The Gospel Coalition

Multi-site churches where the preacher is live at one site but videoed in at another location simultaneously seems to be all the rage right now. One Portland church planter, however, doesn’t think so. In a recent column on Leadership Journal’s Out of Ur blog, Bob Hyatt, founding Pastor of Evergreeen Community Church wrote: 

The celebrity church must die. And doing anything – like video venues – that prolongs its life, even in the name of the lost, runs counter to the best interests of the Church in all its expressions, big and small, and its mandate to see more people not only reached, but gifted, trained, and sent.

Regardless of what you may think of everything Bob says here, I think when it comes to the whole video preacher thing, he’s on to something.

Read the rest of his post here.

A while back I found this paragraph from Chuck Colson’s and Nancy Pearcey’s book How Now Shall We Live? especially clear and helpful on the relationship between evangelism and cultural renewal:

Evangelism and cultural renewal are both divinely ordained duties. God excersizes his sovereignty in two ways: through saving grace and common grace. We are all familiar with saving grace; it is the means by which God’s power calls people who are dead in their trespasses and sins to new life in Christ. As God’s servants, we may at times be agents of his saving grace, evangelizing and bringing people to Christ. But few of us really understand common grace, which is the means by which God’s power sustains creation, holding back the sin and evil that result from the Fall and that would otherwise overwhelm his creation like a great flood. As agents of God’s common grace, we are called to help sustain and renew his creation, to uphold the created institutions of family and society, to pursue science and scholarship, to create works of art and beauty, and to heal and help those suffering from the results of the fall.

This Monday and Tuesday I will have the privilege of speaking at the Fall Kick-off Conference at my alma mater, Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando. I’m speaking four times on “The Rhythms of Worship.” I would greatly appreciate your prayers.

So if you’re in the Orlando area, stop by. It’s free.

You can read more about it here.

I read this sad news today about Todd Bentley’s marriage. Sad as it is, I can’t say I’m surprised. When you distance yourself from the truth of God’s Word the way that Bentley did, you end up in places you never dreamed you’d end up in. May this serve as a warning to all of us…and may all of us remember Isaiah 40:8–”The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.”

J. Lee Grady, editor of Charisma Magazine writes:

It was not supposed to end like this.

Evangelist Todd Bentley had heralded the Lakeland revival as the greatest Pentecostal outpouring since Azusa Street. From his stage in a gigantic tent in Florida, Bentley preached to thousands, bringing many of them to the stage for prayer. Many claimed to be healed of deafness, blindness, heart problems, depression and dozens of other conditions in the Lakeland services, which ran for more than 100 consecutive nights. Bentley announced confidently that dozens of people had been raised from the dead during the revival.

But this week, a few days after the Canadian preacher announced the end of his visits to Lakeland, he told his staff that his marriage is ending. Without blaming the pace of the revival for Bentley’s personal problems, his board released a public statement saying that he and his wife, Shonnah, are separating. The news shocked Bentley’s adoring fans and saddened those who have questioned his credibility since the Lakeland movement erupted in early April. 

Read the whole thing here.

A couple days ago I mentioned the book Concise Theology by J.I. Packer–a book that, in my opinion, is a must have for every Christian. In it, Dr. Packer sets out to unpack 100 or so key Christian doctrines. He handles doctrines like creation, predestination, spiritual gifts, the person and work of the Holy Spirit, and baptism–all in just 2-3 pages each. I posted an excerpt on sanctification to whet your appetite. Here is another excerpt on God’s Sovereignty. Packer-packed, this short article is a theological gem!  

The assertion of God’s absolute sovereignty in creation, providence, and grace is basic to biblical belief and biblical praise. The vision of God on the throne—that is, ruling—recurs (1 Kings 22:19; Isa. 6:1; Ezek. 1:26; Dan. 7:9; Rev. 4:2; cf. Pss. 11:4; 45:6; 47:8-9; Heb. 12:2; Rev. 3:21); and we are constantly told in explicit terms that the LORD (Yahweh) reigns as king, exercising dominion over great and tiny things alike (Exod. 15:18; Pss. 47; 93; 96:10; 97; 99:1-5; 146:10; Prov. 16:33; 21:1; Isa. 24:23; 52:7; Dan. 4:34-35; 5:21-28; 6:26; Matt. 10:29-31). God’s dominion is total: he wills as he chooses and carries out all that he wills, and none can stay his hand or thwart his plans.

That God’s rational creatures, angelic and human, have free agency (power of personal decision as to what they shall do) is clear in Scripture throughout; we would not be moral beings, answerable to God the judge, were it not so, nor would it then be possible to distinguish, as Scripture does, between the bad purposes of human agents and the good purposes of God, who sovereignly overrules human action as a planned means to his own goals (Gen. 50:20; Acts 2:23; 13:26-39). Yet the fact of free agency confronts us with mystery, inasmuch as God’s control over our free, self-determined activities is as complete as it is over anything else, and how this can be we do not know. Regularly, however, God exercises his sovereignty by letting things take their course, rather than by miraculous intrusions of a disruptive sort.

