Two talks done with I think a Sovereign Grace group (Taken from here):
Three talks at an Australian Student Conference:
He also wrote the book Questioning Evangelism which I highly recommend and blogged a bit about it here.
From the DesringGod blog:
Martyn Lloyd-Jones on what the church is for:
The primary task of the Church is not to educate man, is not to heal him physically or psychologically…. I will go further; it is not even to make him good. These are things that accompany salvation; and when the Church performs her true task she does incidentally educate men and give them knowledge and information…she does make them good and better than they were. But my point is that those are not her primary objectives. Her primary purpose is not any of these; it is rather to put man into the right relationship with God, to reconcile man to God. (Preaching & Preachers, 30)
To read an article on the mission of the church, go here.
John Calvin’s help on planning Sunday gatherings for worship.
(HT: Challies)
I’ll list them from least complex and bare to most complex and descriptive, but all three are fairly short.
The church is that collection of people who are hearing the Word of God, responding to it with their lives, and who have obeyed Jesus’ specific commands to be baptized and proclaim his death in the Lord’s Supper.
Elsewhere Dever wrote (“The Church” in A Theology for the Church, 768):
The church is the body of people called by God’s grace through faith in Christ to glorify him by serving him in his world.
The church is a collection of people committed to the Lord Jesus and his gospel, committed to loving one another in full accountability including church discipline, and working together to make disciples of Jesus Christ.
The local church is a community of regenerated believers who confess Jesus Christ as Lord. In obedience to Scripture they organize under qualified leadership, gather regularly for preaching and worship, observe the biblical sacraments of baptism and communion, are unified by the Spirit, are disciplined for holiness, and scatter to fulfill the great commandment and the great commission as missionaries to the world for God’s glory and their joy.
Do you have any thoughts on this? I just reflected on the fact that the way you define church shapes the way you approach church planting.
Update:
The church is the gospel people who believe the gospel, who are a formed community around the gospel, and who demonstrate the gospel in everyday ways of life so that the world might know that the Father sent the Son.
Jeff Vanderstelt just posted another definition of the church with a good intro:
The Church is God’s People (who we are) saved by God’s Power (what He has done and is doing) for God’s Purposes (the good works he created us in Jesus Christ to do).
Believers.org defines a church like this:
A church is a group of believers in Jesus Christ, associated together, under Christ, for His purposes.
This is a chapter written by Tim Chester in a book entitled, “From Multiplying Churches” edited by Stephen Timmis (Christian Focus, 2000). Tim Chester’s chapter has 5 major points: (1) The doctrine of the church and church planting, (2) the centrality of the church in the purposes of God, (3) the centrality of the congregation in the mission of God, (4) church planting and the mission of God, (5) a final word.
Tim Chester summarizes this first point by saying:
I have a few reflections on this section 1.1 (the impact of ecclesiology on church planting):
First, How one defines a church shapes their approach to church planting. “Pastor, building, sermons, membership role, constitution – implicitly these shape the image of church for many people. But do they define what it means to be church? Here the challenge is not just to do the theological thinking, but to have the imagination to strip away the traditional or denominational baggage from our images of church.” So we have to strip ourselves of baggage and allow the Scriptures to shape what we believe the essence of church to be. I think at CrossView our idea of church began with what we believe, how we agree to live, and covenanting to commit to loving each other in all the ways the Bible tells a church to love each other (like Matt. 18:15-17). The major barriers I had to strip away from what I thought of as functionally fundamental to church is a paid elder/pastor/overseer. CrossView began with a statement of faith and a church covenant. Then we began to work on a church constitution, incorporation, a bank account, a church budget, a website, how to serve the community, etc. Now as we’ve been at it a few months and as we look to see other churches planted, I don’t think incorporation, budget, website, and a bank account may be helpful. Maybe having one corporation as a network (say, CrossView Network of Churches) and then having a bunch of household churches so that there are legal safeguards in place for the churches would be expedient. That sounds like the same set up as The Crowded House in the UK. So at its essence what makes a church a church? How would you define what a church is? This leads to my next thought.
