Looking back farther than I would like to remember, I recall as a seminary student reading an article by Richard John Neuhaus (back when he was still a Lutheran) on the issue of relevance in ministry.  In essence, Neuhaus argued that the churches most determined to be relative at all costs were destined to be the churches which were actually least relevant of all.  Making an idol of relevance is a form of self delusion.  Authentic relevance is represented by the transforming Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the faithful witness of the church throughout time.

Mark, I really appreciated your words concerning “assumptions and pursuits.”  I think you are absolutely right in suggesting that the big division among evangelical pastors today is between those who pursue faithfulness, assuming that faithfulness will produce relevance; and those who pursue relevance, hoping that faithfulness will emerge out of that quest.  You have provided a wonderful description of how this is realized in the ministry of the local church.

So many of the issues we deal with today seem to be focused on those who, in their own way, argue that we should pursue relevance by putting ourselves and our churches out on the “cutting edge” of ministry.  If this means taking every opportunity to extend faithful witness and ministry in the name of Christ, then count me in. 

Regrettably, it often becomes a rationale for something very different in the end.  Repeating that slogan, many pastors and churches, along with an array of parachurch ministries, push themselves into modes of ministry that are based more on cultural analysis and pragmatism than in a clear biblical and theological understanding of the nature and purpose of the church – and the integrity of the Gospel. 

The other problem with the “cutting edge” is that it really has no edge.  The culture is moving at warp speed in so many different directions that absolute relevance is a mirage.  Faithfulness to the Gospel produces the only relevance that matters.  Of course, we use forms of language and mechanisms of communication that others can understand, but the basic structure of our ministry and the substance of our beliefs are unchanged and unchanging – and still ever relevant. 

Those who push themselves ever onward toward the cutting edge will find themselves falling off the edge.

Mark, thanks also for your beautiful testimony, “Why I Am a Southern Baptist.”  It really is a wonderful piece that reflects your heart and witness.  Lig, thanks for taking time out of your summer travels to join me on yesterday’s edition of the radio program.  Thank you for your bold witness concerning the recent General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA).    

Mark, thanks for the though-provoking post ("Assumptions and Pursuits") on relevance and faithfulness (which seems to have generated good discussion in various places on the web), and for your post on why you are a Southern Baptist. I want to follow up on both. But let me make a few brief remarks on the relevance and faithfulness post first.

I was immediately reminded of David Wells' No Place for Truth when I read your thoughts. Remember how he starts off in the preface to NPFT? "those who are most relevant to this world are those who are judged most irrelevant." This instructs us that faithfulness is always relevant, even if our contemporaries don't think it is relevant.

But, as you note, all the problems don't lie with those discounting faithfulness for the sake of relevance. One problem is that we sometimes confuse faithfulness with something in the past that holds great meaning to us, but is not inherent to the faithfulness that the Bible requires for Gospel ministry. Thus, we judge holding fast to that uncommanded thing (or even some less important thing) as faithfulness in our day, and our relevance sinks. The problem in this case is not our desire to be faithful, but our confusion over what faithfulness entails. True faithfulness is never a hindrance to real relevance, only to false relevance.

Of course, there are other dangers as well - particularly thinking that relevance requires us to modify and upgrade God's prescribed message and methods for the work of the Gospel. One problem with this tendency is that we confuse is and ought, what people want and what people need, the opinions of our contemporaries about what we ought to be doing as Christians and what God tells us in his word that we ought to be doing as Christians. Hence, the seeker approach is always vulnerable to problems entailed in the prevalent consumer mindset of our culture. The customer is always right, being one of them (in terms of Christian evangelistic appropriation of that idea, there are problems with both the subject and predicate, "sinners" do not equal "customers" and they're certainly not always right, whatever we might learn from them). Then there is another meta-problem as well.

That's where a famous German grocer can help us. Karl Hans Albrecht (born in 1920 in Essen, Germany) founded a discount supermarket chain and is among the richest men in the world. Albrecht says: "Customer needs have an unsettling way of not staying satisfied for very long." It is the combination of "give them what they want" and "they've changed their minds about what they want" that poses the threat of irrelevance to those most doggedly determined to be relevant. Faux relevance is trying to hit a moving target (and generally is trailing the bullseye by about twenty years).

I get asked this from time to time.  I've written a personal testimony in Nettles & Moore Why I Am A Baptist.  That talks more about the theological issues that would make me affirm that baptism is only for believers. 

Why am I a SOUTHERN Baptist?  Because I am a member of a Southern Baptist Church.  Why have I encouraged our local church to get more involved in the Southern Baptist Convention, to not only cooperate in a friendly fashion, but to do so increasingly?

