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A Description of the Movement with a Focus on Its Strengths

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the emerging church in this address from The Gospel Coalition sermon library.


My brief in these three talks is to comment reflectively on the emerging church movement, or as some prefer, the emergent church movement. In this first address, I will describe the movement and some of its leaders and then draw attention to some of its strengths. In the second talk, I will try to evaluate it more critically.

Then in the third, somewhat frustrated that I cannot take several hours for evaluation, I will simply abandon the project entirely and expound Scripture on the relationship between experience and truth. In other words, the biblical exposition in this case is going to come last, which may not be a bad thing since it may stick in your mind.

The emerging church movement is itself only about a decade old. It is diverse. That is to say, not all who describe themselves as part of the movement agree with one another. It is amorphous. That is, its boundaries are not very clear. It’s not as if you’re either in it or you’re out. Some are clearly in the center, but some are on the outskirts, as it were, and flirting in different positions.

The movement, as we’ll see in a moment, defines itself in part over against megachurches. On the other hand, there are quite a few megachurch pastors who have now endorsed the movement, too, so it really is complex in its associations. Moreover, it is related to a number of other movements worldwide.

The emerging church movement is really American, but on the other hand, there are somewhat similar things going on in other parts of the Western world. For example, in Britain in the Anglican Communion, evangelicals there are sometimes described … using the categories of Graham Kings … as a canal, a river, or rapids. That is, sort of straight-laced, conservative evangelical, all hemmed in, a canal. Then free-flowing, a river, the open evangelicals. The charismatics are sort of the rapids.

You get these stereotypes of where evangelicalism is going and how we fit into all of this. This is part of worldwide reassessment as evangelicalism tries to understand itself. There’s another book by Pete Ward called Liquid Church. This is not referring to baptism. It is trying to suggest a fluid organization over against a static structure that’s solid and objective. Now we belong to a fluid church and it has many, many correlates with the emerging church movement.

Like most movements attempting reform, it has kindled strong reactions. An awful lot of people with respect to this movement are either for it or against it. If you’re for it, then you use emerging or emergent as a bless word. Everything that you like is good and it’s emerging. If you’re against it, then you can only find all the idiosyncratic nasty bits.

On one positive website I found the glorious expression, “Emergent is friendship.” Good grief, did we have to wait for the movement before we knew what friendship was? I’m not sure that we quite have the right to restrict our treasured values to this particular movement.

On the other hand, there are some people who hate the movement with such viciousness that even-handed evaluation is pretty difficult. It may even be in this august institution that there are some strong opinions that are characterized by more heat than light. Who knows? Moreover, like any reforming movement, it was sparked by frustration and protest.

All reforming movements are sparked by frustration and protest. This is no exception. But this one has been sparked particularly by personal frustration. All you have to do is read the literature and discover how many of the leaders offer many chapters on their own background: Spencer Burke, Brian McLaren, and so on.

Most of them come from very conservative backgrounds and then they’ve been in ministry for a while and got frustrated. They tell you what they’re frustrated about. They’re frustrated by feelings of inauthenticity and legalism and structured rules and so on and so on. They’ve sought some way to break out of it. As they’ve broken out of it, they’ve swung a pendulum somewhat. If you want to see perhaps the most telling collection of these, there’s a book by Yaconelli called Stories of Emergence.

In particular, the movement is protesting against two things besides personal background. The first of these is the more important. First, it’s reacting against what they call traditional churches or modernist churches, churches that have ostensively bought into the modernist worldview with strong emphases on certain values. Secondly, it is protesting against megachurches.

The first are traditional and modernist; the second are merely pragmatic. They want to offer a third option. Here is an example from a church that is in the metro Chicago area that is trying to define itself toward the future. It bases a lot of what it does on Robert Lewis and on Dan Kimball, author of The Emerging Church.

The profiles of traditional evangelicals then include pews, organ, pulpit, religious symbols, a lot of theology, and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. I’m reading from their document. I’m not making an advertisement. The pragmatic evangelicals (that is, Willow Creek and Rick Warren and Saddleback, that sort of thing) are highly polished. They have theaters with no religious symbols, they are seeker-sensitive, and so on.

