I'm in the midst of finishing writing a little book on evangelism.  In one chapter, I'm making some specific suggestions about how to evangelize, and one piece of counsel I give is to "Be Clear."  Here's some of what I'm hoping to say about being clear:

When you share the Gospel, think carefully about the language you use.  One of the best conversations I can remember having about evangelism was with a secular Jewish friend of mine.  I was to give talks soon on a college campus about evangelism.  And I decided to ask my friend about it.  We’ll call him “Michael.”  (In fact, that was his name!)  “So Michael,” I said, “have you ever been evangelized?”

          “What’s that?” he asked.  “You know,” I said, “when someone who is a Christian starts talking to you about God and Jesus and asking if you’re saved.”  “Oh, that!” he said.  “Yeah, I guess I have been.” 

Anyway, Michael and I got into a long and good conversation.  Now, the truth is that I had evangelized Michael a number of times before then, but he thought those were conversations.  As we talked about it, he thought evangelism was something that someone did to him.  And he didn’t understand it very well.

I realized in talking with him that I couldn’t take the meaning of words for granted.  “God”, “prayer”, “heaven”, “good”, “moral”, “judge”, “sin” were all words which I realized I had not done a good job defining.  I could have misunderstood what Michael thought if I had simply gone through a quick, persuasive sales presentation and gotten him to say “Yes!”  He would have been saying “yes” to much that he didn’t understand.

None of us ever have a complete understanding of the Gospel, but we must have a clear idea of what the basics of our message are, and we must be clear in our expression of them.  If there is a likely misunderstanding, we should address it.  We should speak in such a way as to be understood.  (“Contextualization” is the big theological word for this.)  So when we talk about justification (and we should) we should make sure to define it.  Justification is being declared right with God.  But we sin, we’re not right with God.  So how can we be declared right?  We can’t, if God is truly good.  Unless, that is, we have someone act as a substitute for us.  “Justification” then gets us talking about all kinds of issues right at the heart of the Gospel. 
          So, when we’re talking to non-Christian friends about the Gospel, we want to make sure they understand what we mean.  Christians in the Bible had a great concern about this.  So it’s often been noted that Paul would begin with the Old Testament when he was speaking to Jews, but when he began to speak to a group of Greeks in Athens in Acts 17 he begins by quoting their own sayings.  As he wrote to the Corinthians “To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. . . . To those not having the law I became like one not having the law . . . so as to win those not having the law,” (I Cor. 9:20-21).

One part of clarity sometimes missed by earnest evangelists, however, is the willingness to offend.  Clarity with the claims of Christ certainly will include the translation of the Gospel into words that our hearer understands, but it doesn’t necessarily mean translating it into words that our hearer will like.  Too often advocates of relevant evangelism verge over into being advocates of irrelevant non-evangelism.  A gospel which in no way offends the sinner has not been understood.

          Look at Peter at Pentecost in Acts 2.  He wanted to be relevant.  But that relevance gave his words more bite, not less.  How did Peter witness to those he wished to see saved?  He said to them, among other things, “let all Israel be assured of this:  God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ,” (Acts 2:36).
          Relevant?  Yes.  Pleasing?  No. Clear?  Undoubtedly.

          Be clear about the fact of sin (Isa. 59:1-2; Hab. 1:13; Rom. 3:22-23; 6:23; Eph. 2:8-9; Titus 3:5; I John 1:5-6).  Be clear about the meaning of the cross (Matt. 26:28; Gal. 3:10-13; I Tim. 1:15; I Peter 2:24; 3:18).  Be clear about our need to repent of our sins and to trust in Christ (Matt. 11:28-30; Mark 1:15; 8:34; John 1:12; 3:16; 6:37; Acts 20:21).  What would it mean to evangelize without being clear about what the Bible says about these issues?

The future of the church lies in reaching young men.  I think it was Mark Driscoll who recently said or wrote something like that.  And he is not alone in making such observations.  Given the way that God has made us, men do have a leadership role to fulfill in the church, and our not fulfilling it will be to the detriment of the churches.

Having said that, there is always a cottage industry in finding those factors which are the golden key to churches not succeeding.  And one that is being trumpeted a lot these days is the absence of men from churches.  The implications are sometimes taken to be those of the "falling sky" variety.  Fix it, or else!

