This weekend, I heard an incredible sermon on the Prodigal Son. This sermon further strengthened my belief that God’s Word is living, because despite the fact that I’ve heard this story a thousand times, I saw it in a new way. I want to specifically look at one small section of the story. I don’t think I’m guilty of reading more into this than is intended:
Luke 15: 25-30
25“Now his older son was in the field, and as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing.26And he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant.27And he said to him, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fattened calf, because he has received him back safe and sound.’28But he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and entreated him,29but he answered his father, ‘Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends.30But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!’
The older son skipped the opportunity to celebrate the return of his younger brother. He was upset that the father had chosen to bless the younger son. It was unfair. The younger son didn’t deserve it at all. He had wasted his inheritance on foolish living and prostitutes, yet the father was overjoyed to see his youngest son. He even ran out to greet him, and kissed him, and had him clothed in the finest robe.
The father in this story, showed a great act of grace and mercy. Out of the goodness of his heart, he decided to pour out extravagant blessings upon a very unworthy recipient. The older son didn’t understand. He just didn’t “get it”.
For the last couple of days, I’ve been questioning my own motives. I must admit, that on the surface I bare a striking resemblance to the older brother. I can see where an outsider would make that connection. After all, churches like Elevation and Newspring are being blessed. I think (despite the conferences and such) even they would admit that they are wildly unworthy. It appears that I am unhappy about it. Older brother syndrome. I see that.
Something else I’ll admit: I am wholly unworthy of the Father’s blessings as well. While I am pretty strong on theology and doctrine, I am pretty weak on sharing the Gospel with the people I encounter in my daily existence. Sure, sometimes they notice that I don’t cuss much, or that I try not to gossip. If they ask why, I might hint towards my belief in Christ, but in general, I live as if we have forever. We don’t. We are not even promised today. I know that many of my colleagues are completely lost in their sin…and I don’t care enough about their eternity in Hell to share the Gospel with them. I can give you a ton of excuses. I might even lose my job if I were to begin evangelizing co-workers. All that means is that I care more about my standard of living, than I care about the souls of the lost.
What does all this mean? Am I going to stop pointing out error where I see it? No. The stakes are too high. People are being led astray at an alarming rate, and I won’t be quiet. Some of the issues seem minuscule, but they have to be discussed. Deception starts with the small points. Overlooking even the tiniest venture from Scriptural truth will only lead to larger errors in the future.
What this does mean is that I have to rededicate myself to reaching the world with the Good News of Christ, starting right here in my office. My passion for purity of the Church has to be matched with a broken-heart for lost souls.
I won’t ignore error, and I won’t ignore the lost. I will try to join in the dance and celebration when Father decides to put His best robe on a younger brother.
Oftentimes when NewSpring marks important spiritual moments like salvations and baptisms, its members and ministers celebrate publicly by announcing that they’re running up the score against the devil, as Noble did recently and Cooper did last night. Three questions:
If someone dies without being saved by Christ, who has scored?
Does it mean that God lost, however briefly?
Who’s ahead on the souls scoreboard right now?
UPDATE: Commentator Shane had the best answer:
The scoreboard is down. The drinks are put away. The bases are picked up. It is finished (I think my Jesus said that). He wins. Done and Done.
If you regularly read the blogs of the likes of Perry Noble, Steven Furtick or Tony Morgan, you’ll find that they’re more likely to cite the works of leading marketers than they are theologians. One of their distinctive as leaders is their intentional integration of marketing techniques with an evangelistic message.
Some examples:
Tony Morgan asks, “If Apple was a church, how would Apple do church?”
Tony Morgan wonders how to apply Starbucks’ proven (until recently) marketing techniques to the church.
Perry Noble dreams of some face time with Starbucks’ CEO.
Brad Cooper thinks we should design our worship to impress atheists.
Steven Furtick reduces his whole church to a marketing department. “There is no marketing department at Elevation Church. We are all the marketing department. We are all marketing. All the time. We are marketing the greatest message in the history of mankind. Everywhere. To everyone.”
Perry Noble, via Ed Young, expresses the church’s mission as a business plan. “The church has a product (the good news), a mission statement (Matthew 28:18-20), a marketing strategy (Acts 1:8) and profit (changed lives!)”
There’s nothing really new here, but this new fashion was predicted more than a decade ago by Alistair Begg, one of the preachers that several commentators recommended on these pages last week. A helpful reader sent me a link to this prescient message from 1998.
