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Equipped to Serve: Part 3 (Q & A)

Listen as D. A. Carson speaks on being equipped to serve including emerging church issues in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library.


Male: Well, thank you again, Don, for excellent teaching last night and today. You would imagine this generated some response. Okay, first of all, I just wanted to follow up, immediately, some of the things you were saying today. Here’s the first question: Regarding “a husband of one wife,” you made no mention of divorce. Was that deliberate? Or do you not think it applies?

Don Carson: I made no mention of it, partly because there was not enough time to list the eight or 10 major interpretations imposed on that passage. I left a whole lot of them out, and that was one that I left out. I don’t think that that’s what the passage is talking about. There are so many unambiguous ways of saying that sort of thing in Greek, and in English, that to say “husband of one wife” is really dealing with a divorce situation is not the most obvious interpretation.

I gave the interpretation that, in my view, pertains. If I were to say something on the divorce issue, I would turn to a whole lot of other passages that speak much more directly and immediately to the situation.

Male: Okay. Well, coming again back to the same passage, it’s suggested here that you seem to assume a model of supported full-time vocational ministry, but there seems to be nothing in the text 1 Timothy 3 which requires that. Isn’t it, perhaps, unhelpful and counterproductive to push that model as normative for gospel ministry?

Don: No, I think, instead, that it is viewed in the Bible as at least eminently desirable. Normative might be one stage too far, but it is pushed hard in the Bible. So that, for example, in 1 Corinthians 9, where Paul talks about his principles of self-abnegation (why he refuses to receive money in the area where he’s evangelizing, but he’s quite prepared to receive money from Philippi, where’s he’s already evangelized and who are sending him on, as it were, as a missionary), he says that those whose labor in the gospel are to be supported by the gospel.

That’s the normal way for things to be done. He actually gives some illustrations along those lines: “A workman is worthy of his hire,” and that sort of thing. It seems to be that that is, ultimately, the desirable thing because it does free people up to do more of Bible teaching and more study and so on.

Having said that, there is nothing in Scripture that says, unambiguously, that you cannot be an elder, pastor, or bishop unless you’re full-time. So one has to be careful about legislating either way. Although I worry about those who want to have a kind of priestly attachment of vocational ministry to eldership or pastor or whatever, I worry about those, too, who so glory in what’s sometimes called tentmaking ministry that it’s the only acceptable model. It seems to me that stands right against the thrust of Scripture.

Male: Again, following through the same sort of passage, you mentioned in your talk this morning that being an elder, pastor, or overseer is sometimes a very lonely task. Is that necessarily the case? Does it go with the territory or is it a product of the size and style of the churches we’re part of?

Don: Clearly, if you are ministering, as some of my friends have, in missionary contexts where the closest evangelical church is 50 miles away, it’s going to be lonelier that if you’re ministering in a big town where there are 20 or 30 churches that are in genuine gospel partnership, and people are getting together and praying together and so on. So obviously, it is a function, in part, on where you minister, where you serve, what’s available, and so forth.

I think that, in the Lord’s mercy, the kinds of people who can only flourish when they have a support group, the Lord tends, then, not to send to some forsaken corner of the earth where God in his wisdom sends people who really are loners. That’s part of God’s great wisdom. However, that’s not really quite what I was talking about this morning, just the same, though those things are true. I was talking about the peculiar loneliness of ministry that means that you have to hold yourself to be seen to be impartial.

If you are seen to be playing favorites … just because you find certain people’s personalities in the local church a lot more conducive to yours, so you sidle up to certain kinds of people, and then, implicitly, just because you can’t befriend everybody with the same degree of intensity (there aren’t enough hours in the day, let alone your personal personality preferences).… then there is a danger of appearing to be playing favorites. That is very detrimental to the church. That’s why the apostle says, unambiguously, “Avoid partiality.”

Moreover, there are some decisions you take and some burdens you carry. You’re not long into ministry before someone comes to you and tells you that she was abused as a child and just can’t handle it. You’re not long into ministry before you’re dealing with parents who are grieving over a malformed child in the womb. You’re not long into ministry before, before, before …

Some of these things are highly confidential bits of information. You’re supposed to carry them, and you’re supposed to pray about them. Some of them, you can’t even tell your spouse, you’re so sworn to secrecy. So there is a loneliness in leadership. There is a loneliness in ministry. It is a function of these kinds of things, even if you do have some support around you.

