Challenges Facing the Protestant Church (Part 1)

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Brett McCracken
All right, we’re gonna get started here. Welcome everyone. Glad you’re here. Hope you’re enjoying the conference so far. My name is Brett McCracken. I’m a senior editor at the gospel coalition. You’re here for foundations of faith, navigating today’s challenges. First of all, I want to mention that this is hosted by Zondervan reflective so thank you, Zondervan reflective for hosting this wonderful evening. We are going to talk to three authors of Zondervan reflective books tonight, which is exciting. We’re going to look at challenges facing Protestantism, the Protestant church. How do we navigate that kind of different angles to big challenges, new challenges that are facing the church, old challenges that are maybe newly aggravated by cultural issues going on. Personally, I’ve been thinking a lot about technology as like a big category of new challenges facing the church. Of course, there’s also opportunities that come with technology. We were celebrating the 20th anniversary of the gospel coalition today, and I was thinking like, this wouldn’t exist. We would literally not be here. Were it not for the way the internet and that technology brought people together, kind of like minded people who were able to form this coalition. And so we have this new technology to thank for that opportunity, but at the same time, we all know technology poses massive challenges, and just as easily as technology can bring people together form a coalition, we know that coalitions everywhere are dissolving, and there’s fragmentation and online tribalism and all manner of division that the internet and social media is fostering. Some of us might be talking about that a little bit. I know Jared you talk about that kind of in your book. So there are big challenges we’re facing. And I could go on and on, and it’s sobering to think about all that the church in the 21st Century is facing, but thanks be to God. We have godly, wise leaders who are up for the challenge of helping us navigate these challenges and thinking well about them for the purpose of edifying the church, helping the church to not only be sustained through the challenges, but to grow stronger through them. And these, three guys are some of those leaders that God, God has appointed for such a time as this through their wise resources and books. So each of them, as I mentioned, has written a book published by Zondervan, reflective in the last year. I think all of them, one of them, in the last day, has been published so very fresh. I’m going to introduce each of them in a minute, but just want to make mention of the fact that the books are all going to be available at the back of the room, and so at the end, please, please, please, pick up copies of the book, get them signed. These guys will all be available to sign books, take photographs, chat with you for as long as you want to. Right, right guys, well into the night if you want to, we’ll see. We’re all tired. It’s been an intense conference, but let me introduce let me introduce them in the order that they’re going to speak. So the way that tonight is going to work is each of them will speak and give kind of a TED talk for like 20 minutes about the topic of their book or whatever else they want to share about. After they each present, we will have a conversation as a group that I will facilitate, and you guys can contribute questions to that. So be texting in questions, and we’ll hopefully get to a fair amount of those at the end. Okay, so let me introduce each of these presenters. So Jared C Wilson, we’ll start with you. Is an assistant professor of pastoral ministry and an author in residence at Midwestern seminary. He’s a pastor for preaching, a director of the pastoral Training Center at Liberty Baptist Church, and author of numerous books, including the one we’re going to look at today, lest we drift five departure dangers from the one true gospel. The foundation of faith that he is looking at in his book, is kind of the somewhat fragile status of the gospel centrality movement, which is a very germane topic for us here at the gospel coalition, we’re very much a part of that movement, and what we should be on guard against. How can we sustain a centrality on the gospel so that it’s not just a fad that ebbs and flows? So that’s the foundation of faith you’re exploring. Gavin Orland serves as president of truth unites and theologian in residence at Emmanuel church. He is the author of numerous books as well, including what it means to be Protestant, the case for an always reforming Church, which is what he’ll be presenting on and the foundation of faith. Gavin is exploring his kind of historic Protestantism at a time when people are Protestants are maybe being enamored, enchanted, interested in other traditions, Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy. How do we reassert what Protestantism is? How do we defend it robustly? So we’re looking forward to hearing from you on that Gavin. And then finally. Pat Edwards is the church planter of the table church in Lafayette, Colorado, where he lives with his wife, Hannah and their two sons. He’s a regular contributor to mere orthodoxy and the gospel coalition. He co hosts the post everything podcast, and he’s just published his first book, which came out literally yesterday. It’s called the reason for church, why the body of Christ still matters in an age of anxiety, division and radical individualism, and the foundation of faith you’re looking at is really just the local church, and how indispensable the local church is in the life of faith, which is super timely and super important. So as I mentioned, we’re just going to have each of them speak for 20 minutes. So why don’t we kick that off? Why don’t we first just thank all three of them for being here, and Jared is going to kick us off first.