For the same reason that the SBC was initially founded, and for the same reason that the Triennial convention was founded before it (in 1814)--to help local congregations cooperate in order to send missionaries in order to evangelize the entire world.  True, the SBC had a sinful defense of slavery as part of the culture of its founders, and even a precipitating reason for its founding, but the main motivating cause, even through such terrible expressions of human falleness, was the desire to send missionaries with the Good News of Jesus Christ throughout the world.  That did not and has not changed.

The SBC isn't a church, and we don't pretend to be one.  We don't convene annually to entrust the doctrine and discipline of our local congregations to each other, or to the convention as a whole.  We meet in order to agree enough to send missionaries together.

Coming up on the bi-centinniel celebration of the Triennial Convention, I don't know of a group whose aims more nearly match those original ones than today's Southern Baptist Convention.  They originally united to help support Adoniram Judson.  That trickle of witness for Christ has become a flood.  And I rejoice to be a part of it.

That's why I'm a Southern Baptist.

Brothers, we have an unusual opportunity on Wednesday night, June 26, at 7pm.  We are to have Thabiti Anyabwile giving his testimony about being a Muslim and then being converted by God's Holy Spirit through hearing the preaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  Pray for us, that God would use this.  Pray that non-Christians would come.  Pray that many would be converted. 

"Perhaps the greatest gift any father can bestow upon his children, apart from the covenant blessings of parish life and a comprehension of the doctrines of grace, is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives a knowledge of the world, and it offers experience of a wide kind. Indeed, it is nothing less than a moral illumination."

Thomas Chalmers

Mark, what an outstanding post. Thanks. And thank also for the excellent address last night on the Westminister Directory's instructions on the preaching of the Word, given at the Presbyterian Church in America General Assembly pre-conference "The Westminster Confession for Today." Everyone needs to get the audio and listen to it. Great stuff. You and Al have been the highlights of the conference the last two years. By the way, the Opening worship service of the PCA GA began with a quote from you, Mark, out of The Deliberate Church! A great statement about the Word of God. The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) dinner tonight at the PCA GA went very well. Randy Stinson did a super job in hosting and speaking. More soon, when time allows.

Dear Friends, it's been great seeing you lately.  Lig, it was an unexpected pleasure to see your brother Mel at the SBC last week.  I had to remove a paedo-baptist crack or two I had in my church discipline seminar!!  Al, you were absolutely heroic in turning up to do that debate twice only 36 hours after eye surgery.  I was praying for you and was so thankful that you were able to winsomely represent the truth.  CJ, wonderful having lunch with you yesterday, and yes, that is why I am now blogging.  Because you told me to blog about this.

About what?

About this--having been in an unusual (even for me) number of meetings of pastors in the last few months, and reading everything from Rob Bell's Velvet Jesus to John MacArthur's Fool's Gold (I think the latter volume is the better), I've been giving a lot of thought to colloquiums, cooperation, alliances, being together and denominations.  What is it that we pastors are grouping around?  Here' my brief summary.

I think the most basic practical division among evangelical pastors today may be between those who pursue faithfulness and assume relevance and those who pursue relevance and assume faithfulness.

Imagine a spectrum running between those two alternatives; on its edges are positions most all of us would clearly recognize as wrong.  So on the faithfulness side would be a Greek Orthodox like use of untranslated Greek language in the service.  We might believe that the physical fact of proximity to God's Word or hearing the inspired language (even if we don't understand it) might have an almost magical force.  By that I mean, a power unrelated to our comprehension of the words.  No concern about irrelevance if the content is correct.  On the other hand we might find those who want to relate to the world precisely, with no distinct life or message.  Those for whom Paul's  example in I Cor. 9:19-23 is the explanation for what amounts to the vanishing of the church as any distinct society.

The middle of the spectrum is where each of us intends to be--the right balance, the perfect combination of utter faithfulness to the Gospel and piercing relevance in its presentation.  And I suspect that most of us imagine we're not too far from there, or else we would alter our location!

The observation that I've made being at this plethora of meetings in the last few months (and I don't imagine this observation is unique) is that folks about half-way down either side may often have more in common with each other than they do with others with whom they might have more theology in common.  So for example, if you take D (Arminian and seeker-sensitive), J (Arminian and more oriented to pursuing faithfulness), R (Calvinistic and seeker-sensitive), and M (Calvinistic and more oriented to pursuing faithfulness), it may actually be D & R who have more in common, and J & M than those who define theology more similarly on those points disputed between Calvinists and Arminians. 