Here’s a partial transcript of what Begg said:
People … have assumed that preaching is analogous to a marketing exercise, and what you have in the peaching event, we’re told, is a product, namely the Gospel; consumers, namely the congregation; salesmen, the preacher. And the job of the preacher is to overcome consumer resistance and persuade people to buy his product. And many, many, many younger men have begun to labor in pastoral ministry with that as a model.
It is a recipe for the worst kind of disappointment, eventually. Because what do we discover when we turn to the Bible? We discover that according to Paul there is one overwhelming reason why the analogy is no good. And that is because the preacher doesn’t overcome consumer resistance. The preacher cannot overcome consumer resistance. 2 Corinthians 4 says that the Gospel is veiled to those who do not believe.
When Jesus told the parable of the sower, there was one sower and four soils. If it was told today in marketing terms it would be completely the reverse, wouldn’t it? Namely, you would have one soil and four sowers.
Sower number one goes up and does quite a good job, but not a very good job and nothing happens.
Sower number two, he goes up and he’s a little more skillful in the way he does it, and he has a bit of a better response.
Sower number three goes up, and he’s been doing some church growth reading and some marketing analysis and his thing is really beginning to take off.
But number four, he has got all of the technology and all the marketing strategy down, and he knows how to overcome consumer resistance and, hey, presto, look at his field!
Do we really believe that Christian conversion is the result of human persuasion? Absolutely not. God said let light shine out of darkness. See, much of the trouble with our contemporary preaching is that it is built on the fallacious assumption that anybody can and will respond to the Gospel if it’s only presented to them in a proper fashion….
Preaching will be effective…because it is God’s chosen method by which he opens people’s eyes and brings them to an awareness of his grace. And that is why it will demand from us 110 percent committed devotion.
…Young men are coming and people are telling them that people won’t listen to preaching these days. My answer to that is, no, I’ve heard you preach and I’m not surprised that they don’t listen to it. They haven’t even given it a try under the Spirit of God. If they’d used five percent of the imagination involved in creating this roadshow that they’ve got going in their church to seriously understand the Bible and convey it, they’d be amazed at what God would do by his Spirit….
[People say that] people won’t listen to preaching, so what we’ve got to do is look at advertising, look at the way they package it, look at the world of entertainment, look and see how they do it. But the question when our worship services are over is not, how much did the pagan enjoy that; the question is, how much did he learn from that? Not how electric was the atmosphere, but how clear was the Gospel?
It’s simply not true to say that people won’t listen to preaching. If people are being awakened spiritually to their need of God, they will listen. And if they’re not, then no amount of gospel entertainment or evangelistic gimmickry will make them listen.
So if God’s not going to do it God’s way, it’s not going to be done.
There is nothing MORE churchy than having a Jesus sticker on your car and thinking that makes a difference.
Anyone want to RT that?
There is a serious point here, actually. Think about the two men on the road to Emmaus. They were looking right at Jesus and didn’t see him until he opened their eyes. (Luke 24:13-32)
They weren’t even looking at a bumper sticker; they were looking at the real, actual man with visible, recent scars on his hands.
Fame doesn’t bring people into God’s kingdom. Only Jesus does.
(This post is a followup to this one about the purpose of church.)
A few months ago while watching Brad Cooper’s effing Bible video, I saw the basic difference between the way he and I approach church.
To set the scene, Cooper is welcoming his congregation to a newly built (bamf) facility on the NewSpring campus. He has a very important point he wants his people to understand, so we get this illuminating piece of dialog.
Cooper: I want you right now to tell the person beside you, “This building was not built for you.” So you say, “What do you mean by that, Brad? Who was this building built for?”
Seminary student who hadn’t read the script: Jesus!
Cooper (in yes-but-really-no mode): Yeah, absolutely. But why would Jesus give us a tool like this?
He explains that because anyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved, that it’s really for the unsaved friends of the people there, who need to be invited so that they’ll be able to call on the name of the Lord in Cooper’s church. Cooper then lays down the law:
Do you want me to tell you what is failure? Let me tell you what is failure if you believe what we just read. Failure is you showing up by yourself next week.
Look at me in the face! You don’t believe the Word of God if you show up by yourself next week!
Although Cooper grudgingly agrees with Ms. Seminary that it should be for Jesus, his real LOOK AT ME IN THE FACE point is that it is built for unbelievers who have not yet visited the church. Who’s more important here? God, believers or unbelievers. Certainly it’s unbelievers. Existing believers are told that they essentially are faithless if they also don’t agree with Cooper’s hyperventilating pleas to turn the church inside out to get the unsaved there.
