by Matthew Pinson | Jul 2, 2014
A few weeks ago, I recommended four podcasts on youth ministry from the White Horse Inn. I didn’t know at that time how many more podcasts they would post on youth and youth ministry-related topics. They ran four more such podcasts, which I highly recommend to youth and family ministers as well as other pastors and church leaders.
Particularly interesting was the last podcast in the series, “Youth Ministry and Youth Culture,” an interview with media ecologist T. David Gordon. A religion professor at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania, Gordon is one of the most savvy and perceptive cultural critics in evangelicalism today.
He has recently published two penetrating books that focus on how contemporary culture is shaping Christian faith and practice in sometimes unsuspected ways: Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers and Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns: How Pop Culture Rewrote the Hymnal.
One of the things that struck my wife Melinda and me as we were listening to this podcast was Gordon’s reaction to clips from interviews conducted at a ministry conference. Some of the interviewees remarked that teenagers have a short attention span and think in 3-minute segments. So we have to de-emphasize content and the word and emphasize experience and the visual, putting everything into 3-minute segments to keep their attention.
Gordon says that this approach fails to reckon with the established phenomenon of “neuro-plasticity”—the brain’s ability to rewire itself. “People can change. It’s cynical, it seems to me, to say, ‘Well, this person can never think more than three-and-a-half minutes.’ It’s really unjust to say such a thing about a person, because if there are any humans who can pay attention, this person could become one.”
Gordon believes, in short, that it’s unfair to treat the younger generation in such a way as to deprive them of the sort of deep attention to truth that is essential to biblical faithfulness. His comment that, when we dumb things down for younger people, we are being cynical about them and unfair to them, is very poignant.
Gordon, unlike a flood of voices in conservative evangelicalism calling for moving away from age-segregated youth ministry altogether, believes that church ministries specifically for youth can be a golden opportunity to prepare young people for Christian adulthood by training them how to be spiritually mature.
I encourage my readers to listen to this podcast, which can be found here.
Three other White Horse Inn podcasts in the month of June have also discussed youth ministry and youth-related topics:
“Giving Up Gimmicks” (This is a discussion with Brian Cosby, author of Giving Up Gimmicks: Reclaiming Youth Ministry from an Entertainment Culture.)
“Sustainable Discipleship”
“Taking Every Thought Captive” (This is a more-educational podcast about teaching young people to how to engage in critical thinking.)
They have also provided a study kit to go along with these episodes, which includes resources and material not included in the podcasts.
by Matthew Pinson | Jun 23, 2014
For more than four decades, the Commission for Theological Integrity of the National Association of Free Will Baptists (of which I serve as chairman) has sponsored an extended Theological Integrity Seminar at the annual session of the National Association. In these lengthy sessions, we have a speaker address theological trends and issues facing evangelicals and Free Will Baptists. Then we follow up with a time of Q&A and dialogue.
The Theological Integrity Seminar will be Monday, July 28, at 2:00 p.m. in Hall CD of the Fort Worth Convention Center. Because it is lengthier than a typical seminar at the convention, we hold it only one time. I hope you will “save the date” and make plans to be at this seminar.
This year we are discussing a very important topic: the need to revisit ministerial licensure and ordination standards to be more serious about our confessional commitments (the beliefs or doctrines we confess) as Free Will Baptists. The speaker will be Tim Campbell, Executive Director of Arkansas Free Will Baptists, and his presentation will be entitled “A Solemn Appeal for a Serious Approach to Licensure and Ordination.”
Tim is uniquely suited to make this presentation. He brings together a hunger and thirst for theology and a practical ministry among Free Will Baptist churches, associations, and pastors.Through various means in Arkansas such as the Thomas Grantham Society, the Pillars Conferences, etc., he is pioneering theological and ministry mentoring among pastors across generations, and his efforts are meeting with great success. It’s because he sees theology not just as being a book on a shelf, but rather lived-out theology, theology for everyday life and ministry.
This is a seminar we need, and it’s a topic we need to be discussing in this age when the secular culture around us is becoming more and more secularized, and when much of the evangelical culture around us is becoming less and less concerned about doctrine and theological integrity.
So I encourage you to mark this on your calendar and attend this year’s Theological Integrity Seminar at 2:00 Monday afternoon in Hall CD of the Fort Worth Convention Center.Bring your notepad or tablet and be ready to take notes and engage in the conversation.