Michael Horton recently interviewed on the White Horse Inn the author David Murrow.  Murrow published a book last year called Why Men Hate Going to Church.  The publisher calls it a "groundbreaking new book".  In his introduction Murrow said that "no one had ever written a book" (page viii) that addressed this problem.  I assumed this was true. 

Then I bought a book in a used book store a few days ago.    It's by Cortland Myers.  It's called Why Men Do Not Go to Church.  And it was published in 1907. 

I write this not to chastise Mr. Murrow, nor to downplay the problem.  I, too, am concerned like Mark Driscoll, Michael Horton, Murrow, Myers and others about reaching people with the Gospel--including young men.  I am, at the same time, encouraged by having a congregation which is composed of old and young, men and women, but one in which we often hear visitors comment on the number of young men.  I am also encouraged by realizing that real problems recognized 100 years ago, while they may not have been solved, have not stopped the work of the Holy Spirit through our imperfect churches.   It is the promise of a 100% Man that He would build His church, and that even the gates of Hell itself would not overcome the church.  Praise God, neither will gender imbalance.

PS--Thanks, Geoff, for the help on the pictures!

Hey, Al, Lig & CJ!  I got an idea.  Why don't we write the introduction for the T4G volume here on this blog?!  I've got an idea for the structure.  It would require each one of us to write 3 times, rotating through from me to AL to Lig to CJ, covering a different topic each time (how we met & first impressions, how relationship grew, how T4G came about and maybe a 4th brief round about reflections after T4G 2006).  I think it would be a fun, maybe even interesting,  m a y b e even instructive introduction.  Others may enjoy reading it as it's written.  And, honestly, what's more to the point, I think we would be more likely to get it done in a timely manner (my real motivation!).

Any takers? 

Mark, that picture from your previous post (This One’s for You, CJ) added more pain to my already burdened soul. It’s bad enough that the Yankees just swept the Red Sox, but to make matters worse, I have to root for a United States basketball team led by Coach K in the FIBA World Championship!  I did not need a fresh reminder of Duke Basketball at this time.

Seriously, I am very grateful to God you don’t know anything about sports, my friend. I am glad that you didn’t grow up in my neighborhood where all we did was play hoops. Otherwise, you may not have read the Encyclopedia Britannica in its entirety by age seven. But I’m most grateful to God for your friendship and leadership (great post on SBC mistake).

Now, it appears that the much-appreciated readers of our blog refuse to let me ignore your earlier question, “What is CJ?” By the way, what kind of question is that?

What am I? Well, here is what I am. I am the worst sinner I know. And by the grace of God I am doing better than I deserve. For I deserve the righteous wrath of God because of my sin. I deserve to be punished eternally. But in the mystery of His mercy, God sacrificed and crushed His Son on the Cross--as my substitute--so that I might be forgiven of my sin and know God as my Father rather than my Judge. What am I? I am truly amazed by the grace of God. That’s what I am.

Of much lesser importance, I have the privilege to serve and lead Sovereign Grace Ministries in its mission to plant and support local churches. And I am especially blessed to be a member of Covenant Life Church, “the dearest place on earth.”

Sometimes I notice what I keep doing.  I'll be speaking (as I did this past weekend) on elders, congregationalism, membership, the Gospel, and I'll think "I'm saying this again.  I've said this many times before.  Now I'm saying this again."  I stop and talk to an older saint, and hear how much she is called to endure in her following of Christ.  Reflecting on my own life, and my own congregation, I am reminded that I'm always in need of learning the same things   again.  Just as meals in a family are patiently prepared again, and clothes are washed again, and children are corrected again, and spouses ask forgiveness or enjoy one another again, or God forgives us again, so we in our daily lives are called to do much that we do   again.

That is the nature of this life.  But then I'm encouraged by what Martin Luther said, “This life, therefore, is not righteousness but growth in righteousness, not health but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise.  We are not yet what we shall be but we are growing toward it.  The process is not yet finished but it is going on.  This is not the end but it is the road.  All does not yet gleam in glory but all is being purified.” 

But a day is coming . . . .

After 2 months reflection by many pastors, it is increasingly clear that the Southern Baptist Convention has made a serious mistake at its convention in Greensboro.

