Q&A 2 (D. A. Carson and Mark Dever in South Africa)

Listen as D. A. Carson speaks with Mark Dever on the topic of church issues in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library.

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Question: Pressures are brought to bear on us as Christians to show unconditional love to everybody from murderers to pick-pockets. How are we to deal with this?

Mark Dever: Well, that’s a great question. When you refer to unconditional love, there are a number of different things you could mean. You can love someone unconditionally and not approve of what they’re doing, so if you mean with love as the object or having as its object you and you being saved, then yes, you are to unconditionally love everyone.

You are to desire the person who you think is the most heinous sinner you know (other than yourself) to be saved, to love them in that sense, but does that love mean that you approve of what they are doing? Does that love have any necessary impact on legislation? No, that’s a very different question and involves a lot of other things.

If you want to think about this theologically, Don Carson has written a great book called, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God in which he lays out five different ways God’s love is talked of in Scripture.

Question: Mark, what would you call a Christian … saved sinner, struggling saint, or both?

Mark: Both.

Question: Please comment in some detail on the whole question of putting a date to your conversion. You mentioned growing up in a Christian home and not knowing when you were saved.

Mark: Yeah, I think there are two very important things to understand here. One, conversion is punctiliar. It finally, ultimately happens at one point in time. It means turning. That happens at one point in time when you’re given the new birth.

Second important truth, you need not know exactly when that is. You, yourself, have to repent. You, yourself, have to trust in Christ, but if that happens at a very young age, you may not have good recollection or self-awareness in that way to be able to, 20 years later, say that was the case. Yeah, I grew up certainly around some evangelism which said, “If you don’t know the day and the hour you were saved, you’re not really saved.” Well, I think that’s false. I’ll happily talk to you about that afterwards.

Question: Is there a place for a bikers’ church?

Mark: No. It is fine for you to have a bikers’ evangelistic outreach, but I think when you try to make a whole church of that, then it’s dividing the Jews and the Gentiles again. The whole thing that God was about in the church of showing reconciliation of our earthly differences, you’re messing up by then trying to have a church only of people who are homogeneous. Don’t do that. An evangelistic outreach? That’s great! But not a church.

Don Carson: I’m a biker, and I agree. One of my deep, dark secrets. What can I say? Every day the weather is good I go in on a motorcycle. Am I allowed a story here? It has nothing to do with questions and answers. I have to tell you how this happened.

When I was a kid I rode motorbikes. My first motorbike I ever rode was a 500cc Harley with what’s called the suicide shift. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know what that is. I didn’t ride them for years, and then one day my son turned 18 and announced that he wanted to ride a motorbike. My wife, his mother, said, “Absolutely no way!” He smiled sweetly and said, “Yeah, but Dad, didn’t you ride them?” Which is a bit of a killer in an argument.

So we laid down the usual rules. You take the MSF (Motorcycle Safety Foundation) course and make sure you’re wearing the proper equipment, and you pay for it yourself, and all that. So he did, and a year later he came up to me (he’s a great big strapping hunk), put his arm around my shoulder and he said, “Dad, you know what would be really cool?” I said, “What?” “If we rode together.” How could I turn down my son? I’m just trying to be a good daddy? What can I say?

Question: In South Africa, we are now in such anti-obeying-the-law that 80 percent do not stop at stop signs. How do we as Christians respond?

Mark: Well, you can pray that God will use the lawlessness of the day, and Don, I thought your illustration about that was, sadly, really good when you talked about the way there was, at the time of the Titanic, almost 100 years ago, such an inborn sense and a cultivated sense in our society of moral resolve and restraint. I think we just pray, though we’re all in those desperate situations, but that God will somehow begin to strike people’s consciences.

Question: When it comes to the doctrine of the atonement, and especially the preaching of it, do you think the idea of limited atonement is really a helpful and biblical way of speaking about it?

Don: Yes and No. It’s not a helpful way in that the category limited atonement is misleading. Unless you are a universalist, someone who believes that because of Christ’s death absolutely everybody without exception will be saved, then in some sense, you do limit the atonement. All of us do.

If you are on the classically Arminian side of this question, then you limit the atonement by saying, “Christ’s atonement is sufficient for all, but it’s not guaranteed effective for anybody.” That’s one kind of limitation. If you are (again, I don’t like the terminology) on the Reformed side, then you limit the atonement (I don’t like the terminology) in the sense that you say that it is effective for the elect, but it does not extend to everyone without exception.

I much prefer the category definite atonement. I think it is less ambiguous and is less defensive. Instead of putting you on the defense of someone who seems to be limiting the atonement, which doesn’t have a good rhetorical ring to it, I much prefer the expression definite atonement. If, however, you’re asking more the question of substance rather than the question of terminology, then I would say, “The antecedent question has to do with.… Do you believe what the Bible has to say about election and about a whole lot of other things?” That’s also the case.

Then we come to this little book that Mark mentioned, too, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God, and transparently in Scripture, among the five ways the Bible commonly speaks of the love of God, sometimes the Bible speaks of God’s love in a kind of yearning, inviting, salvific, inviting sort of mode. “Turn, turn, why will you die? The Lord has no pleasure in the death of the wicked. Look to me you ends of the earth and be saved.” That sort of thing.

On the other hand, “Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.” “Christ loved the church and gave himself for her.” In other words, in various passages, the Bible can speak of God’s love in a generalized inviting sense for all lost sinners, but it can also speak in other passages of God’s (what else can you call it?) selective love, elective love, choosing love, differentiating love.

That’s so even for Israel, is it not? “I have not chosen you because you’re bigger or brighter or stronger or wiser or more numerous, but because I loved you, because I set my affection on you.” In other words, I loved you because I loved you. You just can’t get farther back than the determination of God’s own love for his own people.

At the end of the day, what the issue is, I think, is whether or not you genuinely believe in substitutionary atonement. That’s what definite atonement is finally tied to. Everything else becomes (in my judgment) a bit of a dodge. So, yeah, I do think it is really important to uphold the doctrine.

I also think it’s important to uphold it wisely and not forget the other ways the Bible also does speak of the love of God. Otherwise you can end up with what is historically a kind of hyper-Calvinist approach to these things which means that you cannot command all people everywhere to repent and you cannot invite people to bend the knee and you cannot preach to everybody. It becomes actually a wrong thing to do to preach the gospel freely to all people. It seems to me that’s a huge mistake biblically, theologically, pastorally, and evangelistically.

Question: Should children be allowed to the Lord’s Table?

Mark: No. Now I realize there’ll be disagreement on that, and I don’t really mean an absolute, “No,” but I would just encourage you to at least begin with “No” and have to reason carefully from there. Don’t make the assumption that simply because your daughter, when she’s 4 years old, has prayed that the next Sunday she should be admitted to the Lord’s Table. So I would just give a basic, “No,” and then reason carefully with your elders to any other conclusion.

Question: Can you comment on the historical practice of the New Testament church with regard to church membership. For example, we’re all baptized people not worthy of church discipline, accepted as church members. We’re all professing believers in a particular place accepted as members of the church in that place. This seems to be the way the New Testament speaks. For example, in 1 Corinthians 1:2.

Mark: I think you’re right. The sort of formal aspects we know of membership you wouldn’t need to have where the church is first being introduced and there are not two churches, particular that disagree, in the same town. If all the Christians are together there in Jerusalem, they are a member of the same church. So I think what you see in the New Testament are by implication the rudiments of what grows into our practice of church membership and church discipline. Don, I would love to hear you talk about that when you come up, if you would for a moment.

