WHI – what is offensive

The boys at The White Horse Inn are starting a new series for 2008 on “Christless Christianity”.

Recently on the program, Ken Jones said the following:

“[preachers] are in the awkward position of saying that the truth claims that we hold to are exclusive. And while certainly I think our personal testimonies have been problematic, I think the thing that’s most offensive is not our testimonies (because as long as I’m telling about what happened to me, and how I overcame this and how I overcame that, at that point I sound like a testimonial for any other product that could clear up your skin or that could help you in a particular way).

But the thing that is offensive is the idea of exclusive truth claims.”

I listened to a recent sermon in which a woman’s testimony was used to ostensibly illustrate the church’s program’s effectiveness in her life. She described a time of hardship in her life and how much it meant to her to be in church and how good it felt. The problem was, she could have just as easily been talking about being in a Buddhist temple, a mosque, or in Joel Osteen’s arena in Houston. There was nothing distinctly Christian about her experience – the testimony was inserted in a Sabbath sermon as a tool for “reaching” the audience emotionally, to say, “See, we comforted her and she felt good here”.

The practice of preaching propositionally and making exclusive truth claims that offend the goats is being lost and forgotten in most evangelical churches in America.

Attacks on the Gospel

From an interview of John MacArthur by Pat Abendroth, Omaha Bible Church.  John is discussing his role as a defender of God’s truth against attacks over the years.

“I  never believed that I would spend most of my ministry trying to defend the Gospel from so-called evangelicals.  There’s a massive shift – as evangelicalism began to expand and lose its boundaries and its borders and its theology, it began itself to attack the Gospel.  It’s done it a number of ways and it keeps doing it even now.

“Every time I’m writing a book trying to defend the Gospel, there’s another little nuance, and I’m about to write another one, because you just have to keep up with the deviations.  They come, not from liberals, from confessed liberals, but from confessed evangelicals, who may in fact not be entitled to that term, but they use it.”

Market-Driven Church

On July 31st, Todd Wilken over at Issues, Etc. interviewed an Orthodox priest (Father John Parker) on the subject of the market-driven church. Here are some paraphrases and quotes I thought were poignant.

• The motivation for pastors in American Evangelicalism to give church members a choice of worship styles/options on Sunday morning stems from 1) the noble goal of fulfilling the Great Commission and bringing/attracting as many people as possible to church and 2) out of a fear of being exclusive and saying there is one way of worshipping that is biblical.
• The essence of Christianity is the laying aside of my wants, preferences, desires, my wants, and being conformed to the image of God. If we are demanding choice, we have not yet laid our will aside.
  The church is not capitalistic, the church is not democratic; the church is Christ.
• The time and place for being “relevant to the people” is not at the chief worship service for Christians. That’s perfect for Wednesday night, for Tuesday morning Bible study, for an all-day Saturday program. Christians for centuries have gathered on Sunday morning to celebrate the resurrection of Christ, not to be convinced that He is Lord.
• As a Christian, I have to compare myself, so to speak, to Jesus Christ and the Word of God, which is the mirror into which I’m to look. And where I don’t match, I have to change.
• The more choice you give people, the more choice they demand. Our sinful nature almost obliges us to desire to do it my way.

The following quote from Parker’s recent article in Touchstone magazine summarizes what the market-drivin church looks like:

The marketed church offers just what everyone wants: the music I want (or don’t), the time I want, the length of service I want, the type of language I want, the style of music I want, the amount of intimacy and responsibility I want, and in some cases, even the pastor I want. But is the gospel a message about the satisfaction of wants?

Secularization of the Church

Todd Wilken (issues, etc) recently took up this topic with Dr. Michael Horton (Westminster Seminary, California and The White Horse Inn). They addressed several primary themes including preaching, music, and the pastor’s role as coach, counselor and CEO. The air date is 7/9/06. You can find Todd’s shows archived at the Issues, Etc. website.

Mike: “When the church begins to assume we know all this stuff [theology, the renewing of our minds per romans 12] and thinks what we really need is practical stuff, then we just start going with the flow; even if we’re not explicit about it, we become secularized while we think that we are morally superior.

Todd: “Why don’t evangelicals notice that their own pulpits/Sunday mornings are being secularized?”

Mike: “There’s this huge assumption that the culture is neutral…

What we can’t spot is the decadence, not only in our own hearts, but the decadence that is part and parcel of putting the Christian faith in such a fragile knapsack as popular culture that cannot hold that
treasure, or pass it down to future generations.

…What we really need is not only the content of the gospel, but the forms that Christ has given the church for carrying it.”

Another of Mike’s comments (paraphrased):

…the gospel of assumption is preached today: assuming Christ has done all of that, and you already know that. Now I’m going to talk about the practical side of life. And that is always to talk about law rather than gospel. What we really need is to learn how to raise positive kids in a negative world and how to clean up our marriages, how to be nicer to each other and so forth, instead of seeing Christ presented to us in His saving office Sunday after Sunday.

A discriminating person

The following is a quote from John MacArthur's series on discernment in the church, part 1 of the transcript – he is discussing how the cultural mileu has contributed to the discombobulation of truth-associated language – in this case, the word "discriminating". 

Now the culture around us doesn't help because we live in a very non‑discriminating culture.  We live in a culture, in fact, that has put a new and unacceptable definition and value on discernment. 