Jared Wilson
Well, good evening, since we are a people who are constantly distracted by million different things inside of ourselves and outside of ourselves, the potential for drifting from the truth of the gospel is a constant danger in our lives and ministries every movement, no matter how faithful, we still remain vulnerable, and we fool ourselves if We think we are the first to finally exercise our institutions and organizations of this temptation to drift. The shifts are more subtle than we usually realize, but they have widespread ramifications. In his book, The Cross and Christian ministry, Don Carson writes this, I have heard a Mennonite leader assess his own movement in this way. One generation of Mennonites cherished the gospel and believed that the entailment of the gospel lay in certain social and political commitments. The Next Generation assumed the gospel and emphasized the social and political commitments. The present generation identifies itself with the social and political commitments. While the gospel is variously confessed or disowned, it no longer lies at the heart of the belief system of some who call themselves Mennonites, whether or not this is a fair reading of the Mennonites, Carson says it is certainly a salutary warning for evangelicals at large, and I think it absolutely is. I have sensed a parallel phenomenon in the generational succession of the quote, unquote, gospel centered movement as well with the increased speed of information transfer the full descent of the Internet age, the reality of globalization, what once might have taken generations, can now transpire in the span of just a few decades, and for a great many of us who came of age at the height of the seeker sensitive church movement, initially influenced by and trained in ministry to emulate pastors like Rick Warren and Bill Hybels and Andy Stanley, the rediscovery of Reformed theology provided a canvas upon which to work out our growing angst with that kind of attractional ministry paradigm. In the beginning, younger boomers and older Gen Xers set about cherishing, or at least enjoying the newness of gospel centrality, especially in reaction to what we were rebelling against. And from this interest arose the now infamous young, restless and reformed. But in just 10 short years, what was new to us had become the established norm for the next generation. So many younger gen xers and millennials effectively grew up with the gospel centered movement as the wallpaper of their church experience. This is the generation of assumption, assuming the gospel, for which the implications of the gospel prove more interesting than the Gospel itself. It didn’t help that many of the cherishers pastoring and influencing them turned out merely to be dabblers themselves in the Gospel centered framework. The watchword of the reformation is always reforming, which, for its originators, meant always returning to the gospel of grace, always repenting, always and ever conforming to the centrality of Christ. So in the spirit of luther’s first thesis, the whole life of the Christian is to be one of constant repenting, which means constantly turning from sin and constantly turning to Christ. Gospel centrality, in other words, is not something you set to autopilot. So what does it mean to be gospel centered? Could you answer the question if somebody asked you, Hey, I know you’re into this gospel centered thing, what exactly does that mean? And if you can answer the question, could the people that you minister to, could they answer the question on the first day of my pastoral ministry course at Midwestern seminary, I always ask. The question, what does it mean to be gospel centered? Hands usually don’t go up right away. Eventually somebody dares to give an answer, and usually he will say something like, Well, it means to center everything on the gospel. Well, yeah, but that doesn’t really answer the question, does it? I find it fascinating how rare it is that folks, ostensibly raised in the so called gospel centered movement, cannot speak substantively about the concept of gospel centrality. We’ve thrown conferences, podcasts, whole publishing houses at this enterprise and the most common understanding of what it means to be gospel centered is that it means we go to certain conferences, we listen to certain podcasts, and we read certain authors. There is an alignment, of course, with Reformed theology, but it seems clear, at least to me, that gospel centrality became more known as a cultural phenomenon and a tribal identifier, than as a coherent theological framework for life and ministry.

Jared Wilson
So unless we drift drawing from Hebrews, chapter two, verse one, therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it. I offer a brief tracking of the rise and decline of the gospel centered movement, and I suggest some hand holds some substance for gospel centrality, because movements come and go, and we can be thankful for the blessings of them, we can be wary at the same time about the downsides of them, but a significant antidote to the kind of gospel amnesia that The waning of this movement has left in its wake is to constantly reestablish our grasp of the good news and its implications. So what does it mean to be gospel centered? I want to answer my own question. Here are the three principles I give my students so that when they’re in ministry and somebody says to them, Hey, Pastor, it says on our website, we’re a gospel centered church, what does that mean they know what to say? So it means, first of all, that we believe the whole Bible is about Jesus. The whole Bible is about Jesus. And this, of course, is the work of biblical theology, seeing the story of Christ as the through line of the entirety of the biblical canon that the whole Bible anticipates, explicates, or culminates in Jesus and His gospel. Secondly, that people change by grace, not law. Now this is still even 20 years into this recovery movement, so to speak, it’s still, I think, the most controversial of these principles that the whole Bible is about Jesus is is less controversial today than it was when I first encountered that idea. For some of you, it’s like, Well, who else would it be about? But you should, you should thank God that you have that assumption. Because the churches I grew up in, the New Testament was pretty much about Jesus, but the Old Testament was not and really the main thrust of the Bible was to be good, because God is good. So to hear that, more and more, the default status of a lot of my students, in fact, is to come out of churches where there’s at least an attempt at seeing a Christ centered reading of the scriptures. But this point, this principle, the second one, is still very, very controversial. And where I where I personally experience the most pushback that people change by grace, not by law. So from conversion onward, the idea that the Gospel itself, the finished work of Christ, is the power for the Christian life, that our sanctification is empowered by the gospel in the same way that our justification is grounded in the Gospel. First, Corinthians, chapter 15, verse two, Paul says it’s this gospel by which you are being saved in Second Corinthians, chapter three, Paul gives us really sort of the contrast the dynamic of law and gospel. And in verse 18 of Second Corinthians, chapter three, he answers the question, how do people change? How is it that people change? He says that we are being transformed from one degree of glory into the next, into the same likeness of Christ. How does that happen? He says it’s by beholding the glory of Christ that this happens. So it’s controversial. People change by grace, not by law, at least at the heart level. I mean, you can manage, you know, behavior by law. You know you can work the law well enough to get people to change their actions. But at the heart level, at the at the seat of affections, at the seat of worship, only the good news of Jesus can change that. It’s controversial because our flesh still yearns for law and then third principle, our ultimate validation is not found in our performance, but in Christ’s performance on our behalf. Our ultimate validation is not found in our performance, but in Christ’s performance on our behalf. I use the word validation there you could very easily substitute. The word justification, because that’s what it is. But I use the word validation because I think most of us intellectually acknowledge and understand that our our justification, the legal declaration of our status before God, our standing before the Holy God, is based on Christ’s work on our behalf, but on a daily basis, your your sense of, Am I square with God? What does God think about me? How does God feel about me? To understand that to press justification into every corner of the room is to see that your ongoing validation is not based on what you can do for God, but in what God, in Christ has done for you in First Corinthians, chapter 15 and verse one, Paul says this gospel is not just the thing you received, past tense, it’s not just the thing that you are being saved by, but it’s also the thing in which you stand. So on a daily basis, the imputation of Christ’s righteousness is your status. This means for us as believers. When we wake up in the morning, God is not standing over us thinking, all right, let’s see what you got. Impress me. And no matter how the day is gone at the end of the day, when you lay your head on that pillow at night, and I mean, we blow it in so many ways, he’s not saying Believe it or not, and I think you should believe it. He’s not saying I thought you were better than that. You know, we don’t surprise God with how we are, and we wake up into his favor because of Christ, and we go to sleep at night into his favor because of Christ. The application for life and ministry is huge. It means that we’re not defined, and we don’t need to be ruled by how things are going. If you’re in church leadership, if you’re in ministry, right? It’s so easy to be ruled, to be you know, have your emotions steered by how ministry is going, even if things are going really well. But to be settled in Gospel centrality means I can be happy when happy things happen and sad when sad things happen, but I don’t need to be ruled steered. I don’t need to have my sense of okayness with God be based on how things are going, how the ministry is going. So it’s with these three principles that I aim to help readers of my book understand and navigate what I call five departure dangers, threats to gospel centrality and the five departure dangers that I identify and explore unless we drift are these a victimhood mentality, superficial faith, attractional pragmatism, which, even though the seeker church doesn’t seem to be a dominant, sort of influential mode anymore, really is dominant in sort of 31 flavors. Now the attractional thing is actually more more widespread and more variegated than it used to be in the kind of seeker church days. Fourthly, a cultural legalism. And then fifthly, spiritual dryness. Spiritual dryness. And so if you don’t mind, I’d like to finish my time here speaking a bit to that last danger, spiritual dryness, because I think maybe it’s the through line for the other dangers. So as I’m helping guys in their preaching and teaching, guys who are convinced about the gospel centered framework, right, I don’t have to convince them to be gospel centered, they still struggle sometimes with the application of it. And the number one question I get, the top question that I get in relation to preaching is this, how do I preach Jesus every week without it sounding one note like it just sounds the same every week? And I always want to say, and a lot of times I find a way to say, perhaps more gently than this, but I always want to say, is Jesus one note to you, because if you are not personally bowled over by the gospel, you will always struggle to see how the gospel enlivens and enhances and empowers your preaching. Sometimes it’s not that we lack the know how. It’s that we lack personal communion with Jesus. So I don’t mean that non gospel centered preachers, or those who struggle with it aren’t Christians, or that their faith is in jeopardy. I just suspect that many who lack the aroma of Christ in their preaching actually lack the aroma of Christ in their spiritual lives. They have probably gotten so accustomed to the routine of ministry that the scriptures and the Christ within them have become more a matter of feeding others rather than feeding oneself, and the Bible has become something dealt out rather than first dwelled in