Now transparently, there’s less of that when things are going well. When things are going well, there are lots of people who are banging the drums, who are praying with you and rejoicing, and you come away with a quiet buzz of spiritual enthusiasm. What can I say? It’s really there. Yet I don’t care how fruitful you are in ministry, sooner or later, you will face a discipline problem.

It will be nasty. It might be doctrinal. It might be moral. It might be something else. To go through those things … especially if the church begins to divide over it, and you must be seen to be clean (you must not only be clean, you must be seen to be clean) … is a very lonely row to hoe. I have done things in ministry you couldn’t pay me enough to do. You’re not paid to do them; you’re set free to do them by the support. Those are lonely places, what can I say?

Male: To what extent is it possible to have things in place, perhaps within an eldership structure of shared team ministry, which will sort of offset those sort of things?

Don: Yes, if you’re dealing with a brand-new church plant with a grand total of 40 people, then there may only be one part-time elder or something. If it’s in a situation where they are not supporting churches around and you face those sorts of crises, then they are lonelier yet.

Obviously, if you’re in a church where there’s a plurality of elders and this sort of thing (especially where the elders themselves have watched their hearts, have good relationships with each other, the families get together, they pray well together, they’re mutually supportive, and they’ve developed a whole pattern of the gift of encouragement), then if something happens in the church and the elders hold together, it’s a lot less lonely.

But let’s be quite frank. Sin is very duplicitous. Occasionally, you find the same kind of split that happens in the church developing in the leaders of the church too. Then the loneliness can come back through the back door. So I’m not trying to paint a bleak picture and say, “You know, if you’re going to be in the ministry, you’re going to be lonely.” That’s not quite what I’m saying. I am saying that you are called to certain principles of integrity and Christian leadership mandates: unambiguously, that you be free from any charge of favoritism.

That means that there has to be a certain kind of.… I don’t know what else to call it … distance, even in the midst of all of your intimacy with people, all of your watchcare in their lives, all of your prayers for them, even the fellowship on a multi-staff, which can be wonderful, sweet, and enjoyable, even humorous. It can be a great place to work and serve for 15 years then something comes up, you’re the senior minister, and you’re responsible for how it comes out. It’s lonely. What can I tell you? If you don’t believe me, just live a few more years.

Male: Again following though the same theme: if pastor, elder, overseer, and so on are interchangeable terms (I agree that they are; that Lightfoot was right), is there any difference between the pastor and a team of elders?

Don: Increasingly, the way language is falling out in independent churches is to use pastor for elders who are vocational (who are paid) and elder for pastors who are not vocational. So they say, on the one level, that they’re all the same, but with a change in terminology, it really means that there are two groups.

They’re just labels. I’m not going to break out into a cold sweat over it, but I do think that it’s unfortunate. It seems to me that anyone you call elder, you should also call pastor and you should also call bishop or overseer. Anyone that you call elder, you should.… Well, you work it out yourself! The terms are interchangeable.

The reason it’s a bit tricky is, inevitably, the person who is vocational has his time freed up to put more energy into things and, therefore, inevitably has more influence. He inevitably has the finger on more taps, is responsible for more things, and the like, and therefore, does gain more authority, so that you start having the pastor as the sort of “super elder” or the most important elder. That’s a bit dicey.

On the other hand, I do want to say something else, too. There is another vision of eldership that comes out of some Brethren movements (but not all) and some independent church movements, that really frightens me just as much. This is the assumption that all elders have exactly the same weight, exactly the same voice, or exactly the same authority. That, to my mind, is biblically unsanctioned and is extraordinarily dangerous.

The fact of the matter is that Paul is discipling Timothy, who is discipling others. Inevitably, in an elders’ board or a group of pastors or ministers in a local church, one is more senior. You can call one of the assistant ones a curate if you like, but at the end of the day, whatever you call them, some are more senior than others.

They know more, are responsible for more, have been around longer, have read more theology, and have been through more years of pastoral ministry. So there is a training that is going on, inevitably, within the board. To say that it’s sort of one person, one vote, on an elder board because they’re all called elder, that bespeaks to me more of a kind of platonic vision of democracy than it does of biblical leadership.