This has nothing to do with elections of officers, mission board controversy or alcohol.  This has to do with what it means to be a church, what it means to be a Christian and the accountability that pastors will give to God.

When a question was raised about the propriety of allowing those who are able to attend church, but who never do to remain members of our churches, the answer was given that this was in order to keep the names as "prospects".  Presumably, the intention is that our prior contact with them gives us an excuse for contacting them personally.

Meanwhile, mortality continues on, and pastors have certainly died since the convention, and will continue to, as we are all eventually called home.  And when we do, according to Hebrews 13, we pastors will give an account to God for the souls in our care.  Who are they?  They are the members of our churches.  At this point, I'm to give account currently for 536.

For me to allow my local congregation to continue on, with people in membership regularly forsaking assembling together is to be in sin, to lead my congregation into sin, confuse what it means to be a member, and confuse what it means to be a Christian.  Any one of these topics could be treated at length.  I simply want to reflect for a moment on how we're serving these "prospects", non-attending members.

All of them will die, many of them without returning to church.  Some of those will be our brothers and sisters in Christ who were in sin.  I fear that many of them will not have been our brothers and sisters in Christ, and so they will slip into a Christ-less eternity, face a good and just God while they are still pleading their own merits for salvation, and fall under God's deserved penalty forever.  We could have helped them, like the man in I Cor. 5 who was caught in sin (and may have repented II Cor. 2?), or like the man in Gal. 6:1.  But we didn't. 

Instead, we met their actions of disobedience with continued formal approval.  They remained members.  We continued to teach them that church membership was their own private business, not the business of the congregation.  We continued to meet their absence with our silence. 

Do you know who opposes this practice of Southern Baptist Churches?  God in Hebrews 10.  Our Southern Baptist forbears who knew what it meant to be a Christian, and a church member, and who suffered for it.  No messenger to a Southern Baptist Convention a century or so ago could have conceived of such an action (or inaction).  Current Southern Baptist church planters oppose us in this.   As Ed Stetzer and David Putnam have recently written, “Any church with a membership twice its attendance is not and cannot be living up to its responsibilities to care for, nurture, watch over, and disciple its church members.” [Ed Stetzer and David Putnam, Breaking the Missional Code (2006), p. 150].

Of course there are hypocrites in the church, but they shouldn't be there with our approval.  We should ourselves be constant repenters and trusters in Christ.  We should not aid unrepenting sinners in their own delusions of being saved. 

How could such an answer have been given?  I'm sure in well meaning sincerity.  But how could it have been soberly accepted by thousands of messengers?  I can only conclude that it must have been due in part to our cheapened understanding of conversion, debased practices of evangelism, worldly attitudes about being "judgmental" and an addiction--a drunkeness, if you will--to numbers.  I don't think it came about by careful reflection on the Bible's teaching on what it means to be born again, to be made a new creation, to consider the fruit of the Spirit in contrast to the works of the flesh.  We were not thinking of II Peter 1.  We not calling people to examine themselves to see if they are in the faith, as Paul urged the Corinthians.  We have not with a sober love called them "sinners" in need of repentance; we have called them "members" and assured them that they are saved.  Or we've called them "prospects."

Friends, "prospects" are in the phone book, in our family, in our neighborhood, at work.  Church members are not "prospects".  Church members are supposed to be our brothers and sisters in Christ.  Church members are our exhibit A of what it means to be a Christian.  They are the walking advertisements for the gospel our congregation preaches.  Church members are supposed to be saved from God's wrath against them.  If they give no evidence of it, we're playing a high stakes game here with the souls of those we claim to love.

Church members are not prospects.  Church members are not prospects.

Your members are those for whom you regularly take responsibility for admitting them to the Lord's Table.  Pure and simple, that's what it boils down to.

Marcus Loane described the members of Richard Baxter's church like this:  “They thronged the Church [St. Mary’s Kidderminster] and sat spellbound as he [Baxter] declared the Word of Truth until the fear of God came down with power.  It soon became necessary to erect five capacious galleries to house the large congregation and the time came when he could say that not less than one third of the townsfolk had passed from death to life. ‘I know not a congregation in England,’ he wrote in 1658, ‘that hath in it proportionately so many that fear God.’ Kidderminster was the only church in which he ever dispensed the Lord’s Supper, and that only to those who would consent to discipline . . . .” Marcus Loane, Makers of Puritan History (1961), p. 184. 

