Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Revival in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
Male: It is a great pleasure and with real appreciation that Don Carson is coming to join us. He is a part of a very busy week with a national training event as well, so I’d like you to make Don feel welcome. A few questions, if I may. We’re interested in planting churches and value the local church. We know that you travel a lot and would be interested to hear how you find home church and spiritual nurture while being on the road and being an academic and, therefore, might be frightening to local pastors. How does that work out in your spiritual life?
Don Carson: It’s called the “gift of intimidation.” Well, I’m away from our own local church so much I’m not really in formal leadership there. They ask me regularly to join the pastoral staff part time, but I’m away so often it just wouldn’t be fair, but behind the scenes I’m regularly meeting with pastors over breakfast and talking to particular people and things like that.
Some of my own closer spiritual accountability links are actually with other senior pastors in the Gospel Coalition. There’s no magic formula. My ministry is odd in that it is so peripatetic. I’m on the road so much. I’m away so much of the time. What can I say? It’s not something I’d recommend.
Male: Sure. It’s good to hear, though, that those things are still needs that are found in a variety of ways. In your travels, you do see a range of church-planting initiatives ranging from within denominations to right on the pioneer of missionary work. Are there things that particularly surprise or excite you as you travel and hear about church planting that takes place around the world?
Don: The models are so diverse that there’s not sort of one model that is winning everything. Moreover, the fruitfulness is hugely varied as well. Do you really want to conclude that the missionaries who went to what is now South Korea 125 years ago were all a whole lot more godly than the missionaries who went to Japan 125 years ago?
The fact of the matter is church growth, church planting, and the like in Japan is horribly slow, and in terms of gross statistics, the church, which on the most generous reading is something under half of 1 percent, is actually declining in numbers, over against figures in South Korea where they’re massively different. Probably a third of the population is Christian, in some sense, in South Korea.
So what are you going to say? They got their methods right in one place and they didn’t get their methods right in another place? You still have to keep remembering that the Lord is the Lord of the harvest. The Lord adds to the church those who are being saved. There is some sovereignty and mysteriousness and providence in all of this that is really important.
Having said that.… I started off by saying, “Beware of generalizations,” and I’m going to make one. I am more encouraged today by what I see going on in quite a lot of corners of the world than I was 10 years ago. There are a lot of challenges. There always are. But this coming April we’ll have a meeting of the Gospel Coalition. We’ll be between 8 and 10 thousand people, and 80 to 85 percent will be under the age of 45. That’s not just us. T4G is somewhat similar. And it’s not just the US.
I was in Brazil recently in a conference there that I’ve known about, attended, been part of occasionally over the last two or three decades. Suddenly, the numbers are big and young. In Britain it’s much slower, much smaller, but the gospel partnerships are hugely encouraging. They’re small, but they’re beginning to grow, and they’re attracting young men who want to plant churches.
I’ve been teaching long enough to know there are generations of students. You get students coming in, and everybody wants to be Toronto Blessing. Then you get another generation of students in, and everybody wants to be Calvin. They come in in waves. Fifteen years ago, they were coming in from the emerging church movement, and they were basically telling us old duffers to shove over because we didn’t know what we were talking about.
The current generation is looking to be mentored. John Piper and I look at each other and say, “Hey, it’s a great time to be 60.” It’s bizarre … 30-year-olds actually want to listen to me. I really do find it very hard to believe. So there is something going on, and it’s in quite a lot of countries, and not just in the West. The most conservative estimates are a million Christians in Iran. There’s a new younger generation coming along, wanting to be mentored, wanting to get the gospel right, wanting to plant churches, and it’s in a lot of different corners of the world.
I don’t want to be naÔve and be optimistic. It can all fall apart. Sin can destroy a lot. Who knows what the future holds? But you just have to keep remembering that Christ said, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” When things look bleak on so many fronts, God has a sense of humor and says, “Watch! I’ll do it again,” and he raises up another generation. So this is not the time to be discouraged, as far as I’m concerned. It’s a time to thank God and press on.
Male: Terrific. We’ve invited you to speak on the topic of Lessons From French Canadian Revival. I’m not sure if French Canadian is the right phrase from the French Canadians’ point of view, but I heard one of the tapes of you speaking about this and thought it was interesting, both because it was so unusual and, again, reminds us of what God can do, but also in that whole process reflecting on what can be imitated, can’t be imitated, all of these things. We look forward to hearing from you. I’ll hand it over to you. Thank you very much.
Don: If I were going to talk to you directly about church planting as I see it today, I probably wouldn’t take this approach right away. In other words, I would start from the Bible and work out from there and relate a number of stories from different corners of the world, but my brief this time is to tell you something of my experience of church planting in French Canada.
I’ve been involved in three church plants myself. One was in French Canada; two were in English Canada. I’ll tell you my own brief experience in a few moments. To understand what happened there, you really have to learn some history. For those of you who hate history, sorry. This is your time to tune out, if you like. I just have to fill in the history to make sense of what happened at all.
The country that became Canada was first settled by the French, not by the Brits. They were a fur-trapping society that actually got on with the Indians pretty well. They were called coureurs du bois, runners of the wood. They settled on the Saint Lawrence, which is the great entrance into the Great Lakes.
They settled in what is now Quebec and Ontario, and then they jumped from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi and went all the way down the Mississippi to New Orleans. That’s why there’s still so much French today in New Orleans. It’s called Cajun French.… Cajun from Canadian. So there is this link all around what became the New England states.
In the war of 1812–1814, one of the causes of it was that the American 13 colonies were feeling trapped on the coast because they were encircled all around behind by the French. Eventually, Canada became British in the Treaty of Versailles in 1763. There’s a long story that I’ll spare you. Canada did not actually become a nation with its own parliament and more or less independent of Westminster (save for the need to have things signed into law by the governor general, a pattern not entirely unknown here) until 1867.