Question: It seems to me from Scripture that there is a definite and consequential link between baptism and membership. If this is so, why does the emphasis not lie here in baptism primarily rather than in membership, and practically in preparation in discipleship, discernment by the church as to whom should be baptized and consequently a member, and responsibilities incumbent on a believer, baptism and membership rather than only as a member.

Mark: I agree with you, and if there was never any disagreement over who should be baptized, then we could go with that so long as the person would at least formally let the congregation know when they come to the place that they were committing to them as a congregation. Then I would agree with you.

The problem is this room demonstrates how you can have men and women who equally love the Lord, are equally devoted to Scripture, agree on just about everything else under the sun, but disagree on baptism. So that’s why you have to talk in more general terms of membership. Again, I’ll happily talk to you about this afterwards if you want.

Question: How does one respond to an individual who resists joining church membership yet desires to get involved in the ministry of the church? Is this dangerous?

Mark: It is dangerous. Don’t let them do it. Why would you let them get settled in socially, leading a Bible study when you’ve never heard their understanding of the gospel? When you’ve never heard them give their own testimony? When they’ve never said (in our church it would be signing a statement of faith) they believe the same thing that you do?

Maybe they believe in annihilationism, that your soul is extinguished if you’re not a Christian when you die. Maybe they deny the second coming. I would encourage you positively to set up membership in such a way that you would investigate the basics of their understanding of the gospel and of Christian truth.

That’s what a statement of faith is there to do, and as a pastor, I’ve had many good experiences with folks coming for membership in the church tripping up over something in the statement of faith that causes a good conversation. They go and read, think, pray, come back two weeks later, and they are just delighted as they’ve come to understand more. So I would encourage you to toe the line on that one.

Don: This question that I’ve inherited is tied to one that I’ve been assigned, so I’m going to waffle around these things for a moment. Let me reread the one that Mark gave me.

Question: Can you comment on the historical practice of the New Testament church with respect to church membership? In particular, we’re all baptized people not worthy of church discipline, accepted as church members. We’re all professing believers in a particular place, accepted as members of the church in that place. This seems to be the way the New Testament speaks.

Don: There are several interlocking issues, and they really are a bit complicated. First, I do think that it is important to say that there is no New Testament evidence that people were converted in the first century and then remained either unbaptized or not members of a church. In other words, it’s a total package. You get one; you get them all.

Baptism is so tied with conversion in the New Testament that you can read something like “As many as have been baptized have put on Christ.” Now if you come from certain Disciples of Christ or Church of Christ background, then you sometimes read into that the notion baptism works in and of itself. It’s an effective thing, but I don’t think that’s what is going on.

I think that baptism very often in the New Testament almost stands for conversion because it is so tied with it that when you say, “As many as were baptized have put on Christ,” you are really saying, “As many as were converted have put on Christ.” Now an example I use with my students in this regard is not entirely relevant here, but you’ll see it right away.

In the late 1920s and 1930s, there was a converted drunken baseball player by the name of Billy Sunday who went around the country preaching a kind of Arminian gospel and prohibition (against alcohol) in approximately equal doses. He was a bit of a showman, standing on tables, thumping and banging and all the rest.

Nevertheless, for a while he had huge influence and went around the country with this whopping big tent that would seat thousands and thousands of people and he had people coming forward, more or less in a kind of converted baseball player Finneyite tradition, but many people did genuinely get converted. There’s no doubt about that.

He quickly discovered that with this whopping big tent, when people came forward, if the tent had been pitched on dry ground, then when people came forward there was a lot of dust kicked up and people started hacking and coughing, which sort of broke the solemnity of the circumstance.

Alternatively if the ground was wet when people came forward, they could start slithering around in the mud, which wasn’t particularly dignified either. So he put sawdust down in all of the aisles. Out of that came the expression to hit the sawdust trail. You could say, “When were you converted?” They’d answer, “Oh, I hit the sawdust trail in Cincinnati in ‘31,” and everybody would understand what they meant.

It became so common that even if you had never been to a Billy Sunday meeting, even if you had never gone forward in a Billy Sunday tent, when you got converted you might well have said, “Oh, yeah. I hit the sawdust trail in Chicago in ‘28.” Everybody would understand what you meant even though nobody would say that going out and pounding some sawdust was intrinsic to becoming converted. In other words, it was so tied up with conversion that by metonymy it stood for conversion.

Baptism functioned a bit like that in the New Testament. Baptism has other functions as well. It has covenantal vouchsafing from God, and there are other significances to baptism. Don’t misunderstand. But on the other hand, it so was connected with conversion in the first century that you might well say to some character in Corinth, “When did you become a Christian?” “Oh, I was baptized in Corinth in ‘46.” (Except that’s the wrong calendar, but you get the idea.)

So the notion of a converted but unbaptized believer or, similarly, I think I could argue at some length, a converted baptized but nonmember believer.… It’s just incoherent in the first century. But having said that, it doesn’t mandate all possible entailments of what you do with certain situations.

It is true that when you were converted you were baptized, but when you say when, does that mean 5 minutes later? At the end of that meeting? That month? Right on the spot? When you have reformation revival circumstances and you have a situation like the Day of Pentecost, things can happen pretty fast, but it is not entirely clear that they went always exactly that fast.

Part of our problem is, I think, we have sometimes thought of conversion in such reductionistic categories that while I agree with Mark entirely that conversion viewed from God’s point of view is punctiliar, you’re either in or you’re out; nevertheless, in terms of the process of people getting there and us observing, let alone the person himself or herself knowing when, it can be really quite slippery.

There’s lots of evidence in the New Testament that some people make profession of faith and even get baptized and become members of the church, who aren’t converted. Otherwise you can’t make sense of 1 John 2:18–19: “They went out from us in order that it might be made clear that they were not of us. If they had been of us, they would have remained with us, but their going showed that they were not of us.”

Which means that you can enough grace to turn over a new leaf, make profession of faith, sign on the dotted line, be baptized, all the rest, but still not have that kind of culminating grace of perseverance that marks every true believer. What can you say?

So at the existential pastoral level, there are some decisions that have to be made even after you do say in the strongest possible terms, “In the New Testament when you’re converted, you’re baptized, you’re a member of the church.” It’s a package deal. Now there are some entailments on all of that, and I don’t know how much farther I need to go. Here’s a related question.

Question: First, how important do you think is the issue to be made about age of baptism when it comes to the issue of unity between Reformed people and membership of churches? Second, are you aware of any recent exegetical and biblical theological insights that can help to bring Baptists and paedo-baptists to a new understanding of the whole issue.

Don: For 10 years I worked part-time with the World Evangelical Fellowship, and part of my job was bringing people together from different continents, different denominations, and so on, all with a high view of Scripture, all with a reasonably good theological education. We had Africans and we had various Asians and North Americans and Latin Americans and Europeans.

We set out to address various theological issues. I would assign the topics around a certain theme. They would write the papers and hand them into me. I would circulate them to everybody. Then we would all meet, usually in Cambridge, and we’d go over everybody’s paper paragraph by paragraph together from all of these different denominational and cultural backgrounds.

We’d take detailed, critical notes of this. We’d spend 8 or 12 hours a day on these papers for a whole week and then everybody would get their notes back and they would revise them and they’d come back to me and I edited them up and out would pop a book. We did this five times over 10 years with five books.

I learned something wonderful. If you have people with reasonably good theological education and a really deep submission to Scripture, it is astonishing to me (it always has been in such meetings) how much agreement and consensus you can win. It really is. It’s a very anti-postmodern sort of view, but that’s been my experience.