Cooper is not alone. The $700 man, Steven Furtick, flat out told the believers in his church that his church wasn’t for them.
We preach so that people can come to faith in Christ, and we want them to get in a small group and serve so that other people can come to Christ.
If you know Jesus–I am sorry to break it to you–this church is not for you.
“Yeah, but I just gave my life to Christ last week at Elevation.”
Last week was the last week that Elevation Church existed for you. You’re in the army now. We do one thing; we preach Jesus so that people far from God can know Jesus, and then we train them up so that others can know Jesus.
It’s called kingdom multiplication. It’s what Elevation Church is all about, and over 500 people have given their lives to Jesus for the first time in this church in the last five months. That’s over 100 per month.
If that doesn’t get you excited, and you need the “doctrines of grace” as defined by John Calvin to excite you, you’re in the wrong church. Let me get a phone book; there are 720 churches in Charlotte. I’m sure we can find you one where you can stuff your face until you’re so obese spiritually that you can’t even move.
Watch the video to witness the profound anger here.
Perry Noble shares Furtick’s distaste for churches who cater to God and believers. In fact, Noble’s vision of the church is so backwards and distorted that he sees expressions of worship as insulting profanity.
We have a purpose…and it’s not to be a country club with a steeple on top that gives our community the middle finger and tells them to go to hell because reaching them would make us uncomfortable!
The architectural purpose of the church steeple was to exalt God by pointing skyward, and to invite people to worship by being an unmistakable local landmark. As one Kentucky steeple maker said,
A steeple points one to the heavens, symbol of the dwelling place of Christ. Through city streets, across the valleys and lakes, through the countryside far and wide, the steeple declares Christ.
Where most of us see Christ, is it a complete surprise that Noble sees a middle finger? Actually, it seems that he sees a lot of Christianity this way.
Every week people show up at their stained glass fortressed and give their community the middle finger and tell them to go to hell.
I never see it prescribed in Scripture than when a church reaches a “comfortable” size–usually around 120 people–that the community should be given the middle finger and told to go to hell because additional people might mess up the holy huddle!
Noble equates the discipleship and equipping of believers as middle fingeresque.
Like it or not–Jesus didn’t go to a bookstore, get a theology book by a dead white guy, get a group of guys together that were just like Him and give the world the middle finger because He was obsessed with “going deep!”
If I meet one more group of guys who think they are becoming more like Jesus because they are theological superior to people (which, by the way, is PRIDE!) but do not know a lost person by name or refuse to exercise their spiritual gift…and yet claim to be godly…I am going to punch them in the throat!
I suppose Noble’s fist trumps devout middle fingers.
In one of his middle-finger diatribes, Noble lays out his own description of his church, which you can find here. It is all about reaching unbelievers, but you’ll have to look hard to find mention of the worship of God (church purpose #1) or the assembly of believers (church purpose #2).
Noble, Furtick, Cooper, Lamb, Warren and many, many others are trying to redefine church by making it primarily about nonbelievers. If you ask them, they’ll give a perfunctory answer that church is really for God, as Cooper’s seminary guest forced him to do, but their actions and emphasis tell us that it’s mainly about nonbelievers. Cooper and Furtick specifically told their audience that they were more interested in people outside the family of God.
Getting people in the doors is much more important than offering them anything once they walk in. Make them feel bad, conscript them into the army, and get more people in the doors.
Several terms have been used to describe these new churches: emergent, emerging, etc. It’s all very confusing, so I offer a new term: The Turnstile Church.
Definition: Churches that attract people for the purpose of attracting more people for the purpose attracting more people for the purpose…
If you were to boil my disagreements with Perry Noble and NewSpring down to a single issue, it would be over the answer to this question.
Here, in order, is how I would answer the question.
God. As God began to reveal himself to his people, one of his early steps was to create a house for himself. Not only was God to have his own house, but he was very particular about how it was to be built and how people were to act when they visited it. From Deuteronomy 12:4-5:
You shall not act like this toward the LORD your God.
But you shall seek the LORD at the place which the LORD your God will choose from all your tribes, to establish His name there for His dwelling, and there you shall come.