When Canada became the Dominion of Canada from sea to sea in 1867, one of the ways the country was kept together was by giving the individual provinces a lot of freedom. Otherwise, Quebec would not have joined, because Quebec was still French and Catholic, and the medieval sort of Catholic. The Catholic Church controlled the police forces there. They controlled the educational systems there. They controlled the media there.
It was a very different world. It was much more like Italy or France before the French Revolution in 1789 than it was like the rest of Canada, which was English or German or Russian, in terms of the immigrant patterns, and diverse … some Catholics, some Protestants, some skeptical, some who knows what. Eventually, it became indistinguishable religiously from, let’s say, Sydney or Canberra.
Quebec was different. Quebec had another language, another culture. Part of the differentiation was more complicated yet in that because it was priestly controlled, their university systems, their educational systems, were constantly pushing Catholicism even at the expense of science and engineering, so the English got the high-level jobs, and the French became the other workers.
There was an underlying resentment and rebellion built up, because they felt like second- or third-rate citizens in the country. The rest are Canadians. They’re French Canadians. If you have to put a label in front of them.… This is the background for successive rounds of separatism that sometimes emerge in the country. Even the vocabulary is different. For example, in French if you say nation (nation), you don’t mean quite the same thing.
In the English-speaking world, nation conjures up nation state, but nation has to do more with.… It could be nation state, but it has more to do with culture and race and self-identity. So Quebecers speak regularly of la nation, le peuple (the people), and that is heard in English ears as if they’re claiming to be non-Canadians but another nation. So you get these sorts of tensions all the time. (Believe me, this is relevant to church planting. You just have to trust me for a minute.)
Now in terms of the progress of the gospel, there was not much for quite a long period of time. At the time of the American Revolution, there were thousands of Americans who didn’t want to rebel against King George III, believe it or not, and they migrated north into Canada. Some of them went to English Canada, and they eventually merged in the population, but those who went to French Canada brought their Protestantism. In very many cases, they brought their evangelicalism, and they brought their names.
Nevertheless, their numbers were so small with respect to the rest of the population that apart from little kernels of pockets, they eventually married into and were absorbed by the population. So you can go to towns of 30,000 to 40,000, look up in the phonebook, and find names like Brown and Greenwood, where nobody in the town speaks a word of English. In other words, the names from the men have carried on, but the whole population has been submerged in Catholicism, in French, and so on.
Then right in the middle of French Canada, a little town like Sawyerville, which was all populated initially by what we call “UELs,” United Empire Loyalists, who moved up at the time of the American Revolution, started their own little village and town, basically kept the French out, and became a little English pocket right in the middle of French Canada. They’re still largely Protestant to this day. So there are all of these anomalies that are checkered through this whole area.
In a city like Montreal, just under three million, about 15 percent of the population when I was growing up (it’s a little less now) was English speaking first, but they would mostly know how to speak French, and many of the French would know some English, but you go to Quebec City and I doubt you’d find 100 families who know how to speak English. So how French it is really depends on where you are.
In this context, therefore, the impact of the UELs turned out to be very, very slight and ephemeral. In a century it was all gone, but in the late 1800s there was a group of Baptists that formed what came to be called the Grande Ligne Mission, the “grand line mission.” It doesn’t make sense in English, but that’s what it was called. They planted about 70 churches up and down the whole Saint Lawrence valley.
It was effective. It was quiet. It was slow, but it was discouraging in this respect. This, too, you have to understand. Because the priests controlled the educational system, all schools were supposed to be Catholic, but then you had to make some allowances under dominion charters for the Protestants, so there were two school boards: a Catholic school board and a Protestant school board. The Protestant school board was basically secular. The Catholic school board was everybody else.
The priests eventually controlled things so that if you were French, you went to the Catholic schools. If you started churches, therefore, in a French milieu, and then the kids were all brought up speaking French and they became part of a Christian family from an evangelical perspective, then as soon as it was clear they weren’t Catholics, they had to abandon the Catholic school.
The Protestants were only allowed English schools, which meant the kids had to go to an English school, which meant they became socialized in English. Thus, you were always at a first-generation level of church planting. You could never have a second generation of educated French Christians, because they became Anglicized.
It was a horrible situation in terms of church planting. You could never have a second-generation French church. The Grand Ligne Mission nevertheless planted a church in this kind of matrix, and then it was hit by classic liberalism from about 1920 on, and those 70 churches dwindled down to five. Liberalism doesn’t plant churches. It’s as simple as that.
Because you don’t have any second-generation Christians, they die fast. If you have second- or third-generation Christians and liberalism hits in, it can take a while for the liberalism to do massive damage. If you have this kind of linguistic problem and then liberalism hits, there’s nothing left. So 70 churches dissipated down to about 5 in about 15 to 20 years.
That takes us to the mid-1930s when my father and a chap from Switzerland (who, therefore, had German, French, and Italian under his belt) felt called of God to start up in French Canada. They were the first ones back on the Baptist side. The only other evangelicals who were doing anything in French Canada were Plymouth Brethren. There was no other group doing anything in French Canada at the time. The Plymouth Brethren were beginning to start up about the same time in the late 1930s.
My father didn’t have the language. He started off having to learn the language properly. I could tell you a lot of funny stories where he stuck his foot in his mouth massively. It’s part of learning a language. Some of you people might have had cross-cultural or missionary experience. Whenever you learn another language, you stick your foot in your mouth. It’s part of the price of learning a language. And Dad did it.
I’ll tell you one story. He was doing door-to-door work. By this time, he was getting reasonably okay. He could get by. He was just trying to get in to get a Bible study going, a conversation going. It was really difficult. On this particular doorstep in Montreal.… This would have been late 1930s. French Canadians were discouraged from having Bibles at all in their homes, and if they did have Bibles, they had to be approved by the Catholic Church.