Male: The archbishop of York is probably going to get apoplexy to know there are several bishops at St. John’s Newland, but there we are. Following on again from that, if eldership is male, then how are women involved in leadership positions?

Don: Again, some Christians disagree over where to draw the line on that one. Let me say two or three things. That one is so huge that we could spend the next hour or two just talking about that one to handle it fairly. I am not of the camp that espouses the broad, sweeping egalitarianism that says there’s no difference between men and women. I just don’t think that you can make that square with Scripture. With all the best will in the world to those who disagree with me, I don’t think you can.

If I had to put a finger on the twin issues, it has to do with the family structure, and it has to do with the church-authorized teaching over men. I want all those words in, but after you have all those words in, I still want to say that I worry about the kind of culturally conservative Christian who sees that position and then writes an essay “16 Things Women Can Do and 17 Things They Can’t” or something like that, where you have extrapolations and on and on, and the basic stance toward life is “No.”

So I want to work very, very hard to push women, as well as men, to get decent biblical training, to learn how to handle the Bible, teach the Bible, and understand the Bible. I could mention names here (I won’t because we’re being recorded) of some women who have an international reputation for communication, who are brilliant communicators. Sometimes they do it in venues that might not be my choice, but they are brilliant communicators, and they really do believe the gospel.

I fear, however, that every time they open their mouths, they can’t rub two sentences together without saying something hermeneutically disastrous. I want to see a new generation of women who have those sorts of communication skills who are handling the Bible well. If, instead, you project an image of just saying, “No, no, no, no, no” all the time, then how are you going to encourage them to do that sort of thing?

At the risk of appealing to the example of the Anglicans (this is a positive example, I’m sure you’ll be glad to know), the archdiocese in the Western world best known for insisting on not ordaining women is certainly the Sydney diocese. Yet do you know which diocese in the entire Anglican Communion has the most paid women staffers? The Sydney diocese. They have a policy that the second full-time staffer, or at least the third, will be a woman.

Now they still don’t ordain them to the priesthood or to senior ministry in the church, but they’re encouraging them in all kinds of writing and Bible teaching … in all kinds of ways. Some of those women are very powerful, influential, godly, well-informed, and biblically-literate souls. I say, “May their tribe increase.”

So whatever you’re doing here, make sure you don’t go through life just saying, “No.” Figure out where you can say, “Yes,” and push it and push it and push it, rather than just being on the backside of negativism all the time. Because then, instead of casting an image of mere cultural conservatism and reactionary traditionalism and that sort of thing, you are building solid families and biblical models.

You are still insisting on the structure of things, and yet, you are still wanting people to come into the fullness of what it means to be a human being made in the image of God, with a genuine knowledge of God. You don’t want to start projecting an image, “Lord, you keep them humble, and I’ll keep them pregnant.”

Male: What then would you say are the essential elements in ministerial training for men and women, if you want them to be good handlers of God’s Word?

Don: In fact, Steven Timmis and I were talking about this in the car on the way up. I think one of the things you have to face is that it’s hard to talk about these things in a kind of theoretical, platonic sense, because ministry takes place in a context. So what is appropriate, desirable, and ideal in one particular context may be a bit different somewhere else.

I mentioned, earlier, our experiences in Quebec between ’72 and ’80, when the churches were growing so fast that a senior elder was somebody who had been a Christian for 18 months. Now in that context, what does training for ministry look like? Versus somebody who is going to step in to follow Dick Lucas at St. Helen’s Bishopsgate, what does training for ministry look like?

Obviously, there are certain things you want. You want Christian maturity that is transparently growing in the light of God’s Word. You want people who are knowing their Bibles better as well as biblical theology and enough historical theology to be able to understand, in a comprehensive sort of way, what Scripture is saying. Then you want to be able to teach it, preach it, communicate with it, and have the kind of relational skills that can build people up in their most holy faith by the use of the Word. You want those things as a bare minimum.

Some of those things are teachable, and some of them are bound up with the gifts and graces that God gives to individuals. Some people, no matter how much you teach them, will never have that. Other people, you don’t have to teach them very much. They just sop up information quickly. They have the relational skills and the passion for the gospel. They really head into ministry far too early, according to the theorists, and yet, God bless them; they’re reaching kinds of people whom I just can’t reach.