Jared Wilson
the 2007 gospel coalition conference, Tim Keller gave the seminal talk. What is gospel centered ministry, which, if you’ve not heard, I highly recommend that message contains the now classic Jesus is the true and better application that’s pretty much become ubiquitous in the movement. Right at the end of the little homiletical run he does there, and he does this in his book, in his preaching book as well, where he says, Jesus a true and better Adam and just kind. Goes through the list. At the end of that, he says something that, when I first heard it just stuck with me, even though I didn’t quite understand it. He said, That’s not typology. That’s an instinct, and it’s confusing, because it is typology. What he was doing. He was doing typology. But I think what he meant was that Christ centered preachers almost can’t help but preach Christ. They would have to make themselves avoid preaching the gospel. If anything, the temptation is to jump over the immediate exposition of the text to as Spurgeon famously said, make a road to Christ. So in other words, if we are regularly communing with Christ, reading the scriptures in a devotional sense, in a daily and disciplined way, the instinct is there to preach Christ. It’s a spiritual impulse that supernaturally finds its way into our sermon preparation. How could a gospel centered preacher not preach a gospel centered sermon? So it’s just a theory, but perhaps the reason so many preachers who read all of the gospelly books and all the gospel y blogs and listen to all the gospel y podcasts and follow all the gospelly Twitter accounts still struggle to preach gospelly sermons is because they are not in regular communion with the Christ who was at the center. Their sermons don’t carry what Spurgeon calls a saver of Christ, because their devotional life does not carry a savor of Christ. If we’re not regularly communing with Jesus, investing in our friendship with Jesus, nurturing our intimacy with Him, personally and spiritually, we will stifle the spiritual instinct to preach Jesus in Christopher ashes, little book on preaching, the priority of preaching, he tells the story of W E Sangster, who was interviewing a candidate for the ministry, and the nervous young man explained that he was quite shy and not the sort of person ever to set the River Thames on fire. My dear young brother responded, Sangster, I’m not interested to know if you could set the Thames on fire. What I want to know is this, if I picked you up by the scruff of your neck and threw you into the River Thames, would it sizzle? So never mind his eloquence. Was he himself on fire? Was he hot? We are often more worried about bringing the heat than we are about being spiritually hot. So underneath a pastor’s sermon preparation and eventual sermon delivery run a current of instincts and impulses, and this current can run in the direction of Christ, or it can run in the direction of 1000 other things that the pastor or his congregation finds interesting. And today, the homiletical instincts of evangelical preachers run the gamut from political hobby horses and culture warriors to historical lectures and theological bromides, and perhaps the most widespread passion of evangelical preachers is the law, whether of positive moralism like it’s found in the attractional church, seven steps to be a better whatever, or expositional imperatives, as In the self consciously Protestant church, but you can also find in many independent churches a kind of preaching that just amounts to thinly veiled gossip rants about other churches, other ministries, or even the sinners in that very congregation. It just so happens that these are also many congregations favorite genres of sermons, and they won’t give you any trouble if you preach them. Is it any wonder that so many evangelical preachers find the routine of gospel centrality shallow or mundane or one note, it is not nearly as entertaining as the alternatives. It does not hold much promise of keeping the customers satisfied, but for the man whose soul has been turned inside out by the grace of God, none of this really matters. In his right mind, he is not interested in his approval rating. Focused on the glory of Jesus. He actually cannot think of a more beautiful, more glorious, more captivating subject, nor can he think of a more versatile, multi faceted, eternally interesting subject. I find it strange that so few ministry leaders in the Gospel centered tribe even speak about Jesus in personal terms. Jesus is indeed the King of kings and the Lord of Lords. He is the Risen son and the imprint of the very nature of God, but he is also our brother and our friend and our advocate and our shepherd, because of his gospel, we are privileged to become partakers of his divine nature. So shouldn’t our communication about Jesus regularly indicate this kind of spiritual intimacy in his institutes? John Calvin warns against an interest in things of the gospel, an interest that is purely intellectual or theoretical, and he calls such exercises frigid speculations. The truth is that no amount of religious interest, ministry effort, or other kinds of spiritual enthusiasm can serve as a substitute for the affectionate knowledge that comes from intimacy. Be with Jesus, even a rigorous interest in God’s law cannot replace communing with God in Christ, to love Jesus is to obey his commandments, yes, but it is possible to obey his commandments without loving him. Religiosity cannot ultimately keep us from apostasy. Being gospel centered on paper cannot ultimately keep us from apostasy, if anything, it might expedite it, as we find it harder and harder to keep up the religious efforts without a heart of renewal, the machinery of spirituality cannot move for long without the oil of spiritual vitality, and this spiritual vitality can only come from friendship with Jesus. So if we’ll see true revival of religion in our land, it will not come through generational transitions. It will not come through cultural interests. It will not come through political pressure. It will not come through vibe shifts. It can only come through a deep repentance from ourselves and a deep personal and passionate devotion to Jesus Christ. Thank you.