He was standing in the door talking to this woman, and he had forgotten his reading glasses. He was trying to quote Ephesians 2:8–9, but you don’t just quote it; you have to show people the text. So he was trying to show her the text, and his arms weren’t long enough anymore to see it, so he couldn’t quite find Ephesians.
Suddenly she saw it as he was flipping by. She didn’t know how the Bible was put together, but she saw …phÈsiens. She stuck her finger in it, and he said, “Vous avez de beaux yeux, Madame,” using beaux as opposed to bon … just how nasal it is. So instead of saying, “Oh, you have good eyes, Madame,” he said, “Oh, you have beautiful eyes, Madame,” and she kicked him out. Those are the sorts of things that do happen when you’re learning another language.
You’re starting from nothing. You’re not starting with a kernel or churches loaning you some people. You try to make friends with neighbors, going door-to-door. That’s the way the work started. Gradually, over the years, the churches grew, but as recently as 1972 the total number of French-speaking evangelical churches (they were all either Baptist or Brethren) in French Canada in a population of about six and a half million … so something like Sydney and Melbourne put together … was about 35 or 37.
There were none with more than 50 to 60 people, most with 20 to 30, and on a good Sunday, 40. It was very slow work. During that time, between 1950 and 1952, for example, Baptist ministers alone spent a total of eight years in jail. The charge was always disturbing the peace or inciting to riot or disorderly conduct, or whatever, but it was always for going door-to-door or passing out literature. It was an extremely hostile situation.
Even in 1967, when I did a brief internship with another chap.… He was an American missionary. He had learned the language. He had planted a church in Asbestos-Danville, and I went and spent four or five months with him. We would go out to one of the nearby villages, going door to door, trying to pass out literature, trying to get somebody interested in a Bible study started or something.
He’d go down one side of the street, and I’d go down the other side of the street. Then we’d come back in the evening. I remember one evening we came in, and we had switched back to English. He said to me (I will never forget it), “Don, I have to go back to French. I’m too tired to think in English.” Here was a man who had so devoted himself to the people it was more natural for him to speak in French, at that point, than English.
Anyway, we would not then go back to that village for at least a month or two. It was not safe to do so, even as recently as ‘67. By the time you got back the next day they would have found out you had been there and would have had the police or toughs around to beat you up. You just had to disappear for a month, and then go back and try again. So it was a very different, hostile situation.
In 1969 in Montreal in an area called Ahuntsic, I worked with another chap to start a church. It was an area of about 126,000. We didn’t know a single evangelical in this area. Not one. I visited 3,000 homes door-to-door before I got my first Bible study going. Now this is not the way I’d recommend you do church planting, but what else were you supposed to do? During that time, we (the leaders of this movement; I was just a kid for much of it) tried all kinds of things. Where they could, they would try to get on the radio, but often they were banned.
There was one chap called Wilson Ewin, a missionary from the US who was extremely bold and adventuresome. He managed to get the address of every nun, priest, and Catholic brother in the province, 20,000 of them, and raised the funds, and the pastors together wrote an eight- or ten-page letter.
It was respectful, it was courteous, but it tried to explain what the gospel was, quoting the Bible, using the Catholic version, and inviting people to talk and meet up with us. There was a return address. I remember as a teenager stapling these things, 20,000 of them, and stuffing envelopes. We had whole teams doing it, and eventually they were all mailed out. Well, the scandal.… It blew up.
I remember one of our recent converts had a shoe shop. He not only repaired shoes but he actually made shoes in his shop. Once it became clear that he was converted, just about the same time, his business went down 90 percent, and then one night his shop was torched. His life was repeatedly threatened. He and his wife left the province and went to Ontario. That was not uncommon in those days.
We kids were sometimes beaten up because we were maudits Protestant, damned Protestants. It never hurt us. It was probably much harder on our parents than it was on us, but that was part of the framework. So church planting was slow and difficult and challenging, and most of the people who were converted were at the low end socioeconomically, which also meant very few of them had potential for real leadership, for theological training themselves. And where were you going to send them? There was no school to send them to unless they learned English.
Suddenly, you have all the multiplied problems of evangelism and church planting in a cross-cultural situation, and yet this in a major Western nation. At the same time, the social pressures under the surface were perking. At the same time that many Western nations were going through the dirty 60s … in the US, Haight-Ashbury, “Flower Power,” the Vietnam War, and all of that.… Canada wasn’t in the Vietnam War, but the same sort of social pressures were going on.
In French Canada, it was rebellion against the English. There was the formation of what was called la Parti QuÈbÈcois, the Quebec Party, la sÈparatistes, the separatists. They started throwing bombs. People got killed. Political minister Pierre Laporte was blown up. Our prime minister of all Canada at that time, Pierre Trudeau, imposed martial law. Some of you are maybe old enough to remember some of this. He imposed martial law and was criticized for it.
He sent in the RCMP and all sorts of undercover people, and in four months he cleaned out the whole Parti QuÈbÈcois, and then he lifted martial law. Afterwards, he was hailed as a hero. It stopped the bombings and everything just like that. That was a sign of the degree of ferment that was going on. Out of this, the premier of that province, Jean Lesage, passed what came to be called Bill 63 in 1963, which detached education from the Catholic Church.
At the time, we barely saw its significance. In retrospect, it was huge. It meant you could have a second-generation church. It took us a while to figure it out. You could start having French-language Protestant churches. Then there were other bills that came in. When I was growing up in French Canada, the majority of the French families I knew had eight children, and priests spoke of la revanche des berceaux, the revenge of the cradle. “We’ll beat the English by producing more babies, and eventually we’ll carry everything in the polls.”