In Psalm 93 the fact of God’s sovereign rule is said to guarantee the stability of the world against all the forces of chaos (v. 1b-4), confirm the trustworthiness of all God’s utterances and directives (v. 5a), and call for the homage of holiness on the part of his people (v. 5b). The whole psalm expresses joy, hope, and confidence in God, and no wonder. We shall do well to take its teaching to heart.

From the most recent cover story of Time Magazine:

If Warren is not quite today’s [Billy] Graham, who presided as “America’s pastor” back when the U.S. affected a kind of Protestant civil religion, he is unquestionably the U.S.’s most influential and highest-profile churchman. He is a natural leader, a pathological schmoozer, insatiably curious and often the smartest person in the room.

Read the whole thing here.

A couple months ago my good friends at Crossway publishers asked me if I would be willing to lead a guided video tour of the forthcoming (and highly anticipated) ESV Study Bible. Because of my enthusiasm for this study Bible (this is, without question, the most comprehensive study Bible I have ever seen) and because many of the people involved with this project are people that I know and hold in the highest esteem (they are first rate scholars, writers, artists, and editors) I agreed to do it. In fact, I was both humbled and honored to be asked.

The entire video is about 14 minutes long but Crossway (in cooperation with YouTube) has posted a five minute section that will give you a great taste and feel for what the ESV Study Bible offers. I have no doubt that the arrival of this study Bible will be one of God’s great gifts to his church in the 21st century. Seriously.

Justin Taylor shares some thoughts regarding John Edwards admission to commtting adultery after repeatedly lying and denying it.

He also links to an article by World Magazine editor Marvin Olasky (publshed before Edwards’ admission) in which Olasky writes that “adultery is generally a leading indicator of faithlessness to the nation. Throughout the 20th century small betrayals in marriage generally led to larger betrayals, and leaders who broke a large vow to one person found it easy to break relatively small vows to millions.” So much for the false idea that public service is not affected by private sin.

Read the whole thing here. Because Justin is a subscriber to World online you have to get to Olasky’s article using Justin’s link.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author whose books chronicled the horrible realities of Josef Stalin’s slave labor camps, died of heart failure this week. He was 89.

Who was he? The Examiner explains:

Through unflinching accounts of the eight years he spent in the Soviet Gulag, Solzhenitsyn’s novels and non-fiction works exposed the secret history of the vast prison system that enslaved millions. The accounts riveted his countrymen and earned him years of bitter exile, but international renown.

And they inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person’s courage and integrity could, in the end, defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire.

Beginning with the 1962 short novel “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” Solzhenitsyn (sohl-zheh-NEETS’-ihn) devoted himself to describing what he called the human “meat grinder” that had caught him along with millions of other Soviet citizens: capricious arrests, often for trifling and seemingly absurd reasons, followed by sentences to slave labor camps where cold, starvation and punishing work crushed inmates physically and spiritually.

His “Gulag Archipelago” trilogy of the 1970s shocked readers by describing the savagery of the Soviet state under the dictator Josef Stalin. It helped erase lingering sympathy for the Soviet Union among many leftist intellectuals, especially in Europe.

But his account of that secret system of prison camps was also inspiring in its description of how one person – Solzhenitsyn himself – survived, physically and spiritually, in a penal system of soul-crushing hardship and injustice.

Solzhenitsyn’s life proves that “a great writer is, so to speak, a secret government in his country.” Thank-you God for providing us with such examples of courage.

The Work Research Foundation is a think tank located in Hamilton, Ontario. According to it’s website, “The Work Research Foundation’s mission is to influence people to a Christian view of work and public life. We seek to explore and unfold the dignity of work, the meaning of economics, and the structures of civil society, in the context of underlying patterns created by God.” I’ve been learning more and more recently about the Foundation and have been impressed with the work and the research that they do. 

This morning I came across an article entitled The Daily Practice of Public Influence written by WRF senior fellow Jonathan Wellum (the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Investment Officer of Canada’s largest private mutual fund company, AIC Limited). In it, he writes:

Over the last number of years, one of my frustrations as a Christian in the Reformed tradition is the lack of involvement in the public square on the part of those who call themselves Calvinistic or Reformed. As a way of correcting this, let me start with three basic presuppositions we need to operate on as we go out into the public square.

I am going to assume the cosmological principle-the sovereignty of the triune God over the whole cosmos in all its spheres and kingdoms, visible and invisible. Thus, all of life, including culture, must come under the Lordship of Jesus Christ and absolutely nothing is to be extracted from the rule of God. Second, I think we need to emphasize that we are utterly dependent creatures and that all of life is moving forward based on the purposes of God and His sovereign will. Thus, if we are to maximize our influence for Christ in the public square then our purposes should reflect God’s purposes and our values should reflect God’s values. Third, bowing to the Lordship of Christ means living under the authority of God’s Word completely. When Francis Schaeffer talked about the uniqueness of Christianity, he stated that “Christianity is not a series of truths in the plural but rather truth spelled with a capital T – Truth about total reality, not just about religious things.” Biblical Christianity is truth concerning all of reality and the intellectual holding of that truth and then living in light of that truth.

I found the article to be both compelling and practical. Tell me what you think.