Ligon Duncan, Council member with The Gospel Coalition and Senior Pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, MS, explains:

It can be weird to meet the people whose books you read.

Not being a pastor, and not making the young, reformed conference circuit, I had never met Justin Taylor, Tim Challies, Eric Redmond, Denny Burk, Russell Moore, and many of the other names whose great books and blogs I’d read before. And prior to November 2009 — when I met with many of these guys in Chicago to work on a Gospel Coalition/Crossway book project — I was familiar with The Gospel Coalition in name only. I knew the organization existed, I knew it had a website, and I knew it served pastors and churches, but I really didn’t know how or where.

That meeting was revealing on a number of levels. I felt like I was the only layperson in the room, as I discovered the depth of knowledge and passion for scripture around the table. I was inspired to learn more[1]. And I was, I discovered, the only young, reformed author in the room without an iPhone™[2]. But I also learned that The Gospel Coalition has a vision to reach out to lay audiences as well as pastors (with our book and other resources), and create unity among churches across the country.

I talked with The Gospel Coalition honcho Ben Peays about a series of articles, and set out to see what this organization actually does. And then I did what any good sports journalist[3] would do — I found a former football player to interview.

Justin Buzzard is a pastor at Central Peninsula Church, which is home to over 2,000 members. He leads a thriving ministry to San Francisco Bay Area twentysomethings, preaches regularly on Sunday mornings, and oversees a variety of adult ministries. He played a season of college football in Washington before graduating from Westmont College in 2000, and received his M.Div. and served as a youth pastor before accepting the call to CPC.

The San Francisco Bay Area has 7.5 million people, and according to Buzzard, only five percent of those would call themselves “churched.”

“It’s a ridiculously expensive place to live, and people here work really hard,” Buzzard says of the Bay Area population, many of whom move from other places to work for culture-shaping companies like Google, Oracle, You Tube and Electronic Arts. “It’s a strategic place to do ministry,” Buzzard says. “Our people can be in their workplaces making an impact for Christ.”

Buzzard has 150 people in his Thursday night group, where he preaches before dividing up into fourteen different community groups that meet across the Bay Area.

“People don’t know anybody when they move here, and our twenty-somethings ministry has grown some great friendships,” he says. “That group has injected a lot of life into our church as they’ve grown and served together.”

It’s also a challenging place to do ministry — a place where the gospel message is often maligned — and a hotbed for social issues. “The push for gay rights is huge here,” he says. “And every day there’s a demonstration or riot of some kind or another at Berkeley, or a group of politicians flying into San Francisco to debate an issue. It’s a happening place, in every sense of the word.”

All the more important, then, for Buzzard and other like minded pastors to find each other.

“The Gospel Coalition connection really gives pastors and other leaders the chance to unite behind the gospel,” he says. “The Gospel Coalition was largely influenced by some pretty heady dudes[4], but I’ve really seen it bring together lots of guys from different backgrounds. It’s helped us to find where Christians are in the Bay Area — Christians who believe in the Biblical gospel. It’s a place where young guys like me can say ‘here’s a place where I belong.’”

Buzzard has received encouragement not only from the sermons, articles and reviews on The Gospel Coalition website, but also the relationships that come from The Gospel Coalition Bay Area Chapter. It’s a model that the organization would like to see replicated across the country.

“Sometimes I feel like the ministry challenges are insurmountable,” he says of the unique cultural climate of the Bay Area. “But the positive in that is that I can’t trust in myself at all, as a pastor. It’s only going to be by a miracle of God’s grace that ministry happens here.”

For more on Justin Buzzard, visit buzzardblog.com. And for more information on The Gospel Coalition Bay Area and their regional conference this month, visit TGC Bay Area.

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[1] I also felt a little stupid/bored at times, but not because anybody made me feel that way.
[2] If this sentence causes legions of young, reformed blog readers to go out and purchase their own iPhones, let it be known, Apple, that I would like a piece of the action.
[3] I write about sports when I’m not writing about the church.
[4] This is something that people from California say. Buzzard is from California.

Christ the Center has a helpful interview with Tim Keller discussing his new book, Counterfeit Gods. Here’s the set-up from their Website:

Christ the Center recently interviewed Rev. Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer PCA in Manhattan, about his most recent book Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters. The panel discussed the nature of sin as idolatry and how such things as money, sex, and power, vie for God’s rightful place in the human heart. Pastor Keller provided powerful insights into the nature of idolatry and how the human heart really is deceitful. This was a very fruitful discussion.

You can listen here.

Contrary to what many Christian’s have concluded, the gospel doesn’t just ignite the Christian life; it’s the fuel that keeps Christians going every day and in every way. Once God rescues sinners, his plan isn’t to steer them beyond the gospel but to move them more deeply into it. After all, the only antidote to sin is the gospel—and since Christians remain sinners even after they’re converted, the gospel must be the medicine a Christian takes every day. Since we never leave off sinning, we can never leave the gospel.

In the debut issue of Commit, my friend Justin Buzzard interviewed D.A. Carson about this. He asks him about the gospel, the upcoming generation, and doing ministry in unchurched regions. I’ve pasted the interview below.