So I’m worried, therefore, about theoretical models, such as, “You must have a minimum of at least one university degree, at least three or four years of theological training, and not less than three years of Greek and two years of Hebrew. Then you must have …” and so on. I could tell you a lot of contexts where, in my view, that’s not only desirable but should be maintained.

There are parts of the world where if you don’t have that, quite frankly, you probably shouldn’t be in the ministry, where you have a very high order of educated people in the local church. There are a lot of churches around where the best church planting, even being done by cross-cultural people, is being done with people who have that kind of training, plus some cross-cultural communication.

At the seminary where I teach, we’ve been teaching cross-cultural training for years and years. That’s probably because we send so many people around the world as missionaries. Recently, we’ve started teaching it to pastors because whether we like it or not, the future of pastoral ministry in our big cities is becoming multi-ethnic. I like it, but some people don’t. The fact of the matter is you don’t have to go to Pago Pago or to Namibia to find someone of cross-cultural background, nowadays.

So part of training people for urban ministry is also training people to be able to talk with anybody. Now if you come out of a well-defined and stable culture, you get some more Bible training, and you go back into that culture, then you don’t need much in the way of cross-cultural communication skills. You’re already there. They’re your people. If you start working in the downtown area of many of our big cities nowadays and you don’t know something about Islam or about Hinduism, you’re up a creek without a paddle. It’s part of responsible ministry.

So saying what’s ideal really depends an awful lot on who you are, what your background is, what your gifts and graces are, and where you’re going to serve. So if you’re at the low end (by low, I mean still less experienced, in a church that’s not very old, still breaking into evangelism, small numbers, there aren’t many supporting groups around), I’m happy with minimal training as long as you have zeal, fire in your heart, a real gift from the Lord, and something of unction.

If, on the other hand, you’re building on the long haul toward reproducing and reproducing, then you have to be thinking long-haul not to idealize that hands-on ministry training as if it is in itself the be-all and the end-all. It is itself also only one form. Most of the teachers teaching in the Northern Institute themselves have theological training from somewhere else.

You need to keep all of those things as desiderata, as things to be desired and pursued, not least as the gospel partnership grows and multiplies. Work at every level. Think big; start small. Think big; start small. Think big; start small. Then, within that framework, work at certain basic commitments of gospel ministry, faithfulness to the Word of God, and a certain basic knowledge (but even how basic that basic knowledge should be depends an awful lot on where you’re starting).

Like the elders that Paul appoints on the swing back from his first missionary journey or like those years in Quebec: a certain ability to communicate, an integrity of life, and a love for men and women may be enough at first. Yet at the end of the day, that has to become more sophisticated, more stable, better trained, theologically more adept, and more competent or else, eventually, you will have a church that’s at the lowest level and is not beginning to grow.

One of the crises in the church in China today, for example, is that after these years of very rapid growth (the best estimates put it now at about 19 million Chinese Christians), the whole thing is right now on the verge of falling apart in all directions because there just aren’t teachers around who know enough to take it to the next level. That, too, happens. It’s another version of “the pew is higher than the pulpit” that we’ve seen in much of central Africa too. So I’m very reluctant to be put in a box on that one.

Male: You’ve just spoken about the importance of cross-cultural communication being where the different cultures exist, even in England now. One movement which seems is keen to respond to this is what’s called the emerging church movement. Would you like to explain a little bit about what that is (you’ve just written a book on the subject) and perhaps its limitations? The question I have here is: Is the emerging church movement just liberalism dressed up in a new coat? So I’d like to give you a bit of time to speak to that.

Don: The expression emergent church or emerging church was coined in ’92 or ’93 by a handful of people: Mark Driscoll, Brian McLaren, and a few others. Yet the movement itself is bigger than just the American model which usually uses that language. It’s found in much of the Western world and even beyond, some of which uses emerging/emergent language and some of which does not. It has three feeds in, as it were.