Now there are certain things that are necessary: Reasonably good education (because some people just can’t see the difference between a good argument and a bad argument), a willingness to be corrected, enough time to probe and probe and probe, a willingness to probe the entailments of a position, and a certain kind of courtesy even where you disagree.

If you have those sorts of agreements, it’s astonishing how much agreement you can get. But one of the big barriers to more agreement are the kinds of discussion which themselves are tied to other discussions which are tied to other discussions which are tied to other discussions. So you get Baptists and paedo-baptists together in the same room, and it’s not just a question of how much water there is or whether you go under it, it’s tied to your whole understanding of how the covenants stand together.

It’s tied to whether or not baptism is the antitype to circumcision, which itself is tied to huge issues about the locus of the covenant community versus of the locus of the redeemed or the elect or the remnant under the old covenant, whether that continues under the new. All of those things are tied to more passages and more themes and more passages and more themes so that the issue of baptism finally turns not on quantity of water but on whole dogmatic structures that cannot be exhausted in a week of meetings even amongst the very best intentioned people.

That’s apart from our own innate sinfulness and our desire to protect our own position and we love our own denominational heritage and all the rest. So if anybody is inviting me to come along here and say, “If you just read this book, that will sort it,” it’s just not going to happen. I could mention two or three books from a Reformed Baptist side, but I could also mention two or three books from a paedo-baptist side, and those of you who are well-read in the area will say, “I’ve heard it all before.”

Those of you who are not well-read in the area, you read the first one and you’ll be convinced, you read the second one and you’ll be convinced, you read the third one and you’ll be convinced, you read the fourth one.… It takes a while even to be sufficiently immersed in the discussions to find out how these things have played out historically. Now that’s the second part of the second question here. The first part was …

Question: Is there a particular age for baptizing people. There was another question in here that came up the same way as well, so I might as well do that one at the same time.

Don: I’m speaking now as a Reformed Baptist. I don’t take the same stance as some. When I was pastor of a church in Vancouver we had a lot of college and careers and young professionals who were getting converted, and because they were getting converted and our baptistery was being used quite a lot, in a church like that what happens is the kids start coming up, too. “Pastor Don, could I be baptized?” So we had all these 8-year-olds and 9-year-olds and 10-year-olds coming to us because they saw the baptistery being used so often with the 22- and 25-year-olds.

I was not satisfied, on the one hand, with the view that simply says, “Wait until 18,” or fix your own number. Although there are my Reformed brethren who say exactly that sort of thing. I’m not satisfied either with the sloppy approach of many Southern Baptists and others in North America where any profession of faith will do. “Get them forward, get them dunked, and then they’re in.” I wasn’t satisfied with either.

Eventually I stumbled across some of the work of one greatest of the Anabaptist theologians, Balthasar Hubmaier. He was bumped off so early he never reached his full prime. Some have said that had he grown, he might have become a theologian of the caliber of a Calvin. Now who’s to say? He certainly had that kind of mind.

He, amongst the best streams of the Anabaptists, developed this sort of procedure: The rule of thumb was there was no age at which they would say, “Yes” or “No” to a child of Anabaptist parents, but when in the opinion of the elders the child had self-consciously felt the tug and attraction of the world and for Jesus’ sake had refused it while trusting Christ, they would baptism him.

Now that still requires pastoral discernment, but it’s shrewd, so I developed some practices after a while to try to handle that. The first one that came along was a lass. She was 8 years old. She came from a wonderful home. She’d seen some of our 20-somethings getting baptized, and she came to me after a Sunday evening service and told me she wanted to be baptized.

By that time I had thought it through. So I said to her, “Nancy, it’s a wonderful thing that you’re asking. This is so important I want to come and see you and talk to you at home. Not to your parents; I want to talk to you.” I tipped her parents off, and I said, “I don’t mind if you listen in, but I prefer you listen in from the next room. I want to talk to Nancy.”

So when I got there, I tried to put her at her ease and find out about her schoolmates and this sort of thing. Then I asked her what she liked in her Bible reading and then asked her some easy pitch questions that any kid brought up in a Christian home who has been decently catechized is going to get. This was a strong home with biblical devotions. You threw her the regular questions, and she would come back with orthodox answers. After she had given a number of these, then I started with my prepared curveballs.

Now I warned her at the beginning of this discussion that the leaders of the church, the elders of the church, had to have it when somebody asked for baptism sometimes to say after listening and talking to the person and praying about it, “Yes, we think it’s a great idea. We really do believe you know Christ, and we would like to baptize you.” Sometimes we say, “No,” and sometimes we say, “We’re not quite sure. Would you mind if we wait a little longer because we really want what’s best for you.” So I’d set the stage with that already.

The curveballs were things like, “Nancy, if your mom tells you to go and clean your room and you do it, does that mean that if you died today after cleaning your room you have a better chance of getting into heaven?” You see, that’s not asking, “Have you received Jesus as your personal Savior?” The clichÈs are always going to get the right answer from a kid brought up in a Christian home. I had prepared about a dozen curveballs along those lines that covered various areas of doctrine but in nonfamiliar terminology. She flubbed them all.

So I said to her, “This is not a decision I ever make on my own. This is something we talk about and pray about with the elders and I’ll get back to you.” Part of what I’m doing is taking out the steam. I’m lowering the temperature, giving it some time. Then we talked about her particular instance with the leaders of the church, and then in due course two or three weeks later, I went back to her and said that in the counsel of the elders we thought it was a good thing to wait for a little longer.

She took it very happily. It was fine. Now in her particular case, I happened to be back in Vancouver some years later, and she was baptized on her eighteenth birthday and ultimately married a French Canadian and became a missionary to Africa. I could tell you some ugly stories as well, but that one worked out extremely well.

After a while, then, I developed whole sets of these questions that I then trained my leaders with so that we didn’t have an age. I’m nervous about an age, but at the same time, we had these grids that we’re looking for some kind of authenticity without providing a kind of maturation screen that is in my judgment a bit artificial.

Mark: If I can just add one qualification to that.… I agree, we certainly don’t officially have an age either. I would be cautious about just establishing questions, because a 14-year-old guy who likes reading systematic theology is going to zip through those questions, and there are still some other things I’d want to see in his life. Yeah, but I think that’s an excellent example of a pastoral tool like that.

As far as discussion on things you disagree on, I had a wonderful debate on baptism that I set up for the staff and interns of our church with a local PCA minister, a Presbyterian minister. Dave Kaufman is one of the most articulate ministers, I think, in the Presbyterian church in America. He’s an amazing man. He pastors in suburban Washington.

He agreed to come to our church and to our building, and we had a big whiteboard, but the way we conducted the debate was I thought a more amicable way to do it was that we had so much agreement, I said, “Dave, let’s demonstrate to these people to their surprise how much we agree on. Let’s take turns writing statements on the board we think are true about baptism that we think the other person would agree with.”

It is amazing how much we got written up there. We filled the whiteboard with things that we believed that we thought the other person would say as well. I mean, there were a few times we had to sort of pause and think and go, “Yeah, I think I can say this,” and we teased out some very interesting disagreements, but we did it in a very amicable way that was, I think, useful for everybody involved.

Question: Do you allow into membership at Capitol Hill those who by conviction are paedo-baptists?

Mark: No, because in order to be a member of our church you have to sign the statement of faith, and there’s an article in the statement of faith on baptism and the Lord’s Supper. So if we as a congregation are going to be acting together, it won’t be helpful if you’re there and you think we’re in sin for not baptizing the infants and you think we’re in sin for (as you would understand it) rebaptizing this person who had been baptized as an infant, but we don’t think they’ve been baptized. With all due respect, we like everything you intended to do.