In contrast, the emergent evangelicals adopt a contemporary approach to ministry including a particular emphasis on worship. They embrace both traditional hymns and contemporary music. They seek active participation, authentic relationships, reaching out to communities, multi-purpose buildings that serve as community centers. They are able to be turned into worship settings where technology, art, even candles and liturgical symbols can be used to create a sense of mystery and awe.

That’s typical. That just happens to be an example I’ve taken off the shelf. The most important thing to understand about the emerging church movement is that it is a plea for reformation based first and foremost on perceptions of changes in the culture. Let me repeat that. It is astonishingly important. It is a plea for reformation based first and foremost on perceptions of change in the culture.

Compare that with the Reformation, that is the Great Reformation. This was a plea for change based on perceptions that the church had departed from Scripture. So it was a call to return to Scripture. This reformation is not a plea to return to Scripture quite, although the people in it all insist they have a high view of Scripture and want to follow Scripture. Let us be fair to them.

But what drives it is not the perception that the church has drifted and we must return to Scripture; it’s a perception that the culture has changed and, therefore, that the church must adapt while still remaining in line with Scripture. Even the word emerging or emergent is in some ways telling.

The idea is that as culture changes, the churches are beginning to change. There is a younger church, a church more attuned with the culture that is beginning to emerge out of all of our churchmanship. It is beginning to look rather different from what churches have looked like in the past.

Nevertheless, this movement has grown so large that one rather cheeky article, written a few months back, asks the question, “Has the emergent church already emerged?” In other words, can one speak anymore of the emerging church when there are so many of them around the country?

At one large pastor’s conference last autumn in San Diego sponsored by Leadership Journal and Emergent YS and one or two other organizations, there were 3,000 pastors that showed up. They were divided into sort of more traditional types. About 2,000 of them that went off and did their thing, and a third of them, 1,000 of them, identified with the emergent church movement and did their thing in another part of the building.

Well, that’s California, but still, one-third is a pretty good percentage. It’s hard to speak of this as just emerging. It’s now become a major movement in its own right. It’s very interesting. The term itself emerging church of course is going to give them trouble a little bit down the road. As they get stronger in numbers, how do you speak of it anymore as being an emerging church?

It’s like calling a movement new. That guarantees to make it old in a little while. The term itself is going to prove problematic, but we’ll let that pass. Above all, it is based on the perceptions of cultural change bound up with postmodernism. Now the difficulty is that postmodernism is a notoriously difficult term to define.

From my perspective, and from the perspective I suspect of a majority of people interested in intellectual history in the Western world, postmodernism has to do first and foremost with a shift in epistemology. Epistemology is simply the study of how you get to know things. How do people know?

Do you know by bringing your presuppositions with you? Do you know by science? Do you know by rational thought? Do you know by emotions? The modernist period of epistemology, it is alleged, had certain profiles. Now we’re into a more postmodern approach to epistemology where you learn less by rationality and you think less about conclusive proofs.

Now there is more feeling and experience and probability. You identify with a certain community. It’s a little humbler. It recognizes that we learn from many different sources. In fact, I lectured a bit on this one seven years ago. I’m sure the tapes are around somewhere if you want a profile on postmodernism from that perspective.

On the other hand, it has to be said today that postmodernism is now being applied to many, many phenomena in the culture. In McLaren’s book, A New Kind of Christian, Neo (Neil Oliver Edward), his hero in the book, constructs postmodernism by adding post- to a lot of words.

Post-conquest, post-mechanistic, post-analytical, post-secular, post-objective, post-critical, post-organizational, post-individualistic, post-Protestant, and post-consumerist. That’s roughly what he means by postmodern. That’s a long way from mere questions of epistemology. It’s really referring to anything that is perceived to be a shifting sand in culture.