***

1. In a paragraph, what does it mean to be gospel-centered in one’s Christian life?

Some think of the gospel as so slender it does nothing more than get us into the kingdom. After that the real work of transformation begins. But a biblically-faithful understanding of the gospel shows that gospel to be rich, powerful, the wisdom of God and the power of God, all we need in Christ. It is the gospel that saves us, transforms us, conforms us to Christ, prepares us for the new heaven and the new earth, establishes our relations with fellow-believers, teaches us how to work and serve so as to bring glory to God, calls forth and edifies the church, and so forth. This gospel saves — and “salvation” means more than just “getting in,” but transformed wholeness. It would be easy to write many pages on how a gospel-centered ness affects all of life, but one must begin with a full-orbed understanding of what the gospel is and does.

2. What do you see happening with the gospel and my generation, the twentysomethings of the American church? Are you encouraged?

Cautiously, yes. It is still a day of relatively small things. But it is always encouraging to observe the substantial number of twentysomethings who want to learn what the Bible says, who are looking for faithful mentors, who are tired of the endless openness of some strands of postmodernism but who do not want to drift back into isolationism or privatized religion. Some from very culturally conservative Christian backgrounds are engaging in a pendulum swing toward “hip” stances that are barely orthodox, but they are winning almost no one except other people like themselves. In God’s grace, the future lies with that part of the younger generation that is passionate to understand, believe, and obey the truth, and who to that end are diligently studying the Word of God for themselves and learning lessons in contrition and joy, in humility and courage, in faith and obedience, that every generation of believers must learn.

3. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area we have a lot of work to do. This is a highly unchurched metropolitan area with great hostility to the gospel. What are a couple brief points of counsel you’d give to church leaders wanting to build (or re-build) a gospel ministry in a region like this?

Trust Christ; believe the power of the gospel; abandon short-term gimmicks; think big but start small and be faithful; meet with, work with, pray with, learn from, those who have a common set of commitments and vision.

4. What are a few key resources you recommend to your average church member who wants to better understand how the gospel is meant to drive the entirety of the Christian life?

Once again, the first step is to understand the gospel, for in doing so, its ties to all of life become luminous. Many of the sermons on thegospelcoalition.org treat such matters. At the risk of calling attention to individuals: (1) Not a few of the sermons of Tom Nelson (on the site) talk about how the believer serves God in the normal responsibilities and cycles of work. (2) Many of Tim Keller’s sermons do the same, with a greater emphasis on working in the arts, journalism, music, and so forth. (3) For a challenge across the field, read John Piper’s Don’t Waste Your  Life. (4) To think through faithfulness in gospel proclamation and doing “deeds of mercy,” begin, perhaps, with a ten-page essay by Tim Keller in Themelios 33/3 (also on the site). (5) For those especially interested in Christianity and the arts, see the lovely 64-page booklet by Phil Ryken, Art for God’s Sake: A Call to Recover the Arts (2006). (6) For those interested in more global/political/theological analysis, try my Christ and Culture Revisited. (7) Similarly, it is worth reading Andy Crouch’s Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling. (8) There are some workshops that were offered at both the 2007 and the 2009 Coalition conference that bear on these matters, and they are available as acoustic downloads. Some of them are quite moving.

This is but the merest introduction. What you must not do, however, is become so interested in questions about how the gospel should drive our entire life and impact every dimension of life, that one begins to neglect the study of the Bible itself, and remove one’s focus from Jesus, his cross and resurrection, his gospel.

In the current issue of byFaith (the Web magazine of the Presbyterian Church in America) Richard Doster has an interesting interview with Michael Horton.

Before reading Horton’s latest book, The Gospel-Driven Life (read excerpt here), it will be helpful to read this interview for the summary critique of the book that preceded it, Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church.

The first question Doster asks Horton gets at the heart of what Horton considers the “alternative gospel of the American church”:

The title of the book is a pretty jarring oxymoron. What, exactly, is “Christless Christianity”?

First of all, it is not a claim that all the churches in America are Christless. It’s certainly not a claim that we have reached a point where Christ is no longer being preached. Rather, it’s motivated by a concern that there’s this creeping fog of what sociologist Christian Smith called “moralistic-therapeutic-deism.” This has turned God into a tool we can use rather than the object of our faith and worship. I’m concerned that the gospel is being taken for granted, that Christ is a sort of life coach, but not the Savior. With the general shallowing within the culture, there is a shallowing of Christian faith and practice. We don’t really know what we believe and why we believe it.

Acts 29 director Scott Thomas interviewed Matt Chandler. Here’s an excerpt. (N.B. Chandler’s excellent counsel on the value of non-negotiable daily time with the Lord in the Word and prayer.)

[HT: The Resurgence]

Mike Reeves interviews Don Carson on theological education (34:46 min.).

[HT: Theology Network]

Dr. David Murray (professor of Old Testament and Practical Theology) at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary is doing a great service by producing short videos about important issues facing the church today. In this video he sits down with Ligon Duncan to discuss the resurgence of Calvinism–what Dr. Duncan calls a “Reformed awakening.” (N.B. Duncan’s call for “spiritual fathers” toward the end of the interview.)

The Resurgence of Calvinism from Puritan Reformed on Vimeo.