The Gospel as Center: Renewing Our Faith and Reforming Our Ministry Practices

The Gospel as Center: Renewing Our Faith and Reforming Our Ministry Practices

The Gospel as Center: Renewing Our Faith and Reforming Our Ministry Practices

The Gospel as Center: Renewing Our Faith and Reforming Our Ministry Practices

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Overview

The church is reeling because of the relativistic mindset of our world. Up until a generation ago, most adults had similar moral intuitions whether they were believers or not, and the core of protestant orthodoxy was still intact. Yet, in the wake of postmodernity and secularism, all that has changed.

Convinced that gospel-centered ministry is utterly imperative for such a time as this, contributors D. A. Carson, Tim Keller, Kevin DeYoung, Philip Ryken, Bryan Chapell, Thabiti Anyabwile, Richard Phillips, Sam Storms, and others defend the gospel and traditional doctrines.

To strengthen the center of confessional evangelicalism, this volume collects the 14 booklets in the Gospel Coalition Booklet series. In addition, this volume includes a preface, the Gospel Coalition’s foundational documents, and indexes. The editors and contributors represent a wide range of denominations and are united not only by belief in the biblical gospel, but also by the conviction that ministry today must be increasingly Gospel centered.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781433518676
Publisher: Crossway
Publication date: 02/29/2012
Series: The Gospel Coalition
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 320
Sales rank: 1,031,809
File size: 919 KB

About the Author

D. A. Carson (PhD, Cambridge University) is Emeritus Professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where he has taught since 1978. He is a cofounder of the Gospel Coalition and has written or edited nearly 120 books. He and his wife, Joy, have two children and live in the north suburbs of Chicago.


Timothy J. Keller is the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York. He is the best-selling author of The Prodigal God and The Reason for God


Thabiti M. Anyabwile (MS, North Carolina State University) serves as a pastor at Anacostia River Church in Washington, DC, and is the author of numerous books. He serves as a council member of the Gospel Coalition, is a lead writer for 9Marks Ministries, and regularly blogs at The Front Porch and Pure Church. He and his wife, Kristie, have three children.


Mike Bullmore (PhD, Northwestern University) serves as the senior pastor of Crossway Community Church in Bristol, Wisconsin. He was formerly professor of homiletics/practical theology and department chair at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. Mike lives in Kenosha, Wisconsin, with his wife, Beverly. They have three children.


Bryan Chapell is the senior pastor of Grace Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Peoria, Illinois. He is also the host of a daily half-hour radio Bible teaching program, Unlimited Grace, and the founder and chairman of Unlimited Grace Media (unlimitedgrace.com). Bryan previously served as the president of Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri, and is the author of a number of books, including Holiness by Grace.


ANDREW M. DAVIS (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Durham, NC. In addition to his PhD, he also holds an MDiv from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He served as a church planter in Japan from 1994 to 1998.


Kevin DeYoung (PhD, University of Leicester) is the senior pastor at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, and assistant professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary (Charlotte). He serves as board chairman of the Gospel Coalition and blogs at DeYoung, Restless, and Reformed. He is the author of several books, including Just Do Something; Crazy Busy; and The Biggest Story. Kevin and his wife, Trisha, have eight children.


Ligon Duncan (PhD, University of Edinburgh) is the chancellor&CEO and the John E. Richards Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary. He previously served as the senior minister of the historic First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Mississippi, for seventeen years. He is a cofounder of Together for the Gospel, a senior fellow of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and was the president of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals from 2004-2012. Duncan has edited, written, or contributed to numerous books. Ligon and his wife, Anne, have two children and live in Jackson, Mississippi.


Richard D. Phillips (DD, Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary) is the senior minister of Second Presbyterian Church in Greenville, South Carolina. He chairs the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology and coedits the Reformed Expository Commentary. He is also a chairman of the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology, a council member of the Gospel Coalition, and a trustee of Westminster Theological Seminary.