So when we get somebody like that we tell them, “Please encourage your parents. Tell them everything they want in the vows they took, we agree with. Thank God, you were brought up in a Christian home.” We simply have a disagreement over what baptism is, and then if they conclude that baptism is in fact for believers only, then we will baptism those people, and that would be a great trial to our dear paedo-baptist brothers and sisters. So, no, though we happily have them come and preach and teach us.

Question: What solution is there to this problem when sincere believers do not believe in credobaptism?

Mark: Heaven. I’m serious. It’s been going on 500 years. We can keep loving each other and learning from each other, and some of us will cross over the line to the other side. My wife was Presbyterian. But then on the other hand, my roommate in college is Presbyterian, and he married a Baptist evangelist’s daughter. So it goes both ways.

Question: At what point do you discipline a member for lack of church attendance.

Mark: Be very slow to do that. We do that, but we would want to wait and see a while, and there would need to be some other things, too. They would need to not be in contact with us or resist, but certainly that lack of attendance is what will tip us off to get more involved and see what’s going on, but ultimately we would because of Hebrews 10:25. If they just stop attending and are able to attend, will not attend, yeah, then we would ultimately do that.

Question: How do you handle such cases in which people resign their membership, assuming they are not transferring to another church?

Mark: We don’t allow them to. We understand it to be sin to choose to not be in fellowship regularly, and so we would excommunicate them. Again, from Hebrews 10:25, not for trying to resign from our church. We have people resigning from our church all the time, but they resign from our church because they move someplace else in the country and they’re going to join another church or in a minority of cases, if they move to another local evangelical church for various reasons.

You know, they’ve gotten engaged to a girl who goes there and they feel all things considered they should go there. We allow them to resign in those circumstances, but if somebody is ever brazen enough to tell us, “I want to resign my membership,” we’re probably fine so far and “I won’t be going anywhere.” Right. Then we don’t understand that they have that option so we would excommunicate them for nonattendance.

Question: When discussing church membership you mentioned that we need to have a statement of faith and a covenant that members sign. How do you respond to those who say that a covenant is pagan, and often they use Matthew 5:33–34 to back this up? Is it biblical to call people to agree to a covenant?

Mark: I’ve never had people use Jesus’ words on vows to object to the church covenant. That’s interesting, so I’ve not really thought about that. We have had one person on similar grounds, though not so well defended exegetically, say he didn’t feel in his conscience right about signing the covenant, though he said he agreed with everything in it and intended to live that way. Well, then we let that stand. That was fine, because that’s what we’re trying to get at, not the simple act of signing the paper, but at least in my experience, I haven’t had a lot of people say that.

Question: How would you present or handle new members’ class when your church is small, say around 50 members, and you receive applications for membership, for example, once every 3 months, only one person applying at a time.

Mark: That’s a really good question. I think I would just disciple them individually and take that opportunity to enjoy the size of that church. You can’t do that when you’ve got 10 times that many members. The Lord may be doing something wonderful with you being able to disciple those people, so I think I would still take them through it, but just do it individually.

Question: How long is your new members’ class?

Mark: It’s seven sessions.

Question: In the curriculum or content of your new members’ class, is it available on your website.

Mark: It is. You can download it for free at capitolhillbaptist.org.

Question: Is it required that a member of the church should tithe.

Mark: No.

Question: Which should be the consequences of members not tithing?

Mark: They should feel guilty. They should start to give. I don’t think we can strictly require tithing per se from the New Testament, but I’m kind of like that like I am Sabbatarianism. I’m not a Sabbatarian, but I kind of act like one. So I don’t really believe you can require tithing.

What we tell our people when they are joining in DC, generally, is, “Look, everything you have is the Lord’s. America is a rich country. Most of the people we’re interviewing for membership are young. We tell them, “Look, try to begin giving 10 percent of your income to the local church, but try to increase that. Whether you’re here or you move to another church, always be working to increase that.” My wife and I have done that.

We would encourage all the Christians we know to do that, and there have been the occasional times when we’ve had people join us who are just in terrible straits financially, and then we offer them help. We try to investigate their finances, what’s going on, are there ways they could be more disciplined, are there other ways they need training or that we could help them, and we try to do that.

Don: One of the best books to read on this question of tithing and giving is by Craig L. Blomberg called Neither Poverty nor Riches. It’s another book in the NSBT series, New Studies in Biblical Theology. It works through all of the relevant passages, and in my view, it’s today, by far, the best treatment. It far outstrips things by Sider and people like that.

Question: Who should be allowed to preach? Any pastor, elders, any member? Who should be allowed to teach?

Don: Part of the problem with this discussion is that these categories of preaching and teaching are used in the New Testament in several different ways, sometimes in generic ways that apply to all Christians in some sense. As I understand the Great Commission, it’s mandated of all believers, even if it was applied to the disciples first, and so if we’re to “make disciples of all nations, teaching them to observe,” there is some sense in which all Christians have got to be involved in teaching.

Again, the writer to the Hebrews can berate his readers, “By this time you ought to be teachers, and instead you’re still going over the elementary things of the Word of God.” So there is some sense in which the whole church should be involved in teaching. But that might mean in the context of the home. It might mean in terms of neighborhood Bible studies of an evangelistic sort. It might be all kinds of different contexts.

So in one sense, we all ought to be heralding the gospel, which is preaching, and in some sense we all ought to be teaching the Word of God to others, so in that sense, the more the merrier. I don’t see any barriers except where the content of the teaching is in error or is not faithful to the Word of God.

But that does not mean that every teacher has the same voice or the same authority or the same knowledge, and it does not account for the fact that there are some who are appointed pastor/teachers in the church. There you also then find the witness of James, as in chapter 3 “Do not be many teachers knowing that you shall face the more severe judgment.”

I tell you frankly, I find that one of the scariest verses in all of God’s Holy Word. “Don’t be many teachers; you’re going to be judged more severely,” so I spend my time wondering around the world teaching people. So the idea of getting on a bandwagon and “God has called me to teach. I want to teach,” it can be genuinely Spirit-driven. It can be a form of one-upmanship, of just wanting to throw your weight around.

It’s important to recognize that God has gifted certain people to be pastor/teachers in the church and they have a primary responsibility for the whole magisterial function, the teaching function of the local church, and that means that if there are others in the church who are teaching, they really ought to submit in principle to the magisterial office that God has particularly appointed where there will be more maturity, one hopes, and more insight, more knowledge, and there will be a kind of passing on and training out for the whole rest of the church.

Question: Are there distinctions (I have half a dozen questions in here on women) about limitations of what women may do in the church?

Don: I’ll come to that one again in a moment, but it still has to be put within the broader question first of all Christians being mandated to teach in some sense, to learn in some sense. I detest with a passion the implicit view that wants to keep theological education out of the hands of women. “Lord, you keep them ignorant, and I’ll keep them pregnant.” That kind of view? It’s demeaning.

I want as many women as possible to get as much theological education as possible. My own mother was probably a better student of Greek and Hebrew than my father. She was probably better at outlining Bible studies and things like that, too. Yet there was no sense in which she was pastor of the church, too.

When I hear some of the worldwide names of women who are teaching the Bible in certain contexts and who cannot open their mouths without sticking their hermeneutical foot in it, I cringe. What I long for them to have is a couple of MDivs and things like that and get some decent Bible under their belt for the sake of the ministry and even for the sake of their ministry amongst women, for goodness’ sake. Beyond that I’ll make some further observations in my next round, or one of my next rounds.

Question: You mentioned that some would argue that there are teaching elders and nonteaching elders. Is there a difference? Does Scripture clearly teach that elders are to teach?