So, for example, consider these two.  First, there is brother R who believes the Gospel, has Reformed soteriology, but assuming that everyone understands what he means when he says "Gospel", spends all his time and energy in being creatively relevant.  On the other hand, there is brother J who believes the Gospel, is self-consciously anti-Calvinistic, but believes in inerrancy, God's exhaustive knowledge of the future, salvation through Christ alone, penal substitutionary atonement, that the response to the Gospel must include repentance, and that the Gospel will be offensive to carnal man.  My guess is that, while I would have some challenges working with either, I could more easily and naturally work with brother J, even though we would disagree about the relation of the death of Christ to the non-elect.

I remember taking a walk with Don Carson once, and Don remarking something to the effect that the first generation has the Gospel, the second generation assumes the Gospel, the third generation loses the Gospel.  I am concerned that too many people who have the Gospel are lazy with it, compassionless, and not sufficiently motivated to spread it.  I fear that this is me.  Pray for me and Capitol Hill Baptist Church in this.  On the other hand, there are those who in the name of evangelism, simply assume that everybody sufficiently understands the Gospel, and will alter everything to make the non-Christian feel more at home in their public services.  (WHO EVER SAID THAT MOST OF THE CHURCH'S EVANGELISM SHOULD BE DONE THROUGH OUR PUBLIC SERVICES?!)  They give themselves to pursue relevance thinking that THAT is their major challenge, assuming that holding on to the Gospel itself is comparatively easy.

Consider what you and I will do to the Gospel message in our churches if we continue to change the "presentation" of the Gospel until we begin to get a response.

Pursue faithfulness and relevance.  Know that the Gospel is always relevant.  NEVER assume the Gospel.

Mark, Lig and Al, thanks for serving us big time with your insightful posts on this important topic. Please keep this stuff coming, boys. And Al and Mark, any possibility you guys could live-blog the Southern Baptist Convention this week? How exciting would that be?  So, how about if you cover the SBC this week, and I will take responsibility for the U.S. Open (that would be an important golf tournament, Al and Mark)? Lig, who ya got in the World Cup?

Well, you have heard from three of my favorite scholars; and now it’s time to hear from a simple, but athletic pastor. Here’s my concern: It is all too easy for us to affirm biblical manhood and womanhood and humbly contend for the complementarian position, and yet fail to intentionally and consistently apply this body of teaching to our lives and churches. So this post is a reminder to us as pastors that we must not only proclaim truth but practice truth. Preaching on biblical manhood and womanhood is not enough--we must transfer this body of truth to every member of our churches. Complementarianism must be functional in our personal lives and in our churches, not simply professed. And we must not lose sight of the difference biblical manhood and womanhood can and should make for husbands, wives, children and singles. 

Our responsibilities as pastors fall into two categories: Personal Application and Pastoral Strategy.

1)    Personal Application

Our teaching on this topic will only be as effective as our personal example. Modeling precedes teaching. Biblical instruction cannot be divorced from personal example. We must provide our churches with a genuine (not perfect) model of biblical masculinity. It is possible to skillfully teach Genesis 1-3 or Ephesians 5 and yet neglect to apply these passages to our lives. So, let me ask you: Where and how are you going to demonstrate biblical manhood to your wife and children this week? What difference is your complementarian position going to make in your life and for those you love, lead, and serve? If I spent the week with you, would your conviction about biblical masculinity be obvious?

Gentlemen, here is a gift you can give to your wife this week. Set aside a few hours of uninterrupted time, and ask her to honestly evaluate your personal example of godliness and your leadership in the home.

I dare you to ask her this question:

Where do I need to grow in serving and leading you?

For bonus points, ask this question:

Where do I need to grow in serving and leading the children?

This one conversation could initiate dramatic changes in your life.

After you’ve talked to your wife, I would encourage you to relate the details to a fellow elder, pastor or friend. Invite their questions and observations and make yourself accountable to them for application. This step will weaken pride and cultivate humility. Because God gives grace to the humble, this is a very smart thing to do. In fact, it would be stupid not to, since God opposes the proud. So, let us avoid being mere advocates of the complementarian position. By the grace of God we must be functional complementarians, and this must be evident for all to see.

I double dare you to ask your wife that question.

2)    Pastoral Strategy

Do you have a strategy for helping your church demonstrate biblical manhood and womanhood? If so, what is your strategy? What is your plan to clarify, cultivate and celebrate biblical manhood and womanhood in your church? This must be done intentionally, strategically and consistently--not occasionally. And it won’t get done if you don’t lead humbly, wisely, and boldly.