It had the highest birth rate in the Western Hemisphere. In World War II, they say (this is guarded; I don’t know if it’s true or not), if the pope had had to evacuate the Vatican, he would have come to Quebec City. All through the 40s and 50s, Quebec was the most Catholic nation in the world, as measured by the fact that they sent out more priest and nun missionaries per capita than any other Catholic nation in the world. It was a very medieval, devout sort of Catholicism.
Then, in the course of about 25 years, it became one of the most secularized parts of the entire Western world. Quebec now has the highest abortion rate and the lowest birth rate of the entire Western Hemisphere. I’m not saying that’s necessarily better either. All I’m saying is you begin to catch the measure of the change, the social ferment that was going on. Now you have 50,000 students at UniversitÈ de MontrÈal, and of the 50,000 students, I doubt 45,000 of them have ever opened a Bible or held a Bible in their hands.
So the only places where Catholicism is in any sense vibrant anymore are within the older population and in villages and rural and ignorant. Then God raised up two or three people. There was an Armenian by the name of Jacques Alexanian, who did some of his theological training in Paris and then at Wheaton College, and he became a church planter in French Canada. For seven years it was very slow, and then in 1972, things just took off and were largely under his leadership.
He was a formidable man. He was sort of the Al Stewart/Phil Jensen of French Canada. A bit of an entrepreneur, aggressive, in-your-face, but clever and gifted at evangelism, shrewd at sussing things out, and theologically alert. These men are not to be downplayed because we have a “cut down the tall poppy” philosophy. They are to be honored because they are used by God in all kinds of interesting ways.
Quebec, as part of this revolution, had thrown out its educational systems and revamped it so it was much more in line with France. So there’s high school, which only takes you to year 11, and then two years of what they call CEGEP, sort of junior college, and then three years of university after that. It’s much more like a French system. For the first time, they managed to start getting some Bible studies going in the CEGEPs and in the French universities.
I went to McGill, which was at the time an English university. Now it’s a bilingual university, but when I went to McGill, it was 90 percent English. So it was easy to have an IVCF group there, but the UniversitÈ de MontrÈal didn’t have anything like that. There was just no way you could get it on the campus. Now, gradually, we’re getting these groups on the campus, and especially in the CEGEP.
Jacques Alexanian was pastoring a church in Sherbrooke. He started one in the CEGEP there, and suddenly you were getting conversion after conversion after conversion. Suddenly, in two or three years, we had hundreds and then thousands of conversions, and between 1972 and 1980, eight years, we grew.… We evangelicals, not just Baptists but Baptists and Brethren, and now a whole lot of others started coming in when things were really moving. We grew from about 35 churches to about 500 in eight years.
That meant a whole lot of different problems. Many of these churches were still only 50, but others were 300 or 400. You could now have a conference somewhere with 1,000 people, which was simply unheard of when I was growing up. In 1972, my dad was already 61. The leadership was really passing into other hands. He became, in some ways, the grand old man. He ran in his region what was called La Pastorale, where he had a whole lot of young pastors he was mentoring.
They revered him, but in terms of the aggressive leadership of Jacques Alexanian, that was really passing on to another generation. It was during that time that almost all of the leaders of the confessional Protestant churches today were converted, just as here in Australia many of the senior leaders who are running things today were converted during the Billy Graham crusade of 1959. It really was a movement of God that brought a lot of people in during that eight-year period.
After 1980, things settled down somewhat, but the patterns of evangelism changed. Instead of evangelizing Catholics, which was one set of strategies (that’s what you were confronting), you were now evangelizing secularists, so you had to go through another whole rethink. But there was also, in the providence of God, a kind of social vacuum, emotional vacuum, religious vacuum, because the reaction against the Catholic Church was so huge the doors were suddenly wide open.
You could do all kinds of things you couldn’t do before, and the felt needs for some sort of reality beyond medieval Catholicism were strong as well. In retrospect, it’s clear that that too was God’s providential preparation for all of this. I was in England between ‘72 and ‘75, and when I came back in ‘75.… This is right in the middle of this. I took up a post on the West Coast of Canada in 1975, but I was instantly put on the French board and was flying back and forth, because I had the language and the training.
I remember probably in ‘76 I flew back to give a couple of weeks of lectures to young pastors in French Canada. I was asked to speak this Wednesday night in a church in Sherbrooke. I had been out of the country for three or four years, and I hadn’t seen anything like this in French churches. This was a Wednesday night prayer meeting. I said to the pastor, “How many will be here?” He said, “Oh, probably 85 or 90.” Well, that was double or triple the size of the churches I knew in French Canada.
I said, “How long do I have to speak?” He says, “Oh, I never speak less than an hour. These people are so hungry.” He says, “You’re a visitor. You probably have an hour and a half.” So I expounded Scripture for an hour and a half. They sang songs, first of all, and they weren’t the old hymns I knew from “Sur les Ailes de la Foi,” which was our primary hymn book. There were a whole lot of fresh ones, and they were full of theology and vibrancy. Keith Getty and Rob Smith-type stuff, but in French.
They sang for about 30 minutes, and then I preached for an hour and a half. Then the guy got up and said, “We’re very glad Don Carson is here. Maybe you’d like to ask some questions while he is here.” So I answered questions for another hour, and they all had to do with the Bible, theology, spiritual life, formation, growth, how to wrestle with sin, and how to evangelize. It was all that sort of thing.
Then, “Now it’s time to pray. Does anybody have any prayer requests?” Almost everybody was.… “Pray for my second cousin twice removed. I’ve been talking to him about the gospel, and I think he’s really close. He’s coming under conviction of sin. Pray that the Lord will really convert him.” It wasn’t, “My dear Aunt Maude, who’s 92, may have cancer. Pray the Lord will heal her.” It was none of that kind of stuff at all. It was really vital.