Mark: Scripture does clearly teach that elders are to teach in 1 Timothy 3. Paul is clear. In fact, apt to teach is the only qualification that’s not really something that is required of all Christians. Our church, when we first came to it, did not have elders, and I had the great privilege of having Don come and teach on elders.

I don’t know if you remember that. You addressed a joint sort of Sunday school class of mainly the older people who were not entirely happy with the idea of elders. But one of the great things Don did in doing that is he went through each of the things that are enjoined, and then he showed elsewhere in Scripture where all Christians are called to have these virtues.

The one exception is the apt to teach. So yes, all elders need to teach. Now I think what you may be getting at is in 1 Timothy 5 where he says in verse 17, “The elders who direct the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honor, especially those whose work is preaching and teaching.” Some people have taken that last phrase to imply that there are some elders whose work is not preaching and teaching.

I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think that’s any more true than say, Paul, when he says in 1 Timothy 4:9–10, “This is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance (and for this we labor and strive), that we have put our hope in the living God, who is the Savior of all men, and especially of those who believe.”

Oh, well, I think what Paul is doing in the second phrase, is he’s clarifying what he means in that first phrase. “… the Savior of all men …” Oh, is Paul a Universalist? Well, I mean, “… those who believe.” Well, I think that’s exactly what he’s doing here. “The elders who direct the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honor.” I mean, those whose work is preaching and teaching. I think that’s a description of the elders’ work.

Question: If you have inherited an eldership team and some don’t conform to biblical mandates (the things that I mentioned earlier today about how we found elders), where does one start and what can one do?

Mark: Well, one starts really, really carefully. One does really, really, little except for pray sincerely to the Lord who called you here that he will provide, and teach, teach the elders and teach publically and simply pray that God will with each one of these individuals give you a solution. Maybe some of them will become qualified. Maybe others will see from your teachings themselves that they aren’t qualified.

I had two older men in the church, dear godly brothers, that when I was nominating our first round of elders, I approached them about nominating them, not because I was entirely convinced they were qualified but because I thought it would be useful and they were humble enough. I was thinking a little bit more politically but knowing they were really godly and they were not going to do anything wrong.

Both of them said, “I don’t think I’m qualified to teach.” These were men in the 60s and 70s who had been in the church 50 years, godly men in their lives, and they were right. So pray that God would show mercy on that particular eldership. Just get very practical. Look at your church constitution, and who has the responsibility for naming elders, how that happens, and make sure you begin to address it there.

Also, is there an end to the eldership term? So we would recognize elders for 3 years. Then they have to be reaffirmed by the elders and the congregation, and then unless that’s their full-time calling, like me, they would have to take a year’s sabbatical. Then they have to be nominated again before they would serve again. So just look to some practical things you could do to help with down the road.

Question: In a recent book, Revolution, the author, George Barna, speaks of and seems to endorse the trend toward the informal home-type church. Your comments on this approach to church in light of your teaching on membership and church discipline?

Mark: As I said earlier today, it doesn’t matter. A church doesn’t need a building; it needs people, members. Those members for the first three centuries of Christianity did not meet in property that they owned as a church as a corporate entity publically. The fact that a group meets in a home is neither here or there to whether they’re a church.

What determines whether they’re a church is whether or not they are taking responsibility to preach the word, to baptize, and to have the Lord’s Supper, and to do so in accordance with Scripture. If they are able to do that, then it’s fine with me wherever they would meet.

But if by that sort of informal-type you mean to suggest that there is no formal membership, that they may or may not baptize, they may or may not have sermons, may or may not have the Lord’s Supper, and they are kind of loose on things like that, well then, no, I think you’re getting into other questions.

I read Barna’s book, Revolution, too, and that’s definitely what he’s talking about. Barna is talking about going out with five friends who like to golf, and that’s his church, and I don’t think that’s a church.

Don: So often in these matters, it is easy to sound prophetic from the margin. In other words, if you have a voice like Barna’s or like McLaren’s or people like that, they sound prophetic because they’re on the margins of things. It’s easy to sound prophetic from the margins, but what that tends to do is, wittingly or unwittingly, to shift the center toward the margin.

If you talk to a McLaren, and say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but you don’t make the cross the center the way I do,” he gets quite indignant and says, “Yeah, but I believe in the cross, too. I’m not denying the importance of the cross.” But anybody who has been a teacher or preacher for a while knows that how you stamp the next generation is not merely by what you say but what you get excited about.

So that if the gospel becomes what you assume while what you focus on is on the margins, the next generation is focused on the margins. One of the most urgent things for the church of the living God in every generation is to be prophetic from the center, and that means you have to get the basics right again and again and again.

What you just got from Mark Dever was that kind of voice. Do you have to have buildings? Many people are thinking of pipe organs and stained glass and all. Or can you be a house church? You hear this polarization, and you think, “What’s going on in that kind of agenda?” You’re offered extremes.

Why don’t you start with the biblical center … what the gospel is, what the church is, what the people of God … then whether or not you have buildings is relatively incidental, but this thing that sounds as if it’s pushing toward informality and fellowship and intimacy in the small unit, well, those are all good values.

Who am I to want to criticize any of those? But why do they have to be put over against whether or not you have classical hymns and a pipe organ? Are those the crucial things that define us? So you have to start from the center all the time. Start from the center, start from Scripture, and then work out to make judgments in these areas. Otherwise you trip over yourselves all the time. Be prophetic from the center.

Question: What is your view on the Puritan emphasis of first preaching the law before preaching Christ and the atonement?

Don: In 25 words or less.… It wasn’t just the Puritan view. That view has filtered down to contemporary evangelicalism in various strands. Wesley, in one of his letters was asked by an interlocutor, “What do you do when you go into any new place to preach the gospel?”

He said (and this could have come right out of Puritan writings, but it shows that it went right through the Wesleyan side of the Methodist movement), “I begin with a general declaration of the love of God, and then I preach the law. I preach the law so that people will know that they are guilty before God, that they will see their sin, know of their deep need, their desperate state. After I see that there are at least a few people under such conviction of sin that some are agitated and perhaps crying, I preach more law.

Then, when there are many, many people in the congregation who are clearly under a deep, deep burden of sin, I admix a little grace. When virtually the whole congregation is crying out to God for forgiveness, then I preach the gospel freely and openly and generously and show the matchless love of God. Then quickly, do I admix law, lest men shall presume.”

In some ways that’s classic Puritanism. It comes from Wesley. It’s one of the reasons why Jim Packer calls Wesley an inconsistent Calvinist. Most Wesleyans don’t like that label on their hero, but nevertheless, there is some truth to it when you see how he actually went about doing certain kinds of things.

So then, is this wise? Is this right? Is this good? The biblical passage on which this is preeminently based, this theory, is Galatians 3. For in Galatians 3, Paul says, in effect, that the law was given as our schoolmaster to lead us to Christ. It was given because of sin, because of transgression.

The idea is the law multiplied the transgression. The rebellion was already there, but the law said, “You shall not,” and we did it anyway, so the law becomes all the more damning, all the more indicting, and as a result, finally, it becomes our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ.

You can still find quite a lot of people in the Reformed camp who work through chapter 3 of Galatians and draw exactly that lesson today. I’ve got two or three problems with it, and yet there’s something to it that is right. That’s why I can’t answer this one quickly. I can’t just say, “Yes,” or “No.”

In the first place, Galatians 3 is transparently not about the psychological profile of somebody who comes to Christ. It’s not about the individual. It’s not about how you preach the gospel to individuals today in any particular culture. Transparently, it’s about redemptive history. It’s what place the law has in the stream of redemption.