When I built my house a few years ago, I was keenly interested in adapting the plans and monitoring the workers who were constructing it. Large sections of the Old Testament are devoted to God’s detailed instructions on how the tabernacle and, later, the temple were to be designed and outfitted. God designed his house so that he would enjoy inhabiting it. It had to be just so before he would move in. From Exodus 40:34, after Moses had completed the tabernacle:
Then the cloud covered the Tent of Meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. Moses could not enter the Tent of Meeting because the cloud had settled upon it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.
If you visited my home, I would expect you to act in accordance with the customs and rules in my home, and if I visited yours, one of the things I would be trying to do is to figure out your rules. Who sits in what chairs at the dinner table, for example. In an analogous way, God expects visitors to his house to act in accordance with his rules. Deuteronomy 12:8:
You shall not do at all what we are doing here today, every man doing whatever is right in his own eyes.
Outsiders and unbelievers especially were not be be a standard for behavior in God’s house. Look at Deuteronomy 12:30-31.
Beware that you are not ensnared to follow them, after they are destroyed before you, and that you do not inquire after their gods, saying, ‘How do these nations serve their gods, that I also may do likewise?’
You shall not behave thus toward the LORD your God, for every abominable act which the LORD hates they have done for their gods.
God also expects his own people to come near with respect. Leviticus 22:2 (and many others):
Tell Aaron and his sons to be careful with the holy gifts of the sons of Israel, which they dedicate to Me, so as not to profane My holy name; I am the LORD.
Ecclesiastes 5:1-2 also reminds us that church is not primarily for us, and that that understanding should affect our behavior:
Guard your steps as you go to the house of God and draw near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools; for they do not know they are doing evil.
Do not be hasty in word or impulsive in thought to bring up a matter in the presence of God For God is in heaven and you are on the earth; therefore let your words be few.
Believers. By his grace, God opened his house to his family to join him and enjoy him. The Psalms often refer to assemblies of believers who gather to worship God. Psalm 149:1:
Sing to the Lord a new song, his praise in the assembly of the saints.
It’s interesting to note that the label of Christian was given to describe believers who gathered in church. From Acts 11:25-26:
And he left for Tarsus to look for Saul; and when he had found him, he brought him to Antioch And for an entire year they met with the church and taught considerable numbers; and the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch.
Christians and church are inseparable. Christians were defined in part by their attendance in church.
Church is also necessary for preserving the saints in their faith. Note the progression from preaching to discipleship to church government in this passage from Acts 14:21-23.
After they had preached the gospel to that city and had made many disciples, they returned to Lystra and to Iconium and to Antioch, strengthening the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the faith, and saying, “Through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God.”
When they had appointed elders for them in every church, having prayed with fasting, they commended them to the Lord in whom they had believed.
Paul tells Timothy that proper behavior is expected in church, which is to be so honored because it is essential for understanding truth.
You will know how people ought to conduct themselves in God’s household, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth. (1 Timothy 3:15)
The church is given to us as a venue to worship God, and as his venue to teach, bless and discipline us.
Unbelievers. Although church is not created for unbelievers, it does not exclude them. Paul instructs the church on the proper use of tongues by telling them to consider whether unbelievers will be there. From 1 Corinthians 14:22-25:
So then tongues are for a sign, not to those who believe but to unbelievers; but prophecy is for a sign, not to unbelievers but to those who believe.
Therefore if the whole church assembles together and all speak in tongues, and ungifted men or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are mad?
But if all prophesy, and an unbeliever or an ungifted man enters, he is convicted by all, he is called to account by all; the secrets of his heart are disclosed; and so he will fall on his face and worship God, declaring that God is certainly among you.
Although this verse is sometimes misused to justify turning churches into virtual pagan temples, note that Paul assumes that unbelievers are not a regular part of church. The repeated use of the word if shows that church is not lacking anything if they are not in attendance, but neither should they be excluded.
Paul also assumes that if an unbeliever is attending church, they are quite likely about to be saved and begin to worship God. These are not seekers Paul is talking about; they are people ready to be turned inside out by God.
The reason they’re in church is probably because God has drawn them there. We know that they’re not there of their own volition to seek God, as Romans 3:11 makes clear.
There is no one who understands, no one who seeks God.
The reason this matters is because our understanding of the purpose of church will affect the way we behave in it and how proper our worship is when we’re in it.
(Tomorrow we’ll look at what Perry Noble and his friends believe about this question and how it affects their worship.)
A few years ago I had a student writer who thought she could jazz up her writing by rewriting her plain language with the help of a thesaurus. Her prose ended up being utterly ridiculous and unreadable, or as her thesaurus might have written, her tongue came to a halt actualized to the nth degree slaphappy and cacographic.