Gavin Ortlund
Well, it’s wonderful to be with you all, and for me to learn from Jared and Brad as well. And thanks to everyone, it’s under been reflective for helping set this up. I hope that you’ll leave here feeling encouraged, especially those of you who are in ministry. Jared just mentioned the word revival. I hope we will return to that a little later and talk about that more. I think that be a wonderful point of focus, a uniting thread between the three of us, something to just rally around and pray for a fresh work of God in our day. That’s what I want to give my life to. I want to address, though, one challenge that I am seeing, I tend to think of it as somewhat niche and specific, as I felt the Lord draw me into ministry facing this challenge. I did not expect it to be a sort of broad ministry in any way, but I have to say it’s probably been maybe a dozen or a dozen and a half conversations over the course of this conference have given me the feeling of, okay, I’m not the only one who is seeing this. It’s possible to exaggerate this, but it’s a reality right now. I’ll just throw out a term for it. I’ve invented the term for it. I don’t know what else to call it, of ecclesial anxiety. So the word ecclesial having to do with the church, and I’m especially thinking of young men, especially, especially Gen Z, though not limited to that, who are struggling with their identity in the broader church, and in many cases, are leaving Protestantism altogether for a different Christian tradition. And I’m really fascinated to try to understand that, and to try to be a friend to those who are going through that process. I think there’s many causes for that, but at the root of it, what we want to do is see this as an opportunity for gospel ministry. Jared just helped us think about so wonderfully. The root need in every heart is for Jesus himself, and that’s true for these big, structural theological questions as well, like trying to find your place in church history. I think one of the causes for that right now is the instability of the world and the desire for a sense of roots and connection to the past. People are longing to be a part of something larger than themselves. That is a huge reality, especially honestly, one of the things I just want to give my life to right now is serving the younger generation. There is so much spiritual openness in Gen Z, and it’s so exciting to see people open to the Gospel. And we have an opportunity here to speak to this experience. Let me just paint a profile, if I can, of what this might look like. And then I’ll be very brief, actually, I just want to identify two particular aspects to this struggle and how that presents an opportunity for the gospel. Here’s the profile. Imagine a 22 year old young man. He has just graduated from college. He’s grown up in the church. He loves Jesus. He’s not considering leaving Christianity, but he’s asking deeper questions about his faith. He’s been challenged by listening to the talking points of spokespeople for different Christian traditions, and he’s realizing these issues are a lot more complicated than I ever realized growing up. And he’s asking questions like, if I believe that the scripture is our supreme standard, how do we know which books are in the scripture, and how do we know that the early church got that right? If the Scripture is our supreme standard, what do we do to settle. The Legion disagreements that we have in interpreting the scripture, and is it really the best scenario to that we simply plant a new church whenever there is a disagreement, and so we have all these different spiraling up denominations and networks and groups and so forth. Is this? The Is this how it should be? Maybe they’re just reading church history and they’re they’re just wondering, do I have any authentic connection to the past in this way? And what this ultimately produces is a sense of anxiety, wondering, Am I in the church that Jesus founded? And in some cases, more often than I expected to find it produces the question, will I be saved? The at the root level, it comes down to that for so many, and I think there’s a there actually are a lot of people like that right now. Some of you are pastors or serving in some other kind of ministry. I’m guessing that there are people under your care who are wrestling through questions like this. Others of you, I’m guessing, have friends who are in this circumstance, My heart burns with a passion to help them to be a friend, pointing them to Jesus. Because the ultimate need in all of that, without making it too simplistic, it is the gospel that the heart is searching for. Let me unpack that just a little bit and try to identify two aspects of that experience. I hope this would be helpful to you in whatever your ministry circumstances look like, or even just being a friend to others in trying to sort of diagnose some of the dynamics of the moment, how we bring the gospel to them. So first, I want to talk about anxiety to which we can bring gospel peace, and then rootlessness, to which we can bring gospel depth. These would be really fast. But first anxiety, I don’t think I need to convince us of the reality of this. We are in an epidemic or crisis of anxiety in particular Gen Z, though it is not limited to Gen Z, but Gen Z, I think we can say, is more anxious, more depressed and more lonely than any previous generation on record. And I feel a fatherly burden for them to be a friend and point them to Christ. I know you, so many of you do as well. That is the world that we live in and it’s a multi faceted problem, not to be formulaic about this, but one particular opportunity that we have is to speak to our friends about assurance of salvation. Now I did not expect to be pulled into this. All of us will have the experience sometime where something that hasn’t been a part of our own journey comes into our ministry as we’re just trying to help people. And I never would have thought that the word assurance would be one that becomes so precious to me personally, and that I seek to hold out so much to others. But this is a tremendous need in the hearts of people today, and we have such rich resources we can draw from from our own tradition. We can go back to the Puritans, for example, who had so much to say about how the love of Jesus heals and nourishes and assures anxious hearts. Okay, Romans, chapter eight, we have this wonderful idea that the Holy Spirit speaks to your heart the testimony of the Holy Spirit. Romans, 815, you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons by whom we cry, Abba, Father. Verse 16, the Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. So the Holy Spirit speaks to your heart and says to you, you are a child of God. And I am fascinated to experience and then hold this out to others and hold this out to anxious hearts today. What does it feel like to have the Holy Spirit speaking to your heart. In my book on Protestantism, I provide an example from Catherine Parr who was the final of Henry the eighth’s wives. She was raised as a Roman Catholic, but developed Protestant views and eventually wrote a book promoting justification by faith alone. When you study church history, it’s the most strange story you could ever imagine. You learn things you never could have imagined. And her book is great, a great book about justification by faith alone. Let me read you a paragraph. Listen to the adjectives she uses, and think about what she what is going on in her heart that would make her write this. She says, Come to me, all you who are who labor and are burdened, and I shall refresh you. She’s quoting Matthew 1128, there. What gentle, merciful and comfortable words are these to sinners. What a most gracious, comfortable and gentle saying was this, with such pleasant and sweet words to allure. His enemies to come to him when I behold the mercy and goodness of the Lord, I am encouraged, emboldened and stirred to ask for such a gift as living faith. By this faith, I am assured. By this assurance, I feel the remission of my sins. There’s a sentence right there I want to give to every anxious person in our culture. This is it that makes me bold. This is it that comforts me. This is it that quenches all despair. Thus I feel myself to come, as it were, in a new garment before God, and now by His mercy, to be taken as just and righteous. So some of the words here in that paragraph, which I’ve read through many times and appreciated as an experience of gospel, assurance, gentle, pleasant, sweet, emboldened, assured, comfort. And you ask, what was going on in her heart that would lead her to say that?