The Commission for Theological Integrity has been in existence since 1962. Its historic purposes are: (1) to alert our people to theological trends that could threaten our theological integrity as a denomination, (2) to prepare materials that will contribute to the continued preservation of the theological integrity of the denomination, and (3) as need and opportunity arise, to conduct seminars on subjects which are pertinent to the purpose of the Commission.
The members of the commission are myself, Kevin Hester (secretary), Randy Corn, and Jackson Watts. A fifth member will be elected this year at the convention.
We look forward to seeing you at this year’s Theological Integrity Seminar!
by Matthew Pinson | Jun 11, 2014
In my last post, I began talking about my family’s visit to the church Chuck Swindoll planted in suburban Dallas, Stonebriar Community Church. I discussed how he began to see the church drift into a market-driven approach, and the renewal he believed was necessary, which he outlined in his recent book The Church Awakening: An Urgent Call to Renewal. I conclude in this post with some brief impressions from our visit.
Getting a Glimpse
So I wanted to attend Stonebriar Community Church when I had an opportunity, to get a glimpse into what this might look like on the ground. There I was very encouraged by a very Word-driven worship service with expository preaching as its centerpiece.
But it wasn’t just the sermon that was Word-driven. Everything in the service was geared toward letting the Word of Christ dwell richly (Col. 3:16) in the worshippers. This Word-drivenness was by no means the caricature of an arid “academic” approach, but was rather a winsome, fervent, reverent, prayerful service geared to building up the body and fueling spiritual growth. The worship was reverent and structured yet felt natural and free, not stilted, with a sense of vibrancy and zeal (much of it no doubt owing to Swindoll’s natural charisma).
The excellently done music, both traditional hymns and contemporary songs by artists like Keith Getty and Stuart Townend, led by Pastor of Worship and Music Ministries Don McMinn and a choir and accompanied by an orchestra, served to undergird the sermon and inculcate the Word. We sang from a hymnal when singing hymns that were printed in the hymnal, and a screen when singing modern songs that weren’t.
I found it interesting that Swindoll did not use PowerPoint during his sermon (not that he would say pastors ought not project their outlines), although a beautifully printed outline of the sermon with space for writing notes was included with the state-of-the-art printed “Worship Guide” that was distributed to each worshipper by the friendly greeters at each door. No visual images were used in the worship service. Swindoll preached a longer sermon than I had expected (perhaps, I surmised, because most of the sermons I’ve heard him preach have been edited for radio).
Some people were dressed in suits and ties and dresses, others were dressed in “business casual” dress, and others were dressed in jeans (some of the older people were dressed more casually, and some of the younger people were dressed up, and vice versa). The congregation was richly multigenerational and multiethnic.
Several thousand people were in attendance, so there were two morning services. But I read on the church’s attractive and user-friendly website that both the church’s morning services are identical in terms of the music, sermon, and other features of the service. Everything was done with the highest standards of technical excellence and care.
Refreshing and Encouraging
It’s refreshing to see a minister of Swindoll’s stature questioning the status quo of much market-driven evangelicalism. And he’s not just questioning it but actually repenting of the ways he himself has been involved in it, and making appropriate changes to return to a more New Testament oriented church life away from the entertainment- and image-drivenness of much present-day evangelicalism.
Attending Stonebriar was also encouraging and confirming of the sort of approach we’re attempting to foster at Welch College. We don’t do things exactly like they do (for example, our choir does not wear choir robes, and while we use a variety of musical instruments in worship, we do not have the large orchestra they have). But at Welch we’re trying to nurture an attitude to being the church that is pertinent to modern life yet refreshingly different and transcendent.
We want worship and church life to be saturated in the Word and shaped by the Word. We hope for worship and church life that is in continuity with, not divorced from, the Christian tradition. But we don’t want churches to stick slavishly to habits they’ve sometimes acquired in the mid- to-late twentieth century that have too often become non-negotiable “traditions” to them.
I encourage you to read The Church Awakening. Like me, there will be, as with any book, things you agree with and things you disagree with. But it will be rewarding to hear the wisdom of this servant of God who himself is attempting to bow to the Lordship of Christ in the way he is leading his congregation.
By the way, after the service, Melinda, Anna, Matthew, and I went and greeted Dr. Swindoll and introduced ourselves, and I told him a little about our ministry at Welch. I told him how much I appreciated The Church Awakening. He gripped my hand and said, “That right there tells me a lot about you.” Those words warmed my heart. I thank Dr. Swindoll for his deep wisdom, his steadfast courage, and his inspiring example.
by Matthew Pinson | Jun 10, 2014
“When we sacrifice truth on the altar of relevance, our words are no longer relevant.”
