The Gospel Coalition

Dear Friends, 

Thank-you all for your prayers regarding our merger team meeting on Wednesday night. It was a long (five hours!), hard, but good meeting. We are discussing in detail everything that needs to be discussed: the good, the bad, and the ugly. And, I’m super encouraged by the fact that we are speaking about these things openly and honestly.

God is teaching all of us so much. I don’t think I’ve prayed so hard and so desperately as I am now. We are receiving prayerful letters and encouraging notes from all over the country and from many at both churches.  For those who are supporting us with your prayers, we are genuinely grateful. It is your prayers that God is using to sustain us during this time. 

Here are some things to be praying for: a couple of us have requested to meet with the Coral Ridge elders next Tuesday night. It’s very important for us (the New City side) to have the support of the Coral Ridge elders before we take another step. We want them to be well informed and on board like the New City elders are. Also, we are continuing to work through structural and governance issues. We’ve concluded that a real indicator on whether or not God wants us to move forward is dependent on how these things are worked through and worked out. 

As an entire team, we will meet again on Wednesday Feb. 18th (that will be exactly 30 days from the time we started although we will need more time to sort through things than originally thought). There is much to do in between now and then so please continue praying for God’s clear direction and fierce protection.

We are, as I’ve said before, absolutely committed to keeping you informed. We want you to know and pray about those things that we know and are praying about so that we can all be moving together in every way.

Side by Side; Back to Back,

Tullian   

Numbers 13:25-33 was the passage of Scripture that my wife and I read and meditated on this morning (to get the whole context go back and read Exodus 23:20-33 along with Numbers 13 and 14). But this is what Numbers 13:25-33 says: 

At the end of forty days they returned from spying out the land. And they came to Moses and Aaron and to all the congregation of the people of Israel in the wilderness of Paran, at Kadesh. They brought back word to them and to all the congregation, and showed them the fruit of the land. And they told him, “We came to the land to which you sent us. It flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit. However, the people who dwell in the land are strong, and the cities are fortified and very large. And besides, we saw the descendants of Anak there. The Amalekites dwell in the land of the Negeb. The Hittites, the Jebusites, and the Amorites dwell in the hill country. And the Canaanites dwell by the sea, and along the Jordan.”

But Caleb quieted the people before Moses and said, “Let us go up at once and occupy it, for we are well able to overcome it.” Then the men who had gone up with him said, “We are not able to go up against the people, for they are stronger than we are.” So they brought to the people of Israel a bad report of the land that they had spied out, saying, “The land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people that we saw in it are of great height. And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.”

Twelve spies were sent into the land.

Ten returned in fear.

Two returned in faith.

As I pointed out a few weeks ago from his sermon on the purpose of revival delivered in 1959, the late Dr. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones said regarding this passage:

The Children of Israel were about to enter the promised land and they had been hearing about all these tribes: the Hittites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites. The spies had been sent forward and they came back and said, “You know, there are giants in that land and when we looked at them we felt that we were as grasshoppers.” And they were trembling, they were afraid of these great powers that they had to meet when they entered the promised land. Here is the answer: when you know that the living God is amongst you, what are the Hittites, who are the Girgashites and the Jebusites? What are the whole lot of them put together? They become as nothing. The fear of men is taken away immediately when we realize that the living God is among us.

The question that all of us have to ask and then answer (whatever our fears are–however huge, seemingly insurmountable and impossible the circumstances may be in our lives or with our churches) is simply this: “Which group do I belong to–the ten or the two?”

Dear New City Family,
 
Today is a day full of merger talks and we need, therefore, all of you to be praying hard for God’s clear direction and fierce protection.
 
This afternoon, the represenatives from New City (Scott Spell, Mark Kreisel, John Laudadio and me) are meeting with an outside attorney we’ve hired to go over legal, financial, and structural issues. We have worked our way through Coral Ridge’s by-laws along with the Book of Church Order so as to determine how things are currently governed and what changes need to be made. We have accumulated a mass of information and documents that tell us everything we need to know about Coral Ridge’s organizational structure, financials, and human resources. This afternoon we will be going over all of these things with our attorney, plus our CPA and Scott Spell (our Executive Pastor), all of whom have gone through these documents already and prepared written reports along with clear recommendations.
 
Then tonight, we will meet with the representatives from Coral Ridge, first for dinner, and then for a meeting at Mark Kreisel’s office beginning at 7:00. At that meeting we will discuss our findings, diagnose the problems, and propose the solutions. We anticipate that it will be a long, hard, but very productive meeting. So, we need you to be praying hard for these things. We are at the point where things, one way or another, will start to become a bit clearer.
 
I’ve said this before but I’m going to keep saying it: please be praying that if this is what God wants he will work things out. And if it’s not what God wants, he will shut it down. Pray that God will protect both churches from vain speculation. Because both churches are willing to follow God’s lead on this, we can expect great opposition from the inside and the outside.
 
I will continue to keep you posted. Remember, there are no secrets. What we know, we will let you know. We are looking forward to watching what God does and, as it’s been from the genesis of New City, we will go where God tells us to go and do what God tells us to do because we understand that we are owners of nothing but stewards of everything.
 
Side by Side; Back to Back,
Tullian

I’ve been going through some of my old New City files–things I wrote about our mission and vision (who we were going to be and why) when I was starting the church 5 1/2 years ago. I was hugely encouraged to discover that we haven’t veered off track. That, in fact, we have become what I hoped and prayed 5 1/2 years ago we would become. God has been and continues to be very good and gracious to us. Over the next few days I’ll be posting some of the things I wrote back then. Here’s the first: 

New City has never tried to be something or do something that no other church has ever tried to be or do. Realizing that “there is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl. 1:9) we do not make it our aim to be innovative. Stylistically, however, there is a need in the Body of Christ today which, by God’s grace, we are seeking to meet.

In our estimation, it is unfortunate that there are churches today who do “thinking” well but “feeling” poorly, while there are other churches who do “feeling” well but “thinking” poorly. New City sees this polarizing trend as a weakness in the Body of Christ, not a strength.

Believing that God has equipped Christian’s with both a head and a heart, intellectual capacities along with emotional capacities, we understand that no one can feel rightly about God without thinking rightly about God. On the other hand, we also believe no one can think rightly about God without feeling rightly about God. Therefore, we are seeking, in everything we do, to combine gravity and gladness, depth and delight, doctrine and devotion, precept and passion, truth and love (Matt. 22:37; John 4:23-24; 1 Cor. 14:15; Eph. 4:15). We want to be a community that glorifies God in the way that we think and the way that we feel. We strive to be a church that thinks and feels theologically while seeking to avoid both intellectualism and emotionalism.