Gavin Ortlund
And that is Romans, 816, that is the Holy Spirit taking the truths of the gospel and speaking them to your heart, which you experience and receive by faith. To know that your sins are forgiven is the most comforting, nourishing, anxiety, reducing experience you can imagine, and my heart burns with a passion that Gen Z and others today as well would have that experience. Here’s another way I like to think of it. Think of Jesus in the I love reading through the resurrection appearances, where Christ appears to the disciples, so much of them is enthralling to consider, but I love how frequently he greets them with the words, peace, be with you. And to think that I believe that is the disposition of the heart of Christ today, for troubled believers, when we read the newspaper or when we are on social media and we feel anxiety ourselves, we need to go straight to the Lord Jesus Christ, and he says to us as well, Peace be with you. Think of the most calming, stabilizing experience you’ve ever had. Think of maybe you work in a stressful environment, but you have a garden that you can sneak away to, or there’s a Sabbath day or a vacation you know you can sneak away to. This is what Jesus and the gospel is to our anxiety. He invites us into his calm and the assurance of knowing I am a child of God, my sins are forgiven. And I just could put it as simply as I can to say hearts right now in 2025 are aching for that, and there’s the anxiety is thick and we have it gives us an opportunity to speak the peace of the gospel. The second thing I notice so much is rootlessness with how complicated and fast paced and thin the modern world is, hearts are aching for a sense of connection to the past and a sense of connection to something transcendent to reach the younger generation. We do not need gimmicks. We need substance. People want to go deep and that, I believe that is true more than ever. This is a mistake I’ve made so many times in my ministry of underestimating the theological appetite of the sheep people want to go deep. And I’ll put out videos and books and other resources on church history, and I’ll talk about the Trinity, or I’ll talk about, you know, things that, even creeds and confessions, things like this. And my assumption is no one is going to watch this, or no one is going to read this. And I’m amazed to find you know what I discover, how many young people right now want that. And I just, I look at that, and I say, Okay, what does that mean for how we hold out the gospel today? If to use the categories of Hebrews five, if people are actually aching for the solid food and not the milk, then how do how do we meet that need with the gospel? I think we have a responsibility to meet healthy needs, and so we want to touch that need in the heart. And once again, we have so many resources in our tradition that we can draw from if you want to be historically connected. Christianity is a great religion to be a part of, when you come to Christ, you join the great tradition that goes back throughout all of human history, to Cain versus Abel, and you are on the side. You know, the most nourishing verse for me these days is in Matthew five, where it speaks about the prophets who went before you, and just this sense of, we’re a part of this great cause, once again, the hearts of people around us are aching to be a part of a cause, and as Protestant Christians, one of the weaknesses that we often have is we neglect to study church history. But there is nothing in our theology that requires that when we profess to believe in soul. Scriptura. That is the doctrine that the scripture is our North Star. It’s our only infallible rule. It checks everything else. It is not the idea that only the Scripture is valuable or instructive or useful, or that tradition has no place at all. And the early Protestants did this so well. People like Luther and Calvin engaged so carefully with the early church. And I just mentioned this not as a point to be academic about, but as a point of ministry. Actually, I think today, in 2025 amidst the upheaval in our culture, we do well to be rooted in history. People are aching for a depth and a connection that the gospel of Jesus Christ meets and touches. Actually, it’s the fulfillment for that longing, and so we give the privilege of inviting people into a story. Now I feel this frequently, and I say this over and over. It’s just what’s in my heart right now is now is the time for evangelism. There is an openness in many hearts right now, and the anxiety and the rootlessness are my best effort at articulating some of what gives us an opportunity we have the food for which the world is perishing with hunger, and that is Jesus and His gospel. And now is the time to be bold and to speak out the truths that we ourselves are nourished in. So just a final thought to say is in connection to all of this and flowing out of this, returning to that word revival there, one of the things I want to give my life to is to pray for revival. And revival is nothing spooky or sensationalistic. Revival simply means a time of renewal in the church, in the Gospel, when Christians are freshly drawn in. You know, Jared helped us think about just that, that experience of intimacy with Christ, and all of us know, we need to come back to that over and over again when Christians when that you know breaks upon your heart afresh, and it’s like the first time you became a Christian, and it lands upon you in that meaningful way. And when many others outside of the church come to know Jesus, let’s pray for revival in the midst of the upheaval, in the midst of the sense of rootlessness. Now is a great time for evangelism and for moving forward, building something hopeful and constructive that we can offer to people. So I guess I just this is not complicated. This final point, this is pretty simple, but I just keep saying it, because I think it’s a great thing to emphasize is, let’s pray for revival. Let’s pray for a new work of God. In our day, there’s an openness in hearts right now. Just leave you with this sort of image, I guess, as I’ve been building friendships with these wonderful, precious people in the younger generation. One of the guys I’ve gotten to know, I’ve just been watching the Holy Spirit work on him and draw him closer to the Gospel. And he’s gone from atheism to agnosticism, and then agnosticism to theism. And then in that stage, for a while, there was just this articulation of, well, why I’m a theist, but I’m not a Christian, but I knew the Lord was stirring in his heart. And I remember one particular conversation, I just decided I’m not going to argue with any of his points, because I know the Lord is already breaking that down and drawing him closer to himself. And sure enough, Barua was not long after that when he began to articulate himself responses to all of his objections to the gospel, and isn’t it? I mean, is there anything more wonderful than seeing people come to know the Lord, and is there anything better to just give ourselves to right now? Now is a time for evangelism. I just mentioned that as one sort of anecdotal observation of just how many other people are in a similar place. And the Lord is drawing people to Himself right now, and we have the opportunity to be bold in speaking the name of Jesus and praying for a fresh work of God and calling hearts back to the ancient gospel of Jesus Christ. So thanks for listening, and we’ll have a chance to talk more about this.