Whether you like it or don’t makes no difference. The grounds are shifting, it is argued. We are in this postmodern world and we have to adapt and respond appropriately. For some people, like AndraÈ Crouch, postmodernism is simply tied to consumerism. For others, there is no real difference between modernism and postmodernism at all.

Postmodernism is merely an extreme form of modernism. In fact, some people have said postmodernism is really mostmodernism. I’ll return to that a bit tomorrow. It is a difficult question. It’s a matter of definition. But in the emerging church tradition (already, in 10 years we can speak of tradition), postmodernism is the term that controls the entire discussion. This, they say, is where rising numbers of people are, a new younger generation, and as a result we must make some changes. The movement puts a lot of stress on the following things.

1. Feelings and affections over against rational thought.

2. Experience over against a kind of hard-edged rational truth.

3. A great emphasis on a contemporary definition of tolerance.

I’ll come to that contemporary definition tomorrow. Because there is such an emphasis on tolerance there is …

4. A lot of emphasis on inclusion versus exclusion.

You don’t say that people are outside and then try to convert them. Rather, you try to get them to join you and participate and be included with you. They learn by osmosis and example and communal living and demonstration and integrity, authenticity, what a Christian outlook appears like. As a result, they become Christians almost subconsciously. They gradually identify with you. There is more emphasis on inclusion than on exclusion.

5. A very deep concern and consequence not to tell others that they’re wrong.

That is, to win people by example and affection and care rather than by telling people that they are wrong. There is a heavy emphasis on participation, a heavy emphasis on narrative story over against propositional truth. That is to say, story in two senses. Story in the sense of, “You tell me your story and I tell you my story.”

That’s not all bad. In my advisee group at Trinity, for example, what some people call a chaplaincy group or the like, we do a lot of things in there. We reserve some time for prayer and Bible study. We reserve some time for treating certain contemporary subjects, but we also reserve time (three or four or five students per semester) telling us something of their life story.

Nowadays, people come from all kinds of interesting backgrounds. We have, in my group for example, a Vietnamese chap who came out with the boat people. We have somebody who came from the slums of Detroit and was brought up on the wrong side of the tracks, involved in guns and drugs, the whole bit. We have people brought up in middle-class, Midwestern America.

We have people from broken homes and how the grace of God has converted them, brought them to Trinity, training them, calling to the ministry. We can learn from one another and be encouraged. That’s narrative. That’s story. That has knit the whole group together. People are opening up and talking to one another, sharing their experiences. But this emphasis on narrative also extends to preaching.

In a recent essay by Walter Wangerin, for example, he talks from his Lutheran background of how when he was a boy, catechism classes were very propositional. Students had to memorize bits. “What is this?” Then you answer with your formulaic answer. Instead now he tells them stories. Christian Bible stories, no doubt, but he tells stories, and people are captivated rather than these propositional truths.

6. The movement is pretty profoundly anti-individualistic.

It is suspicious of the Western emphasis on the individual. It is suspicious of a lot of materialism. It is anti-consumerist. It wants to understand that witness and evangelism are bound up with life rather than simply with word. Let me give you some sample quotations.

Here is Dan Kimball, The Emerging Church. He says, “The emergent movement embraces pluralism, experience, mysticism, an emphasis on narrative. It is fluid, global, communal.” Leonard Sweet, who is one of the gurus of the movement, has coined the term EPIC as an anagram. EPIC: experiential, participatory, image-driven, and focusing on connectedness. That is, you need to be connected with others rather than being so individualistic.

This generates different ways of looking at worship. For example, here is one author’s assessment of what a modernist … a traditional … worship service is like. The sermon is focal. The preacher serves as a dispenser of biblical truths to help solve personal problems in modern life. It emphasizes the explanation of what truth is. Its starting point is with the Judeo-Christian worldview.

Terms like gospel and Armageddon don’t need definition. The Scriptural message is communicated primarily with words. Preaching and a worship service is the primary way one learns from the Scriptures during the week. Preaching takes place within the church building during a worship service, and so on. That’s the characterization of a modernist approach to corporate worship that they provide.