So after a half an hour of these discussions, we all got down on our knees to pray. Then we prayed for another hour and a half. By this time it was midnight or 12:30. About 1:00 I left, because I was lecturing the next morning at 7:30 and I was done in. I don’t know when they left. That was not really an atypical Wednesday. It was a little longer because I was there, I suppose, but that’s the way it was.
That went on for, depending on the part of Quebec, between two and eight years. Then at the end of that, about 1980, it settled down to more regular things. The church no longer grew so fast. It became a time of training. That became the place and time, under the leadership of Jacque Alexanian and others, where they founded SEMBEQ, SÈminaire Baptiste …vangÈlique de QuÈbec (Evangelical Baptist Seminary of Quebec), but it wasn’t a seminary as we would think of it quite.
It was basically theological education by extension-type courses. Many of them we actually took over from Spanish missionaries, missionaries to Latin America, who had developed all kinds of theological education by extension, programmed learning stuff, very simple sorts of things. We took it over from missionaries to the Latin American countries because a lot of that was geared toward evangelizing Catholics, and we still had an awful lot of Catholics around.
So we took over that stuff and translated it into French. We started with that, and then we would have one-week modules and six weeks of them having to do things on their own. These guys were beginning to take on pastoral responsibilities, supervised by regional pastors (we wouldn’t dare call them bishops, but that’s what they were). It was full of life and vitality but extremely dangerous. You could go to a church where nobody had been an evangelical Christian for more than 18 months.
On the other hand, that sounds like the New Testament to me. You read the book of Acts, and Paul plants churches on the way out, and then on the way back he actually appoints elders in every place. That was a two-year trip. They couldn’t have been more than 18 months old in the Lord. That’s what we were seeing in Quebec. It was a very first-century feel on so many, many fronts, but at the same time very dangerous, as it was in Paul’s day. So many volatile young, enthusiastic people without much training, background, history, knowledge, or anything.
So the years from 1980 on became years of a bit of retrenchment. There was a bit of disaffection. Not much, but not much more growth. A lot of training. SEMBEQ became much more established. Those of us who had French came up and would lecture for a week or two at a time. I still go back and lecture in French for a week every year, and others like Roger Nicole who had the language would go up.
Then they’d get up people who didn’t have a word of French. They would do simultaneous translation or line-by-line translation. It was like what happens when I go to China today. There’s a translator for everything. This was a translator into French. That’s the way education went on. Eventually, they got accreditation at SEMBEQ for their first degree, and now I’ve had SEMBEQ graduates at Trinity doing Master of Divinity and ThM.
I’ve had one of them do a PhD at Trinity now, and another one came through Trinity and then went to France to do a PhD at Strasbourg and is planting a church over in France. The thing has now become much bigger. It’s third and fourth generation now, and it’s much more stable. The church is actually beginning to grow with a fresh round of evangelism again, and now they’re trying to cross some other bridges and form a kind of French equivalent of The Gospel Coalition. There are some other things that are going on now, and it has changed its shape quite a bit.
That’s the history. For those with ears to hear, you’ve probably already picked up all kinds of little things on the way, but let me take a few moments and outline some lessons from the lean years and then some lessons from the high growth years, because they’re not quite the same lessons, and then I’ll throw it up to Q&A.
So let me suggest some lessons from the lean years, therefore. I suspect that many of you are in situations that feel a lot more like 1950 to 1972 in Quebec than 1972 to 1980, and there are some lessons to learn from those years too.
1. You have to begin to view opposition and persecution as a privilege.
“Indeed, all those who live righteously will suffer persecution because of Christ Jesus.” So writes Paul to Timothy. When the first whiff of persecution breaks out in Jerusalem, the apostles rejoiced because they were counted worthy to suffer for the name. Otherwise, you will descend into self-pity, discouragement, despair, and despondency.
Discouragement and opposition.… If you can begin to view it as a badge of privilege, it transforms everything. They treated Jesus this way. Why on earth would you ever think that you should escape? Isn’t that what Jesus says in John 15? That doesn’t mean we become secret spiritual masochists. “Go ahead. Hit the other cheek. I really like it. I enjoy the pain.” I don’t mean that.
Yet at the same time, view opposition as a certain kind of badge of honor, remembering at the same time that the Lord is no man’s debtor, and when the awards are meted out on the last day, I don’t think it will be the case that all of the missionaries who went to South Korea will be more greatly rewarded than all of the missionaries who went to Japan.
2. Pursue evangelism no matter how difficult, find your way around, and keep thinking of creative ways of gossiping the gospel.
You have to teach the Word of God. You will certainly not grow in a difficult situation by mere organizational skill or the right band or whatever. You have to evangelize. Whatever else you do, evangelize. Evangelize or die. At the end of the day, although church planting is more than evangelism, it’s never less … unless all you’re doing is taking a group of people from one church and constituting another church without any growth.
Real church planting is evangelizing. In this connection, I want to say I’ve gradually come to the conclusion that even the word evangelist that we sometimes use is a mistake. When Paul writes to Timothy and says, “Do the work of an evangelist,” we’re inclined to think of doing the work of a Billy Graham or a one-on-one evangelist or talking about the gospel to somebody who’s not a Christian. That’s what evangelism is.
It includes that, but don’t forget the gospel, the evangel (it’s the same word), in the New Testament is not just the message that tips people in. It’s the announcement of the good news of what God has done. It’s the big thing under which you put your church planting, your discipleship, your missionary training, and all that sort of thing. It’s not the little category that tips people in, and then your missions department or discipleship department or assimilation pastor takes over.
The gospelizing is the big category, because it applies not only to evangelism as we think of it (so presenting what God has done in Christ Jesus that men and women by God’s power are savingly converted), but this is the gospel that shapes us, that transforms us. It is the gospel we preach to ourselves. We all need it. It is the big category announcing what God has done. So doing the work of the evangelist is simply doing the work of spreading the evangel. It’s gospelizing.
