowly the huge auditorium filled. His evening services were twice the size of the morning services, since people from all over London came to bring their non-Christian friends. I dare say that something similar happened to us in New York City over the past two decades, and in an analogous context.

So preaching does still "work"—they will come, but notice the Doctor's makes two qualifications to this statement. We will look at them in the next post.

Let's survey Lloyd-Jones's answers to the objections in his day to the importance of preaching.

The Doctor points out how in Acts 6 the church faced a crisis over the support of widows in the early church. The ministry of mercy to the needs of the poor in their community was quite important and necessary. But notice why the apostles put some new leaders over it. They did it so they could devote themselves to "prayer and the ministry of the Word" (Acts 6:4). That was the primary thing, and that was what the apostles, the main leaders of the church, had to give themselves to. The Doctor points to Jesus' own ministry, especially to places where, under pressure to do more miracles, he says that what he came primarily to do was preach (e.g. Mark 1:38). Jesus' miracles were wonderful—they helped people with disease and suffering—yet what reconciled people to God was belief in the message and work of Jesus.

The Doctor argues this forcibly. It is good for the church to help people with their suffering and need—through social service and counseling—but the one thing that the church can do in the world that is unique is to reconcile people to God through the gospel. That takes words, a message, explanation, exhortation, not just compassionate deeds.  He points out that in the UK it was after times of revival, when millions of people became Christians through the gospel, that hospitals, labor unions, and all sorts of social legislation arose. The church's primary duty is to preach the message of grace that motivates and empowers people to be salt and light in the world.

Dr. Lloyd-Jones effectively dismantles the idea that watching a video or listening to an audio of a sermon is as good as coming physically into an assembly and listening to a sermon with a body of people. It is obviously a good thing if a person who never hears or reads the Bible listens to the recording of a good gospel message and is helped by it. But the Doctor argues that people experience the sermon in a radically different way if they hear it together with a body of listeners and if they see the preacher. Watching on a screen or listening as you walk detaches you and the sermon becomes mere information, not a whole experience. There is a power and impact that the media cannot convey.

The Doctor takes on the idea that preaching should not be about "truth propositions" of Biblical doctrine but rather should describe practically how to live as a Christ-follower in the world. The trouble is, he says, that may mean you are preaching morality and ethics without the Gospel as a basis—and that simply will not work. If you tell someone to "live a life of service to others in accordance with the values of the kingdom of God" that will not change them in the core. Hearing a message like that will not lead them to weep and cry, "my chains fell off, my heart was free; I rose, went forth, and followed thee." The life-transforming, paradigm-shifting message of the gospel requires lots of teaching about the nature of sin as well as the character of Christ's redemption and the difference between grace and works and the nature of faith. All of these things are "truth propositions."

He also makes the case that, paradoxically, the preacher has greater credibility if he does not preach mainly out of his own experience, but shows that the message has come out of the Word itself. Instead of saying, "here's my experience, and this is how the Bible played a role in it," the preacher should say, "this is what the Bible says, and it actually contradicts my desires and intuitions, but I'm showing it to you because this message is from God, not from me."

The Doctor's basic case has been made. Preaching must convey the truths of the gospel as the basis for all Christian practice. It must arise out of the Biblical text to show that the message is from God. It should be heard in person in an assembled community. And preaching "sets up" everything else—it creates regenerated agents of justice in the world, it provides the material with which Christians counsel and disciple one another and which equips believers to share their faith with others. 

But Lloyd-Jones has one more objection to tackle, and it is the biggest one. It is a pragmatic one and it goes like this: "nowadays, people simply won't come to hear preaching." We'll look at his answer in the next post. 

Many voices were saying in D.M. Lloyd-Jones' day that the older approach to preaching was too monological, information-driven, inspirational, and authoritative. Today that same charge is being made. Today's critics have in mind not only the older traditional forms of expository preaching (think James Boice and Charles Stanley) but also the newer, inspirational, practical talks of "seeker-driven" spectacle churches.

Postmodern people, they argue, are deeply skeptical about authority and "salesmanship." Preaching that reaches postmodern people will almost not be recognizable as "preaching." It will be quiet, sincere, dialogical conversation rather than authoritative monologue. It will be more highly metaphorical and narratival than logical. It will not be intense, charismatic or high-energy. Also, it will be much more about how to live as a Christ-follower in the world according to the reign of God than about doctrinal and spiritual propositions that must be believed. Yes, it will center on Scripture, but the speaker's credibility will not lie in his expertise in the Bible per se, but on his personal experience of how the text has shaped his life. Also, the preaching will be just part of the whole liturgy, not the centerpiece. (For an example of a proposal for this kind of preaching see "Preaching in the Missional Church" by Ervin Stutzman.)

I think it is intriguing to see how much alike these newer objections to preaching are to the older objections (see Part 1) that were fielded by The Doctor in his 1969 lectures at Westminster Seminary, published as the book Preaching and Preachers. Lloyd-Jones believed that by and large the objections were wrong-headed, that expounding the Word of God to gathered assembly is a permanent feature of Biblical ministry. It is not something that can be discarded when times change. It should continue to be as central to church ministry in the present age as it has been in the past. His criticisms of all of these objections to the primacy of preaching are trenchant and, I think, compelling. But before moving on to them, first a word of warning.

As I re-read his book I realized that his views by no means have won the day. The objections to classic preaching have largely been accepted and people are scrambling to find alternatives. I think most young leaders who would pick his book up today will find it completely out of step with any of the last several books they may have read on preaching. And yet here I am, after twenty some years in the middle of New York City, a postmodern city by any definition, having been deeply shaped by the Doctor's definitions and prescriptions for preaching, and they have borne much fruit here. So if this advice has proved effective in the middle of NYC, why are so few people taking it? So why are so many people going in a different direction with preaching? Why aren't more people listening to it?

If you move beyond these posts and read the Doctor's book—as I hope you will—you will quickly see one possible reason why people have not followed him. Dr. Lloyd-Jones makes a host of dogmatic assertions about very specific practices. He believed strongly that the pulpit should be physically above the listeners, that the minister should wear a robe, that he should not make many personal references to himself nor use much humor. He believed that the preacher should not announce his texts and topics ahead of time. (He was that loathe to cater to people's interests and "felt needs.") He thought it was abominable to plan out exactly what your texts and topics would be months in advance. (That did not give enough space for the leading of the Spirit.) He was also opposed to having his sermons recorded (though he reluctantly agreed to it eventually.) He believed that large preaching services (Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Friday night) really would carry virtually all the "freight" of the church's ministry. He frowned on small group ministry and had few other ways for the church to gather as a community or do discipleship and instruction. As it turned out, in the end his church was too preaching-dependent and after his retirement the church experienced a crisis.

I've come to the conclusion that Lloyd-Jones's basic theses about the nature of preaching have not been followed in the U.K. nor here in the U.S. largely because of his own dogmatism on details and also because so many of his followers did not seem to know how to extract the Doctor's particular methods and personal tastes from the broad lines of the argument he laid down. That argument is, I believe, successful and crucial for us in our times. So I will turn to it in my next post.

I recently was asked to write a short essay on D.M. Lloyd-Jones' book of lectures Preaching and Preachers which Zondervan is slated to re-issue in 2012. This afforded me an opportunity to re-read the book and to discover that I had been more helped and shaped by it than I had remembered. Most of what I discovered would not fit in the essay and so I decided to spread a bit more of it out in some blog posts.

The first thing that struck me was how this nearly 70 year old Welsh minister (called "the Doctor" by his followers), lecturing in 1969, could have anticipated and addressed so many of the questions surrounding preaching that we are wrestling with in our own culture today. During the post-World War II era in Britain, there was a growing resistance to the older idea of the "primacy" of preaching. Previously it was considered the single most important thing that the minister of the church did. However, by the mid-1960s, there were many in the UK arguing that the era of the pulpit was over and that other things must displace it because preaching—and certainly traditional preaching—was no longer the most effective way for the church to reach people.

In his first lectures the Doctor recounts all the reasons and arguments for the move away from preaching. World War II had given Europeans a suspicion of great orators (think of Hitler himself.) As time had gone on there was more and more suspicion of words and "texts." There was less and less trust that language can communicate meaning. Also, television and radio had changed people's attention spans and created an appetite for informal, intimate speech, not oratory. In a post-Christian culture, there was also an increasing suspicion of all authority, especially religious authority. How, it was asked, could you expect modern people to come out and listen to someone, usually physically standing above you, doing a monologue without any opportunity for response or argument? They certainly would not come on their own, and if they were dragged there they would be bored or offended by all the pontificating.

Lloyd-Jones then lists the various proposals for what the church should do. Some who had lost faith in preaching sought to change it. It became marked by showmanship—more emphasis on stories, on direct appeals to the emotions, and to the creation of spectacle. (He pointed to Henry Ward Beecher of Brooklyn as a prototype.) Others insisted that preaching should be replaced or at least supplemented heavily with "new media" (which in Lloyd-Jones' time meant television and radio.) Still others proposed that preaching should not be so central to worship—that liturgy and artistic expression should come more to the fore. Also there were criticisms that churches had become mere preaching centers, not communities, and greater emphasis needed to be made on social services to the community and on counseling. Finally, the Doctor said there are those who taught that the only hope for the churches was essentially to abandon their current form. Christians should disperse, they said, throwing themselves into serving the community, addressing people's personal and social problems. Then, when Christians did have gatherings, they should be small and characterized by dialogue and multi-voice conversations.

What is so striking is how all of this discussion that happened 40-50 years ago in Britain has been happening in the U.S. over the last 10 years. In Lloyd-Jones' day the call was that "preaching won't work with modern people" and today it's the same claim with regard to postmodern people. In his day the charge was that preaching had to keep up with the television age, and now it's a call to adapt to an internet age. But almost all the proposals for how preaching must adapt are basically the same. Therefore, the Doctor's response and critique of them is very relevant. We will look at them in the next post.