In the emerging service (in the same book), the sermon is one part of the experience of the worship gathering. The preacher teaches how the ancient wisdom of Scripture applies to kingdom living as a disciple of Jesus. It emphasizes the explanation and experience of who truth is rather than what truth is.

The starting point is the garden of Eden and the retelling of the story of creation and of the origins of human beings and of sin. Biblical terms like gospel and Armageddon need to deconstructed and redefined. Scripture message is communicated through a mix of words, visuals, art, silence, testimony, and story.

The preacher is a motivator to encourage people to learn from the Scripture throughout the week. A lot of the preaching takes place outside the church building in the context of community and relationship. It is deeply theocentric. It does not insult people’s intelligence but has a passion for substance.

In addition, Kimball himself suggests that our buildings be rearranged. Now there are crosses and candles and incense. There might be little retreat centers in various parts of the building where, in the middle of service, you could go over and do some journaling as you pray before one of the retreat centers that are there with candles, and so forth. It is far more participatory.

This is merely description of what is there. I’m not commenting on it good, bad, or indifferent. Many of these things are entirely praiseworthy. You must understand. I’m merely describing at this point. Moreover, this movement loves peer discussion. It is suspicious of hierarchy of all sorts. Some of its leaders, incidentally, came from the Brethren movement.

That partly accounts for it, I think, but they love participation and are suspicious of all hierarchy, so chat rooms on the Internet are a big thing. Perhaps one of the most important is one called TheOoze. It can be found at TheOoze.com. By all means, look it up. Spencer Burke, who founded it, tells his story where he came from a conservative background, was one of the pastors of Mariner’s Cove Church, and all the rest. He gave it all up and went and lived in a beach house and started TheOoze.

In this chat room, everybody can say what they think. Everyone is equal. Every opinion is heard. As a result, people are prepared to ask questions and answer questions that would not be asked in a local church. Nobody is superior. There is a kind of integrity of candor in all of this. Now many of these materials have been put out in a kind of edited form in a book by Spencer Burke himself, titled, Out of the Ooze: Unlikely Love Letters to the Church from Beyond the Pew.

He likes TheOoze precisely because it’s liquid, to use Pete Ward’s expression. That is, it’s a bit like blobs of mercury. Sometimes it sort of rolls together, and sometimes it scatters and rolls apart. Sometimes it’s all clumped in a nice cohesive community, and sometimes its lots of little bits. It’s TheOoze. It’s free-flowing.

The movement now has its own website, speakers, mutual blurbers on the books. It’s a self-conscious movement now even though most folk in that tradition don’t like the term movement. Nevertheless, it is a movement. The question to ask then is this.… Is this an emerging church largely constrained by Scripture or is it submerging? (And, let us be fair. No church is perfect. We’re not looking here for perfection.)

We’re looking to see if it is largely constrained, largely seeking to be reformed by the Word of God, or if it is submerging in the culture such that rather than reforming the culture it’s being snookered by the culture, unwittingly. Or is it some combination of both? Let me conclude this first address by stressing some praiseworthy features in the movement.

1. It is trying to read the times.

That’s not a bad thing. That’s very important. It is trying to read the times. Cultural differences are important and they ought to shape us in many important ways. I had an email this week from a colleague of mine at Trinity, Bob Yarbrough, who’s very, very astute. He had just received an email from a former student, a Chinese student from Singapore by the name of William.

William had e-mailed him saying, “My dear revered teacher, I have just come across a story that is supposed to be a joke. It’s supposed to be very funny, but I don’t understand the last line. Could you please explain it to me?” Bob copied it to me and then asked this question.… Could anything prove more tellingly the important of cultural hermeneutics? Here’s the story.

A frog goes into a bank. He comes up to the teller, and he sees by her name plaque that her name is Patricia Whack. He comes to Patricia Whack and he says, “My name is Kermit, Kermit Jagger, and I would like to borrow $30,000.” “Thirty-thousand dollars is a lot of money,” Patricia Whack says to Kermit. “You’re going to need some collateral or something.”