Brad Edwards
All right, so while preparing for this talk, I found out the story I wanted to begin with is actually very likely apocryphal, but I’m going to use it anyway, primarily because it’s just really good and really helpful. And you may have even heard it before because it is a favorite among preachers. And for good reason, it’s one of those pithy illustrations that really just kind of cuts through all the white noise. And holds up a mirror to our hearts. The story goes that in the early 1900s an editor from The Times newspaper in London asked several prominent writers and authors, including GK Chesterton, to write an essay in answer to the question, What is wrong with the world. Chesterton reportedly submitted a letter reading only, dear sir, I am yours.

Brad Edwards
GK, Chesterton, I wonder how most people would answer that question today.

Brad Edwards
Chesterton, Chesterton’s answer was so powerful, because our tendency to look outward rather than inward is timeless and universal, to be sure, but even, maybe even especially, our wrong answers can tell us something about where we are as a culture and as a society. For example, if Chesterton were alive and he’s today and he spent more than five minutes watching the news or listening to politicians or pursuing perusing social media. He could be forgiven for thinking that finger pointing has replaced baseball as America’s pastime. But because he hasn’t been swimming in the water like the rest of us fish, he might even notice that even though we’re all fracturing into an infinite number of different teams. We all seem to be using the exact same playbook. I say that because if you squint just a little bit, and I might be dating myself with this, but how many of you remember the Magic Eye books where you like damage your eyesight by crossing your eyes. And it’s worth it when you see that picture like, oh, I can’t unsee it now, right? But if you squint a little bit, there’s a pattern that starts to emerge, namely that nearly all of our modern answers are variations of the same formula. We are all very convinced that institutions and those who lead them are what’s wrong with the world. In fact, that might, that belief might be the only thing we still share in common. When my wife and I started planting the table church in Boulder County, Colorado, we launched two Sundays before the 2016 election, you can pray for us. I expected that the hardest part would be in persuading non Christians that God exists and that they need Jesus. But by several orders of magnitude, it has been a lot harder to persuade anyone that Christ’s bride is beautiful or good for anyone at best, church just isn’t really worth the effort, because there are so many more options that we have available to us, to rest, to feel connected to God. At worst, the church is the root of all that’s evil and wrong with the world, and pastors are either narcissists or, I don’t know, shepherds for sale. Thoughts and prayers. Gavin,

