Posts tagged Evangelicalism
Quote of the Week – Bill Kinnon on Christian Consumerism
Dec 9th
“If you insist on bragging about your church, don’t tell us about the numbers. Tell us about how the Kingdom has come to your community. Tell us of the lame who walk, the blind who see, the debts that have been forgiven, the reconciliation that has taken place at personal, generational & racial levels, how the poor and the outcast are loved and taken care of, how widows and orphans are grafted into the church family, how your community is experiencing the Year of Jubilee – because of what the Spirit is doing in and through your church.
But if all you can talk about are your numbers, then, please…
…just shut up. It’s long past old.”
- Bill Kinnon (from his post, “What We Win Them With is What We Win Them To“)
Quote of the Week – Matthew Lee Anderson on the ‘People of the Fad’
Nov 4th
Online church seems to be the logical extension of models we have already adopted.
But more importantly, I think the whole conversation has reinforced for me that evangelicals are people who love fads. Church growth, seeker sensitive, emerging…and now we’re on to ‘online church.’ We love getting all worked up, talking a lot about it, and then we all eventually move on and keep doing our own thing.
Of course, that doesn’t mean such fads don’t have any impact. The center gets pulled in various directions as the people on the fringe’s make their case. Case in point: video sermons are now the center, while 5 years ago they were the fringe. But we are suckers for the next cool way of ‘doing church,’ a treadmill that is difficult to keep pace with.
- Matthew Lee Anderson (On Online Church and Evangelicals being “People of the Fad”)
Quote of the Week – Trueman on Rubbish (Passed off as worship)
May 5th
If God is awesome, sovereign and holy; if human beings are small, sinful, and lost; if Christ died and rose again by a most miraculous and costly act of grace, then this should impact the way things happen in church. This is not to argue for a one-size-fits-all-my-way-or-the-highway approach to church. Context and culture are important; but what is expressed through the idioms of particular cultural manifestations of the church should be awe, reverence, and, above all seriousness – not a colourless and cold miserable seriousness but a fitting amazement at the greatness of God and his grace. - Carl Trueman (http://www.reformation21.org/counterpoints/wages-of-spin/look-its-rubbish.php)
The iMonk on the Current State of the SBC
Mar 23rd
Dynamite stuff:
Southern Baptists are now a denomination where conservative leaders are watching young pastors distance themselves from everything but the most lukewarm denominational loyalties. Gone are the days when Nashville (or the state convention office) determined the programs and priorities of every SBC church. Gone are the days when the local association, the state convention and the national denomination could talk to young pastors with authority and the expectation of being heeded. Gone are the days when younger pastors and would-be church planters were eager to be identified with the SBC. Today men like John Piper, Mark Dever, Tim Keller, Mark Driscoll, C.J. Mahaney, Bill Hybels, Matt Chandler and Rick Warren are providing models for ministry that appeal to the next generation of Southern Baptist pastors. These men and others wield enormous influence by their example and their determination to communicate with and develop young leaders. Given the choice of a denominational meeting or a trip to a conference sponsored by one of these men, 9Marks, or the Acts 29 Network, it’s not much of a choice for many young pastors. Unable to face up to the loss of influence, some elements in the denomination have decided to take the once well-used lower road of “denominational loyalty.” Who are the “real Baptists?” How will we know them? Who will “walk the aisle” and announce they are 100% on board with the SBC?The whole article can be found here.
Quote of the Week – Mark Galli on the “Evangelical Collapse”
Mar 13th
What I will do, to my dying day, is work with anyone who knows he was lost but now is found, whose Bible is worn because she repeatedly looks there for God to speak, who finds the Cross the most meaningful of symbols, for whom the Resurrection is not just a doctrine but a power, and who wants nothing more than to find new and creative ways to share the evangel of Jesus in word and deed. I’ll work with these people no matter what scholars decide to call them. For now they are called evangelicals, and I suspect that in one form or another, they’ll be around for some time. -Mark Galli, “On the Lasting Evangelical Survival”
Quote of the Week #2 – Kevin DeYoung on Martin Lloyd Jones and Evangelicalism
Mar 4th
“The evangelical distrusts reason and particularly reason in the form of philosophy. We are not concerned about contradictions between the gospel and the philosophies of our day. Reason and scholarship must be kept in their place. They are servants, not masters. Reason can teach us how to believe, but not what we believe. We must not be afraid of scholarship, but we are not desperate for the approval of the academy. Remember, most of the lasting damage to the church in the past two centuries has come through the seminaries. [emphasis added]” - Kevin DeYoung, paraphrasing Martin Lloyd Jones
The Internet Monk on Making Evangelicalism Better
Dec 14th
The Internet Monk has a very interesting post on the questions: “What would make for a much better evangelicalism?”
Points 1, 6, and 10 are intriguing, to say the least.
The Battles for the Evangel in American Evangelicalism
Dec 14th
Excerpts from Paul Washer’s Deeper Conference 2008 message:
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