“Oh,” he says, “it’s not a problem. My dad’s name is Mick, Mick Jagger. Besides, I know the president of this bank.” “Even so,” Miss Whack says, “You are going to have to have collateral.” “Well,” the frog says, “Will this do?” He reaches into his pocket and he pulls out a little pink porcelain elephant about half an inch tall, of no apparent great significance.

He says, “Will this do for my collateral for a $30,000 loan?” By this time, Patricia Whack is thoroughly discombobulated and takes this and says, “I’ll have to go and talk to the manager.” So she goes back and she talks to the manager. She says, “There’s a frog out there called Kermit Jagger who claims that he knows you and wants to borrow $30,000. On top of that, all he’s offering for collateral is this little pink elephant. What is it, for goodness’ sake?”

The manager said, “It’s a knick-knack, Patty Whack, give the frog a loan. His old man’s a Rolling Stone.” If you didn’t get it, you’re either very young or you’re foreign. That’s the point. In which case, ask some of your student friends afterwards to tell you what is going on with this story. No doubt Willy really did have problems with this. There are quite a lot of things you have to know to even begin to laugh at that one.

Well, in all fairness then to the emerging church folks, they are trying very hard to understand the surrounding culture. It’s no surprise either that most of them are found either on the East Coast or on the West Coast, because this is a diverse country. The Midwest is a little more conservative. The South is far more conservative again. But on the East Coast and on the West Coast, there are different kinds of things happening.

To take one small example, I could bring you to church after church after church on both coasts that are now astonishingly racially integrated. I know a Baptist church in Queens, for example. The last time I was there two or three years ago, I personally talked to people who were born in 30 different countries. The church reflects the neighborhood.

I met a black guy there who was right out of Rikers. I met another black guy there who was head of neurosurgery in the nearest hospital. I met a white chap there who was the son of a Mafia Don. He got converted about six months earlier. I met another white chap there who was head of a big accounting firm. This is Queens, for goodness’ sake. I met Japanese and Koreans and Swahilis. I mean, I met them all! They were all there!

I know a church on the West Coast that I preached in not long ago where the senior pastor is Mexican, and his wife is Japanese. The next pastor is white, and his wife is African American. The next pastor is Heinz 57 variety, I don’t know what he’s got in him. His wife is, if I recall, Vietnamese or something like that. It’s merely a reflection of what the church is, whereas that’s a lot rarer here in the Midwest, and it’s just an impossibility in the Deep South.

As a result, you have perceptions of where the culture is that vary a great deal around the country. Some of the reactions against these folk come from the conservative middle against people who are facing things a little bit different on the coast. That has to be faced, too. At least they are trying to understand what is going on.

2. They push very strongly the value of authenticity.

Now I know that’s a slippery category. Do you not feel sometimes in many of our own churches that there is a kind of profound phoniness sometimes? A fakeness? It’s just unreal. It’s not part of the real world, somehow. It’s not part of real spirituality. You go through the motions.

They are desperate for authenticity, authenticity in their faith and in their obedience in their devotion to Christ. That, brothers and sisters in Christ, is not bad. In fact, sometimes we have fostered inauthenticity by our very efforts to be cutesy. Our very efforts to be relevant can, in some cases, generate a certain kind of superficial platitude that is full of inauthenticity.

Alternatively, we can come from a tradition that is merely tradition. You go through the motions but there’s no sense of the presence of the living God. You don’t find people leaving corporate services Sunday after Sunday saying, “We met with the risen Christ this day, and it was good to be here as we were humbled before him.” Whereas let me tell you, in churches that are full of genuine spirituality and life, that is part of common experience. Their push for authenticity is not a bad thing.

3. They do recognize at least some of the parameters of the changing culture bound up with this category postmodernism.

They are not all wrong in what they perceive as the front edge of the culture. Now in my view, some of their analysis has to be questioned. We’ll come to that tomorrow.