—Chuck Swindoll
This past Sunday my family and I had the opportunity to worship at Stonebriar Community Church in suburban Dallas, the megachurch started by Chuck Swindoll fifteen years ago. I have wanted to attend worship at the church since reading Swindoll’s recent book The Church Awakening: An Urgent Call for Renewal. At Stonebriar we were blessed by a joyful, Word-driven worship service that combined excellence and pertinence to modern people with a refreshingly biblically faithful, God-centered approach.
A 2009 poll asked pastors to list the most influential preacher in America, and Chuck Swindoll ranked second only to Billy Graham. So it was worth noting when, in The Church Awakening, Swindoll basically repented for allowing himself and his church to get caught up in the market-drivenness that characterizes large swaths of the evangelical church.
Erosion
Ten years after he had planted Stonebriar Community Church, he says, he realized that the church was “eroding,” not in its faith—its doctrine—but in its practice. It was becoming more committed to trying to make the gospel relevant than shaping the church, its practice, and its people’s sensibilities according to Scripture. He came to realize, as he says in the book, that “when we sacrifice truth on the altar of relevance, our words are no longer relevant.”
A Call for Renewal
In The Church Awakening, Swindoll issues a call for the renewal of evangelical churches, urging pastors to:
- Stop worshipping at the “altar of relevance”
- Quit marketing the church, attempting to “sell” it to religious consumers by making it appealing to their consumer tastes and preferences
- Structure and lead the church according to biblical principles rather than corporate business techniques
- Make God and His Word, not the individual’s private religious experience and expression, the center of corporate worship
- Move away from a reliance on visual media and entertainment techniques in public worship that distract from the Word-centered worship that characterized the Reformation
- Avoid congregational segmentation/segregation based on generation or consumer preferences, which hinders the biblical ideal of unity of the body
“As Christians, we must demand a halt to superficial religion,” Swindoll says. “We should refuse to be entertained any longer. We must stop calling it ‘worship.’ It’s time we openly state that we expect deep teaching from the Word of God from our pastor, not a twelve-minute sermonette. ”
Not Just a Critic
One of the things that is refreshing about the book, even if one doesn’t agree with everything Swindoll says or does (which I don’t), is that Swindoll is writing not merely as a critic of the direction many evangelical churches are moving. He is writing as a minister who has felt himself gradually moving—as he says, like a frog in the kettle—toward a toleration for the very things he decries in the book.
So, in line with his emphasis on grace in his preaching and writing, he is far from “scolding” people from the outside. Rather, he iswith the churches he is critiquing. He is writing in a repentant sort of way, and he is hopeful to see other ministers transforming their churches in the direction of a more Word-driven, gospel-centered approach as he has done.
In a Leadership Journal interview with Skye Jethani (author of another, yet somewhat different, book with similar themes entitled The Divine Commodity: Discovering a Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity), Swindoll quoted the influential twentieth-century British evangelical Martyn Lloyd Jones as saying:
“When the church is absolutely different from the world, she invariably attracts it. It is then that the world is made to listen to her message, though it may hate it at first.”
This quotation gets to the heart of the concerns Swindoll discusses in his book and the Word-driven solutions he recommends.
In my next post, I’ll give some brief impressions from our visit to Stonebriar Community Church.
by Matthew Pinson | May 29, 2014
I occasionally listen to the White Horse Inn podcast and like most of what I hear, especially when it comes to the subject of the church maintaining kingdom values and priorities in the midst of contemporary secular culture.
The White Horse Inn is run by Michael Horton, one of evangelicalism’s leading theologians. I first encountered Dr. Horton when I read some things he wrote on the Calvinist doctrine of perseverance several years ago. As a result, I asked him to write the “Classical Calvinist” chapter in my book Four Views on Eternal Security. Horton is one of the brightest minds in the church today, and despite our differences on the doctrines of salvation and the church, we have much to learn from him.
An example of this is a recent series of podcasts the White Horse Inn produced on youth ministry. I encourage my readers—especially pastors, youth and family ministers, and lay youth directors—to go online and listen to each of these podcasts. They feature guests who are deeply involved in the ministry of discipling young people.
It is encouraging to listen to people who have a heart for youth and are not giving up on youth ministry in a time when many churches are doing away with targeted youth ministry. Yet Horton and his guests, while not jettisoning youth ministry, are moving away from the pragmatism and generational segregation of much recent youth ministry toward a more biblical-theological approach.