In Japan, in Western Europe, and in Russia, the birth-rate has fallen precipitously, to below replacement levels. If this does not change, the economic and cultural impact will be very great on those nations. Many have pointed out that interest in child-bearing is lowest in the most secular countries and sectors of society, while it is the highest in the most religious countries. Why is this? One explanation is that more educated people put off child-rearing until later in life and that means fewer children. However, educated religious people have more children than educated secular people, and therefore the socio-economic answer isn't the most basic answer. I don't think anyone can be completely sure that they have a handle on this complex phenomenon, but I think it creates an interesting backdrop for the consideration of the unique Christian view of the family.

My European friends have two theories for why their secular neighbors have lost interest in the family. First, there is the sacrifice factor. For the last thirty years, sociologists have documented that secularism fosters individualism. A 2003 Ben Gurion University study found religious communes in Israel did better across the board than secular communes. (Cited in "Darwin's God", New York Times Magazine, March 4, 2007.) The reason? The members of secular communes simply were more selfish, particularly the men. Men who went to synagogue regularly were much more willing to sacrifice for the family and the community than men who did not. Despite the new financial incentives to have children that European governments are now offering, many people can't imagine a happy life with the severe loss of independence that comes with parenthood. As the studies since Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart have shown, secularism teaches that every individual determines his or her own purpose in life—the autonomous self is sovereign. In this world-view, family life looks like the loss of personal meaning and happiness.

There is also the hope factor. My European friends tell me that their secular neighbors are much more pessimistic about the future. They (rightly) see oceans of injustice and poverty in the world surrounding islands of democracy and prosperity. They are keenly aware of the ecological and technological disasters that are possible, perhaps inevitable. Why bring children into such a bleak world? Religious persons, however, have a profound assurance that in the future is final justice, or paradise, or union with God in some form. They have an over-arching hope that makes them more optimistic about bearing and raising children.

At this point you might think I would simply say "Yay for religion, it is the friend of the family!" It is not that simple. While secularism in the west tends to make an idol out of the individual and his or her needs, traditional religion has often made an idol out of the family. According to theologian Stanley Hauerwas of Duke University, Christianity was the very first religion or world-view that held up single adulthood as a viable way of life. Jesus himself and St. Paul were single. "One…clear difference between Christianity and Judaism [and all other traditional religions] is the former's entertainment of the idea of singleness as the paradigm way of life for its followers." (Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character p.174) Nearly all religions and cultures made an absolute value of the family and of the bearing of children. There was no honor without family honor, and there was no real lasting significance or "legacy" without leaving heirs. By contrast, the early church not only did not pressure women to marry but it institutionally supported poor widows so they were not forced to remarry as they were out in the culture at large.

Why? The Christian gospel and hope of the kingdom-future de-idolized marriage. "Singleness was legitimated, not because sex was questionable, but because the mission of the church is 'between the times' [the overlap of the ages]…We must remember that the 'sacrifice' made by singles was not [just in] 'giving up sex' but in giving up heirs. There could be no more radical act than that! This was a clear expression that one's future is not guaranteed by the family but by the [kingdom of God and the] church…" ( Hauerwas, p.190). "[Now, in the overlap of the ages], both singleness and marriage are necessary symbolic institutions for the constitution of the church’s life... that witnesses to God’s kingdom. Neither can be valid without the other. If singleness is a symbol of the church's confidence in God's power to effect lives for the growth of the church, marriage and procreation is the symbol of the church's understanding that the struggle will be long and arduous. For Christians do not place their hope in their children, but rather their children are a sign of their hope . . . that God has not abandoned this world." (Hauerwas, p.191)

The gospel-based community practices a view of family that is contrary both to the cultural idols of secular and traditional societies. The gospel frees singles from the shame of being unmarried they find in conservative cultures. Their truest identity is in Christ and their assured future hope is the kingdom of God. Even bearing children, in the Christian view, is merely nurturing more lives for the family of God. That can be done in other ways than the biological. On the other hand, the gospel gives us the hope and strength for the sacrifices of marriage and parenthood that is lacking in liberal cultures. Christians grasp that they were only brought to life because of Jesus' radical sacrifice of his independence and power. We know that children are only brought to life and self-sufficiency if their parents sacrifice much of their independence and power. In light of the cross, it is the least we can do.

The gospel is neither religion nor irreligion, it is something else altogether. Vital gospel Christianity's influence on a society will produce neither a liberal and secular nor a traditional and conservative culture, but something we have seldom seen before.

How do seasons of revival come? One set of answers comes from Charles Finney, who turned revivals into a "science." Finney insisted that any group could have a revival any time or place, as long as they applied the right methods in the right way. Finney's distortions, I think, led to much of the weakness in modern evangelicalism today, as has been well argued by Michael Horton over the years. Especially under Finney's influence, revivalism undermined the more traditional way of doing Christian formation. That traditional way of Christian growth was gradual – whole family catechetical instruction – and church-centric. Revivalism under Finney, however, shifted the emphasis to seasons of crisis. Preaching became less oriented to long-term teaching and more directed to stirring up the affections of the heart toward decision. Not surprisingly, these emphases demoted the importance of the church in general and of careful, sound doctrine and put all the weight on an individual's personal, subjective experience. And this is one of the reasons (though not the only reason) that we have the highly individualistic, consumerist evangelicalism of today.

There has been a withering critique of revivalism going on now for twenty years within evangelical circles. Most of it is fair, but it often goes beyond the criticism of the technique-driven revivalism of Finney to insist that even Edwards and the Puritans were badly mistaken about how people should embrace and grow in Christ. In this limited space I can't respond to that here other than to say I think that goes way too far. However, this critique trend explains why there is so much less enthusiasm for revival than when I was a young minister. It also explains why someone like D.M. Lloyd-Jones was so loathe to say that there was anything that we can do to bring about revivals (other than pray.) He knew that Finney-esque revivalism led to many spiritual pathologies.

Nevertheless, I think we can carefully talk about some factors that, when present, often become associated with revival by God's blessing. My favorite book on this (highly recommended by Lloyd-Jones) is William B. Sprague's Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1832). Sprague studied under both Timothy Dwight, Edwards' grandson, at Yale and also Archibald Alexander at Princeton. The Princetonians – the Alexanders, Samuel Miller, and Charles Hodge – did a good job of combining the basics of revivalism with a healthy emphasis on doctrine and the importance of the church. Sprague's lectures include a chapter on "General Means" for promoting revivals, and his chapters on counseling seekers and new converts are particularly helpful.

The primary means-of-revival that everyone agrees upon is extraordinary prayer. That's the clearest of all and so I won't spend time on it. The second means is a recovery of the grace-gospel. One of the main vehicles sparking the first awakening in Northampton, Massachusetts was Edwards' two sermons on Romans 4:5, "Justification by Faith Alone," in November, 1734. For both John Wesley and George Whitefield, the main leaders of the British Great Awakening, it was an understanding of salvation by grace rather than moral effort that touched off personal renewal and made them agents of revival. Lloyd-Jones taught that the gospel of justification could be lost at two levels. A church might simply become heterodox and lose the very belief in justification by faith alone. But just as deadly, it might keep the doctrine "on the shelf" as it were and not preach it publicly in such a way that connects to people's hearts and lives.

The third factor I would mention is renewed individuals. Sprague points out how certain church leaders can be characterized by the infectious marks of spiritual revival – a joyful, affectionate seriousness, and "unction" – a sense of God's presence. In addition, often several visible, dramatic life-turnarounds ("surprising conversions") may cause others to do deep self-examination and create a sense of spiritual longing and expectation in the community. The personal revivals going on in these individuals spread informally to others through conversation and relationship. More and more people begin to look at themselves and seek God.

A fourth factor I will call the use of the gospel on the heart in counseling. Sprague and John Newton in his letters do a good job of showing how the gospel must be used on both seekers, new believers, and non-growing Christians. The gospel must cut away both the moralism and the licentiousness that destroys real spiritual life and power. There must be venues and meetings and settings in which this is done, both one-on-one and in groups. See William Williams, The Experience Meeting, a leaders' manual for revival-promoting small group meetings in Wales during the first great awakening.

Finally I would add a fifth factor. Sprague rightly points out that revivals occur mainly through the ordinary, "instituted means of grace" – preaching, pastoring, worship, prayer. It is a mistake to identify some specific programmatic method (e.g. Billy Graham-like mass evangelism) too closely with revivals. Lloyd-Jones points to some sad cases where people who came through the Welsh revival of 1904-05 became wedded to particular ways of holding meetings and hymn-singing as the way God brings revival. Nevertheless, Sprague grants that sometimes God will temporarily use some new method to propagate the gospel and spark revival. For example, under Wesley and Whitefield, outdoor preaching was a new, galvanizing method. Mid-day public prayer meetings were important to the Fulton Street revival in downtown NYC in 1857-58. I'm ready to say that creativity might be one of the marks of revival, because so often some new way of communicating the gospel has been part of the mix that God used to bring a mighty revival.

I was very glad to see the new book by Collin Hansen and John Woodbridge, A God-Sized Vision: Revival Stories that Stretch and Stir, because a generation ago there was far more interest in and desire for revival than there is now, though everyone had somewhat different conceptions of it. For many in the Baptist and Methodist tradition, "revival" meant a season of vigorous activity for the purposes of prayer, renewal, and evangelism. For Pentecostals and charismatics, it meant a time in which the extraordinary gifts of the Holy Spirit were evident. For those in the Reformed-Puritan tradition who looked to Jonathan Edwards' theology of revival as definitive, it meant an intensification of the ordinary means of grace and a great wave of newly awakened inquirers, soundly converted sinners, and spiritually renewed believers.