Moreover, whether or not they have the appropriate response to it at every juncture is another question that has to be raised. Nevertheless, they do rightly perceive that the times, they are a changing. I see this in university campuses. It’s not merely gross changes like rising biblical illiteracy, but there are changes of sense of humor and what’s appropriate and what’s inappropriate.

Twenty-five years ago when I started doing university missions, if I were dealing with an atheist, at least he or she was a Christian atheist. That is to say, the god he or she disbelieved in was the Christian God, which is a way of saying that the discussion categories were on my turf. You can’t presuppose that anymore.

When I do university missions nowadays, the level of biblical illiteracy is formidable. It is simply formidable. I pass out sheets with the text that I’m going to expound and I have to explain the big numbers and the little numbers. They don’t know that there are two Testaments. The level of biblical illiteracy is profound.

This means that, not that they are blank slates, that we simply have to write on biblical truth and everything is okay. They’ve already got a worldview. They’ve got frames of references. As we start putting on biblical categories, then they start clashing with what they’ve already got on their mental hard drive.

Part of the problem is that these clashes between what I’m trying to say from the Bible, what God has disclosed in Scripture, and what they have learned from the surrounding cultures cannot coexist very well. Gradually, there’s a struggle that develops. To understand the times is a very important thing. Moreover, it’s even biblically mandated.

Compare, when you have time, what Paul preaches in the Synagogue in Pisidian Antioch in Acts 13, where he is evangelizing biblically literate people (Jews, proselytes, God-fearers who know what we call the Old Testament) and what he preaches in Acts 17, where he’s preaching to bright but utterly biblically illiterate people. There’s a larger frame of reference that has to be established. It is right and good to recognize these points.

Twenty-five years ago the kinds of questions that had to be answered were these: “Did Jesus really rise from the dead? What’s the evidence for it? Why should I believe that?” But if someone really came to believe that, “Yes, Jesus did really rise from the dead,” you were, humanly speaking, well on the way to seeing that person come to saving faith in Christ.

Nowadays, even if somebody says, “Okay, if you say he rose from the dead, I believe that. Fine, fine. If you say so. What about all the Hindus?” It doesn’t resolve anything. The questions are different. They’re bound up with tolerance and inclusivism. Nobody’s wrong. The hardest notion to get across in the university campus today is sin, by far. So the analysis of some of these parameters is not all bad.

4. In this movement, there is a deep concern to reach what I will call the way-outs, the people are way out there.

Some of the emerging church people divide the human race into A, B, C, where A are the people who are in the church, they go to church, they’re comfortable with the church, whether they’re Christians or not, many of them are. At least they’re inside, they go regularly, they’re familiar with the categories.

B are the people who come to Easter sunrise service and maybe Christmas and weddings and that sort of thing. They have some familiarity. Maybe their parents went and so forth. C are the people who really don’t like anything to do with it. They’re so far out there that they’re completely illiterate. They work in completely different categories.

The question is.… Who’s going after C? Who’s comfortable with going after C? Those of us from more conservative traditions do all of our evangelism entirely within the A-going-on-B range. Who’s going after C? They never come to church. They’re not going to come to our buildings, that’s for sure. Who’s going after them? These people love to go after them. That’s commendable too, isn’t it? They have developed the ability to talk with anyone. Most of us from very conservative backgrounds find that very difficult to do.

5. They display a willingness to question tradition.

Now that can be dicey. I know that. You can throw out the baby with the bath water. Moreover, we’re not the first Christians to think about things. So it’s important that you don’t throw out too much too fast. I know that. We’ll come to the problems tomorrow.

Nevertheless, if you really do believe that the Bible alone is the final authority, then you cannot simply park yourself on tradition and say, “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever more shall be without end, amen.” You have to at least raise the questions. What could we dispense with that is merely traditional and not mandated by Scripture that is getting in the way in our generation, in our culture, of authenticity, of evangelism?