Philip Graham Ryken (DPhil, University of Oxford) is the eighth president of Wheaton College. He preached at Philadelphia’s Tenth Presbyterian Church from 1995 until his appointment at Wheaton in 2010. Ryken has published more than 50 books, including When Trouble Comes and expository commentaries on Exodus, Ecclesiastes, and Jeremiah. He serves as a board member for the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities, the Lausanne Movement, and the National Association of Evangelicals.


Tim Savage (PhD, University of Cambridge; ThM, Dallas Theological Seminary) is a pastor, author, international conference speaker, and founding council member of the Gospel Coalition. He has served in churches in Arizona, Great Britain, and Texas. He is married to Lesli and they have two adult sons, Matthew and Jonathan. Tim is the author of No Ordinary Marriage.


COLIN S. SMITH is the senior pastor of The Orchard Evangelical Free Church in Arlington Heights, IL, where he has been since 1996. He is the author of The 10 Greatest Struggles of Your Life and can be heard on his Unlocking the Bible broadcast with Moody radio.


Sam Storms (PhD, University of Texas at Dallas) has spent more than four decades in ministry as a pastor, professor, and author. He is currently the senior pastor at Bridgeway Church in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and was previously a visiting associate professor of theology at Wheaton College from 2000 to 2004. He is the founder of Enjoying God Ministries and blogs regularly at SamStorms.com.


Stephen Um (PhD, University of St. Andrews) serves as the senior minister of Citylife Church in Boston, Massachusetts. He also serves as a council member for the Gospel Coalition. Stephen lives in Boston, Massachusetts, with his wife, Kathleen, and their three daughters.


Sanders (Sandy) L. Willson (DD, Crichton College) has been the senior minister at Second Presbyterian Church in Memphis, Tennessee since 1995. Sandy is a cofounder of the Memphis Center for Urban Theological Studies as well as a cofounder and chair of the Nexus leadership mentoring program. He also serves on the boards of the Gospel Coalition, World Relief, Union University, and Reformed Theological Seminary. Sandy and his wife, Allison, have five children and ten grandchildren.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Gospel-Centered Ministry

D. A. Carson and Timothy Keller

The Gospel Coalition is a fellowship of churches and Christians from many different denominations that are united not only by belief in the biblical gospel but also by the conviction that gospel-centered ministry today must be strengthened, encouraged, and advanced. What follows gives a bit of the history of how and why we have come together.

Several years ago a number of us began to meet together annually. That group became The Gospel Coalition's Council. For the first three years we sought to do two things.

The Confessional Foundation

First, we sought to identify and strengthen the center of confessional evangelicalism. We believe that some important aspects of the historic understanding of the biblical gospel are in danger of being muddied or lost in our churches today. These include the necessity of the new birth, justification by faith alone, and atonement through propitiation and the substitutionary death of Christ. We sought to maintain and strengthen our hold on these doctrines, not merely by citing the great theological formulations of the past but also through continued, fresh interaction with the Scripture itself, and so we worked together to produce The Gospel Coalition's Confessional Statement.

Biblical-Theological Categories

Many members told me afterward that working on the Confessional Statement was one of the most edifying and instructional experiences they had ever had. About four dozen experienced pastors worked it over line by line. One of our goals was to draw our language as much from the Bible as possible rather than to resort too quickly to the vocabulary of systematic theology. Systematics is crucial, and terms such as the Trinity, which are not found in the Bible itself, are irreplaceable for understanding and expressing large swaths of the Bible's teaching. Nevertheless, to maintain unity among ourselves and to persuade our readers, we sought to express our faith as much as possible in biblical-theological categories rather than drawing on the terminology of any particular tradition's systematic theology.