For example, it can be simply noted that it used to be that when someone was a person of discrimination, that was an indication of their nobility, an indication of their wisdom, an indication that they were to be honored and respected, they were desirable.  That was a person of discrimination, one who could discriminate between good and evil, true and false, what is best.  Now a person who discriminates is somebody who is going to get sued by the ACLU.  The word has taken on a completely different meaning.  It isn't even allowable in our vocabulary. 

This is a day that will not tolerate absolutes.  This is a day that will not tolerate discrimination of any kind.  And I'm not talking about racial discrimination which is intolerable to God, I'm talking about discrimination of any kind.  This is not a time that will tolerate convictions.

Along similar lines, GK Chesterton once wrote: "Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions". 

Experience

It seems toothpaste and toothbrush technology is moving faster than PC or ipod evolution. My wife brought home some Aquafresh "Experience" today from the store. Will it explode when I open the box, or do I put some on my five-colored toothbrush and brush the ones I want to keep? I guess "paste" doesn't have the "zing" it once had with American consumers.

In much the same way, the American evangelical is bored with "declaration of truth" and chases after the "experience" of fellowship, community, or "doing what Jesus would do".

John MacArthur has an audio series on discernment that is outstanding. I think it's too old to be in the "oneplace.com" archives where his recent messages are, but it's available through his website, www.gty.org. I commend it highly to you.

Preachers Wanted

Mike Horton and the boys at The White Horse Inn have provided a link to an article written by Horton in 2000 entitled, "Wanted: Ministers Who Preach Not Themselves".

What do churches want in their minister/pastor? He begins with a list of several criteria found in pastor/minister want ads found in evangelical magazines. Here is the list:

Innovative, progressive, change initiating

Team leader/builder

Pastor-coach

People-developer with strong organizational skills

Someone who "can relate well to fast-track commuters" and "design and build infrastructure, envision and create ministry delivery teams"

Approachable, dynamic, catalytic

Relevant

A close walk with the Lord

Able to lead worship through drama, audio-visual technology, banners and dance

Degrees in music or business required, a degree in theology preferred

He then applies each of these to the apostle Paul to see how Paul "stacks up" against today's ministry position applicants who might respond to the ads. What results is a refreshing discussion about what the ministry involves and how scripture should direct our evaluation of those who minister in His name.

The basic difference between Paul’s outlook and the dominant perspective reflected in these ads is quite simple: for Paul, the authority and power rests in the ministry, not the minister. It is the proclamation of Christ, not the skills, personality, charisma, or even personal godliness, that builds Christ’s Church.

White Horse Inn 5-7-06: Imputation

Once again, the 2006 National Pastors Convention has provided further evidence of rank maleducation among evangelical leadership in this country. The most recent edition of The White Horse Inn contains a clip of their producer interviewing attendants of the Convention. He asked the question, "How important to your ministry is the doctrine of imputation?".

The results:

• 33% were familiar with the concept
• 67% were unfamiliar with the very term (and therefore couldn't begin to answer the original question.

My favorite response was, "Amputation?…ah, imputation. Could you explain what you mean by that?".

One respondent said with regard to the congregation he works with, "…if you asked them to explain what made a difference in their life, it would have nothing to do with that…"

Resources

Check out any number of the links at www.monergism.com OR this link to a sermon by John Piper about imputation.

Misunderstanding preaching

This link to a post at the Jolly Blogger is worth checking out. I'll include the relevant text below. The quote comes from D. Martin Lloyd-Jones' commentary on Romans Chapter 6. I have not put my hands on this commentary to verify every word, but I will soon.

First of all, let me make a comment, to me a very important and vital comment. The true preaching of the gospel of salvation by grace alone always leads to the possibility of this charge being brought against it. There is no better test as to whether a man is really preaching the New Testament gospel of salvation than this, that some people might misunderstand it and misinterpret it to mean that it really amounts to this, that because you are saved by grace alone it does not matter at all what you do; you can go on sinning as much as you like because it will redound all the more to the glory of grace. If my preaching and presentation of the gospel of salvation does not expose it to that misunderstanding, then it is not the gospel. Let me show you what I mean.

If a man preaches justification by works, no one would ever raise this question. If a man’s preaching is, ‘If you want to be Christians, and if you want to go to heaven, you must stop committing sins, you must take up good works, and if you do so regularly and constantly, and do not fail to keep on at it, you will make yourselves Christians, you will reconcile yourselves to God and you will go to heaven’. Obviously a man who preaches in that strain would never be liable to this misunderstanding. Nobody would say to such a man, ‘Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?’, because the man’s whole emphasis is just this, that if you go on sinning you are certain to be damned, and only if you stop sinning can you save yourselves. So that misunderstanding could never arise . . . . . .

Nobody has ever brought this charge against the Church of Rome, but it was brought frequently against Martin Luther; indeed that was precisely what the Church of Rome said about the preaching of Martin Luther. They said, ‘This man who was a priest has changed the doctrine in order to justify his own marriage and his own lust’, and so on. ‘This man’, they said, ‘is an antinomian; and that is heresy.’ That is the very charge they brought against him. It was also brought George Whitfield two hundred years ago. It is the charge that formal dead Christianity – if there is such a thing – has always brought against this startling, staggering message, that God ‘justifies the ungodly’ . . .

That is my comment and it is a very important comment for preachers. I would say to all preachers: If your preaching of salvation has not been misunderstood in that way, then you had better examine your sermons again, and you had better make sure that you are really preaching the salvation that is offered in the New Testament to the ungodly, the sinner, to those who are dead in trespasses and sins, to those who are enemies of God. There is this kind of dangerous element about the true presentation of the doctrine of salvation.

God in the Wasteland quote

From the book, God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, by David Wells