Paul’s argument is not, “Make sure you preach the law before you come to Christ. At the psychological level this is necessary.” His argument is, “Don’t you understand? The promise that in Abraham and in his seed all the nations of the earth would be blessed was given unambiguously to the forefather of the Jews before the law was given, and this gospel promise was already there on the books.” God’s own unconditioned promise before the law was given.

So therefore, you are misplacing the center of things if you say that the law is central. The promise comes first, and the giving of the law cannot annul the promise. In other words, the whole argument is salvation-historical, what place the law has in the stream of redemptive history rather than what place the law has in our psychology.

On the other hand, if you ask why God gives the law in this stream of redemptive history, it is, amongst other things, precisely to show the guilt and the fact that at the end of the day, the law itself cannot save. Mere moral demands, mere demand for right choice, it is not itself intrinsically powerful.

It takes the grace of God reaching in and transforming, and since that was required for the Jews, the covenant people of God in the whole stream of redemptive history, then in some sense isn’t it all the more necessary today? So if you’re going to use chapter 3 of Galatians to make some sort of argument along these lines, it had better be filtered through the grid of redemptive history rather than become immediately individualizing or you’re abusing Scripture.

At the same time, I would say that sin in the Bible, in the largest frame of reference possible, is a very generic term. It’s more than, it’s more complex than, it’s more multilayered than mere breach of law. I use the term mere advisedly. After all, as Paul argues in Romans, sin prevails from the fall until Moses. If you read right through the Old Testament and ask, “What is it that is most repeatedly said to make God angry?” It’s idolatry. Idolatry has to do with the breaking of the relationship between Creator and creature.

In my judgment, it is more useful today. It catches people unawares a little more powerfully, more immediately today amongst a new generation of biblical illiterates to get across sin in the categories of idolatry, the de-Godding of God, the breaking of the relationship with our Maker, rather than law. I say rather than; that’s overstating the case. I’m happy to talk about the breach of law, but only when I’ve got some of these other things in place.

In my view, one of the ablest preachers in the Western world for getting across the nature of sin to biblically illiterate relativists is Tim Keller at Redeemer.com. Go and download 20 or 30 of his tapes, and you’ll hear him doing it all the time. He makes constant appeal to the category of idolatry, and in that sense, the old Puritan insight was right. I just think that they fasten it on law rather than on the bigger category of idolatry and they justified their view by a false reading of Galatians 3. Nevertheless, the big issue that they were dealing with was surely right.

People don’t cry to be saved unless they know they’re lost. They don’t see what the gospel is about unless they see what condemnation is about. Unless they see that the whole issue is whether or not you’re going to be reconciled to your Maker or face him as Judge and be consigned forever to banishment from his presence in torment, unless you see that is the eternal issue, it is the fundamental issue, it is the controlling issue, then you won’t begin to see what the cross is about.

In that sense, yes, you do want people to know their lostness, to know their sin, to know the ugliness of idolatry. Otherwise, you may be guilty of preaching a gospel which (to use the prophetic words) means healing the wounds of God’s people slightly. So there is deep, deep insight in the Puritan vision. I think the way they get it and defend it sometimes is a bit mistaken and could be improved a bit in terms of biblical theology.

Question: In a church planting situation when in terms of numbers and quality, can we start calling or designating a group of believers in a specific locality a local church if, for instance, there are no suitable candidates for eldership yet? Is that a church?

Mark: That’s a really good question. To the person who asked the question, is there a single elder? Is there a preacher? If there is a preacher, then, yes, I think you can call it a church, but it certainly is an immature church. Don, would you agree with that?

Don: It seems to me again that what we’re trying to do is have a kind of simply on/off switch, and that’s not always wise. On the first apostolic mission, the apostle Paul and Barnabas go out and they preach and they plant churches in every place. It’s on the return swing that they appoint elders in all these churches. I mean, it’s very interesting, isn’t it? So are they churches or are they not? Well, yes. Are they full-fledged, functioning, mature churches? Not yet.

Mark: But you would say that a church like that without a plural eldership could certainly take in members, could have baptism, and the Lord’s Supper?

Don: Absolutely, yes. Unless you try to make priestly functions of pastoral ministry so only the ministers can baptize.

Mark: Which I guess by you calling it priestly function, you don’t think it’s a good idea.

Don: Well, I think that it needs to be controlled by the authority of the church, and that’s normally in the church or worked out through the elders/pastors of the church. On the other hand, where you don’t really have that, it still ought to be done for the preaching of the gospel’s sake.

If the pastors then designate some others to come in, I don’t think that there’s something especially magic about being baptized by a particular man. I’ve had people come up to me in England and say, “I was baptized by Lloyd-Jones.” I’ve had people come and tell me that, and what are you supposed to say? “Bully for you”? Or, “Does this make you holier?”

Mark: I’ve attended a conference by Don Carson.

Don: [Inaudible] priestly functions in the ministry, too, and for all that you want to stress the importance of the fact that there are pastor/teachers in the church with certain responsibilities, you also want to preach the priesthood of all believers and work that out in great detail.

Question: Sometimes one hears reference made to Matthew 13:24–30, the parable of the weeds, regarding the matter of church discipline, and usually it’s used to say that it’s inappropriate for us to practice church discipline because the servants ask him, “Do you want us to go and pull them up?” and he answered, “No, because while you’re pulling the weeds, you may root up the wheat with them.”

Mark: I don’t think that parable is well used against church discipline, though it has commonly been done. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, established churches regularly pulled out this parable against churches that would be more Puritan or more pure or more reforming. This was just standard fare.

I would think, unfortunately, for that argument is verse 38 where Jesus is explaining the parable a little bit later and says, “The one who sowed the good seed is the son of man; the field is the world,” not the church. So this is having reference to final judgment, not to what is done in church. So I don’t think it’s immediately relevant to church discipline in that way.

Don: It’s also one of the parables of the kingdom. What this raises in a big, big fashion is.… What is the relationship between the kingdom and the church? That’s further complicated by the fact that kingdom is what some call the tensive symbol; that is, it doesn’t have the same technical force in every place.

In some cases, the kingdom is God’s utter sovereignty. “His kingdom rules over all. In this case, God is ruling over the whole thing, over the whole world, and in this whole world, there are wheat and there are tares. But in other places, well, you have to be born again to see the kingdom or to enter the kingdom, and in that sense, the kingdom is that subset of God’s sovereignty under which there is life.

So again some of our complications in this area are because we’ve not thought accurately and context-related very carefully as to what kingdom means and what church means in any particular passage. But you cannot simply say that kingdom equals church. Kingdom is a dynamic category of reign, and it can be in particular that subset of God’s reign under which there is regenerating life and is finally consummated in the new heaven and the new earth or it can have to do with God’s sovereignty, but church is a people category.

Church is a people category. Kingdom is a king dominion dynamic category. It’s certainly true that the exercise of God’s saving reign calls out the church, and then in the restricted sense of the locus where God’s saving reign operates in this age is the church, so it all kind of overlaps, but you cannot take a parable of the kingdom and simply say it’s referring to a mixed corpus of people in the church, that exegesis.

Mark: With all due respect to our Anglican brothers here. I have several questions here on what you should do when you discipline someone in a practical sense. Meaning, when a member has been disciplined then how do you treat them? Forgive me for not taking these all individually. One of you cites 1 Corinthians 5:11, “Do not even eat with them.” Basically I would say, if you look at all those phrases that I read through this afternoon, there seems to be a sort of range of acceptable behavior.