When my wife and I got to Gordon-Conwell Seminary in 1972, we had both seen, on our respective campuses, an extraordinary year of spiritual renewal. (Kathy went to Allegheny College in Meadville, PA.) Before 1970, the InterVarsity fellowships of central Pennsylvania campuses were all small and sleepy. At my campus, Bucknell University, IV had consisted of 5-15 students for a number of years. Then during the 1970-71 school year there was an explosion of spiritual interest, and by the end of the year we had about 100 students attending meetings, even though there had been no 'outreach' programs to speak of. I also remember that spring that we went to the central Pennsylvania area retreat and discovered that the same thing had spontaneously been occurring on most of the other campuses.

When we got to Gordon-Conwell we took a course with Richard Lovelace called "The Dynamics of Spiritual Life" and the next semester I took his course on the history of revivals and awakenings. There I read deeply in Edwards and also met his "modernizers" D.M. Lloyd-Jones and J.I. Packer, and Lovelace himself, who distilled Edwards in his classic, The Dynamics of Spiritual Life. Their descriptions of revival were an enormous help in understanding what I had seen, albeit briefly, on our college campus. After seminary Kathy and I went to a small church in Hopewell, Virginia, where we saw solid growth and some wonderful individual conversions, but where we wouldn't say we saw the things usually described as revival. Later however, during the first 18 months after the founding of Redeemer here in New York City, we again saw the "spiritual dynamics" we had seen on our campuses twenty years before. Manhattan at that time (1989-1991) was very crime-ridden and was going through a recession. There were very few evangelical churches in the whole metro area, and Christians were not moving into the city, only out of it. Yet we saw probably a hundred people come to faith and a church grow from zero to hundreds in attendance in just a few months, all in a location where absolutely no one said it could happen. In my reading of Lloyd-Jones's life, it appears he had the opposite experience to mine. Originally he pastored a struggling mission work in a small town in Wales, Aberavon, where he saw many conversions and growth to an attendance of almost 900 after a few years of ministry. That was simply unheard of in that time and kind of place. However, he did not see the same kind of revival dynamics in his church or in his city during his later center-city ministry at Westminster Chapel in London.

What I learned was this. Revivals can be longer, lasting several years, or shorter, enduring only a few weeks; they can be more widespread, affecting a whole town or region or country, or more narrow in scope, such as just one congregation. But they are seasons in which the ordinary operations of the Holy Spirit are intensified many-fold. "Sleepy" and immature believers become electrified through joyful repentance and put Christ in the center of their lives. Nominal Christians within congregations get converted and testify to the fact, which leads to more sleepy believers waking up. In turn, non-believers are drawn in to the beautified Christian community and begin embracing Christ in numbers that defy normal explanations. The "church growth" can't be accounted for by demographic-sociological shifts or efficient outreach programs in such cases. Most telling of all, the corporate worship gatherings are thick with a sense of the presence of God that is not orchestrated by the presiders.

What brings about such seasons? Is it even right to talk about ways and "means"? We'll look at that in another blog post.

We recently had an election season in the U.S. Every year, it seems, the amount of attention paid to the mechanics and outcomes of partisan politics grows. Thirty years ago there was nothing like this amount of attention given to politics. Many point out rightly that the 24-hour news cycle and the internet creates an appetite for political analysis. But I think there is more going on. It's not just that the political is given more air time, but that it's now seen as far more important to human life. The politically fragmented media, with outlets ranging from very liberal to very conservative, only seem to agree on one thing, namely, that nothing matters more than which American political party wins the most seats.

R.R. Reno recently wrote a blog post at the First Things: On the Square website that "Culture Matters More than Politics". He points out that, in Marxist theory, economics and political power are the fundamentals, while culture is "epiphenomenal." Literature, poetry, music and the arts are merely the supportive apparatus for power interests. Therefore, politics – who controls state power – is the factor that most sets the course of human life. On the contrary, Reno states, the deeper sources of public life are what we believe about human nature, human destiny, and the meaning of life. These beliefs are carried out into life by religion and philosophy, by high culture and popular cultural domains, by a huge variety of human institutions, the vast majority of which are not part of the government. These shared beliefs shape a people's vision of a good human community and a good life, and politics largely follows on from that.

James D. Hunter has been making the same point for years, though he invokes Nietzsche, rather than Marx. In On the Geneology of Morals, Nietzsche argued that Christian moral claims – of the primacy of love, generosity, and altruism – were really just ways for the early Christians to grab power from the people who had it. Christian morality developed out of the "ressentiment" by the weak of the strong and as an effort to wrest their position from them. This view will also lead to the conclusion that politics is what life is really about.

Hunter argues that ressentiment – "a narrative of injury" – has now come to define American political discourse. Both conservatives and liberals make their sense of injury central to their identity, and therefore in each election cycle it is only the group out of power, who therefore feels the most injured and angry, who can get enough voters out to win the election. Politics is no longer about issues but about power, injury, and anger. How Nietzschean! Hunter goes farther and argues that the Christian Right, the Christian Left, and even the neo-Anabaptist (think Dobson, Wallis, Hauerwas) are "functional Nietzscheans" in the public square, either because they see politics as too all-important, or (as in the case of the neo-Anabaptists) they think wielding political power is inherently non-Christian. In each case, Hunter says, Christians are being too shaped by Nietzsche's view that politics and power is fundamental.

We should not conclude that, really, politics is unimportant to culture. Hunter makes the case that culture is formed and passed on more by institutions than by individuals, and he calls Christians to maintain "faithful presence within" the cultural institutions of our society, counseling them to be neither triumphalistic nor withdrawn.

Reno and Hunter warn that culture matters more than politics, and I agree with them. We must reject the growing belief that power politics is what really matters. Nevertheless, Christians must not over-react. The government is one of the key institutions among others that reflect and shape the underlying beliefs that are the deepest source of public life. I recently wrote an introduction to a book, The City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era by Michael Gerson and Pete Wehner. The authors plead with Christian readers to not under-value the role of politics in culture-making, even as they acknowledge the danger of over-valuing it. It's an important plea. James Hunter makes the intriguing case that those Christians who counsel withdrawal from politics may have as nihilistic a view of power as Nietzsche.

Christians should be as involved in politics and government as they are in all other realms of life.

I've written a book that will be coming out this month called Generous Justice. A number of people have asked me why I wrote it, and others have asked about the title itself. My answers to these two questions go together.

One group of people I hope will read the book is the young adults who express a passionate interest in social justice. Volunteerism is the distinguishing mark of an entire generation of current American college students and recent graduates. The NonProfit Times reported that teens and young adults are creating enormous spikes in applications to volunteer programs. As a Baby Boomer it is interesting to me that volunteering rates were high in the 1970s but had fallen off until the last half of the last decade when they began to rise again. Of course I consider this an excellent trend.

However, many people have imbibed not only an emotional resonance for rights and justice from our culture, but also a consumerism that undermines self-denial and delayed gratification. While they may give some of their time, they spend large amounts of money on entertainment, their appearance, electronics, and travel. For a great number, then, volunteering is part of their portfolio of life-enriching activities, but it is not a feature of a whole life shaped by a commitment to doing justice, including radical generosity with one's finances.

One of the things that struck me as I was studying the Bible's teaching on justice was how often financial generosity is considered part of doing justice. Job says, "If I have kept my bread to myself, not sharing it with the fatherless...if I have seen...a needy man without a garment, and his heart did not bless me for warming him with the fleece from my sheep...these also would be sins to be judged, for I would have been unfaithful to God on high." (Job 31:13-28)

Many people believe that "justice" is strictly the punishment of wrongdoing, period. They don't think we should be indifferent to the poor, but when we help them they would call such aid charity, not justice. But Job says that if he had failed to share his food or his fleece – his assets – with the needy, which would have been a sin against God and by definition a violation of God's justice. Of course, we can call such aid mercy or charity because it should be motivated by compassion, but a failure to live a lifestyle of radical generosity is considered injustice in the Bible.

Our culture gives us a mixed message. It says: make lots of money and spend it on yourself; get an identity by the kind of clothes you wear and the places you travel to and live. But also do some volunteer work, care about social justice, because you don't want to be just a selfish pig. However, Christians' attitudes toward our time and our money should not be shaped by our society; they should be shaped by the gospel of Christ, who became poor so that we could become rich (2 Corinthians 8:9).

The main theme of my book is that the gospel of grace will turn anyone who truly believes it into a person who does justice for those in need. Doing justice includes not only the righting of wrongs, but also generosity and social concern, and a willingness to live a more modest lifestyle in order to be generous to the church and to the poor. This kind of life reflects the character of God (Deuteronomy 10:17-18; Psalm 146:7-9). We have the Biblical and spiritual resources to overcome the superficiality of our culture and become what the spiritual descendents of Abraham should be – a true blessing to our city and to the poor (Genesis 12:1-3; Galatians 3:7).

In the past, many of our neighbors could understand traditional Christian preaching even when they responded with disagreement or indifference. During the last fifteen years, however, our message is increasingly met with dumbfounded incomprehension or outrage. Until a generation ago in the U.S., most adults had similar moral intuitions whether they were born-again believers, church-goers, nominal Christians, or non-believers. That has changed.

Many have characterized the change over the last generation as "the postmodern turn." The "modern" era, we are often told, was characterized by confidence in rationality and science and the pursuit of a grand social order that would be mediated by institutions such as the academy and the nation-state. The postmodern era is marked by pluralism, a loss of confidence in the rational, a desire for experience, and so on.

Recently, however, I've been reading thinkers who believe that this way of describing things obscures much of what is happening. They say that the term "postmodern" overemphasizes the discontinuities with the recent past and fails to see the strong continuities. They propose that what we have today is not so much a departure from modern patterns of thought and life, but rather an intensification of these patterns as they have now penetrated further into our institutions. These thinkers prefer to talk of 'late' modernity or even 'liquid' modernity, and here is why.