Here’s why: The members of our churches are daily being assaulted by a feminist worldview and culture. They are breathing feminist air each and every day. So do not assume that your statement of faith or last year’s teaching series are sufficient to protect your church from cultural or evangelical feminism.

Here’s how: Begin by thinking through each ministry in your church. Is biblical manhood and womanhood modeled and explicitly taught in each ministry? What about your children’s ministry? How about the youth ministry? The worship team? The counseling ministry? Thoroughly evaluate every aspect of your church, including the teaching diet on Sundays. Then devise a specific plan to channel this important body of teaching through each ministry of your church to every member of your church for every year you pastor the church.

Although I attempted to be brief and concise, this has once again become the never-ending post. My apologies. The fact is, I am not sufficiently gifted to be concise. But before I conclude, I must reaffirm that our motivation for biblical manhood and womanhood is the gospel. I am convinced that the complementarian position will strengthen the church in her God given-role to proclaim and protect the gospel. And the most effective apologetic (apart from Scripture) for the complementarian position is marriages, families and singles who radiate the beauty and wisdom of God’s plan for men and women. Biblical manhood and womanhood is the life-transforming effect of the gospel on full display. When a church teaches, practices and honors gender distinctions determined by our good and wise God, the gospel will advance. But this will only happen where there are humble and courageous pastors who lead every member and ministry of the church by personal example and with strategic pastoring.

Thanks, Mark and Lig for two outstanding posts on the issue of complementarianism.  Let me deal with the gender question Mark raised for a moment.  He made a generalization, of course.  Nevertheless, I agree with Mark and I believe the generalization to be generally true.  Younger complementarians seem to be more concerned to contend for complementarianism than (some . . most?) older complementarians.

I see this as part of the larger pattern visible in the church today.  I can see it in the students at the seminary and I can sense it among younger, seriously-minded pastors.  Put bluntly, this younger generation has been, of necessity, ready to assume a counter-cultural posture and then to find a way to contend for their convictions in the context of hostility, derision, and worse.  In a very real sense, this generation has been swimming upstream all their lives.  They know nothing of the cultural Christianity their parents took for granted.  Even in pockets like the deep South, where cultural Christianity still remains a factor, young Christians soon find themselves facing a very different context when they go to the university, move to a large city, or enter the professional world. 

Their parents, on the other hand, may find a counter-cultural posture to be strange and difficult.  They may share the same convictions concerning God's gift of gender and sexuality, but they are less enthusiastic about standing apart from the dominant culture.  When they went to seminary and graduate school, egalitarianism appeared to be ascendant. 

A couple of additional suggestions would involve marriage, parenthood, and theological vision.  Many younger pastors are in the midst of getting married, establishing a household, producing and raising children, and all that comes with this season of life.  Given the shape of the larger culture, these young complementarians have had to think through all the issues and then forge their own way.  Having forged their convictions in the midst of an adversarial culture, they understand that young couples need explicit and clear support and encouragement in order to obey Scripture and establish marriages and homes that reflect these commitments.

Further, they have heard and read all the (aging) arguments on behalf of egalitarianism, and they grow frustrated with what they (correctly) see as a pattern of exegetical and theological corner-cutting.  They are convinced that complementarianism is the winning argument.  They are not interested in playing defense.

Finally, younger pastors have had the encouragement of those who have been pointing evangelical Christians to a comprehensive vision of the glory of God in all things -- and this produces a commitment to complementarianism that goes far beyond just "getting it right."  They want to display God's glory in their marriages and in their churches on these very issues, knowing that nothing less is at stake.

Once again, they are right.  Our belief that this is a watershed issue explains why an explicit affirmation of complementarianism appears in our statement.

Your post on the complementarian question was excellent Mark. I've waited a week before posting to follow up, in part because I didn't want anything else to deflect attention from your reflections on that important matter. There were dozens of comments left here at the T4G and the conversation was all over the place in the blogosphere.

Two notes before I make a few remarks. First, as I was preparing to post tonight, I think I noticed new formatting for the T4G site going up. Looks good. Way to go team. Second, I plan to start blogging through our T4G statement to give some context to it. Hope you, C.J. and Al will join me.

Now, as to the issue of younger conservative evangelicalism and complementarianism, I think your observations are spot on - though I want to point out that guys like Harry Reeder, Kent Hughes and Ray Ortlund (who were in that meeting and who are over 50) have led brilliantly and faithfully in the whole area of biblical manhood and womanhood, not to mention our own dear C.J. who has been on this issue like white on rice for years. Once again, C.J. shows his world-class discernment!