Thus far there have been four podcasts in the series:
Youth Ministry in Crisis
http://www.whitehorseinn.org/blog/2014/05/04/whi-1204-youth-ministry-in-crisis/
The State of Youth Ministry
http://www.whitehorseinn.org/blog/2014/05/11/whi-1205-the-state-of-youth-ministry/
Keeping Our Kids, Part 1
http://www.whitehorseinn.org/blog/2014/05/18/whi-1206-keeping-our-kids-part-1/
Keeping Our Kids, Part 2
http://www.whitehorseinn.org/blog/2014/05/25/whi-1207-keeping-our-kids-part-2/
They have also provided a study kit to go along with these episodes, which includes resources and material not included in the podcast:
http://whitehorseinn.org/store/products/Youth-Ministry%3A–Keeping-Our-Kids-Study-Kit.html
by Matthew Pinson | May 23, 2014
The sort of approach I’ve been discussing in the last two posts arises from the second theme I want to talk about in today’s post with some ideas from Proverbs 4—intentionality. Intentionality not only grounds this approach to Christian education, but this approach will also help the people in our congregations to
Be intentional about getting divine wisdom and knowledge.
“Wisdom is the principal thing,” the father tells his son in verse 7. “Therefore get wisdom. And in all your getting, get understanding.” If we’re going to partake, however incompletely, in the wisdom and knowledge of God, we must be intentional about it. We must work hard to get it.
This theme of intentionality is reiterated throughout this passage. The child listens intently to the instruction of his father in verses 1 and 10. He gives attention to know understanding in verse 1. He does not forsake his father’s law in verse 2. He retains his father’s words and diligently keeps his commands in verse 4. He invests in wisdom and understanding in verses 5 and 7. He strives neither to forget nor turn away from wisdom and understanding in verse 5. He does not forsake wisdom and understanding in verse 6. Heworks to exalt wisdom and understanding in verse 8. He receives his father’s sayings in verse 10. He takes firm hold on instruction and keeps it in verse 13.
The message seems clear. There are too many things threatening to get our students or Bible study participants away from godly wisdom and knowledge. If we are to train our students to know godly wisdom and knowledge with their minds, treasure them in the depths of their souls, and live them out moment-by-moment in their lives, then we’ve got to go to extreme lengths to help them strive for divine wisdom and knowledge.
It’s not just going to come to them. It’s not just going to fall into their laps. We’ve got to help them go after it. As Goethe said in Faust, “What you have as heritage, take now as task. For thus you will make it your own.”
He’s right. The only way we are able to receive this wisdom and knowledge of God from our fathers and mothers—this deposit of divine truth that will change the world—is to take it as task. To work at it. To go after it with everything in us.
This intentionality is most strongly implied by the word “get” in verses 5 and 7. Scholars tell us that this Hebrew word implies buying or possessing or acquiring something. We need to buy or possess wisdom and understanding, realizing that it’s more important than anything else we could ever buy or possess.
I think this is an especially meaningful piece of advice for the culture we’re living in. Verse 7 says, “In all your getting, get understanding.” “In all your getting, get understanding.” In other words, if there’s anything that’s important to possess—important to own—it’s divine wisdom and understanding. We’re tempted to get everything but wisdom, to buy into modern consumerism and get, get, get. We’re often like the preacher in Ecclesiastes, who looked in vain for meaning and satisfaction in material possessions: “Whatever my eyes desired, I did not keep from them.”
The author is telling us here, “The most important getting you should be doing is getting God’s wisdom and understanding.” I like Miles Coverdale’s sixteenth-century rendering of this verse. “The chief point of wisdom is, that thou be willing to obtain wisdom; and before all thy goods to get . . . understanding.”
“Before all thy goods, get understanding.”
We need to heed this godly counsel in our consumeristic age, when our moment-by-moment existence seems increasingly to be programmed and determined by our consumeristic desires, by getting, getting, getting!
We have a desperate need to pass on this ancient wisdom to the generations that are coming after us. We simply cannot afford to fail in this regard. We cannot afford to drop the ball on this one.
My prayer for my readers today is that you will see how crucial Christian education is for imparting wisdom and knowledge in the context of rich relationships and community. Resolve to be intentional about helping your students acquire divine wisdom and knowledge, so that they will diligently go after it with everything that’s in them, seeking it earnestly with their minds, treasuring it deeply with their hearts, and living it out vibrantly in their lives, to the glory of our God, and the expansion of his Kingdom.