The root idea of modernity (even more fundamental than confidence in rationality, etc.) is the overturning of all authority outside of the self. In the 18th century, European Enlightenment thinkers insisted that the modern person must question all tradition, revelation, and external authority by subjecting them to the supreme court of his or her own reason and intuition. We are our own moral authority.

Modern society nonetheless continued to be dominated by relatively stable institutions for a long time. People still were able to root their identities to a great degree in family and clan, in local civic communities, and in their work or vocation. Yet now even these institutions seem to be passing, worn away by the "acid" of the modern principle, namely individual happiness and autonomy must come before anything else. Marriage and family, workplace and career, neighborhood and civic community – none of these institutions can now remain authoritative or stable long enough for individuals to depend on them. People live increasingly fragmented lives, no longer thinking of themselves in terms of basic roles in communities ("Christian, father, lawyer.") Instead, their identities constantly shape-shift as they move through a series of life episodes that are not tightly connected to each other. They are always ready to change direction and abandon commitments and loyalties without qualms and to pursue, on a personal cost-benefit basis, the best opportunity available to them.

Here's an example. The new Christian Smith book, Souls in Transition (Oxford, 2009), profiles the beliefs of young adults age 18-23. In an interview with Ken Myers on Mars Hill Audio, Smith relates how he often interviewed people and asked them if their moral convictions (some of which were very strong) were mainly subjective feelings or really true to reality. He found that most had difficulty even understanding what he was asking.

The underlying thread that ties all this together is the inconceivability of a moral order based on an authority more fundamental than one's own reason or experience. That was the founding principle of the Enlightenment, and that is the cornerstone of the most recent generation. So how can we say the Enlightenment is over?

We can certainly use the term "post-modern" to refer to many aspects of our life in the world now. There certainly are discontinuities with the recent past. But I conclude that an over-emphasis on the post-ness of our situation can lead us to celebrate the greater tolerance, the end of "Christendom," the fall of Reason-capital-R, and the openness to the spiritual, without seeing that it is based on a kind of hyper-modernity that is perhaps more antithetical to Christianity than ever.

I am old enough to have seen both the "high modern" and the "late modern" / "post-modern" opposition to Christianity, and there are unique opportunities and difficulties in both situations. In the end, I don't prefer ministry in one over ministry in the other, for I believe the continuities between these ages are more fundamental to ministry than the discontinuities.

The word "movement" is often used to describe a kind of vital, dynamic human organization, in order to distinguish it from what are called "institutions." Both of these words can have broader meanings, but for the sake of this discussion let us define them in the following ways.

A movement is marked by an attractive, clear, unifying vision for the future together with a strong set of values or beliefs. The content of the vision must be compelling and clear so that others can grasp it readily. It must not be so esoteric or difficult that only a handful of people can articulate it. Instead, it must be something that all members of the movement can understand and pass along to others. By contrast, "institutionalized" organizations are held together by rules, regulations, and procedures, not by a shared vision.

This unifying vision is so compelling that it takes pride of place. First, the vision leads to sacrificial commitment. Individuals put the vision ahead of their own interests and comfort. They are willing to work without high compensation, power, or perks. The satisfaction of realized goals is their main compensation. There is no more practical index of whether you have a movement or not. If the leader is making all the sacrifices, you don't.

Second, the vision leads to generous flexibility. Institutionalized organizations are very turf conscious. Members are suspicious of anyone encroaching on their area of responsibility. Positions and power have been hard-won and jealously guarded. This is done by slavish devotion to rules of procedure, accreditation, and tenure.  In movements, however, the accomplishment of the vision is more important than power and position. So people are willing to make allies, be flexible, and cooperate with anyone sharing the basic vision and values.

Third, the vision leads to innovativeness. Institutions are organized more vertically, where ideas from "below" are unwelcome. Movements are flatter because the commonly shared vision unifies and empowers. The vision is what matters - so anyone with a good idea about how to accomplish it is welcome to give it. Ideas flow out of the whole organization, top to bottom, which leads to greater creativity.

Finally, a movement is marked by spontaneous generativity. Spontaneous combustion means energy generated from within - a conflagration without the need for external ignition. A movement is able to generate its own resources, recruit its own new members and participants, and (especially) raise up its own new leaders. This does not mean that movements have no formal training programs. Rather, it means that first, the vision of the movement (especially as its content is disseminated) attracts people with leadership potential, and, secondly, that the work of the movement provides opportunities that reveal emerging leaders through real-life experience and then prepares them for the next level of leadership in the movement. Denominations or church networks that always have to recruit ministers and staff that were raised up in other environments, and that attract them mainly with good compensation, do not show signs of being a movement.

David Hurst, a Harvard scholar, summed up how movements become institutions this way - vision becomes strategy, roles become tasks, teams become structure, networks become organizations, recognition becomes compensation. It is wrong, however, to draw such a hard line between the two forms. It is typical in the Christian movement literature to be highly critical of "institutionalism," for good reason. But the impression is left that all authority, central control, and formal processes are bad for ministry. The reality is more complex.

It is natural for new churches and ministries to try very hard to stay informal, non-codified, and non-centralized. But part of what makes a movement dynamic is a unified vision, and that always requires some codification and control. As time goes on, to maintain the main engine of movement-dynamics - a unified vision - a ministry must adopt some of the aspects of institutions. A strong movement, then, occupies the difficult space between being a free-wheeling organism and a disciplined organization.  A movement that refuses to take on some organizational characteristics - authority, tradition, unity of belief, and quality control - will fragment and dissipate. A movement that does not also resist the inevitable tendency toward complete institutionalization will lose its vitality and effectiveness as well. The job of the movement leader is to steer the ship safely between these two opposite perils.

There are three kinds of prayer I try to find time for every day - meditation (or contemplation), petition, and repentance. I concentrate on the first two every morning and do the last one in the evening.

Meditation is actually a middle ground or blend of Bible reading and prayer. I like to use Luther's contemplative method that he outlines in his famous letter on prayer that he wrote to his barber. The basic method is this - to take a Scriptural truth and ask three questions of it. How does this show me something about God to praise? How does this show me something about myself to confess? How does this show me something I need to ask God for? Adoration, confession, and supplication. Luther proposes that we keep meditating like this until our hearts begin to warm and melt under a sense of the reality of God. Often that doesn't happen. Fine. We aren't ultimately praying in order to get good feelings or answers, but in order to honor God for who he is in himself.

There are two kinds of Bible reading that I try to do. I read the psalms through every month using the Book of Common Prayer's daily office. I also read through the Bible using Robert Murray M'Cheyne's reading calendar. I take the more relaxed version - two chapters a day, which takes you through the Old Testament every two years and the New Testament every year. I do the M'Cheyne reading and some of the psalms in the morning, and read some Psalms in the evening. I choose one or two things from the psalms and M'Cheyne chapters to meditate on, to conclude my morning devotions.

Besides morning prayer (M'Cheyne, Psalms, meditation, and petition) and evening prayer (Psalms and repentance) I try as often as possible to take five minutes in the middle of the day to take a spiritual inventory, either by remembering the more spiritually radioactive ideas from my morning devotion, or by a quick look at my most besetting sins and idols. I do that to see whether so far that day I've given in to bad attitudes such as pride, coldness and hardness of heart, anxiety, and unkindness. If I see myself going wrong, the mid-day prayer can catch it. The problem with mid-day prayer is finding a time for it, since every day is different. All I need is to get alone for a few minutes, but that is often impossible, or more often than not I just forget.  However, I carry a little guide to mid-day prayer in my wallet which I can take out and use. 

The last form of prayer that I do daily is prayer with my wife, Kathy. About nine years ago Kathy and I were contemplating the fact that we had largely failed to pray together over the years. Then Kathy exhorted me like this. "What if our doctor told us that we had a serious heart condition that in the past was always fatal. However, now there was a pill which, if we took it every night, would keep us alive for years and years. But you could never miss a single night, or you would die. If our doctor told us this and we believed it, we would never miss. We would never say, 'oh I didn't get to it.' We would do it. Right? Well, if we don't pray together every night, we are going to spiritually die." I realized she was right. And for some reason, the penny dropped for us both, and we can't remember missing a night since. Even if we are far away from each other, there's always the phone. We pray very, very simply - just a couple of minutes. We pray for whatever we are most worried about as a couple, anyone or anything on our hearts that day. And we pray through the needs of our family. That's it. Simple, but so, so good.

It is very hard to stick with this regimen, especially when I'm traveling. But every so often I buckle down for a 40-day period in which I push myself to do every one of my stated times of prayer every day. This creates habits of mind and heart that stick with me, so that even when there are very busy times, I find I am able to stick with some of my disciplines, and I don't find myself getting cold and hard toward God.

Robert Murray M'Cheyne was reputed to have said to ministers, "what your people need most from you is your personal holiness."