There are three things that go into it:

  1. Part of it is the widespread perception that there is an emerging (there’s the word) culture that is really quite different from the culture that came before it. Often, that is understood in terms of postmodernism and what it’s doing for notions of truth, tolerance, and so on. There is a new generation of people with another set of biases, another culture, and another set of values. The traditional ways of articulating the faith and evangelizing in those sorts of frameworks are really quite dated, and we have to re-think some things.
  2. Some of it is driven by missional concerns. How do you reach certain groups of people who are not being reached? For example, there’s an awful lot of Christianity in this country that is essentially middle-class. How to break out of that into the Black Country, for example, or how to break out of that into blue-collar estates, and so on: that is a challenge, isn’t it?

At the other end, how do you get into the arts and sciences? How do you get into the media? In North America, there are far more Christians in the populace at large, but there are parts of the country that are as bleak, statistically, as Yorkshire. There are segments of society in every part of the country that are completely untouched. The media, Hollywood … that sort of area … is one of them. With only a few exceptions, people aren’t penetrating into that area, so we need to answer the question of how to do that. Those sorts of concerns are good questions.

  1. There’s a third impetus that comes into it, and it’s reactionary in some ways, just plain reactionary. These new folk are suspicious of traditional churches, with or without liturgy, but with everybody dressed in a suit, singing old-fashioned hymns, preferably with a pipe organ, highly stylized, everybody comes to church on Sunday and looks exactly the same as if they were in a business institute all during the week, and so on.

Or, alternatively, they’re also rebelling against the megachurches with drama, presentation, and sophistication. What they want over against that, partly driven by their perception of where the culture is, is more stuff that’s based on relationship, a buddy-around-the-arm thing, friendship, and so on.

Now in so far as that is all that is in the emerging movement, I’m largely for it. The trouble is that the movement itself is so diverse nowadays it’s hard to speak of generalizations. The best of the concerns, which I’ve just described, are already being demonstrated and prosecuted, in my view, in the best of the confessional churches. They already are. I could name a lot of them in many different countries. It’s what some of your own churches here are trying to do and represent.

So it’s not as if the only people who have missional concerns, for example, are the emerging churches. That’s not the case. In fact, at one point when I was doing my study on this area, I went through all of the main leaders of the emerging movement, and I found out that 80 percent of them had come from extremely traditional, culturally-conservative backgrounds.

In the words of Brian McLaren, he himself said that he had been on the most conservative twig on the most conservative branch of evangelicalism. In fact, he’d been on a fairly right-wing Plymouth Brethren sort of assembly. Then what he did was sort of jump on a vine, do a big swing, and went to the pendulum hoop on the other end. That’s really what he did.

So there’s a fair bit of reactionism there that is not going to be attractive to churches that are already well situated and meeting a whole lot of people in a lot of different ways. I don’t see what the attraction is, all of a sudden. It’s a bit silly. The difficulty is that the emerging church embraces people who are basically confessional evangelicals who have some of these missional concerns, but it includes, amongst the most high profile of the leaders, an increasing number of very loud voices that are suspicious about talking of truth.

Especially in churches of the believers church tradition, for example. You start saying that you have to believe in order to belong. They now say you have to belong in order to believe. By all means, you should participate in the Lord’s Supper; who knows, you might meet Christ there. You’re not a Christian yet, but it doesn’t matter because you could meet Christ there. To say “No” to people is just excluding them, and that’s not going to win them.

There is some element of truth in the certain insight of having to belong in order to believe, in that you have to love people and have associations, friendship, and context of witness, whether it’s having a beer in a pub, playing soccer together, or going to the opera. Whatever it is, there has to be some context of friendship. In that sense, you have to belong, don’t you?

Yet it goes so far as to sort of introduce people into the church, into conversion of the gospel, and into salvation by a kind of osmosis, which is so far removed from the in/out mentality of the New Testament. The most frightening thing of all, however, is how far Brian McLaren has gone (and in this country, Steve Chalke and others) where at the end of the day, the kind of Christianity that is being pushed has closest reminiscence, as far as I can see, to 1920s liberalism. I don’t know what else to call it.

There was a startling debate in Grand Rapids, Michigan, just before Christmas, between Brian McLaren and Michael Widmer. There were about 2,000 people there. I wasn’t there, but this was reported to me, and I’m going to get the tapes. The person who reported it to me tends to be understated, so I have every reason to believe his report is fair.