I would just say looking at how Christians have understood this in the past, the two sort of extremes would be the sort of Anabaptist/separatist/Amish, “We entirely cut off from you; we treat you as if you’re dead” over to the modern evangelical, “Well, we would want to say something to the person, but then we’d want to go on and keep befriending them because that’s how they’re going to repent.”

I would say you’d probably want to be inside of those two borders. You probably don’t want to get in either of those positions, just get inside of there. For example, in our congregation, we would not encourage any member of our congregation to literally have a meal with someone who had been disciplined if it were merely a sort of casual meal, because we think that would seem to have the connotation to them of, “Everything is okay … sorry about this religion thing” It’s a little awkward sometimes.”

Now if they want to go have a meal and talk with them specifically about substantial matters in their life, that’s quite different. We would understand that if some of the sort of fishing works from the continuing preaching to repent, but what we would not want is the kind of casual social interactions that communicate, “Everything is okay.”

Question: How are we to understand the doctrine of progressive sanctification when we see believers, even leaders in our churches, who continue to struggle with a particular sin years later? The sin has been repeatedly confronted, but may be a personality flaw that is not serious enough to warrant church discipline. How do we discipline the smaller sins of character and personality?

Don: I want to respond in two or three steps. I’ll try to be as brief as I can. First, this side of the Reformation, many of us use the term sanctification over against justification. Justification is the mark of entrance. It is God’s declaration that you really are just in his presence. It’s the outset of the believer’s experience, whereas sanctification is ongoing conformity to Christ. It’s ongoing progress. In terms of the Reformation debates at the time, this is a very useful distinction.

On the other hand, the best of the Reformers themselves recognized in terms of actual word usage in the New Testament, sometimes the sanctification word group, the holiness word group, the hagios word group, actually refers not to continuing progress but to what they would variously call definitional sanctification or positional sanctification. That is, you’re already set aside for God. You’re holy.

So when Paul writes to the Corinthians, for example, he addresses himself to those in Corinth, “… sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy …” Now that’s very interesting. To think of the Corinthians as a sanctified church on traditional definitions of sanctification is a bit of a stretch. Paul’s not quite sure they have their doctrine of resurrection right. Some people are in complete chaos in terms of church order and public worship. At least one chap is sleeping around with his stepmother. There is argumentation over party factions and all.

This is a sanctified church? Well, yes, in one sense. Sanctification in the New Testament can, and in my judgment, in the majority of cases, does actually refer to a kind of religious equivalent of the forensic element of justification. You’re either in or you’re out. But, there are lots of other passages in the New Testament which do speak of growth.

For example, Philippians 3 is a classic. “Forgetting those things which are behind.… I press on toward.… My brothers, I do not think that I have arrived [achieved], but I press on to pursue that for which also I am apprehended by Christ.” The whole idea is of growth. In other words, I would want to argue that the New Testament teaches the doctrine of sanctification without much using the word, and when it uses the word sanctification, it’s normally not talking about the doctrine but about positional sanctification.

Now what that means is you have to recognize that there are sometimes distinctions in the word usage in the domain of systematic theology and in the domain of exegesis, because the fact of the matter is the biblical writers sometimes use words a little bit differently from the way later systematics use them.

Or they use words differently even amongst themselves. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, for example, Jesus says things like, “Many are called, but few are chosen.” Called in that context means something like invited. But for Paul, if you’re called, you’re saved. Well, it’s a different use of the same verb, isn’t it? It’s the context that defines.

So if you’re trying to write a systematic theology and you write, “The doctrine of the call of God,” well, probably you’re going to take it out of Paul, and then you’re going to make a mistake when you go and read Matthew. So it is important to recognize that vocabulary regularly has a domain of discourse, and you need to see how that domain of discourse is functioning.

One of the jobs of a well-informed preacher is in preaching particular texts to make sure people understand the text as God has given it. The text as a text, but also, then, to make links not only to our personal lives but to the way this has been used in the history of the church so that people can understand what those debates are so that when they are reading Calvin or Luther or whatever, they are understanding how the vocabulary has sometimes been used a bit.

Now you don’t do that in every sermon, but that’s part of progress in your growth as a pastor, as a preacher, in teaching the whole counsel of God so that you’re making the links to help people understand a little better. That’s the first thing. So when you start talking about sanctification and growth in grace, that’s a really important thing to say.

Second, until the consummation, we will struggle with sin. Yes, yes, yes. Another way of looking at this is the question of integrity. If you’ve been around in the church for any period of time, you have seen ministers make terrible shipwreck of their faith, sometimes after years and years and years of fruitful ministry.

In the various instances where I’ve been involved close up with people like that, in no case, in no case, has it suddenly happened. There has been an antecedent pattern of deceit, of double standards. In no case. There might be one somewhere, but I haven’t come across it yet. What that does is raise the much deeper question of integrity. Integrity is merely being in public what you are in private. That’s all it is. It’s being the same thing on the inside as on the outside. That’s all it is.

That’s what Jesus has in mind when he speaks of being single-eyed. It’s what Jesus’ half-brother has in mind when he says, “A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.” God help us, in some measure all of us lack, this side of the consummation, perfect integrity. Would you want your spouse to know absolutely everything you ever think about him or her or about other parties?

But if you’re a Christian, if you’re genuinely a Christian, and you really are committed to the gospel, then the pattern is, you hate the double standard. You see yourself caught up in it, but you want the inside and the outside to be as unified as they can be. You repent when these things are there. Do you see?

If instead you develop a whole public persona of what Christians look like, how they behave and this sort of thing, but this interior that is still the old nature that you’re not quite yet done with it, you start to feed and you start to nurture it. Then what happens is this pus pocket begins to be fed, and while you’ve got this external looking quite good, inside there’s more and more and more poison.

Your inside is not where your outside is. Your outside is, “God bless you, my sister.” “I’m praying for you, my brother.” And your inside is feeding porn on the Internet or building up resentments against some minister who is more capable or becoming very materialistic or real resentments to your spouse or whatever. It’s growing and growing and growing until eventually what happens is the outside shell becomes so thin it just explodes, and you say, “Where did that come from?”

Well, it came from about 15 years of feeding the poison, of not dealing with the issue of integrity, of being one person, which the Bible speaks about so often, “A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways,” So this struggling with sin needs to be put in the matrix of a whole lot of discussions.

It’s regularly the person who is closest to holiness that is most drawn to the light who is most aware of his or her sin because the light shows up all the dirt. So as you grow in grace, ironically, you may actually for a while feel more guilty, and then you return to the cross again, and then you see more light and you feel more guilty again. You become aware of more and more poison. But at the same time, that’s part of the Spirit’s work to make you more and more conformed to Christ. That’s part of the growth, isn’t it?

One day, one day, we will be transformed and will never struggle like that again. We have moments, don’t we, when we catch glimpses even in our own lives of what it means to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength and our neighbors as ourselves? We say, “Yes, there’s some gospel working even in me.”

Then somebody says something rude to you and you want to rip them apart. And here we go again. But you’d like to think that over years the ripping apart stuff is a little less frequent, and the praying for your enemies is a little stronger, and the light of God’s Word mediated by the Spirit is a little more powerful and more probing.

You still hate this polarity between the outside and the inside, between the external man and what we are on the inside. We want to become one people, single-eyed in that sense, loving God with heart and soul and mind and strength and our neighbors as ourselves. It’s part of what gospel transformation is about.

Do not think you’re ever going to break out of it completely before the consummation, but never stop wrestling and fighting. Otherwise you’re just so far removed from the pages of the New Testament and “wrestling not against flesh and blood but against the powers of darkness” and so on. That brings us, then, to the practical question, the third element of this one right at the very end.

Question: What do you do about discipline for smaller sins of character and personality?