'In his sermon "Doctrine and Life" in Walking with God: Studies in 1 John (Crossway, 1993), David Martyn Lloyd-Jones takes on people who do not like an emphasis on doctrine or theological precision. They say:

" 'We are not interested... in your various ideas and schools of thought with regard to the precise explanation of how the atonement of Christ works. These things are of no concern to us... so long as we are living a good life and producing good works, that is the only thing that matters.' " (p. 22)

This point of view is more prevalent than ever today. In both "liberal" and "conservative" churches, there is a resistance to an emphasis on doctrine. Often it is put this way: "We are not saved by assenting to propositions, but by obedient trust in God. What matters is being like Christ." Lloyd-Jones' response is, in my view, devastating: 

"'Whether you like it or not, to speak like that is, in and of itself, to speak in a doctrinal manner. To make statements along that line is, in actual practice, to commit yourself to a particular doctrine... the doctrine of works and, in a sense, of justification by works.' 'Ah, but' they reply, 'we are not interested in such a term as 'justification by works.'" But whether they are interested in such terminology of not, that is exactly what they are saying... In other words, whether we like it or not, we cannot avoid doctrine. ... There is no such thing as an irreligious person; everyone has his or her religion, if you mean by religion that ultimate philosophy or view of life by which people live." (p. 22-23)

So when you say, "I don't care about doctrine, it's how you live that matters," you are ironically promoting the doctrine of justification by works. You are proposing that what God really wants is a good life.  The response can be similar when someone claims that it doesn't matter which religion you belong to, because all religions are alike and no one should be held to a particular doctrine of God. Yet that assumes that God is not holy, and that he does not hold people responsible for how they live. In other words, to say, "no one should be held to a particular view of God" is to assume and promote a particular view of God. To say, "doctrine about God doesn't matter" is itself a statement of doctrine about God - and therefore it does matter! So Lloyd-Jones concludes: "It is no use your saying, 'We are not interested in doctrine; we are concerned about life'; if your doctrine is wrong, your life will be wrong." [italics mine] (p. 23)

However, whenever Lloyd-Jones takes up the importance of doctrine, he always points out that there is a danger on the other extreme. He speaks of some Christians and says "There is nothing they delight in more than arguing about theology" and they do this in "a party spirit" (p. 24). One of the signs of this group is that they are either dry and theoretical in their preaching, or they can be caustic and angry. They have "lost their tempers, forgetting that by so doing they were denying the very doctrine which they claimed to believe" (p. 24). In short, ministers who go to this extreme destroy the effectiveness of their preaching. What is the cause of this? Lloyd-Jones answers that they have made accurate doctrine an end in itself, instead of a means to honor God and grow in Christ-likeness. "Doctrine must never be considered in and of itself. Scripture must never be divorced from life" (p. 25).

If we maintain this balance, we will get criticism. In another sermon, Lloyd-Jones makes a rare observation about his own reputation. He was considered by the mainstream British listener to be highly doctrinal and orthodox, but many in more conservative churches felt he put too much emphasis on human experience.  He responded:

"It seems to me that we have a right to be fairly happy about ourselves as long as we have criticism from both sides... For myself, as long as I am charged by certain people with being nothing but a Pentecostalist and on the other hand charged by others with being an intellectual, a man who is always preaching doctrine, as long as the two criticisms come, I am very happy. But if one or the other of the two criticisms should ever cease, then, I say, is the time to be careful and to begin to examine the very foundations." (From "Test the Spirits" in The Love of God: Studies in 1 John, Crossway, 1993, p. 18.)

Dr. Lloyd-Jones was very far-sighted. This insight and balance has never been needed more than it is today.

American cities saw twenty years of decline (1970-1990) and twenty years of resurgence (1990-2010). But the economic bubbles that largely fueled the growth of cities are over. Almost certainly, the renaissance of American cities over the past 20 years has come to an end. But what is the future?

There are a number of trends that will continue, and some will be in cities' favor. First, American cities will continue to globalize. That is, they will continue to increase international connections and influence, which will help to keep real estate values up, provide more jobs, and bring increased prominence and status. As a result, American cities will become more like other world cities and less like their own regions, culturally speaking. Second, urban planning will continue to create compact, transit-oriented, walkable mixed use developments (with residences, business, retail, education, cultural institutions, and entertainment all located in close proximity.) The emphasis will be on neighborhood schools, streets with sidewalks for pedestrians, lanes for bicyclists, and so on. This is sometimes called "the New Urbanism" or "Smart Growth." There are many factors driving this, including environmental concerns, and so cities will continue to develop as a desirable alternative to suburbs as a human social arrangement. Third, since immigration laws have not significantly changed at this point, there will continue to be immigration from around the world to the U.S. (There is always some place in the world where the economy is worse than ours!) The cities that receive immigration will benefit from the influx of both working class and professional energy and ideas. Fourth, as far as I can see, the postmodernism that leads young adults to prefer city life to suburban life is continuing. These trends are pretty well established, and they will sustain the growth and continued rise of cities.

However, there are several factors working against cities. First, there are likely to be greatly increased social service gaps in cities. During hard economic times there is a sharp increase in people needing services just at the time when tax revenues dry up. For example, one report says there are 34% more people sleeping on the streets in New York City than there were 12 months ago, at the same time that the city is having to make all kinds of cutbacks and layoffs. Schools, public transit - all of them are facing a crisis. This will have to have an impact on the quality of life in cities, and it may lead to a rise in crime. Second, there are those who say that the rise of technology will make "agglomeration" (that is, the economic and social benefits of many people being located in one place) unnecessary. Technology makes social networking and communication less dependent on physical proximity. Put this together with the economic downturn (it is argued) and people simply won't pay the higher costs of living in a city. This will lead to urban population decline, or at least to "bright flight" - the loss of the highly skilled workforce.

There is no complete consensus of experts about the future of cities. Some of the most troubled, such as Detroit, are going to have to make drastic changes, essentially shrinking their urban footprint deliberately and redesigning themselves as a smaller municipality. But that will not be the norm in the U.S. I believe that immigration and broader cultural factors still make cities highly desirable destinations for the most ambitious and innovative people, and that will be crucial in continuing the rise of cities. In a fascinating article about the demise of "big publishing" in Manhattan (see here), David Carr writes that "macromedia economics... have vaporized significant components of the business model that drives traditional publishing." He goes on to say that employment in communications in New York has lost 60,000 jobs since the year 2000. So does that mean young people who want to be in publishing and media have stopped coming to New York City? Not at all.

"For every kid that I bump into who is wandering the media industry looking for an entrance that closed some time ago, I come across another who is a bundle of ideas, energy and technological mastery. The next wave is not just knocking on doors, but seeking to knock them down.

"Somewhere down in the Flatiron, out in Brooklyn, over in Queens or up in Harlem, cabals of bright young things are watching all the disruption with more than an academic interest. Their tiny netbooks and iPhones, which serve as portals to the cloud, contain more informational firepower than entire newsrooms possessed just two decades ago. And they are ginning content from their audiences in the form of social media or finding ways of making ambient information more useful. They are jaded in the way youth requires, but have the confidence that is a gift of their age as well.

"For them, New York is not an island sinking, but one that is rising on a fresh, ferocious wave." (David Carr, "The Fall and Rise of Media", New York Times, November 30, 2009.)

Not only can we be confident of a good future for American cities, but also of good opportunity for urban ministry. If cities experience great gaps in social services, this only opens a door for our churches to help in such a way that their neighbors will rejoice that we are here (1 Peter 2:11-12). Whether or not cities are rising or falling, the Christian church's ministry in and to cities can and must continue to grow.

During roughly twenty years from 1970 to 1990, American cities went into sharp decline. The migration of African-Americans from the south to northern cities resulted in white flight and the creation of inner city ghettoes. In the late '70s and early '80s there were protracted recessions that diminished tax revenues and drove some cities into virtual or actual bankruptcy. Meanwhile, urban planning in the mid-20th century privileged the automobile and big stores and stadiums and lots of parking and no residents and massive housing projects for the poor. All of this led to downtowns that were like ghost-towns after dark, and neighborhoods that were riddled with crime. The middle class fled along with many jobs, leaving the poor neighborhoods even poorer. Cities were polarized into poor non-white centers and affluent white suburbs.

However, for the last twenty years, since 1990, American cities have experienced an amazing renaissance. During this time many cities' population declines have reversed or at least slowed. People began moving back into cities in droves, and downtown/center cities began to regenerate at their cores. Why? First, during this time the U.S. experienced remarkable economic growth and what now is being called a series of economic "bubbles." This created a great deal of new wealth and new jobs. Second, crime went down in cities, probably for reasons both liberals and conservatives talked about (job creation, tougher law enforcement). Third, the cultural mood became what we now call "post-modern," that is a culture which enjoys eclecticism, a mixture of the old and new, asymmetry, messiness and unmanageability, cultural diversity, and the artistic. All of these are features of city-life rather than the suburbs, which are much more controlled and homogeneous. Fourth, and perhaps most important of all, changes in immigration law in 1965 (the Hart-Celler Act) opened the door to an influx from non-European nations. Between 1965 and 1970 U.S. immigration doubled and then from 1970 to 1990 it doubled again. Most of this wave of immigrants went into America's cities, renewing and diversifying many neighborhoods. It also completely changed the older, gridlocked, binary black-white dynamic of urban politics to a far more complex, multi-polar situation of many ethnicities and nationalities.

As a result many American cities began to surge. New professional-class neighborhoods developed along with working class and poor ones. Sometimes the gentrification was more destructive and disruptive to the social fabric, while other times it was more healthy. The main new residents in this upsurge included empty-nest Boomers returning to cities, young professionals seeking cities to live and work in, and a wave of immigrants in inner city neighborhoods and inner suburbs that produced second-generation college graduates who moved in to the center city to live and work. These groups joined the communities of homosexuals and artists who have always chosen urban communities to live in.

Our church was founded at the very beginning of this renaissance, in 1989. At that time, moving into the center city to begin a church seemed to be a fool's errand. The year we moved to New York City, a survey came out indicating that most of the residents of NYC would move away if they could. Those were bad times! Yet, within a few years of our founding, I began to get calls from churches, denominations, and leaders who had begun to notice the renaissance in nearby cities. They realized that it was time to plant churches to reach all of these new residential communities.

But twenty years later, we have reached the end of an era. The Great Recession is upon us, and even if it has officially ended - or has it? - we expect a protracted time of high unemployment and fitful, sluggish economic growth. This same kind of economic environment in the 70s and 80s was destructive for cities. The question for us now is, what lies ahead for American cities?