In the format of the debate, each side could speak for certain amounts of time and all that. Then, as part of the format of the debate, each side could ask the other side questions. Michael Widmer (who is a young scholar, but a confessional Christian, thought through, and so on) actually had the courtesy to send his questions in advance to Brian McLaren. He said, “I’m doing this because I’m really not trying to sandbag you. I’m not trying to win a debate. I really want to know what you think, and if we can come to terms with our disagreements around Scripture.”

One of the questions that he asked, then (this is not the exact wording, but this is the substance of it) was, “Are there any elements of belief or truth that are essential to orthodox Christianity; that is, without which orthodox Christianity is no longer orthodox Christianity? If so, what are they?” When the question, then, was put publicly on the floor, even though McLaren had had it for two months, he hemmed and hawed and sputtered.

He finally articulated half a dozen elements of orthopraxy but did not utter a single element of orthodoxy. In other words, you know, “Well, you really do have to love each other,” and so on. Well, been there, done that. That was 1920s liberalism. There are some truths to be proclaimed in the gospel too.

This is why, in the last chapter of the book that I wrote on the subject.… I worry about young people I talk to who are swept up in this movement. They openly tell me, “You know, I like so much of what I see in this movement, but I do confess that I’m nervous when I read the Bible and it says somebody is in and somebody is out as well as all these questions about truth. These parts of the Bible make me nervous.”

My response invariably is, “If you’re reading the Bible, and it’s making you nervous, who is wrong?” I mean, what should give? Therefore, I listed, in the last chapter, passage after passage after passage that simply spoke of truth. Now what do you do with that? If you can’t integrate that in your system, stay out of the ministry. We don’t need you. You’re dangerous.

Part of Christian faithfulness is Christian living, is orthopraxy, but part of it is orthodoxy too. You can’t drive a wedge between the two. You can’t dismiss orthodoxy because there are some hypocrites out there any more than you can dismiss orthopraxy because there are some eggheads out there. You just can’t do that. It’s a whole package. It’s the gospel that transforms the way we think, what we believe, how we act, our conduct, and our life. It’s a whole package. So this antithetical thinking that goes from one pendulum swing to the other.… God, help us.

In 30 years, no one is going to be talking about emergent, but they’ll still be talking about the gospel. So which bandwagon do you want to get on? The best of the things that are in the emerging movement, as far as I can see, are already in the best of churches that don’t connect themselves with the movement.

So part of it is that I’m worried about any movement where the movement itself becomes the excited thing around which we revolve. It’s what C.S. Lewis calls the danger of “the inner ring syndrome.” You know: “I’m more evangelical than you are!” Except they’re not saying even evangelical, but, “I’m the best of the evangelicals because I’m emergent.”

You know, “What kind of Christian are you? Are you a Christian or are you an emergent Christian?” That really worries me. You know that I’m confessionally a Reformed Baptist, but I am first and foremost, God help me, a Christian. If you don’t get that one square, and you make your whole point of self-identity, first and foremost, some movement that’s coming along, then you’re only a whisker away from idolatry that takes you away from devotion to Christ. Just be careful of it.

Male: Would McLaren and others still identify themselves as evangelical, or would they adopt the post-evangelical terminology and that sort of thing?

Don: That depends on the party. There are a lot of them that would insist that they’re evangelicals, and many of them are. Some, however, are evangelicals in the sense that they don’t deny certain things, but in all fairness, they never push them either. So if you’re confessionally an evangelical, and you believe there is final judgment and believe there is truth and error, but you never talk about that because you find it’s culturally difficult, then, at some point, you sooner or later have to ask whether or not you really are in the evangelical camp.

If you’re not overtly denying something but you’re no longer giving it the place that it has in Scripture, how is Scripture having the kind of reforming voice, how is it functioning as the norming norm. So there are a lot of people in that sort of ambiguous position who want to be called evangelicals, but, by being silent on certain issues, are, in fact, implicitly redefining evangelicalism and pushing the boundaries of what that means.

There are others, who are much happier with expressions like Tomlinson’s post-evangelical, and yet won’t come right out and say that they are not evangelicals, partly because that would lose them a very major part of their audience. They’re still being invited to all of these so-called evangelical conferences and congresses and all this sort of thing, where they’re nevertheless trying to change things in a direction away from confessional evangelicalism of the past.