Beginning with God

We also thought it was important to begin our confession with God rather than with Scripture. This is significant. The Enlightenment was overconfident about human rationality. Some strands of it assumed it was possible to build systems of thought on unassailable foundations that could be absolutely certain to unaided human reason. Despite their frequent vilification of the Enlightenment, many conservative evangelicals have nevertheless been shaped by it. This can be seen in how many evangelical statements of faith start with the Scripture, not with God. They proceed from Scripture to doctrine through rigorous exegesis in order to build (what they consider) an absolutely sure, guaranteed-true-to-Scripture theology.

The problem is that this is essentially a foundationalist approach to knowledge. It ignores the degree to which our cultural location affects our interpretation of the Bible, and it assumes a very rigid subject-object distinction. It ignores historical theology, philosophy, and cultural reflection. Starting with the Scripture leads readers to the overconfidence that their exegesis of biblical texts has produced a system of perfect doctrinal truth. This can create pride and rigidity because it may not sufficiently acknowledge the fallenness of human reason.

We believe it is best to start with God, to declare (with John Calvin, Institutes 1.1) that without knowledge of God we cannot know ourselves, our world, or anything else. If there is no God, we would have no reason to trust our reason.

Evangelical

Also, as part of this process, we gave some time to the question, "Is the term evangelical useful anymore?" A good case can be made for the position that it is not. Within the church, the word conveys less and less theological content. The word almost means "all who are willing to use the term 'born again' to describe their experiences." Outside the church, the word has perhaps the most negative connotations it has ever had.

Nevertheless, the term describes our churches and association. Why? We come from different denominations and traditions — Baptist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, and charismatic, to name the larger groupings. We do not think the distinctives of theology and ecclesiology that divide us are insignificant — not at all. They shape our ministries and differentiate us in many important ways. (One could say "complementary" ways, but that would be another essay.) However, we are united by the conviction that what unites us — the doctrinal core components of the gospel — is far more important than what divides us. On the one hand, that conviction differentiates us from those who believe that there is no gospel to preach apart from the distinctions of their tradition. They do not think that their denominational distinctives are "secondary." On the other hand, that conviction differentiates us from those who would rather define evangelicalism only in sociological or experiential terms and who would therefore not make such a robust doctrinal confessional statement the basis for fellowship and cooperation.

So we continue to use the important term evangelical to describe ourselves, often adding the word confessional to it to denote the more theologically enriched vision of evangelicalism that we hold.

The Vision for Ministry

We have not united, however, merely to defend traditional gospel formulations. Our second purpose was to describe, support, and embody gospel-centered ministry today.

Changes in Our World

Many younger leaders in our churches are reeling from the changes they see in our world. Until a generation ago in the United States, most adults had similar moral intuitions, whether they were born-again believers, churchgoers, nominal Christians, or unbelievers. All that has changed. Secularism is much more aggressive and anti-Christian; the society in general is coarsening; and the moral intuitions of younger people radically vary from their more traditional parents.

Many have called this new condition the "postmodern turn," though others call our situation "late" modernity, or even "liquid" modernity. Modernity overturned the authority of tradition, revelation, or any authority outside of the internal reason and experience of the self. Yet for a long time, relatively stable institutions continued to dominate contemporary society. People still rooted their identities to a great degree in family, local communities, and their work or vocation. That seems to be passing.

The "acid" of the modern principle — the autonomous, individual self — seems to have eaten away all stable identities. Marriage and family, workplace and career, neighborhood and civic community, politics and causes — none of these institutions now remain stable long enough for individuals to depend on them. People now live fragmented lives, no longer thinking of themselves in terms of a couple of basic roles (e.g., Christian, father, and lawyer). Instead, their identity constantly shape-shifts as they move through a series of life episodes that are not tightly connected. They are always ready to change direction and abandon commitments and loyalties without qualms and to pursue — on a cost-benefit basis — the best opportunity available to them.

Responding to Changes in Our World

In the past, many of our neighbors could understand traditional evangelical preaching and ministry, but they met it with disagreement or indifference. During the last fifteen years, people have increasingly met it with completely dumbfounded incomprehension or outrage. The American evangelical world has been breaking apart with wildly different responses to this new cultural situation. To oversimplify, some have simply built the fortress walls higher, merely continuing to do what they have always done, only more defiantly than before. Others have called for a complete doctrinal reengineering of evangelicalism. We think both of these approaches are wrong-headed and, worse, damaging to the cause of the gospel.

