SOLA CULTURA

John Muether has a very helpful article on Christian Liberty found in the Nov/Dec issue of Modern Reformation.

In the article Muether defends a robust, confessional view of the liberty Christians have as it relates to the sufficiency of Scripture.  In short, Christians can do whatever they want except sin.  And the church has no authority to try and bind the consciences of believers with extra-biblical forms or methods of piety and practice that the Bible itself does not explicitly or implicitly command.  Only the Word of God can bind.  So where the Bible is silent, the church would do well to shut-up.

One particular section that stuck out to me was Muether’s dealing with the argument that Christian Liberty will diminish the church’s relevance.  To this, Muether writes:

Still the objection is raised:  If the church is silenced on speaking to the ‘real world,’ hasn’t it lost its relevance?  The assumption that lurks behind that question is that the world sets the standard for relevance.  The gospel is not obliged to meet the world’s cravings;  it is designed to challenge them.  The message of sin and salvation is only irrelevant only to a church that has abandoned its calling in pursuit of worldliness […] In the desperate pursuit of the ‘very latest thing’ the culture sets the agenda for the church and the principle of sola scriptura has morphed into sola cultura.

I find that it is a very prominent notion that the church must capitulate to some assumed culture in order for people to understand the message.  Yet what always happens is that the church begins to look like the world.  People want the church to be scripted into their stories, to be relevant in their lives, instead of having their stories scripted into the drama of redemption and allow the natural relevance of God to shape what is important in the life of the believer.  The gospel message and the appropriate forms of worship that follow from it are ‘other-worldly.’  We encounter the divine other in worship and in the Word.  And the more we try to shove the ‘other’ into our own cultural preferences, the less relevant God actually becomes in our life, and we run the risk of merely utilizing Christ in our me-centered lives.

Great stuff by Muether.

Church Planting is For Wimps

And not necessarily for the macho machismo that James K. A. Smith says is somewhat prominent in the  neo-Calvinist movement.

Mike McKinley has just come out with a book by the title, Church Planting is For Wimps:  How God Uses Messed Up People to Plant Local Churches that Do Amazing Things.  Indeed, I guess God also uses long book titles as well.  At any rate, this book seems to really drive home an important point:  God uses whomever he will to plant a church.  You don’t have to fit some man-made personality test in order to plant a local expression of Christ’s body.  There are simple biblical standards for pastors found in the Bible, and none of those passages mention youth, beer-making, truck driving, or weight lifting as being required.

McKinley’s book was recently reviewed in Modern Reformation by C. R. Wiley (who helped plant Presbyterian churches in Boston, MA).  In the review Wiley writes:
 
Throughout [the book] there is a stress on forms of worship and fellowship that bridge generations and ethnicities.  Instead of healing a fragmented world, too many “missional” churches want to segment it further, keeping the church “relevant” by breathlessly chasing an ever more segmented and fickle market.  McKinley calls us back to the ‘Blue Plate Special’ of Word and Sacrament and does so proudly.
Wiley also goes on to note the dangers involved with current hipster models of church planting that preach “contextualization.”  Wiley says:

We all know the gist of it.  We need to contextualize the gospel to the sundry cultures of contemporary society.  Fine.  But what constitutes a culture?  And is every subculture worth the effort?  What’s a passing fad and what’s a genuine culture?  Shouldn’t a culture persist through time?  Failure to ask these sorts of questions has not only led to a great deal of silliness and triviality, it has resulted in real damage—churches that are symptomatic of a culture in decline.  When these cultural ephemera pass away, so will many of these churches.

Truly, there is much good food for thought found in wimps.  It is very sad but true that there are many un-accountable, un-ordained folks running around these days planting churches and telling others if they are fit to plant churches with the criteria being how ‘manly’ a man is.  McKinley’s book is a helpful contrast to that model. 

So if you don’t fit the mold, and you are wimpy and want to plant a church.  Praise the Lord.  God is greater than our weakness and he calls Timothy’s (young, unhealthy, mentality wimpy dude) to do the work of the church.  Faithfulness is the key, not numbers nor machismo. Just pray, preach, and shepherd the flock.  Give attention to your life and doctrine.  People who are interested in being part of a covenant community that loves and cherishes all that God has revealed in his Word will love to come to your church. 

So to the wimps out there:  Don’t get discouraged if famous autonomous ranchers tell you not to plant a church.   They don’t get the final say.  God’s Word does.  God has and can indeed use wimps to plant churches and McKinley’s book is a helpful reminder of this.