Don: I don’t even know if I can always talk about smaller and larger, but discipline is not excommunication or nothing. It’s also admonition. It’s encouragement. It’s gentle exhortation. So even amongst some of the ministers that Mark and I know.… If Mark thought I was going wrong in some place, he would tell me. We’re both aware of a particular minister who is astonishingly gifted. He’s not 36 yet, and he’s planted far more churches than Mark or I will do in our lives combined, and yet, in all fairness, this dear brother does need some rebuke.

There are a bunch of us around him who are trying to sidle up to him and love him and cherish him and say, “You know, that’s not smart. Clean up your language.” But on the other hand, then you start looking also at the direction of a life, don’t you? In a conversation with Mark he mentions, “When people are moving towards your position, you don’t shoot them.” As they are coming through the door, you don’t say, “Hey, you’re not in yet,” Rat-a-tat-tat-tat and wipe them out.

So you want to take a look at their direction, and the same is true in the local church, isn’t it? So that if somebody comes in with a really violent temper and a whole background of abuse, God’s not finished with him yet. He’s not finished with you yet. You want to see where the directions are, and part of genuine full-orbed Christian discipline is trying to provide the safety net and the admonition and the courtesy to small group, the discipline, the rebuke, the correction. It’s not excommunication or bust.

Mark: If you want to think more about these specific questions on discipline, because I have a lot more that there’s just not going to be time to get to, that book I edited called, Polity, I don’t mind pumping it because I didn’t write it. I just pulled together 10 writers from the past who have written about the church.

It’s 10 entire books combined in one volume. We put a joint Scripture index in the back, but one of them, sadly his name is Savage, wrote a guide to church discipline which may be the best one in the book, and in it he deals with these small sins: loquaciousness, backwardness, forwardness. “What do you do with these small sins?” he asks. He says, I think very well, “You forebear.”

You just forebear. You overlook. You forebear. I mean, as much as you have a relationship, you try to help the brother or sister, but friends, there are going to be some things that the wisest thing we can do is just forebear … like people have been doing with us. But don’t use that as an excuse to not fulfill your duties to your brothers and sisters.

Question: One person asked, “How would you reconcile winning an idle person (referring to Paul’s words to the Thessalonians), restoring someone caught in sin, with having nothing to do with them?”

Mark: Well, I think in the sense of Thessalonica, Paul had taught these people. They knew the truth, they were continuing to be taught the truth, and I don’t think there’s any reason you can’t continue to teach them the truth. When we excommunicate somebody, we’re not saying, “Don’t come to church.” We want them to still come to church. What we’re saying is, “You’re not a member. You can’t come to the Lord’s Table.” But we want them to come to church. We want them to hear the preaching of God’s Word. We want them to be able to be affected through the Word by the Spirit.

Question: Did Jesus refer to any particular sin in Matthew 18:15?

Mark: I don’t think so. “If your brother sins against you, go and show …” There’s no particular sin that I understand he’s referring to there.

Question: How should church discipline be exercised by a congregation as a whole?

Mark: At least from Matthew 18, I think you can say the congregation needs to be informed. If you ask, “Why does the whole congregation need to be informed if you’re talking about the final step of excommunication?” Because when you read Paul’s letters, the whole congregation then has to act in such a way toward that person that they would help to woo them and win them back even as they withhold fellowship and instruct them.

Question: How should we respond to couples known to be unmarried living together who attend church regularly?

Mark: You should be really happy they attend church regularly.

Question: Apply for church membership?

Mark: Well, in our church that would be the time when we would be able to get in, hear their story, hear their understanding of the gospel, and then confront them with specific sin and see how they would respond.

Question: Apply to get married in the church?

Mark: That gets into a lot of other issues that we would have to deal with individually.

Question: Is marriage understood to be something just for Christians or also for non-Christians?

Mark: Well, we would certainly understand it’s for non-Christians as well. Marriage in that sense would be common grace ordinance. We want our Buddhist friends to enjoy the fruits of marriage. It’s a wonderful thing.

Question: Do we understand that the church has a responsibility to marry those people who aren’t Christians?

Mark: No. We don’t understand that at all. We understand the society can set that up and they can have a justice of the peace do that wedding if they want because it’s a common grace ordinance. Now if one member is a Christian and the other is not, then we are forbidden from doing that marriage. We have no competence to marry there. It would just get into a lot of particulars counseling and what we do in that situation.

Question: What communication is had with a disciplined brother to ascertain his readiness to be received back into the congregation?

Mark: That’s a great question. I think you have to see evidence of genuine repentance, and we’ve seen this, praise God. We’ve gone to one step with somebody just short of excommunication where we publically rebuked him, but that public rebuke was really at his own request because what he did had been so public and such a shame to the gospel among the Marine Corps that he lived with when he was known to be a Christian,

He desperately wanted us to do something that he could then cite to his friends so that they wouldn’t just write off Christianity or even this whole local church. So he asked us to publically rebuke him in a member’s meeting for what he’d done. Then he could tell his friends. So that’s a truly penitent heart. You’ll be able to tell as you’re working with them.

Question: What remedial follow up if any is carried out to help untangle the brother from the snare he was caught in?

Mark: Well, that depends very much on what that snare is, and I’m going to trust any of you who are pastors here can get together with each other and share wonderfully encouraging stories about that. Thanks for the excellent questions. Sorry for the ones we didn’t get to.

Don: This one in particular, because I can respond briefly, it’s worth saying something.

Question: Could you tell us (this is to both Don and Mark) what three books have most influenced your theological and pastoral understanding?

Don: My answer is, “I don’t have a clue.” It’s partly because in my experience sometimes books have been very influential in shaping me at a certain point in my life that I would not recommend to anybody. When I was 14, one of the first serious theological books I read was Watchman Nee’s The Normal Christian Life. It was, at the time, a tremendous incentive to holiness, and I shall always remain grateful to God for it. I also think at this stage, it’s a load of exegetical rubbish. What can I say?

It really is bad, so I can’t recommend it to anybody, but this is part and parcel of what the Bible says. “God can use even the wrath of man to praise him.” So in part what I would recommend would depend not just on what I’ve experienced in certain periods of my life but trying to understand you and where you are right now and what might be most helpful to where you are in your ministry and so on. To me, that’s a far better question than, “What are the best three of this or the best four of that?” I’m punting. What can I say?

Mark: I would say two that are generally going to be helpful are Charles Bridges book The Christian Ministry and David Martyn Lloyd-Jones book Preaching and Preachers.

Don: If you ask, what are the books that have been written in the last 30 years which will still be around in 100 years, so far as we can guess, if the Lord tarries that long, then I have a short list. It includes things like Packer’s Knowing God, for example. That will become a Christian classic. You could list other books of that sort, too. There are not many books that will still be in print in 100 years, in all fairness. The whole history of the Christian church testifies to that.

The last one, the only reason I bring this one up is because quite a number of you have caught me privately, and I’d better say something public.

Question: Where can we get ahold of your poems?

Don: I wrote a book of sonnets that is out of print called, Holy Sonnets of the Twentieth Century, but although it’s out of print, I’ve got about 80 copies left that are sold through the Trinity bookstore. So you can get those. It’s a Scripture on one page and then a sonnet that’s a mediation of it on the opposing page, and there are about 50 of them.

Some of the ones I’ve quoted in the sermons.… I write poetry that ends up in hymns, so the one that I quoted this morning at the end of the one on Matthew 27 is, in fact, on a second CD of hymns you can get on the ChristWay Media website (Christwaymedia.com). So some of those you can get in that. They are meant for corporate singing; it’s just that I quote them as poems.