Preaching. Here is one example. Over the last few years there has been a major push to abandon expository preaching for what is loosely called "narrative" preaching. The diagnosis goes something like this:

These are postmodern times, marked by the collapse of confidence in the Enlightenment project and a rational certainty about "truth." So now hearers are more intuitive than logical; they are reached more through images and stories than through propositions and principles. They are also allergic to authoritarian declarations. We must adapt to the less rational, nonauthoritarian, narrative-hungry sensibilities of our time.

In our understanding, it is a great mistake to jettison expository preaching in this way. But in some quarters, the response goes something like this: "Because postmodern people don't like our kind of preaching, we are going to give them more of it than ever." They are unwilling to admit that much conventional use of the expository method has tended to be pretty abstract, quite wooden, and not related to life. It is also true that many traditional expository preachers like the "neatness" of preaching through the Epistles instead of the vivid visions and narratives of the Old Testament. But most importantly, expository preaching fails if it does not tie every text, even the most discursive, into the great story of the gospel and mission of Jesus Christ.

Justice and ministry to the poor. Another example is the issue of justice and ministry to the poor. Many young Christian leaders who are passionate about social justice complain that the classic reading of the book of Romans by Augustine, Luther, and Calvin is mistaken. They say that Jesus did not bear God's wrath on the cross, but instead exemplified service and love rather than power and exploitation and therefore "defeated the powers" of the world. The gospel of justification, in this view, is not so much about reconciling God and sinners as about including the marginal in the people of God. In other words, they believe that if Christians are going to leave their comfort zones and minister to and advocate for the poor and marginalized of the world, we must deconstruct traditional evangelical doctrine.

All this rightly alarms many conservative Christian leaders, but some wrongly conclude that those who are strongly concerned to minister to the poor must abandon traditional Christian doctrine. Neither group is right. You do not have to change classic, traditional Christian doctrine to emphasize that ministering to the poor is important. Jonathan Edwards, who is hardly anyone's idea of a "liberal," concluded, "Where have we any command in the Bible laid down in stronger terms, and in a more peremptory urgent manner, than the command of giving to the poor?" Edwards saw a concern for the poor that was rooted not only in a doctrine of creation and the imago Dei but also in the doctrine of the substitutionary death of Christ and justification by faith alone.

Since Jesus had to die to appease the wrath of God, we know that God is a God of justice, and therefore we should be highly sensitive to the rights of the poor in our communities. They should not be mistreated because of their lack of economic power. And because we were spiritually bankrupt and received the riches of Christ undeserved, we should never look down on the poor and feel superior to the economically bankrupt. We should be willing to give our funds even to the "undeserving poor" since we are the spiritually undeserving poor who receive the free mercy of God. Edwards argues powerfully and tirelessly for ministry to the poor from classic evangelical doctrines.

Gospel-Centered Ministry Today

The Gospel Coalition is united by the belief that we must not ignore our context and setting, and we must seriously reflect upon our culture so that our gospel-ministry engages and connects with our culture. This is why we developed the Theological Vision for Ministry, which concludes that the gospel should

produce churches filled with winsome and theologically substantial preaching, dynamic evangelism and apologetics, and church growth and church planting. They will emphasize repentance, personal renewal, and holiness of life. At the same time, and in the same congregations, there will be engagement with the social structures of ordinary people, and cultural engagement with art, business, scholarship, and government. There will be calls for radical Christian community in which all members share wealth and resources and make room for the poor and marginalized. These priorities will all be combined and will mutually strengthen one another in each local church.