Brad Edwards
I say to my say to our people at the table all the time, don’t hear what I’m not saying. Okay, no institution is immune to corruption or abuse, including the church, and I’m not arguing otherwise. What I’m arguing is that maybe the only thing that we have accomplished after 10 years or more of culture wars is this very new universal social consensus that institutions, including the church, are inherently and inevitably harmful. I recently came across a tweet, or whatever we’re supposed to call them these days, that illustrates just how much harder this makes ministry in the local church. The tweet reads, and I quote when I say deconstruction, I’m referring to an attempt to recognize the difference between God himself and the scaffolding that’s been erected around him through generations of man made institutions, traditions and power grabs. And here’s the most heartbreaking part. The very end of this tweet reads, I just want to see his face, frankly, if it is already a foregone conclusion that truth, goodness and beauty can only be found on our own and apart from institutions, then it is a miracle of the highest order that only 40 million people have left the church Over the last 25 years that said this anti institutional attitude is not something that most of us have actually consciously chosen or opted into. Rather, it is the primary symptom of Stockholm syndrome with radical individualism. For example, if you think that God’s face has been obscure. By institutional scaffolding. Just wait until you harm your eyesight with a magic eye and you start seeing how individualism reinforces and surrounds the modern self with more social and cultural reinforcement than Notre Dame has flying buttresses. And yes, I did just want to say flying buttresses in a talk. Right? You’re not gonna blame me for that. Politicians right? Tell us to Rock the Vote, because our voice is a sacrament. Disney through Elsa or any number of interchangeable heroes, tells you to let it go, because autonomy is our salvation. Social media tells us to burn it down, because your outrage is righteous, and everyone preaches you do you because following your heart is following God. Each and every one of these, make no mistake, is a sermon on the gospel of individualism, and as bad as that news is individually, it is even worse news for society. I love this if you if you follow this kind of thing. We’re seeing this more and more often. A growing number of non Christian writers and thinkers are now arguing that our most debilitating social and cultural crises, just like Gavin and Jared were talking about, are all downstream of this great dechurching. One of those thinkers and cultural commentators, Derek Thompson, he’s a left of center staff writer at The Atlantic. He wrote an article almost exactly a year ago titled The true cost of the church going bust in the opening paragraph, here’s what he writes. He says, As an agnostic, I’ve spent most of my life thinking about the decline of faith in America in mostly positive terms, organized religion seem to me, beset by scandal and entangled in noxious politics. Only in the past few years have I come around to a different view. Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence. Turns out that if you spend several decades preaching that Christianity is not an institutionally bound religion, but a personal relationship only, eventually, all of society will start believing us. The technical term that sociologists use to describe how that’s going is not good. I’m glad we’re laughing instead of crying. This is healthy, guys, Sarcasm aside, whether we intended to or not, and truly, most have not preaching a gospel centered theology without a Christ centered ecclesiology has made multiple generations of lopsided disciples who know and love Jesus but could take or leave his bride. This has even affected

Brad Edwards
infected the way that we read and understand the Great Commission. We’ll talk about that more in a minute.

Brad Edwards
I wrote the reason for church to understand, to try and understand explain why we keep sawing off the limb that we are standing on, why the Christians who seem the most spiritually mature in our congregations are often the quickest to leave, why everybody needs therapy, nobody wants shepherding, and yet we’re only growing more fragile, anxious and rootless. Why we finally accept the social accept that social media is bad for our mental health, but we still reject that it might be forming or shaping our souls. Why our politics look more like professional wrestling than problem solving, rest in peace, our 401 case.

Brad Edwards
Well, why we’ve replaced trust with power as our currency for relationship, and we feel even less safe than we did before. Each of these things that I’m mentioning are connected to a different of five church defeaters that I cover in the part one of my book. Yes, the reason for church is an allusion to Tim Keller’s the reason for God, because I’m taking his defeater beliefs idea and applying them, not to with respect to God, but with respect to church and our willingness to believe or to trust in the local church. These church defeaters are beliefs, cultural beliefs and assumptions of individualism that make participating in a local church implausible, if not impossible. They’re the brick and mortar. Order that we use to build our own modern towers of Babel. But also what’s interesting is we do it for the same reason that Genesis says Genesis 11 says motivated the original tower builders to make a name for ourselves. Now, in saying that, I know that we typically swap out the word name for identity, but we mean the exact same thing. To make an identity for ourselves means to have the freedom and the power to author our own story, to craft our own meaning and to achieve our own dignity, value and worth, but without having to rely on God for any of it. After all, you can’t very well make a good or beautiful name for ourselves if we are what’s wrong with the world. Can we now, to be fair, I can very personally empathize with wanting to make a name for ourselves, mostly because I really, really do not like my given name, Brad, second only to Chad. And apologies to any Chads in the room, because I know you know where I’m going with this. Brad might be Hollywood’s favorite name for characters with that special kind of incompetent cluelessness, which we have dubbed a bro, Truly, truly, I say unto you, what could possibly be more wrong with the world than a bro, right? We have, we have Jim bros. This is TGC. So we have Theo bros. We need to own this. We have hipster bros. And when a when a finance bro and a tech bro really love each other,

Brad Edwards
you get the invasive species called the crypto bro. Yes, I am inordinately proud of that.