That’s not just gospelizing to outsiders. It’s do the work of an evangelist; preach the gospel. That’s your whole job. So as in 1 Timothy 3–4 Paul is told to hold on to the Bible, he’s also told in chapter 4 to hold out the Bible to others. “In the light of the return of Christ, I charge you: Preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season.” In that context, he says, “… do the work of an evangelist.” Do gospelizing. Preach the gospel. Preach the whole Bible of God, focused on the gospel of Jesus Christ. That’s what you do.
If, then, you want to see people converted, it must be done in some kind of context or framework where it is touching the lives of unconverted people. That might be done one-on-one in a coffee shop. You might be able to get some neighbors in. You might be able to get some friends to invite some other friends.
I like the Alpha style of having people around a table. I don’t like the Alpha courses. In my view, it’s not quite the best one out there. I think there are other ways. But the idea of having people around a table, eating, having a nice time, being friends with neighbors, having a brief presentation and discussion.… Friendship that leads to the discussion of the Word. Find out how to do it. In our case, in French Canada, it was door-to-door. It was some of these letters we’d circulate to people.
Occasionally, we’d get on some local radio station for a few months before we were kicked off. Dad was on and off I don’t know how many times. Each time he got on he was thrilled to bits, and each time he got off he was discouraged. But what do you do? You keep trying. You keep knocking on doors, starting a Bible club, whatever. Find out how you can be busy doing the work of an evangelist in the biblical sense.
3. Work on the biblical texts that talk about endurance, perseverance, stamina, and the like.
There is a huge amount of biblical material that values steadfastness, endurance, and the like. Think of how Paul can multiply his metaphors, for example, in 2 Timothy 2: Like an athlete. Like a soldier. Like a hardworking farmer.
Build those graces. Don’t keep building up in your mind the image of someone who comes in and immediately is so successful and fruitful you’ll never have fewer than 10,000 people listening to every word that falls from your lovely lips. It may be that God will raise up one of you along those lines, but the graces to pursue are not that sort of imagination. The graces to pursue are stamina, courage, faithfulness, long-term endurance.
4. Develop confidence in the doctrine of election.
At one point in the French Canada story (this was in the late 50s), something that happened in another part of the francophone world had an impact on us. It was the Congo rebellion in the late 50s. The Congo was, at that point, called the Belgian Congo. It was ruled from Belgium.
In the various rebellions, the over-turnings, that transformed Africa into what it became today, with more and more colonial powers being thrown out or walking out cheerfully or whatever the case, the Belgian Congo was one of the countries that went through this sort of upheaval. The Belgian Congo eventually became Zaire, and then it became the Congo. It still is going through all kinds of bloody mayhem.
At the time, virtually all of the missionaries who were in the Congo left, including quite a lot of Americans. Hundreds and hundreds of missionaries from all over the world left during this bloody period that ended about 1959. Some of the Americans, then, going back to America were looking around for another part of the francophone world to go to. At least they had French. It’s not Africa, but there’s at least some shared culture, at least a shared language, more or less.
Some of them came up into French Canada. So suddenly, in 1959, right in the heart of this depressing period, we had an influx of fresh blood and experience and maturity and missionaries. There was a certain buzz around the place, saying, “This is great. Carry a load. These people have been at it a long time. They’re going to have to learn something of French Canadian history and culture, but at least they have the language fluently.”
Not one of them stayed longer than six months. Not one. By this time, I was a teenager, so I knew a great deal. I asked my father, “What’s the matter with these people? Are they all wimps? No stamina? No guts?” I had their number. Not like my dad. He was courageous. They were all just a bunch of.… My father was the gentlest of men.
He said, “Don, you’re being too harsh. You have to understand where they’re coming from. They’ve been serving Jesus in a part of the world where they expect fruit at this point. They’ve built hospitals. They’ve seen churches grow. They’ve established Bible schools. So they come here, and they see nothing happening, and they infer they must have made a mistake. This can’t be their call after all, because nothing is happening.” So I said to him, “Then why don’t you go someplace in the world where you’d see more fruit?”
He turned to me and said, “I stay because I believe God has many people in this place.” He turned and walked out of the room. I don’t think you can really serve faithfully and well and enduringly unless you do believe in the doctrine of election. At the end of the day, you’re called to be faithful, but if people are converted, you recognize this is the work of God. As long as you are convinced that God has people in this place, your job is still to preach until they are found. So develop confidence in the doctrine of election.
5. Recognize the strange mix of, identifiably, the supernatural work of God on the one hand, and on the other, God’s providential work.
I’ve spoken in many Catholic countries. You speak in Italy, in Southern Ireland, in Spain, and everybody wants to know about the French Canadian movement, because they’re thinking, “Hey, we’re Catholic too. We have that same sort of European rootage. What did you guys do?” If they can just find out what we did, then maybe you can find the same sort of thing taking place in Spain.
Although very few of us analyzed the situation very well at the time, when you look back, you realize the murder of Pierre Laporte was something God providentially used. The bomb throwing that shook French Canadian society to the core was something God used. The martial law imposed by Pierre Elliott Trudeau that cleaned out the violence but left people gasping with despair and emptiness, the courage of Jean Lesage when he passed Bill 63 and tore the educational system away from the Catholic Church …
That was shatteringly important for all that we did, and none of it was anything we could do. In other words, all of the social dynamics were not things we could bring about in an attempt to evangelize Spain. It’s just not the way it works, but God in his providence brought all of these pieces together and then raised up a man like Jacque Alexanian.
Usually in these sorts of movements there really are one or two or three leaders.… There are some movements that have come along that are people movements through and through, but usually there are one or two or three leaders who really do stand out in some way, who have more entrepreneurial vision and a lot of energy and a lot of courage. They bring along a whole lot of people with them.