Do you have to wear a tie and suit if you’re a fellow and a really nice dress or a suit if you’re a woman to church on Sunday morning? Why? Why not? It’s not what is done in some parts of the world, starting with California. Even in California, it depends. I was out there for a conference a couple of weeks ago. All through the weekend it was sort of sandals and flip-flops and bare bellies and tee shirts, and all that, but on Sunday …

This particular church happened to be a conservative church. In fact, it was an Asian church, as a result, everybody wore suits again. Good grief, where does this come from? It was the same sort of exposition, same sort of hymns, same sort of singing. Where does this come from? Is it good, bad, or does it even matter? You go to some parts of the world, some parts of Africa, 95 degrees, 98 degrees, but because the missionaries wore suits, they’re still wearing suits.

Every time I go to Africa, I have to dress up. I go to California; I undress. What do you do with this? Then you go instead to Sydney and you find archbishops preaching in shorts. It’s Australia. People brought up on Bondi Beach are not really big on robes. So these five things are at least worth thinking about and commending these folk for.

Let me end this way. I don’t know if you know the name Tim Keller. I hesitate to use his name in public when I know this is being recorded and even broadcast, but I don’t think he’d mind. He’s become a friend. I wish I could spend more time with him. He’s pastor of a Presbyterian church in Manhattan, Redeemer Presbyterian.

He went to that church from a teaching slot at Westminster Seminary about 20 years ago. He commuted for about year and met with about 40 or 50 people to form a small Presbyterian church, a PCA church in the heart of Manhattan. You must understand that Manhattan is not chock-a-block with crypto-Presbyterians. It is a very secular part of the country.

He wasn’t going there seeking to find all the Presbyterians who weren’t going to church. But in the years since then, the church has grown and numbers several thousand now. He’s planted another dozen churches. It’s almost all conversion growth. I don’t know many people in the country who understand culture better than he.

He’s thought things through again and again and again. I don’t know anyone in the country who is better able to get across the notion of sin to biblical illiterates than Tim Keller. One of the things I like the most about him is that he can talk to anybody. Nine days, ten days before the towers came down 2–1/2 years ago, I was in Princeton for something and took the train in to go and spend the day with Tim.

Because I knew it was his practice to always have an evangelistic Bible study that he himself was leading, As we sat over lunch in this little arcade I said, “Tell me about your Bible study at the moment, Tim? What’s it like?” “Oh,” he said, “I’ve got a dozen lesbians.” “How did that come about, Tim?” He said, “Well, they trust me. I love them. I’m taking them through the gospel of Mark. Some will get converted. Some won’t.”

Now you must understand that Tim is one of the most theologically apt pastors in the country. He is a deeply theologically driven man. In other words, what I hope you’ve seen is that I’ve just described someone who has all the strengths that I’ve listed here for the emergent church, yet in fact, in some ways, he’s a remarkable traditionalist. That can hurt your head, can’t it? If you go to his worship services on Sunday morning, there they hire musicians. It’s astonishingly liturgical.

The evening services are suffused with a lot of jazz. What can I say? But there is deep authenticity in the corporate worship, in the Bible studies which are all over Manhattan and beyond, in the community, in the service, in the intensity and honesty with which Scripture is read, and in the diversity of people who are touched.

Do you know what I look for in the seminary where I teach? I look at our outgoing MDiv students every year. Do you know what I look for besides orthodox and integrity and purity of life and a concern to teach the Scripture beyond all of that? I look for young men and women who can talk to anybody. I covet them.

There will be some who will be really great in Lincoln, Nebraska. But take them out of the prairies and they’re going to muff it. We have some African Americans. They’re going to be great on the South Side of Chicago. They’re really not going to do too well in New England. But the ones I hunger for, the ones I look for every year, they’re the ones who can talk to anybody.

That’s like Jesus, and I want them for our cities. I want them for this generation and the next because they can talk to anybody. You don’t find those people only in emergent circles. You find them in all kinds of places, including at Redeemer Presbyterian in Manhattan. Let us pray.

Help us, Lord God, not to live and think and assess things at the level of mere slogans, but deeply, faithfully, humbly, in submission to Scripture for the good of Christ’s church for which he’s shed his blood and for the glory of Christ himself, in whose name we pray, amen.

 

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.
To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.