I had one leader write to me after my book came out. I won’t tell you his name. It was a 20-page email that was.… Well, the kindest thing I can say is that it used embarrassingly uncontrolled, intemperate, and offensive language. I tried in the book to speak frankly, but I also tried to make it completely inoffensive and to be as fair as I could. I put it through several editors and readers, double-checked all the facts, and everything was documented because I really didn’t want to just inflame.

Well, this chap was ticked, internationally-class ticked. I received 20 pages of this stuff: “Don’t you know that you’re destroying my ministry?” At the end of the whole thing, he charged me with various bits of distorting what he was saying, not being fair, not engaging him in public, and all the rest. At the very end, he asked the question, “So tell me, do you want me to say that I’m not an evangelical? If that’s what you want me to say, I’ll say it publicly. Will that satisfy you, or will you acknowledge that I’m an evangelical?”

Well, I went through the first part of his 20 pages, and I answered in great detail every single place where he said that I had misrepresented him. I gave him chapter and verse from his own books. I really had tried to be very careful. I went through the whole thing and said, “Please explain, in the light of this, how I misrepresented you.”

I went through the whole thing all over again, to the very end, but that last question I saw as a trap. Because, you see, if I said, “No, I don’t want you to be an evangelical,” then he could hold that up in public and say, “Do you see? They’re just trying to marginalize us.” If I say, “No, I want you to call yourself an evangelical,” then I’m including him in. You have to watch these things. There are traps all the time.

So what I wrote to him was, “Of course I want you to call yourself an evangelical, but even more, I want you to be one. What I’m really calling you forward for is repentance. I’m begging you, in the name of Christ, repent in the line of Scripture. Either show me where I’m wrong in what I’ve said, either in your material or in my handling of Scripture, or repent and stop doing what you’re doing. Then raise the flag of the gospel as high as you like.

But if, in fact, you’re not acting like it, then at what point do you yourself, not as a function of what I’m suggesting that you do, but as a function of your own integrity, admit that you’re not in the evangelical camp because you’re disavowing all these fundamental biblical principles.” Well, he wrote back a 3-liner email saying, “I see that it’s really not much use pursuing this conversation,” and that was the end of it. So are they evangelicals or are they not? Well, it depends. This one still wants to use the label, but in fact he’s doing far more damage than good.

Male: Part of the problem is that evangelicalism tends to be defined either in terms of where we’ve come from, our sort of personal history, or in relation to a historical movement, rather than doctrinally and by practice that arises from the doctrine, isn’t it?

Don: Yes, that’s exactly right. There was a time when evangelicalism was, first and foremost, a theological label. Now depending on which group is talking about it, it’s a theological, sociological, historical, or even psychological label. Some people use evangelical because you come from a certain evangelical stable. Some are evangelical because they call themselves evangelical, whether or not they hold any evangelical beliefs. They’ve come out of that camp, and they still call themselves that.

The sociologists refuse to use any other category than these sorts of self-designated ones. There are some Lutheran Christians in the world who don’t call themselves evangelicals whom I would call evangelical on theological grounds. There are a lot of evangelicals who call themselves evangelicals whom I would not call evangelical on theological grounds.

So the issue gets very, very tricky. There are many people who call themselves evangelical today who no evangelical would have recognized as an evangelical 50 years ago. That’s the sad truth. So I’m not so married to the term evangelical that I think that we have to live or die by it. The trouble is, at the moment, I just don’t know another term. As a result, I still use it, but then where I go, I have to define what I mean by it and give it a certain historic rootedness.

It is grounded, as a movement, in the Reformation, but before that, in the Bible itself, in the Reformation and in the great evangelical awakenings, so it defined itself over against liberalism and Catholicism, on the one hand and is defined theologically by the solos, the insistence on the authority of Scripture as the norming norm, and a number of other kinds of things.

If you have more and more people calling themselves evangelical who are not to be distinguished from the world and the flesh and the Devil, except that they go to a church that calls itself evangelical, then the norming norm of Scripture gets left behind.

There are some statistics in North America that show that people who are self-defined evangelical have the same divorce and remarriage rates as the population at large. That’s considered a national scandal, people write long essays on it, bemoan our moral laxity, and ask, “Is judgment about to befall us?” Well, it may well be, but it still, in my view, entirely misses the point.