That is God’s appointment too. I am not sure, humanly speaking, that the Quebec church would have had its growth in 1972 to 1980 if God hadn’t given us Jacque Alexanian and two or three others like him. It’s not that there weren’t a lot of other good men, but some people are just more endowed than others.
Would Redeemer Presbyterian Church be Redeemer Presbyterian Church if it hadn’t been for Tim Keller? God could have raised up somebody else. You remember what Mordecai says to Esther. “Who knows whether God has raised you up for such a time as this? If you’re not faithful, God can easily raise somebody else up.” But humanly speaking, without God’s appointment of certain kinds of leaders in certain kinds of places …
So you look back at it, and you see the hand of God working mysteriously through providence to bring about the kinds of social things that left a huge vacuum, and even the change in the educational system so that all of these CEGEP were opened up, and they weren’t trained in being anti-Christian. We got all of these clubs going in all of these CEGEP schools.
That’s where the whole generation of leadership came from, and they were almost all guys who were being converted. For about 15 years, we had two guys for every girl between the age of 20 and 35. In many parts of the world, there are far more girls than guys who are converted. In French Canada it was just the opposite. We were swamped with guys. We didn’t have enough girls to go around to marry them off to. Just the opposite. Maybe you need to send some Australians up to French Canada.
So I was brought up in a context where I never thought of church planting in terms of Sunday schools and women’s Bible studies, and then eventually you get around to the men. I was brought up in a context where of course you went after the men. If you got the man, you got the man, the woman, and the pocketbook. Of course that’s what you do. It was the only thing that was working in that transition period as well, in any case.
So somehow the lessons you learn in all of this as you look back is to marvel at God’s providential bringing together all of the pieces to the point where the gospel is preached, the Word of God is being multiplied, and God brings in the right leaders, the right people at the right time, and suddenly you have a movement. It’s wonderful to watch. Now let me say a few things about the rapid growth period. The last point was just transitional.
First, if you start getting rapid growth, think especially hard and vigorously about patterns of training. Of course, even in days of slow growth you need to think about training and education and evangelism and how to prepare people, how to prepare people even for slow growth. That’s true, but suddenly you have a whole lot of really keen converts who don’t know much but love Jesus passionately and want to know more about the Bible, and you have a huge problem on your hand.
There’s no point sitting around thinking, “Well, this is the Spirit’s doing. Don’t slow me down with education now. Just give me more power, Lord.” In fact, I’d be prepared to argue that was one of the things that went wrong with the Welsh Revival in 1904 and 1905. I think there were two big things that went wrong there. First, they began to hunger for the experiences rather than for the Lord and the gospel that had given the experiences in the first place.
Second, with only one very small exception, there really was no thought-through commitment to theological training in consequence of it. The thing became more and more taken over by extremists, and meanwhile, they didn’t even begin to attack the liberalism in the theological schools or start another school that was really believable. A tiny little thing that became Barry Bible College, first of all, for laypeople at night. There was no vision or direction.
One of the strengths of Jacque Alexanian and a handful of others was their vision to start SEMBEQ. What theological education will look like in a particular context will depend on the language, the availability of books, the availability of teachers. In some places there will be residential courses for three or four years. That’s what you really want.
That’s ideal, I’m sure; a whole lot of time to study and think deeply and be exposed to a good library and all the rest, but in this kind of situation, modular courses, short-term courses, programmed learning courses, begging money to turn some English books into French.… This was thought through on the fly as aggressively as was humanly possible granted the limited resources to try to make sure you flood things with Bible teaching, Bible knowledge, to set the bar as high as you can and keep raising it higher for this generation of keen people.
There is so much energy in these converts when this sort of movement takes place. The question is.… What do you do with it before it rapidly dissipates? I’ve been on the edge of two or three really wonderful movements of God. There was a brief movement in Canada, sometimes called the Canadian Revival, when I was pastoring a church in Vancouver in 1970 to 1971. I’ve been on the edge of a few of them and dropped in in places in the world where I’ve seen some of them, and I’ve come to certain conclusions as a result.
If the Lord in his great mercy ever puts me anywhere near the center of another one, there are certain steps I will take immediately. First, I will do everything in my power to keep the press out. You can’t keep it out absolutely, not in this day of blog posts and all the rest, but downplay things. I am persuaded that one of the things that preserved French Canada for as long as it was preserved was the linguistic barrier.
People in America and English Canada didn’t have a clue what was going on. They’d hear the odd story, but they couldn’t fly in to catch the revival, because they didn’t understand the language. That preserved us. The Toronto Blessing, whatever it was, people were flying in to catch the blessing. God help us. Is that what revival is? Suddenly, you’re making gurus out of people. You’re making gurus out of a certain kind of experience.
You’re all jabbering away about whether or not you’re allowed to do this or that, and the blog posts foment shared ignorance in massive doses. Do everything you possibly can to keep it out of the press. Don’t talk about things like that. Talk about the gospel, talk about Jesus, talk about conversions, talk about Bible study, but stop talking about the revival, and discourage any of your friends who know anything at all about what’s going on from giving any interviews with the New York Times. Don’t do it. It will always go wrong.
Now don’t misunderstand me. Again, there is a place for certain capable people to have a voice in the media. That’s right. I’d rather commit interaction with the Sydney Morning Herald to the hands of Peter Jensen than anybody else in Australia I know. He just is so shrewd. But when these things get going in revival sorts of proportions, everybody wants to talk to the press and talk about their experiences, and the thing just goes wild as a feeding frenzy, and all of the motives get corrupted really fast. So do what you can to dump down the press.