In my reading this past month, I discovered that Immanuel Kant made a case for a Christian sexual ethic but without using any appeal to the Bible or theology. In "Duties Toward the Body in Respect of Sexual Impulse" (Kant, Lectures in Ethics) he argued that sex outside of marriage dishonors human dignity. He reasoned that when you ask for sex without giving your whole self to the other person in marriage ("person, body and soul, for good and ill and in every respect"), you turn the sex partner into an object, a mere means to a selfish end, instead of an end in him (or her) self. Kant's famous "categorical imperative" was that human beings should never be treated as means, but only as ends. Using only this belief, which is intuitive for many modern people, he argued that you should never have sex outside of marriage.

I compared this with Wendell Berry (in Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community and other volumes) who also makes a case for the Christian sex ethic without appealing to overtly religious arguments or sources. Berry says that sex outside of marriage is sex for its own individual fulfillment rather than for building community. That, he argues, is a market-shaped, individualistic, consumerist approach to the human body. Instead, he insists, sex should be only used inside of marriage because there it becomes a nurturing discipline that establishes community, creating the deep stability between parents necessary for children to flourish.

What the two men have in common is that they both start with premises that most modern, secular readers share, but then they use those commonly held beliefs to drive them toward a Christian sex ethic, which has been largely abandoned by most secular people. They do this without appealing to the Bible or to other sources of religious authority.

Does this mean that it is possible to prove Christian morality is true without appealing to the Bible itself? No, I don't think so. Though Kant believed that reason was all you needed to discover ethical truth, his high view of human dignity still was ultimately a belief. It was not the inescapable conclusion of logic or empirical investigation. And Berry's appeal to the importance of community over individual freedom is also, in the end, a vision of human flourishing that can't be proved rationally. Berry's and Kant's arguments can't prove the Christian sex ethic to someone who doesn't accept their basic premise-beliefs. But if you share those beliefs, then their case is quite powerful.

Here's what I learn from Kant and Berry. First, there are ways to argue in public discourse for various features of the Christian account of human flourishing without directly appealing to Biblical texts or to God. For example, if I am a Christian in politics, and I am speaking to a body of people who I know will resonate to Kantian views of human dignity or Berryan views of community, then it is possible to make a compelling argument for practices that are rooted in Christian truth. Why? Because people without an overt religious profession still hold many true beliefs about human dignity or community that are spiritually "there" in their souls because they are created in the image of God. We should not be under the illusion that we can "prove" Christianity to secular people however. The compelling nature of our argument relies on discovering the underlying beliefs that a non-believer has that match up with Biblical truth. Only if they grant these beliefs can we make our case.

Second, I find it is often helpful even when preaching to briefly recapitulate arguments such as these from Kant, Berry, and others. Why? The ultimate foundation for what we believe as Christians is the authority of God's Word, but often the people we preach to are not convinced of the Bible's complete trustworthiness. Here is an example. I may first present what the Bible says about sexuality. Then I may briefly make a Kantian argument (which C.S. Lewis also makes in Mere Christianity) about how sex outside of marriage de-humanizes or a Berryan one about how it harms community. Then I can add, "These are only some of the terrible results that come from violating God's design for sexuality. There are certainly many others." This approach both honors the Bible as the final authority for our lives and draws in listeners who, while not yet sure about the Bible's inspiration, share the premises of Kant, Berry, or whomever else you use.

I think that in our contemporary society, Christians' beliefs about sex and gender will be one of the biggest points of conflict with our culture. We will need to co-opt some of our culture's own baseline narratives (the importance of human dignity and community) in order to gain any hearing at all for our beliefs.

Some years ago I preached through the book of Proverbs, and I learned two things I hadn't known about it. First, the Proverbs only give up their meaning cumulatively. No one proverb gives you the whole picture. If one proverb says, "the morally good always have a good life" and a later proverb says, "sometimes the morally good suffer" we think it's a contradiction. That's because we think of each proverb as an individual stand-alone promise. But they are not. All the proverbs on a given subject are meant to be taken together, each one modifying the others like the parallel clauses do. One gives you information about a topic; then subsequent ones come along and answer questions raised by the first one, or they condition and nuance a more blanket statement made earlier.

Chapters 10-15 tell us that the hard-working have enough to eat and the lazy will be poor. But starting in chapter 16, the exceptions to the customary-way-life-works come along. There is an order God has put into things that we must abide by, but, on the other hand, we can't see it all and so must expect exceptions. An example of how the Proverbs only give up their meaning cumulatively is the famous Prov 16:25 -- There is a way that seems right to a man, but that way leads only unto death. I've never heard this invoked except when the speaker wants to say to the listeners "don't trust your feelings." But earlier Proverbs repeatedly said -- "The way to destruction appears right to the fool." That is, fools are terrible at making plans because they reject the way of wisdom (not getting counselors, not being humble, not watching your words or controlling your emotions, etc). But 16:25 comes along and says -- "But the way of destruction can appear right not just to a fool, but sometimes to anyone (to 'a man'.) Even if you follow the way of wisdom to the "T" and make your plans as well as can be -- sometimes your life can still blow up! This is a broken world. The wise know that sometimes all paths may run ill.

So Proverbs cannot be "dipped into". It only repays very long study in which you keep the whole book in your head and compare passage with passage. How is that best done? In a community! Some commentators argue that the book of Proverbs was originally written as a manual to be studied by a community of young men under the mentorship of older men -- for a number of years. Each proverb was to be discussed and considered and compared to the others. Examples from life were to be shared. In other words, Proverbs may have been written to be the basis for deep, comprehensive personal growth through mentoring in community. It touches on every area of life.

It is also noteworthy that in Proverbs wisdom constantly raises her voice in the city's public places -- the commerce/market (where the roads converge), the court/justice system (the gate), etc. (Prov 1:20-21; 9:1-4.) For years I have been struck by the fact that discipling people for faithful living in their vocation is different than other kinds of discipleship. When I try to disciple someone to do work in the church, it is more one-way (I am the expert in Bible and ministry) and information-driven (I download my knowledge.) But how do you disciple a Christian actor to think out what roles to take, or a Christian financier to think out how to invest and how to treat profits? The Bible does not give us so much hard and fast rules as 'proverbs' -- motives, goals, and values that have to be applied with wisdom to situations in the world. And that wisdom happens more through communal reflection on Scripture, especially a text like Proverbs.

How can we best integrate our faith with our work? I think we need more experienced people in a field meeting with younger persons in that field and working through a book like Proverbs in community, always applying its insights to the work they are doing in the world.

It's remarkable to read David, the Warrior-King of Israel, writing these words from Psalm 131.

My heart is not proud, O LORD, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. But I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me.

The metaphor for spiritual maturity here is a "weaned child." On the one hand, we are a child at the mother's breast, an image of complete helplessness. We are completely dependent on God. Without him we can do nothing. On the other hand, we are a weaned child, an image of contentment. Unweaned children cry in mother's arms until they get something from mother -- her milk. Only then are they quiet. But a weaned child is satisfied just with mother herself, with her very presence.

Here we see depicted, vividly and compactly, what Job was taught through all his trials. We must love God for himself alone, not just for what he gives us. This is the essence of what, for Jonathan Edwards, distinguished "true grace" from "the experience of devils," who hold sound doctrine and tremble before God (James 2:19.) Real grace on the heart leads us to see the "beauty and comeliness of divine things, as they are in themselves" (from the sermon by the same name in volume 25 of the Yale edition of Edwards' works). We become satisfied with God himself. Even his transcendent holiness is enjoyed as a beautiful and magnificent thing, which fills the heart to contemplate, though we certainly get nothing out of it!

If grace has really changed our hearts, we don't ultimately care if life goes the way we want it, as long as we have him. The joys of acclaim, wealth, and power are nothing compared to the eternal acclaim, wealth, and power we have in him. A "weaned child" is not just someone who knows this in principle, but who has worked gospel truths into his or her soul as spiritually sensed realities. Internally, this quiets the soul into profound contentment and poise. Externally, it means humility, a willingness to learn from others and also to trust God. The believer realizes that the reason God's actions are often opaque is not because we are wise and he is foolish, but because he is too "great" and "wonderful" for us.

A Christian should never have the attitude toward God, "what have you done for me lately?" Spurgeon said about Psalm 131 that it was "one of the shortest psalms to read, but one of the longest to learn."

Some people hear me speak about the importance of city ministry and think I'm saying that all Christians (at least all those missions-minded) should move into cities. But I'm not saying that. I'm saying that many more mission agencies and many more Christians ought to minister in cities than are currently doing so. Why? Because of the sheer masses of people who live there and because of how influential cities are on their respective societies and cultures.

It is, then, a matter of emphasis -- as in, the church doesn't emphasize city ministry enough. Even mathematically, it is obvious that cities are woefully underserved by the church. For example, Georgia and South Carolina, combined, have an estimated population of 15 million, while the New York City metro area has a population of 18-19 million. Ask nearly any evangelical denomination -- do you have as many churches in the NYC area as you do in Georgia and South Carolina all together? Then ask for the numbers. Then ask why two states with a smaller population would have (in most cases) many times more churches than New York. Is that fair?

When I studied the book of Proverbs, I came to see that a proverb is not the same as a command or a promise. Proverbs say things like, "In general, if you work hard, you won't find yourself lacking the basics, but there are plenty of exceptions. So work hard, but don't be shocked if something goes wrong." That's not an iron-clad promise (that everyone who works hard will be well off) nor a command. It is a statement about a wise course of action. When I say that we need to put more emphasis on city ministry, I'm speaking 'proverbially.' The Bible and history shows us how important cities are as centers for ministry, yet the amount of effort the church puts into cities is not proportionate to the need or opportunity.

So my point is -- that far more churches, far more Christians, and far more missions should be dedicated to reaching the great cities of the world. That is not the same as saying 'anyone who is really sold out for Jesus' mission will go to cities.'