As I’ve chronicled before on these pages, there’s a deliberate effort afoot to remap Christian language to make it more acceptable to the unsaved. To a certain extent, there’s wisdom in speaking in a language that a listener can understand, but many of the efforts have the same outcome as my wannabe writer’s prose. You can’t just replace words rich in meaning with another word that a thesaurus writer has determined is within some extended semantic family.
Nick Charalambous, in advocating that we put saved in our back pockets for awhile, pointed his readers to a list of traditional Christian words and their suggested replacements. While not everything on the list is disagreeable, there are quite a few that do a great injustice to the carefully cultivated meaning of the original word.
Let’s look at a few of the suggested changes:
Converted becomes changed. Conversion implies a complete and radical change. I can convert my car from gas to biofuel, and in so doing I change the basic nature of the car. I can change my car’s fuel from 87 to 93 octane easily, but I can just as easily change back if it doesn’t suit me. Conversion talks of altered natures and character. Change is something one does to oil and underwear.
Get saved becomes made a decision to follow Christ. The key difference here is who’s doing the doing. If I need saving, there’s going to be someone or something that was the agent of that salvation. If I’m on a sinking ship, I generally don’t have the luxury of choosing whether or not I get saved. By emphasizing a decision to follow, we lose the emphasis and dependence on grace that is denoted in saved.
Preach becomes talk about. Everyone can talk, few are called to preach. Talking is something that buzzes around me and invites me to ignore it; preaching is God’s Word directed at me that demands my attention and obedience. Who wouldn’t rather be talked to than preached to? Talking is casual; preaching is insistent, which is probably why it’s taboo.
Christian becomes Christ follower. Belief is replaced with works. See a fuller discussion here.
Sin becomes acting against God’s will and offending God’s character. Acting against God’s will is one way we can sin, but it ignores the doctrine of original sin. I sin without having to do anything at all. I am not God, so my very existence falls short and offends God’s holy character. If sin is about doing bad things, then I can become less of a sinner by doing fewer bad things. Sin, in its full original sense, nails me regardless of what I do.
In a related article, a sensitive evangelist also suggests that we not talk about sin.
Rather than talking about “sin,” discuss the nature of broken relationships with God and the need for healing.
Healing? We’re dead in our sins and need an entire new life, not a few therapy sessions. It’s a similar diminution in meaning as we see in the converted vs. changed redefinition.
Which points to a more profound issue in evangelism. From what I can tell from the Bible, conversion involves repentance and belief. If we’re resorting to creating Christ followers who haven’t heard us talk about sin, perhaps we’re dealing with people who have neither repented nor believed.
Although I reject the premise that we can draw people to Christ by changing their opinion of the church, let’s look at what a culturally contrite approach has wrought in the church.
I’ve argued against overusing the phrase To make Jesus famous. What, then, could we replace it with?
How about To make Jesus known?
It describes evangelism and discipleship equally well. Fame is too heavily biased towards presenting Jesus to the unsaved and leaves the family of faith in the cold. By emphasizing knowledge, we acknowledge both the need to fish for men and to feed Jesus’ sheep.
It demands that we offer the world substantive truth. Fame thrives best in a world of happiness, glitz and glamor. While Jesus brings joy, he also places demands on us that our unregenerate human nature recoils from. Knowledge lets us present all facets of Jesus’ nature.
It focuses on individual responsibility. Fame is a collective quality; once I’m aware of someone, that person can’t become more famous in my life. Fame only increases when someone else also thinks of the famous person. Knowledge exists on an individual level and can increase over time.
It better describes the relationship between the divine and me. Fame made some quality of Christ dependent on me. Knowledge reverses that dynamic. Jesus is all and in all, complete, perfect, infinite. My knowledge of Christ can improve or deteriorate, but neither state affects his nature. He is the rock that I throw myself against and on. It is my responsibility to know him, and by his grace he has given me all the tools I need to do that. It’s the church’s responsibility to introduce me to Jesus through the logos he’s left us.
This blog is mine alone and does not necessarily–or very often–represent the thinking or sentiments of anyone who disagrees with me, my wife, my employer, my friends, my family, my pastor, my brother, my church and, almost certainly, God. After I hit the Publish button, it doesn’t always even reflect my own thinking. It does seem to often reflect the thinking of Tommy F, Twit Conway and some guy in Minnesota, however.