Brad Edwards
My very belabored but no doubt hilarious point here is that, whether by fraternity membership or temperament, let’s just say that Brad falls short in conveying the significance, meaning and worth that I personally long for, especially in this cultural moment, and also so what? That’s okay, because the really good news that I unpack in the second half of the reason for church is that God’s word from beginning to end explains that the name we long for is not earned by us at all or achieved on our own. It is bestowed by God’s grace and received among God’s people, both both bestowed by God’s grace and received among God’s people. In fact, the entire point of Genesis 12 is that these two are the two sides of the same coin. Immediately after the Tower of Babel narrative, in Genesis 11, God promises to bless a childless, geriatric named Abraham, so that he will be a blessing. Abraham asked, how will you bless me? God says in a two fold answer, I will make a great nation out of you, and I will make your name great. This is a direct response to the Tower of Babel narrative. However, as we know, it doesn’t happen overnight, right? It takes several generations and the complete loss of freedom and power over 400 years of Egyptian slavery for Abraham’s descendants to become a true multitude with a proper name. And even then, as we know, if you are even remotely familiar with Genesis and Exodus, neither the people nor the name of Israel were anything we would consider Great. That didn’t happen until after God delivered Israel from bondage. And so at one point, while wandering around in the wilderness. God tells Moses to have his chief priest, Aaron, bless Israel with the benediction found in number six. The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up His countenance. That word countenance is the same word we translate his face in the previous verse, The Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace. It’s almost like God’s trying to tell us something about this. First of all, our first takeaway here is it’s going to be really hard as that tweet read early. I read earlier to see God’s face, if you were not seeking his face from among the people his loving gaze ordinarily shines upon. And as beautiful as that is, it actually pales in comparison to the reason that God gives for this blessing in the very next verse, in verse 27 God says to Moses and to tell Aaron this, and then to this is the reason why he does it. So shall they put my name upon the people, great nation of Israel, and I will bless them. Do you see it? You see, for God to put his name upon Israel is to do so much more than to claim them as a people for His own possession, as if they were his favorite toy or something. It’s also even more than the initial fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham, you might say, the true and better promise to Abraham to put God for God, to put his name upon his people, is to really, truly and actually, not just symbolically, impart his authority and his presence, both his authority and his presence. Israel becomes a great nation with a great name because they have a great God who so fully identifies with his people that he goes anywhere and everywhere they go. In other words, to know Israel is to know their God. And if you want to know Yahweh, then you must be among his people. But if you can believe it, this actually gets even better still, because at last, we come to what I was alluding to with the Great Commission. And because I know that there are some Baptists in the room, I’m hoping that you can help a Presby bro out. Right? Matthew 28 says, And Jesus came and said to the disciples, all what authority? Okay, so the Baptists are sitting over here cool. All authority in heaven on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in what the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you, and behold, I am up here if you need me. Wait. Sorry, that’s the wrong translation. It says, And behold, I am with you always to the end of the age Christ’s authority, with Christ’s presence, book ending, the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit, y’all God didn’t just give the Great Commission ex nihilo, but if he did, he has the Right and could do that. He didn’t pull it from thin air. The Great Commission is the true and better, the new Aaronic blessing. It is where the great nation and people and the great name that God promised, Abraham, is fully and finally fulfilled. And yes, if you’re a Baptist and you’re worried, don’t worry. Jesus is absolutely exhorting his followers to give a reason for the hope that is within us, but he’s also telling us that church is how we get that hope into us in the first place. In other words, to know the bride is to know the groom. To know the church is to know her savior and vice versa. If the body of Christ friends, if the body of Christ is just a nice spiritual metaphor to rationalize our spiritual gifts assessments and not also a material reality, then we will live like amputated limbs and wonder why we keep bleeding out. We will settle for an individual identity when we are promised the name above all names in Christ. But it’s also not just about us, anymore than it was just about Abraham, because the purpose of God’s blessing was ultimately to bless the nations. And if Paul says in Ephesians three that it is through the church that the manifold wisdom of God will be made known, then it is especially for our neighbors and the nations and Gen Z that we must recover the true, good and beautiful reasons for church. I love how much we did not plan our talks together, but we’re all talking about the same theme, because I’m convinced that Mark Sayers is right when he says that crisis precedes renewal and the remnant is ripe for revival. So ask yourself, it’s a crazy idea. What if? What if God is allowing our modern towers of Babel to collapse under their own weight, and for the same reason that he scattered the builders in Genesis 11. If God right, if God used Egyptian slavery to birth a great nation with a great name, how could he not use all of our social, cultural and political crises to incubate a multi generational reach? Churching even greater than our de churching. How then do we cooperate with the Holy Spirit? How do we faithfully contribute to this revival? How do we put ourselves on the highway of gospel renewal? I have a crazy idea for you.

Brad Edwards
Go to church. Trust in mercy, confess and repent of sin,

Brad Edwards
go back to church. Build institutions instead of burning them down, Love one another with brotherly affection and forgive one another as Christ has forgiven you. Keep going back to church every Sunday, not just one or two Sundays a month, not even just three out of four Sundays a month. Though, I’m sure your pastor will be very grateful. Can I get an amen from the pastors in the room? Okay, if your life, if you want your life to orbit around the groom, and your life does not orbit around the bride. How much time will you end up spending with the groom? Lastly, invite your neighbor to church, if for no other reason than because Jesus wouldn’t be caught dead or alive anywhere else. That alone is reason enough for church, and so I’ll end with this, and especially because we’ve been all sitting for about an hour, I would actually invite you to stand, because I want us to actually do the thing that I’m talking about. And I encourage our people at the table to hold out their hands in a physical, material way to receive what God has said is true of his people. May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace. Amen.