A Few Pictures for the Holidays

Gutsy is an understatement

Yea I know, I am way overdue for a post about the Celtics.  And yes, there has been much to write about.  So here goes:

There is good reason to absolutely love this team.  We've got the league best 12-game winning streak.  And we have done this with a handful of major injuries.  Shaq is out, Rondo is out, Jermaine O neal is out, Delonte West is out, and yes Perk is still out. 

However, this team doesn't care.  They see the impossible and count it as their goal.  This inspires me.
When asked about their difficult situation, a reporter asked Kevin Garnett if he thought the Celtics were gutsy.  To which he replied, "gutsy is an understatement."  Yes, and it counts.  KG is still quotable all these years later.

Have you seen these guys play?  There is something powerful.  Roles are known, players are playing together.  The NBA is not dead.  They are millionares, but you wouldn't know it by the way they play this game, the love is deep in these guys.

I told Rebecca last night that Doc Rivers needs to write a book on his leadership principles and practice.  I will buy that book.  I think there will be much general wisdoms to be gleaned from said work. 

These guys are good.

On Confessionalism (3)

Let's review briefly.

What is a confessional church?  It does not refer to churches that confess sin, or confess secrets, or listen to dashboard confessional.  But confessional churches are churches that subscribe to a confession of faith.  Lutheran’s, Anglican’s, Reformed, etc.  all have confessional churches within their pale.

And I would argue here that it is a biblical imperative that churches hold to formulations of the past as their standard.  I believe churches are instructed in the Bible to engage in this necessary historical enterprise.

Horton’s essay, quoted in the last post, goes to the book of 2nd Timothy to make this point.  In that epistle, Paul calls Timothy to “guard the good deposit” and to “hold fast to the sound words of doctrine.”  All this in addition to the exhortation we find in Jude to be faithful to the “faith once and for all delivered to the saints.”  What these passages all have in common is their call to be faithful to something created in the past.

We cannot do the Bible if we do not do creeds and confessions.  We are called to “hold fast.” Which as Horton notes, “provides the perimeters of faithful preaching, teaching and life.”  Moreover, Paul calls Timothy to “guard the good deposit.”  Which means he must “preserve and not innovate.”  Horton also adds that, “the truth must be guarded, so that it may be dispensed to others in ever-widening circles as the life-giving Word that it always is in its very essence.”

Yes, this means that there is a biblical role the church has, in part, to be museum-like.  We must keep confessing that Christ rose on the third day, we still believe that.  We must keep confessing the chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever, that is still to be believed and confessed among all the other truths found in the creeds and confessions.  Not to be misunderstood, I am simply saying that in order to confess what has already been given, we necessarily have to be involved in the preservation of history (after all, that is how the scriptures came to be).  Which doesn’t mean the church is simply a preservation society.  It’s just that this history is what will then animate the church’s present and future precisely because it is the propagation of God’s Word to the church and to the world. 

more next time…

On Confessionalism (2)

What does it mean for Christians to have creeds, confessions, and books of order?  Why do churches have these?  Should churches have these?  What is the point? 

To begin, it should be noted that everyone has a creed.  To be human is to be creedal.  We all have things we believe, and what we believe is our creed.  The important question then becomes: what is our creed? 

The story is often told of the man who walked up to a preacher after the worship service and asked him, “well, my good man, what is your confession?” and the preacher replied, “oh, I don’t do confessions, I have the Bible, the Bible is my confession,” to which the man responded, “yea, but the Bible is such a large book.”

The point here is that anytime anyone asks about the contents of the Bible, we necessarily summarize the Bible.  No one reads the entire Bible when they evangelize and talk about their faith.  People summarize it and put it into their own words.  Churches believe the Bible teaches things.  The question then becomes, what does it teach and how can we best summarize its message?

So churches that have creeds and confessions do so in order to bless the church and serve the world.  Churches should want to be as clear as possible about what God has revealed to humankind, and creeds and confessions serve that end.

Thus, we have churches that call themselves confessional churches.

Banff!!

So as promised, here are some pictures of my time at Banff.  The place really leaves you speechless.  Unbelievable beauty.  Thanks for the day trip Ken, it was great to enjoy God's good creation.

Semper Reformanda

I write this  from a bumpy 20,000 feet, so please forgive any typos.  But I had to chime in about Michael Horton’s fantastic essay in Always Reformed.