So we in The Gospel Coalition believe that the gospel must always be defended and that one irreplaceable way to do that is to show the world and the church the power of a gospel-centered ministry. The best way to define and defend the gospel is to love, believe, embody, and propagate it. In our Confessional Statement, the Vision for Ministry, and The Gospel for All of Life, we map out some of the basic features of what a gospel-centered ministry should look like today in Western culture.

During the first three years of our walk together, we sought to unite a diverse group of people around this gospel center. Our meetings were provocative and exciting because they were not dominated by one theological tradition or by a couple of dominant personalities. And as we gave time to these issues, we grew to trust each other more and more and came to greater unity of mind and heart.

Prophetic from the Center

More recently, The Gospel Coalition has moved into a new phase of ministry, and the most visible parts are our national conference, website, and TGC Network. But these are just means to being "prophetic from the center."

The evangelical "tent" is bigger and more incoherent than ever. As we have noted, one of the main causes of this is the fast-changing Western culture we find ourselves in. One could argue that it is a much more difficult environment in which to minister than Greco-Roman paganism, largely because it is post-Christian, not pre-Christian. Because of this challenge, the Christian church is splintering and fragmenting. There are at least three types of responses, what James Hunter has called "Purity From," "Defensive Against," and "Relevant To."

"Purity From" responses are found among the Christians and churches that think we can have no real impact on culture, that all efforts to influence culture merely pollute and compromise us. By "Defensive Against" Hunter refers to those believers who think we can change culture through politics or through getting control of elite institutions and wielding their power. By "Relevant To" he designates many mainline, "emergent," and mega-churches that think we can change culture mainly by becoming more compassionate, less combative, and more contextual, thereby winning enough individuals back into the church to make a difference in the culture. Ironically, all of these approaches are still too influenced by our "Christendom" past. Even the "Purity From" party, with its strong denunciation of Christendom, is like a man who is so violently committed to being unlike his father that his father is still basically controlling his behavior.

What does it mean to be "prophetic" from the center? It means to center our churches on the gospel, thereby producing a series of balances that the other approaches do not have. We should be neither separatist nor triumphalistic in relationship to our culture. Believers (not local churches qua churches) should seek both to inhabit the older cultural institutions and to set up new, innovative institutions and networks that work for the common good on the basis of Christian understandings of things.

In our gospel communication, we should neither ignore baseline cultural narratives nor just change the packaging and call that "contextualizing." We should stand for the irreplaceability of the local church, which has the task of evangelizing and discipling. But we should also encourage Christians to work in the world as salt and light. All these balances, we believe, flow out of a profound grasp of the meaning of the gospel for all of life.

The priority we give to the gospel of Jesus Christ may not immediately seem warranted to those who entertain a different view of what "gospel" means. At least two constraints are commonly imposed on the word. First, some think of the gospel as one important but relatively small part of the Bible's content. Second, others think of the gospel as what tips us into the kingdom and gets us "saved," while the life-transforming elements in the Bible's content are bound up with something rather different — wisdom, law, counsel, narrative paradigms, and small-group therapy, but not gospel.

The response comes in two parts.

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "The Gospel as Center"
by .
Copyright © 2012 The Gospel Coalition.
Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Preface,
1 Gospel-Centered Ministry D. A. Carson and Timothy Keller,
2 Can We Know the Truth? Richard D. Phillips,
3 The Gospel and Scripture: How to Read the Bible Mike Bullmore,
4 Creation Andrew M. Davis,
5 Sin and the Fall Reddit Andrews III,
6 The Plan Colin S. Smith,
7 What Is the Gospel? Bryan Chapell,
8 Christ's Redemption Sandy Willson,
9 Justification Philip Graham Ryken,
10 The Holy Spirit Kevin DeYoung,
11 The Kingdom of God Stephen Um,
12 The Church: God's New People Tim Savage,
13 Baptism and the Lord's Supper Thabiti Anyabwile and J. Ligon Duncan,
14 The Restoration of All Things Sam Storms,
Appendix: The Gospel Coalition Foundation Documents,
Notes,

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