Other pollsters have become involved in this whole business and throw in just a few extra filters. They asked not just “Do you consider yourself an evangelical?” but “Are you an evangelical who …” Then they add just a few filters. “… goes to church at least once a week?” “… reads your Bible at least two or three times a week?” “… honestly believes that Jesus is Lord and should govern your life?” Just a few little filters like that. Not even asking probing questions such as, “Are you born again, sister?” or anything like that, but just a few filters of that sort.

That population group’s divorce rate and so on are far, far, far smaller than the national average, which tells me that there are an awful lot of evangelicals out there who aren’t converted, and in that sense, I would start saying not even an evangelical in any biblical, meaningful, theological sense of the term.

The terms are becoming very slippery. People start throwing out conservative evangelical. Am I a conservative evangelical? Well, theologically, yes, I suppose I’m conservative evangelical. I would like to think that in my giving, I’m a liberal evangelical. The very labels themselves get to be a.… I don’t want to be considered a conservative evangelical if, by conservative, you mean a certain package of cultural conservatisms. I don’t want that. So the labels have to be explained. We can’t avoid labels, but don’t make the labels the heart of the whole issue.

Male: Just going back a little bit to the emergent church, in some ways, it would be the easiest thing in the world for conservative evangelicals to simply dismiss them and say, “Well, they’re liberals; that’s what we’ve always thought.” Then so we box them and put them to one side. But do you think there are things in which the emergent church actually challenges the rest of us to be thinking about, doing, and examining in our own practices?

Don: Absolutely. I’ve tried to say that. I would put in a footnote before I insist on the point. The footnote is that in the best areas where it is challenging us, the best of the more traditional churches are already operating. So I’ll take one right out of this country, so I’m not fanning flames over here: Redeemer Presbyterian in New York City, for example, with Tim Keller.

It’s a church that really does understand the city. It understands postmodernism. I don’t know anybody in North America who is better at preaching sin to postmoderns than Tim Keller. The chap is a Presbyterian. He’s driven by theology. Their corporate worship in the morning tends to be very traditional. In the evening it tends to be more like a jazz fest. He has Bible studies going with every kind of group in the city.

People are getting converted. The average age in their church now is about 33. These are the yuppies in the city, but they also have a church plant down in Greenwich Village and so on. Aren’t those all kind of missional concerns? Next week, I’m doing something on ABC television because one of the honchos is connected with Keller’s church. Christians didn’t have those sorts of possibilities a few years ago, but he’s trying to be culturally engaged, as well, and so on.

So all I’m saying is the best of the kinds of things that I am hearing from the emerging churches, I am already hearing from a whole lot of other churches. The only reason why the emerging church leaders have stressed these things so much is because they themselves have come out of extremely culturally conservative churches. They’re talking as if they’re the only ones that have discovered that there’s such a thing as sliced bread.

It gets a bit annoying for those of us who just haven’t been over on the far right already. However … especially if you come from a church that is extremely culturally conservative, is very orthodox, is upright, is faithful to the gospel in all those kinds of ways, but has not really raised any serious thoughts about how to communicate with your pagan neighbor who is biblically illiterate … these people have some very important things to say. They’re not the only people who are saying it, but they do have some very important things to say.

If you can’t share your gospel with a homosexual neighbor, there is something wrong with your maturation in Christ. At some point, homosexuals are not just people to target, to malign, and to put down. They are fellow human beings and, thus, a part of the great morass of triumph and common grace and immorality that constitute all of us. In some sort of frame of reference or another, we have to find ways of building bridges, making friendships, and (in that sense) belonging to the broader community and, within that framework, sharing the gospel.

Insofar as they help us to do that, then I also want to say, “May their tribe increase.” If it’s at the expense of the gospel itself, then.… Wouldn’t it be nice if every movement that came along was either right from the throne room of God or right from the pit? Then you could either bless it or damn it and get on with life! The fact of the matter is this is a fallen and broken world, and most movements that come along, come with this mixture of good and bad. In the Lord’s providence, too, what that does is force us toward discernment, doesn’t it? Which isn’t all bad either.

Male: Thank you very much, Don, for that. I think we should show our appreciation at this point.

 

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.