The piece deals with what that oft used slogan semper reformanda meant, has come to mean, and what it can mean for Christ’s church.  For starters, the phrase from whence the slogan arises is usually mistranslated.  The latin reformanda is in the passive voice and should be translated “always being Reformed.”  Thus, the phrase is properly rendered, “Always Reformed, always being Reformed according to the Word of God.”  And yes, Reformed should have a capital “R” standing for the organized ecclesiastical bodies identifying themselves as Reformed because of their distinctive Reformed confessions.

Horton gives a great history lesson then on the origin of the phrase semper reformanda and how it has been used and abused in both past and present contexts.  However, in this brief blog reflection, I want to take time to look at how Horton ends this essay. 

It is quite a finale in the academic essay-sense of the word.  Horton, in his classic “lumper” style of teaching, begins to talk about two looming dangers for confessional protestants and evangelicals that do not properly understand what semper reformanda means.  The two potential pitfalls are false conservatism and false progressivism.  Did I hear someone say Bingo!  Abraham Kuyper’s sermon “Conservatism and Orthodoxy:  False and True Preservation” is used as a foil to unpack the ills of conservatism while the ills of progressivism are presented right alongside.  Horton advocates that the semper reformanda phrase, when properly understood, guards against both of these dangers. 
Horton writes:

A false progressivism closes its eye to the past, but false conservatism falls into the opposite error.  This type of conservatism tries to merely hold on to the ever-diminishing influence still left to us from our forebears.  This is an exercise in “repristination”:  the mere repetition of past utterances as if this could magically preserve the truth for the next generation.  Advocates of this approach alternate between triumphalism and despair.

Horton goes on to say that:

A false progressivism often advertises itself as missional, while a false conservatism comforts itself in the thought that it is preserving true doctrine while failing to distribute the riches…The assumption (both in false progressivism and false conservatism) is that the gospel is not sufficiently relevant.  Christianity must establish its credentials elsewhere, by its contribution to Western Civilization or by its progressive spirit.

There is much that could be said here, but I think why I am excited is because Horton is rightly pointing the finger not just at the non-confessional folk, but he is trying to clean house in the Reformed churches.  And, yes, we absolutely need it.  Note, he’s not trying to build a new house, but clean house (always being Reformed).

On this note, you should check out the collection of essays found in the current issue of Ordained Servant.  The issue dovetails nicely with Horton’s essay and deals with what it calls Reformed fundamentalism.  I think Horton’s false conservatism and OS’ fundamentalism go hand in hand.

While just scratching the surface with this post, I hope this will be the first in a series of posts about what a robust confessional Christian life (both individually and corporately) can be.  I have been thinking a lot about this recently, and Horton’s essay hits the ball out of the park.  I hope this wets your appetite to buy the book.

Stay tuned…

Just In the Nick/Great Christmas Gift

I got out of Omaha just in the nick of time this morning.  The snow started blowing after we took off.  So I write from sunny, warmer, and mountainous Denver.  I head back up to the great white North in an hour or so.  I am once again privileged to be with the saints at Redeemer OPC in Airdrie, AL, a stones throw from Calgary.  I remembered our good camera this time and hope to take better photos of the beautiful scenery that surrounds Airdrie.  Last time my cell phone pics just didn't cut it.  Add that with a killer Giardia bug, and....yea.

But I have to tell you what happened on this early flight!  On the early bird flight I had a fever.  A fever that only this new book put out by WSC press could cure.  It is a festschrift for the venerable Dr. Pres. Godfrey who teaches at the best seminary in the United States, Westminster Seminary California.  I didn't know what to expect, but I have to say I love this collection of essays.  Diverse, stimulating, very readable, reflective, scholarly, page-turning, and a work that I see as advancing Reformed reflection, not regurgitating.  I recommend this work as a great Christmas gift for that hard-to-buy-for Reformed man or woman in your life.  Or for that needs-to-be Reformed person in your world. 

All frothing aside, I recommend this book to you, the reader's of this blog and beyond.

Onward and upward....

In honor of his 54th birthday

I need to give tribute to the best Boston Celtic of all time.  Larry Bird turns 54 today.  Watch this in honor of this basketball great.  Wohoo!

Perhaps a bit dated, but still funny

Watch this clip.  I had a good laugh.  I hope you will too.  And for the record, I do like Athanasius, Wendell Berry, and Sufjan Stevens (especially Michigan and the new record).