Membership means regular admission to the Lord's Table.  (I'm side-stepping the issue of visitors for now).  Who are those who are regularly allowed to commune?  Who are those who are submitting to the leadership of this local congregation?  Which persons are those who are the responsibility of this congregation to know, encourage and rebuke, as for example the Corinthian congregation was to take responsibility for the man in I Cor. 5.

Membership, at root, is regular admission to communion.

Would you guys agree?

It's the depths of summer.  None of you other guys are posting here much.  So I'll take this opportunity to post the question for Al & Lig, "What is CJ?"  CJ, for you, the question is "What are you?"  By that, I mean, since you're no longer a pastor, are you an elder at your local church?  How do you understand your current role?  Inquiring minds want to know.

Well, not exactly.  But in the last chapter of his book Above All Earthly Pow'rs, David finishes by calling for reform in our churches as a necessary component in reaching our postmodern culture.  When I read it I felt that he had written a perfect introduction for what we're trying to do at 9marks.org.  What he calls for is exactly the burden that I and others here have, and it is what Sovereign Grace ministries, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Twin Lakes Fellowship all have in common.  We might flesh it out in somewhat different ways, but it is our burden and life-goal to see God glorified in local churches.  This is fundamental to our evangelism.  The VISIBLE CHURCH commends the AUDIBLE GOSPEL. 

Here' what David says:  “The postmodern reaction against Enlightenment dogma
will not be met successfully simply by Christian proclamation. 
Of that we can be sure. 
That proclamation must arise within a context of authenticity. 
It is only as the evangelical Church begins to put its own house in order,
its members begin to disentangle themselves from all of those cultural habits
which militate against a belief in truth,
and begin to embody that truth in the way that the Church actually lives,
that postmodern skepticism might begin to be overcome. 
Postmoderns want to see as well as hear,
to find authenticity in relationship as the precursor to hearing what is said. 
This is a valid and biblical demand. 
Faith, after all, is dead without works,
and few sins are dealt with as harshly by Jesus as hypocrisy. 
What postmoderns want to see, and are entitled to see,
is believing and being, talking and doing, all joined together in a seamless whole. 
This is the great challenge of the moment for the evangelical Church. 
Can it rise to this occasion?”  David Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs (2005), p. 315.

Roger Norris has written a nice review of Mark Dever's and Paul Alexander's The Deliberate Church, in the July edition of The Evangelical Times. Here it is (with thanks to ET).

"A few years ago Mark Dever gave us Nine marks of a healthy church — assessments that were deeply embedded in biblical theology and gave nine crucial qualities of a spiritually healthy church. In The deliberate church Dr Dever aims to help pastors and church leaders on the journey towards spiritual health and growth for the local church. Mark Dever is Senior Pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C.

"The book is a reassuring antidote to the many pragmatic approaches of our day, addressing crucial issues of church life with clarity and insight. The authors are careful to trust the Word of God in the work of building the church, knowing that ‘the church itself is God’s evangelism program’.

"The chapters are set out in four sections; 1) Gathering the Church; 2) When the Church gathers; 3) Gathering elders; 4) When the elders gather. The authors make it clear in the first chapter that they do not have a great programme for the church; rather they rely on four basic areas of pastoral responsibility — preaching, praying, personal discipling relationships, and patience.

"Combining biblical principles with practical advice, the book goes on to address such issues as evangelism, membership, worship, fellowship, prayer, leadership and the role of the pastor. There are helpful notes on multiple Sunday morning services and contemporary influences, considered in the light of the biblical data.

"Each section of the book includes a ‘think tank’ of questions and ends with a list of recommended reading.

"The book is ideal for pastors and church leaders, who want to begin with the gospel and take seriously the biblical pattern for the church — and are looking for down-to-earth practical help. At the very least it raises searching and important questions for leaders in our contemporary ‘outcomes-driven’ culture.

"Not everyone will agree wholeheartedly with every point, but the book prompts us to make an honest assessment of the life of the local church. In giving direction to the task of building a ministry, The deliberate church points us away from the pragmatism of programmes to the priority of faithfulness to the gospel; to where the church’s character, privileges and responsibilities are biblically driven — deliberately.