In my regular, daily Bible reading over the past year I read through Proverbs 3, a passage I've studied and preached through many times. But during this reading, I realized that in verses 3 through 12 we have all the themes of the rest of the book, and therefore a kind of mini-guide to faithful living. There are five things that comprise a wise, godly life. They function both as means to becoming wise and godly as well as signs that you are growing into such a life:

1. Put your heart's deepest trust in God and his grace. Every day remind yourself of his unconditioned, covenantal love for you. Do not instead put your hopes in idols or in your own performance.

Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart. Then you will win favor and a good name in the sight of God and man. Trust in the LORD with all your heart (Prov 3:3-5a)

2. Submit your whole mind to the Scripture. Don't think you know better than God's word. Bring it to bear on every area of life. Become a person under authority.

Lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight. (Prov 3:5b-6)

3. Be humble and teachable toward others. Be forgiving and understanding when you want to be critical of them; be ready to learn from others when they come to be critical of you.

Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the LORD and shun evil. This will bring health to your body and nourishment to your bones. (Prov 3:7-8)

4. Be generous with all your possessions, and passionate about justice. Share your time, talent, and treasure with those who have less.

Honor the LORD with your wealth, with the first fruits of all your crops; then your barns will be filled to overflowing, and your vats will brim over with new wine. (Prov 3:9-10)

5. Accept and learn from difficulties and suffering. Through the gospel, recognize them as not punishment, but a way of refining you.

My son, do not despise the LORD's discipline and do not resent his rebuke, because the LORD disciplines those he loves, as a father the son he delights in. (Prov 3:11-12)

As I meditated on these five elements--rooted in his grace, obeying and delighting in his Word, humble before other people, sacrificially generous toward our neighbor, and steadfast in trials--I thought of Jesus. The New Testament tells us that the personified 'divine wisdom' of the Old Testament is actually Jesus (Mt 11:19.) And I realized that a) he showed the ultimate trust and faithfulness to God and to us by going to the cross, b) he was saturated with and shaped by Scripture, c) he was meek and lowly in heart (Mt. 11:28-30), d) he, though rich, became poor for us, e) and he bore his suffering, for us, without complaint. We can only grow in these five areas if you know you are saved by costly grace. That keeps you from idols, from self-sufficiency and pride, from selfishness with your things, and from crumbling under troubles. Jesus is wisdom personified, and believing his gospel brings these character qualities into your life.

For a number of weeks I have been spending time praying for these five things for my family and my church leaders. There's no better way to instill these great things in your own heart, than to pray intensely for them in the lives of those you love.

Part 1: The Big Issues facing the Western Church

1. The local church has to support culture-making. Most of the young evangelicals interested in integrating their faith with film-making, journalism, corporate finance, etc, are getting their support and mentoring from informal networks or para-church groups. Michael Lindsay's book Faith in the Halls of Power shows that many Christians in places of influence in the culture are alienated from the church, because they get, at best, no church support for living their faith out in the public spheres, and, at worst, opposition.

At the theological level, the church needs to gain more consensus on how the church and Christian faith relate to culture. There is still a lot of conflict between those who want to disciple Christians for public life, and those who think all "engagement of culture" ultimately leads to compromise and distraction from the preaching of the gospel. What makes this debate difficult is that both sides make good points and have good arguments.

At the practical level, even the churches that give lip-service to the importance of integrating faith and work do very little to actually equip people to do so. Seminary only trained us ministers to disciple people by pulling them more out of the world and inside the walls and ministries of the church. So how does a church actually help its members in this area? Leaders who want to get started should look at Redeemer's Center for Faith and Work.

2. We need a renewal of apologetics. There is a lot of resistance right now among younger evangelical leaders toward apologetics. We are told we don't need arguments any more because people aren't rational. We need loving community instead. But I think this is short-sighted for two reasons.

First, Christians in the West will finally be facing what missionaries around the world have faced for years--how to communicate the gospel to Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and adherents of various folk religions. All young church leaders should take courses in and read the texts of the other major world religions. They should also study the gospel presentations written by missionaries engaging those religions. Loving community will be extremely important, as it always is, to reach out to neighbors of other faiths, but if they are going to come into the church, they will have many questions that church leaders today need to be able to answer.

Second, there a real vacuum in western secular thought. When Derrida died I was surprised how many of his former students admitted that High Theory (what evangelicals call 'post-modernism') is seen as a dead end, mainly because it is so relativistic that it provides no basis for political action. And a leading British intellectual like Terry Eagleton in recent lectures at Yale (published as Religion, Faith, and Revolution by Yale Press) savaged the older scientific atheism of Dawkins and Hitchens as equally bankrupt. Eagleton points out that the Enlightenment's optimism about science and human progress is dead. Serious western thought is not going back to that, no matter how popular Dawkins' books get. But postmodernism cannot produce a basis for human rights or justice either.

This is a real opening, apologetically, in reaching out to thoughtful non-Christians, especially the younger, socially conscious ones. We need to think of new ways to engage, asking people how they can justify their concerns for human rights and social justice. (For a great recent form of this approach, see Chris Smith's "Does Naturalism Warrant a Moral Belief in Universal Benevolence and Human Rights?" in The Believing Primate: Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Reflections on the Origin of Religion (Oxford, 2009.)

Over the last twenty years my preaching and teaching has profited a great deal from doing the hard work of reading philosophy, especially the work of older Christian philosophers and scholars (Plantinga, Wolterstorff, Mavrodes, Alston) and the younger ones. Ministers need to be able to glean and put their arguments into easy to understand form, both in speaking and in evangelism.

I agree with the critics that say the old, rationalistic, 'evidence that demands a verdict' makes people's eyes glaze over today. But that doesn't mean that people don't still use reason and still make arguments. There is a big chink in the armor of western thought right now. People don't want to go back to religion, which still scares them, but they are not so sanguine about the implications and effects of non-belief.

3. We need a great variety of church-models. Avery Dulles' book Models of the Church does a good job of outlining the very different models of churches in the west over the centuries. After qualifying his analysis by saying these are seldom pure forms, he lays out five models. Each one stresses or emphasizes: a) Doctrine, teaching, and authority, or b) deep community and life together, or c) worship, sacraments, music and the arts, or d) evangelism, proclamation, and dynamic preaching, or e) social justice, service, and compassion.

Many evangelicals today have bought in to one or two of these models as the way to minister now in the post-Christendom west. So for example, those who believe in the 'incarnational' (vs. 'attractional' approach) emphasize being and serving out in the neighborhood, smaller house churches and intimate community (a combination of Dulles' b and e models.) Meanwhile, many evangelicals who are afraid of the 'liberal creep' of the emerging church, stress the traditional combination of a and d emphases. Each side is fairly moralistic about the rightness of its model and seeks to use it everywhere.

I feel that our cultural situation is too complex for such a sweeping way to look at things. There are too many kinds of 'never-churched-non-Christians'. There are Arabs in Detroit, Hmongs in Chicago, Chinese and Jews in New York City, Anglos in the Northwest and Northeast that were raised by secular parents--some are artists and creative types, some work in business. All of these are growing groups of never-churched, but they are very different from one another. No model can connect to them all--every model can connect to some.

4. We must develop a far better theology of suffering. Members of churches in the west are caught absolutely flat-footed by suffering and difficulty. This is a major problem, especially if we are facing greater 'liminality'--social marginalization--and maybe more economic and social instability. There are a great number of books on 'why does God allow evil?' but they mainly are aimed at getting God off the hook with impatient western people who believe God's job is to give them a safe life. The church in the west must mount a great new project--of producing a people who are prepared to endure in the face of suffering and persecution.

Here, too, is one of the ways we in the west can connect to the new, growing world Christianity. We tend to think about 'what we can do for them.' But here's how we let them do something for us. Many or most of the church in the rest of the world is used to suffering and persecution. They have a kind of faith that does not wilt, but rather grows stronger under threat. We need to become students of theirs in this area.

5. We need a critical mass of churches in the biggest cities of the world.

I know I'm always expected to say this! But this is not a mere tack-on to the other measures for addressing the Big Issues. In some ways, this is the 'Big Idea' that will help us move forward on all fronts.

If there were vital, fast-growing movements of churches--orthodox in theology, wholistic in ministry, and committed to culture-making--in the great global cities, so that 5-10% of the residents of the 50 most influential cities were gospel-believers, a) it would have a great impact on culture-making, b) it would help the church learn new ways of reaching the never-churched (since they concentrate in cities), c) it would connect western churches more readily to the new churches in the non-western world, d) it would unite churches across traditions and models.

His question is--will Christians going into the arts, business, government, the media, and film a) assimilate to the existing baseline cultural narratives so they become in their views and values the same as other secular professionals and elites, or b) will they seal off and privatize their faith from their work so that, effectively, they do not do their work in any distinctive way, or c) will they do enough new Christian 'culture-making' in their fields to change things? (See http://www.virginia.edu/iasc/HHR_Archives/AfterSecularization/8.12PBerger.pdf)

2. The rise of Islam. How do Christians relate to Muslims when we live side by side in the same society? The record in places like Africa and the Middle East is not encouraging! This is more of an issue for the western church in Europe than in the U.S., but it is going to be a growing concern in America as well.

How can Christians be at the very same time a) good neighbors, seeking their good whether they convert or not, and still b) attractively and effectively invite Muslims to consider the gospel?

3. The new non-western Global Christianity. The demographic center of Christian gravity has already shifted from the west to Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The rising urban churches of China may be particularly influential in the future. But the west still has the educational institutions, the money, and a great deal of power.

What should the relationship of the older western churches be to the new non-western church? How can we use our assets to serve them in ways that are not paternalistic? How can we learn from them in more than perfunctory ways?