Allow me to reiterate a few points you made, as a public expression of solidarity, and to explain why I think this is so important, and warranted inclusion in our T4G statement.

One, the denial of complementarianism undermines the church's practical embrace of the authority of Scripture (thus eventually and inevitably harming the church's witness to the Gospel). The gymnastics required to get from "I do not allow a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man," in the Bible, to "I do allow a woman to teach and to exercise authority over a man" in the actual practice of the local church, are devastating to the functional authority of the Scripture in the life of the people of God.

By the way, this is one reason why I think we just don't see many strongly inerrantist-egalitarians (meaning: those who hold unwaveringly to inerrancy and also to egalitarianism) in the younger generation of evangelicalism. Many if not most evangelical egalitarians today have significant qualms about inerrancy, and are embracing things like trajectory hermeneutics, etc. to justify their positions. Inerrancy or egalitarianism, one or the other, eventually wins out.

Two, and following on the first point, the church's confidence in the clarity of Scripture in undermined, because if you can get egalitarianism from the Bible, you can get anything from the Bible. Paul may be excruciating to read aloud and hear read in a dominant feminist culture, but he's not obscure in his position! In 1 Timothy 2:11-12 he says, "A woman must quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness. I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet." Elsewhere, 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, we find the confirming parallel to this previous pronouncement: "The women are to keep silent in the churches; for they are not permitted to speak, but are to subject themselves, just as the Law also says. If they desire to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is improper for a woman to speak in church." These verses (and many others) are uncomfortably clear and certainly politically incorrect, and though some of us may be consoled by "exegesis" that shows that they don't really mean that women can't preach, teach, rule in the church, yet there remains this nagging feeling that such interpretive moves are the victory of present opinion over clear but unpopular biblical teaching. Cultural cooption of the church's reading of the Bible, robs the church's ability to speak prophetically to the culture and to live distinctively in the culture, which in turns undermines the church's Gospel witness.

Three, because the very ideal of equality championed by egalitarianism (whether secular or Christian) is a permutation of a particular strand of Enlightenment thought, and because this particular ideal of equality is actually alien to the biblical anthropology and ethic, whenever and wherever it is read into the text of Scripture and its principles are worked out consistently, there is a competition with a biblical view of manhood and womanhood. For instance, try to find this view of equality in Genesis 1 - it's just not there. Consequently, commitment to evangelical egalitarianism opens the door for two competing but incompatible ethical norms and ideals within the individual, family and church. If the egalitarian impulse wins out, the church is compromised precisely at the point where paganism is assaulting the church today. For, as Peter Jones has brilliantly demonstrated, paganism wants to get rid of Christian monotheism by getting rid of the Creator-creature distinction. And one way paganism likes to do that is through gender confusion. Hence, the bi-sexual shaman, the sacred feminine, goddess worship, etc. Paganism understands that one of the best ways to prepare the way for pagan polytheistic monism over against the transcendent Creator God of the Bible is to undermine that God's image in the distinctiveness of male and female, and in the picture of Christ and the church in marital role distinctions, and in the male eldership of the church. Egalitarianism is just not equipped for that fight, and in fact simply capitulates to it.

Four, when the biblical distinctions of maleness and femaleness are denied, Christian discipleship is seriously damaged because there can be no talk of cultivating distinctively masculine Christian virtue or feminine Christian virtue. Yes, there are many Christian ethical norms that are equally directed and applicable to male and female disciples, but there are also many ethical directives in the NT enjoined distinctly upon Christian men as men and Christian women as women. Furthermore, the NT (and the Bible as a whole) recognizes that men and women are uniquely vulnerable to different kinds of temptations, and thus need gender-specific encouragement in battling against them in the course of Christian discipleship. Evangelical egalitarianism, fearful as it is that any acknowledged difference between men and women could set the stage for inequality of role or status, is utterly unprepared to help the believer with these distinctive commands or temptations. Egalitarian discipleship of Christian men and women has, then, an inherent androgynous bias. But that is not how God made us. He made us male and female. Thus Paul warns Christian men against the soul-peril of "effeminacy" without in any way criticizing (and, indeed, admiring and encouraging) the "femininity" of women. We need masculine male Christians and feminine female Christians, and that kind of discipleship requires an understanding of and commitment to complementarianism. Hence, denial of complementarianism compromises Gospel discipleship.

For these reasons and more, Mark, I think we were right to "deny that any church can confuse these issues without damaging its witness to the Gospel." But we'll have a chance to say more on this later.