Second, do everything you can to funnel all of this God-given, Spirit-empowered energy into Bible study, understanding the gospel, understanding God’s Holy Book, and teaching people to teach it, because if you don’t funnel the energy there, it’s going to get funneled somewhere else, probably toward the passion for experience. Hunger for experience of God is not a bad thing, so long as it does not become an end in itself.
The distinction between a passion for experiencing more of God and a passion for God is very small, but it’s significant, because if it’s the experience of God you want, pretty soon you’ll do anything to drum up the experience … it’s like a kind of drug … whether you really have God or not. The fact of the matter is the experience of God is bound up with his Word and the gospel and with Jesus. That’s where you focus, and maybe then, in God’s mercy, the experience will go on for a long time.
Once you start pursuing just the passion for the passion’s sake, start formulating rules for the way prayer meetings must go.… They must go until 1:00 in the morning. You must have a certain amount of singing. You must have an hour and a half of exposition. That becomes the test. Then you have a whole new generation of rules, and pretty soon you have a self-righteous, merit-based theology. It’s no longer the gospel of grace, it’s no longer the gospel at all, and pretty soon the whole thing is sinking down into new kinds of moralism.
If you look around the world today at places that have experienced something of rapid growth, a genuine movement of God.… Let’s say Ethiopia 30 years ago. Let’s say some of the Eastern European states formerly under the USSR, where the gospel really did grow massively for a while.… Romania, let’s say. You ask, “Where are they today?” Almost without exception they’re awash in moralism and legalism, because eventually you start trying to preserve what you have by rules, and what you lose sight of is grace and the gospel.
So if I have anything to do with another one of these movements, if the Lord spares me long enough and allows me to live in that kind of context, then besides doing my best to damp down the press, I will do everything in my power to funnel all of the energy toward Bible study, knowledge of the Lord Jesus, following him, discipleship, growth in grace, understanding the gospel, magnifying the gospel, how to teach the gospel, how to evangelize, that sort of thing.
You need to let the rest of it look after itself, because if you lose the center you are either going to go into aberrational forms of almost cultic sorts of extreme pursuit of phenomena or you will descend into moralism and legalism.
Third, start carefully, prayerfully, and humbly to institutionalize. What I mean by that is when these movements first start going it’s almost never the case.… I don’t want to say “never,” because my knowledge of church history isn’t broad enough to be sure, but it’s almost never the case that it’s started by somebody with a big plan.
I get students today who come up to me.… Now I’m old enough and I’ve had enough birthdays and done enough things, they come up to me at Trinity and ask, “How did you plan to get to where you are in your life?” Every time, I just burst out laughing. Every time I hear it, I think it’s just a huge joke. I didn’t plan anything.
I was heading for chemistry, and then I was heading for church planting, and I wasn’t going to do anything more than an MDiv. Then I was planning to go to Manchester and landed up in Cambridge. That was almost a mistake. Then I got back to Canada. I had absolutely no intention of going to the US, certainly not going to Trinity. I mean, just point after point. The Lord dumps you into things. To talk about it in terms of planning.… Good grief! It’s ridiculous.
The reason I got involved in all the international stuff was because the president at Trinity at the time got so ticked off with me about a number of things one particular day that he kicked me off four committees. He basically was trying to squeeze me out so I’d go elsewhere. I was depressed for all of two hours. Then I thought, “Oh, this looks like fun. I can do other stuff.”
The same week, the director of the World Evangelical Fellowship asked me to lead an international conference, and I had 10 glorious years with the World Evangelical Fellowship, making contacts all over the world that I wouldn’t have done if I’d still had all those four cotton-picking committees. I didn’t plan that one either. The Lord just sort of dumps you into things.
The same is true with reformation and revival. When these things really do begin to break, it’s not because Jacques Alexanian down there in Sherbrooke was saying, “I have a 10-year plan.” That just isn’t what happened. It just exploded. But what he did do was instantly see that some of all of this needed to be institutionalized.
I’m not sure how familiar you are with a particular form of the emerging church movement in North America, but it’s really broken up into four or five different tracks, and some of them are more orthodox than others. As a whole, the emerging church movement prides itself in being anti-institutional. They don’t want to institutionalize, for which I’m profoundly thankful, because that means they’re going to be dead in 10 years, 20 at the most.
The point is that in 20 years nobody is going to be talking about the emerging church. Absolutely nobody. People will still be talking about the gospel. If the emerging church really wanted to preserve even what’s good in the movement, they ought to be thinking about institutionalizing, because the energy of these Spirit-empowered movements that first comes along gives you a lot of impetus and passion and energy to begin with, but what preserves things, what passes things on to another generation is the first beginnings of institutionalization.
You say that slowly, humbly, and carefully, because institutions can themselves become gods. Now everybody has to go to Bible college before they can preach their first sermon, so suddenly you have another kind of legalism. That can happen too, but if you don’t institutionalize in any sense, you don’t preserve much. It becomes a flash-in-the-pan kind of thing.
So when you go back to movements like the evangelical awakening.… They said at the time that Whitefield was by far the greater preacher above John Wesley but that Wesley was the better organizer. He developed his classes and his other groups, including his roving preachers, where they had to begin by reading an assigned list of 50 books and be tested on them. What is this but the beginning of institutionalization?
The Wesleyan side developed, on the long term, into a much more stable and influential force than the Whitefield side, even though as late as 1780 to 1790, even after Whitefield was long dead, there were far more Calvinist Methodists than there were Wesleyan Methodists, because as many as remembered Whitefield were shaped by him, but on the long haul, it was the institutionalizing of Wesley that had the greatest long-term impact.
One of the great strengths that Jacque Alexanian and others brought was this move toward a cautious institutionalization that produced not only SEMBEQ but Association d’…glises, La Pastorale, that my father led, and so on. Those were all careful small steps of preserving, institutionalizing, training, and passing on. What that will look like in any particular situation is not always given in advance, but it has to be thought through.