4. The growing cultural remoteness of the gospel. The basic concepts of the gospel -- sin, guilt and accountability before God, the sacrifice of the cross, human nature, afterlife -- are becoming culturally strange in the west for the first time in 1500 years. As Lesslie Newbigin has written, it is time now to 'think like a missionary'--to formulate ways of communicating the gospel that both confront and engage our increasingly non-Christian western culture.

How do we make the gospel culturally accessible without compromising it? How can we communicate it and live it in a way that is comprehensible to people who lack the basic 'mental furniture' to even understand the essential truths of the Bible?

5. The end of prosperity? With the economic meltdown, the question is -- will housing values, endowments, profits, salaries, and investments go back to growing at the same rates as they have for the last twenty-five years, or will growth be relatively flat for many years to come? If so, how does the western church, which has become habituated to giving out of fast-increasing assets, adjust in the way it carries out ministry? For example, American ministry is now highly professionalized--church staffs are far larger than they were two generations ago, when a church of 1,000 was only expected to have, perhaps, two pastors and a couple of other part-time staff. Today such a church would have probably eight to ten full-time staff members.

Also, how should the stewardship message adjust? If discretionary assets are one-half of what they were, more risky, sacrificial giving will be necessary to do even less ministry than we have been doing.

On top of this, if we experience even one significant act of nuclear or bio-terrorism in the U.S. or Europe, we may have to throw out all the basic assumptions about social and economic progress we have been working off for the last 65 years. In the first half of the 20th century, we had two World Wars and a Depression. Is the church ready for that? How could it be? What does that mean?

Part 2: How Should Churches and Leaders Be Preparing to Address These Big Issues Facing the Church?

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.

Recently Redeemer was featured prominently in a USA Today article about multi-site churches. Outside of the fact that Redeemer doesn't 'do video,' the differences between our approach and others were not referred to. And in much discussion on line after the article, it was clear that all multi-site churches were being Lumped Together. Just for the sake of clarity, it might be helpful to know these facts about why and how Redeemer does the multi-site.

1. First, we did not go to multi-site because it was more economical or efficient for us. When we began meeting at multiple sites ten years ago, we were already holding a morning and an evening service at a single site that was quite large. It would have been much more cost-effective to multiply to four or five services in that single location. Moving to other sites meant greatly increased costs for rent, for children's ministries, for music and many other things.

2. Second, we did not go to multi-site to quickly reach more people. The auditorium where we began meeting 10 years ago seats over 2,000 people, and other spaces that size are not available. The spaces we have rented in other parts of the city are far smaller. If we had stayed in that space and multiplied services there, we would have reached greater numbers more swiftly.

So what were the reasons that we adopted the multi-site model?

1. First, we sent our services out into different locations so that people could worship closer to where they lived. People can become more deeply involved in the community and can more easily bring friends if they attend services in their neighborhood. This was an 'anti-mega-church' move, since huge churches create a large body of commuters who travel long distances to attend church. We wanted to resist this tendency and root people more in their locales.

2. Second, the multi-site model is a transition design for us. Redeemer has a timetable for turning each site into a congregation in its own neighborhood, with its own pastoral leadership. I was the main preacher at all sites, but two years ago we went from four to five services at three sites, which is too many for me to preach in a Sunday. Rather than beaming me in by video, we determined that other pastors on the staff would always preach at least that fifth service. When we get to six and seven services, about two years from now, each site will have its own Lead Pastor who will share the preaching with me.

We will then transition from a 'multi-site' to a 'collegiate' model. Though still under one unified board of elders, each church will have its own pastoral team, elder team, and set of lay leaders. Other collegiate models in our PCA denomination include Harbor Presbyterian in San Diego and Brooklyn Presbyterian here in New York City.

I was careful in my interaction with the USA Today journalists not to criticize other multi-site churches. I do not know what motives other churches have for using the multi-site model, but those are ours.

I often get asked how I personally became acquainted with the pervasive influence of idolatry in the human heart.

Like many younger ministers I worked far too many hours, never saying "no" to anyone's request for my pastoral services. When salary increases were offered to me, I turned them down. When administrative help was offered to me, I declined. I was quite proud of being the kind of person who worked very hard, never complained, and never asked for any help. This regularly brought me into conflict with my wife, who rightly contended that I was neglecting my relationships to her and to my young sons. It also led to health problems, although I was only in my early thirties.

Nevertheless, I continued to feel that the way I was living was noble and good. I believed I was sacrificially committed to the ministry of the Word. I was especially delighted to make sacrifices that nobody saw -- not my people or even my family. That made me feel most noble of all. If all this created some problems for me personally, wasn't that just evidence of how truly devoted I was? It was a very dangerous situation. My future was bleak, though I didn't know it. In the short run, this kind of ministry workaholism is often rewarded by admiring people all around.

Some well-meaning friends, however, saw the problem and literally "laid the law" on me, showing me that I was violating the commandments of taking Sabbath and of honoring my family. I usually responded with incremental changes that never endured. Others used the modern technique of self-esteem -- "You need to think of yourself; you need to do things that make you happy." I despised that advice as terribly selfish. I valued self-sacrifice.

It wasn't until I began to search my heart with the Biblical category of idolatry that I made the horrendous discovery that all my supposed sacrifices were just a series of selfish actions. I was using people in order to forge my own self-appreciation. I was looking to my sacrificial ministry to give me the sense of "righteousness before God" that should only come from Jesus Christ. People make idols out of money, power, accomplishment, or moral excellence. They look to these things to "save them" -- to give them the sense of purity, value, and acceptability that only Jesus can give. In my case, I was using ministry (and my own people) in this way.

In my blog post on Willow Creek, I said that many Reformed evangelicals think of sound, expository preaching as something of a 'magic bullet.' We may think that as long as we are preaching the Word--preaching the law and the gospel rightly--that everything else in congregational life will somehow take care of itself. We may give lip service to the other two marks of the church--the administration of the sacraments and discipline--but we don't give them proper weight. Fully considered, the administration of the sacraments includes pastoral care, education, and discipleship, while the ministry of discipline means rightly ordering the community, that is, pastoral leadership.

I have often seen many men spend a great amount of time on preparing and preaching lengthy, dense, expository messages, while giving far less time and energy to the learning of leadership and pastoral nurture. It takes lots of experience and effort to help a body of people make a unified decision, or to regularly raise up new lay leaders, or to motivate and engage your people in evangelism, or to think strategically about the stewardship of your people's spiritual gifts, or even to discern what they are. It takes lots of experience and effort to know how to help a sufferer without being either too passive or too directive, or to know when to confront a doubter and when to just listen patiently. Pastors in many of our Reformed churches do not seem to be as energized to learn to be great leaders and shepherds, but rather have more of an eye to being great teachers and preachers.

I'd point us to the example of John Calvin himself. No one put more emphasis on expository preaching as central to ministry. And yet Calvin sat nearly every Thursday in the Consistory, hearing hundreds of practical pastoral cases each year brought by the elders of the city to the council of pastors and other elders. He applied his theology to the intimate details of "adultery and fornication, disputed engagements and weddings, family quarrels, incest, rape, sodomy, buggery, prostitution, voyeurism, abortion, child neglect, child abuse, education disputes, spousal abuse, mistreatment of maids, family poverty, embezzlement of family property, sickness, divorce, marital property disputes, inheritance..." (Witte and Kingdon, Sex, Marriage, and Family in John Calvin's Geneva, Vol 1, p. 15.) Also, Calvin's voluminous correspondence shows what a forceful and wise leader and statesman he was. Because Calvin was not only a preacher but also a great shepherd and leader, he built up the church in a way that changed the world.

I pastor a church with a large staff and so I give 15+ hours a week to preparing the sermon. I would not advise younger ministers to spend so much time, however. When I was a pastor without a staff I put in 6-8 hours on a sermon. If you put in too much time in your study on your sermon you put in too little time being out with people as a shepherd and a leader. Ironically, this will make you a poorer preacher. It is only through doing people-work that you become the preacher you need to be--someone who knows sin, how the heart works, what people's struggles are, and so on. Pastoral care and leadership (along with private prayer) are to a great degree sermon preparation. More accurately, it is preparing the preacher, not just the sermon. Through pastoral care and leadership you grow from being a Bible commentator into a flesh and blood preacher.

This summer I spoke at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit. It was an honor to be invited. No one pulls off a conference like Willow Creek. Who else could bring their content to 120,000 people? And the three other talks or sessions that I saw were extremely high quality.

The time at Willow led me to reflect on how much criticism this church has taken over the years. On the one hand, my own 'camp' -- the non-mainline Reformed world -- has been critical of its pragmatism, its lack of emphasis on sound doctrine. On the other hand, the emerging and post-modern ministries and leaders have disdained Willow's individualism, its program-centered, 'corporate' ethos. These critiques, I think, are partly right, but when you are actually there you realize many of the most negative evaluations are caricatures.

John Frame's 'tri-perspectivalism' helps me understand Willow. The Willow Creek style churches have a 'kingly' emphasis on leadership, strategic thinking, and wise administration. The danger there is that the mechanical obscures how organic and spontaneous church life can be. The Reformed churches have a 'prophetic' emphasis on preaching, teaching, and doctrine. The danger there is that we can have a naïve and unBiblical view that, if we just expound the Word faithfully, everything else in the church -- leader development, community building, stewardship of resources, unified vision -- will just happen by themselves. The emerging churches have a 'priestly' emphasis on community, liturgy and sacraments, service and justice. The danger there is to view 'community' as the magic bullet in the same way Reformed people view preaching.

By thinking in this way, it makes it possible for me to love and appreciate the best representatives of each of these contemporary evangelical 'traditions.' Nobody provides more practical help for organizing and leading ministry than Willow Creek. I also am humbled that Redeemer is well-regarded in each of these 'streams' of evangelicalism, though we have our feet firmly set in our own Reformed tradition. That is quite unusual, and it makes it possible for us to both teach and learn across the spectrum of church life today.