Second, When does a church plant become a church? This is a great question that reveals your functional definition of what a church is. Chester lists a few answers: “Is it when a launch takes place? Is it when a constitution is agreed? Is it when leaders are appointed? Or is it, as Luke’s definition might suggest (referring to Luke 2:42), when the church planting team first gathers?” So it sounds like Chester is saying that when a team first gathers, it is a church. I think that’s on the right track. In the church tradition from which I come, a church is “The church is that collection of people who are hearing the Word of God, responding to it with their lives, and who have obeyed Jesus specific commands to be baptized and proclaim his death in the Lord’s Supper” (Mark Dever). Nestled into that is a commitment to church discipline. I’d define the church as a collection of people committed to the Lord Jesus and his gospel, committed to loving one another in full accountability including church discipline, and working together to make disciples of Jesus Christ. (This is the same in essence as Driscoll’s definition, though even less cumbersome). So at CrossView we didn’t have a launch. We had a constituting of the church where we heard each others’ testimonies of how God saved us with the gospel and clearly communicated that we are committing to love one another as a church and make disciples of Jesus Christ together.
Bottom line: how you define a church effects how you go about planting a church. It also determines how confident people think they are in being able to be part of a pioneer planting team. As a pastor at CrossView I want all our members to have the confidence that they can be part of a small church planting team. But this is almost exclusively dependent on what they think a church is or how a church is defined.
I recommend you read this article entitled, “Mission: A Problem of Definition” by Keith Ferdinando from Themelios issue 33-1 (html | pdf). He takes four major ideas of what the church’s mission may be and shows which one he thinks is right. He considers the mission dei, the cultural mandate, social action, and making disciples of all nations. Here are some of quotes I found key for where I was at when I read it some months back:
Social change occurs through those who have been transformed by the gospel – through transformed communities of God’s people who become salt and light in their societies. It is fruit rather than substance of mission. Communication of the gospel in its richness is the most significant “social action” that missionaries can undertake (58, emphasis mine).
Certainly the extent of Christian engagement with the world is not limited to disciple-making but includes involvement in every area of life – all for the glory of God. The problem, however, is that if the making of disciples is subsumed under a category of mission which is much broader and far more inclusive, its absolute importance risks being compromised. Stott makes something of an allusion to this concern: “The main fear of my critics seems to be that missionaries will be sidetracked.” However, the issue is rather that churches in general would lose sight of the primary importance of making disciples and see such activity as simply one of many things that they are called to do… There is a danger of marginalisation of disciple-making if its distinct and unique nature is not specifically recognised and singled out as the great work of the people of God – the work that they alone can do (58-59, italics mine except for the underlined one).
The appropriate response may be loudly to reaffirm a disciple-making definition of mission; perhaps more realistically it may be to accept the irreversibility of “lexical entropy” and to develop new expressions – apostolic mission perhaps – to assert the church’s primordial and unconditional responsibility to make disciples. The importance can scarcely be overstated. The great theme of Scripture is God’s redemptive mission to call a people for his own glory among whom he will dwell; and those he calls are in their turn to engage in mission as his co-workers by making disciples of Jesus Christ. Definitional ambiguities must not be allowed to obscure the absolute centrality of that vital task (59, italics his).
I love Ferdinando’s clarity to what he thinks the mission is. And, on the whole, I agree with him. Read the whole thing.
As I think about mission, missional living, and accomplishing the mission God has for CrossView, all churches, and all Christians (namely making disciples of the Lord Jesus), I came across this nike commercial posted below. Watch it. As I did, I thought, “I’d be like one of those guys who’s objective is to retrieve the ball, yet I’d be admiring the view, the security systems, the guards, the skills of the other guys, or just sitting on the side resting.” That’s how I feel sometimes as I think about how God sent us to Los Angeles to make disciples and establish a church planting church. With the simplicity of that mission (like retrieving a ball), I find myself wanting and actually doing all kinds of things that don’t tie to the mission. I don’t consciously tie all my reading to the mission. I don’t consciously connect my every interaction with my volunteering at Shatto Recreation Center with the mission. I don’t see my greeting people at the gym when we play basketball as woven into the mission. And so I end up slowing the mission or worse, displeasing the Lord who died for us, rose for us, intercedes for us, accompanies us, empowers us, and sent us. The lesson I learned: STAY ON TASK.
This is from the 2009 Different By Design Conference put on by CBMW:
HT: JT
You can find all the D.A. Carson audio that I’ve found here.
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Tim Chester is one of my favorite authors to read on church, church planting, and mission. Here are three of his lectures on mission given at a recent Radstock Conference in the UK. Here’s a summary of Tim’s talks in a short youtube interview.
1. Organic Mission – audio|notes
2. Reproducible Mission – audio|notes
3. Cross-centered Mission – audio|notes
(HT: 9Marks Blog)
Here is Alan Hirsch’s main concern for Calvinism (he said it in the comment section):
My main concern for Calvinism of any variety (and I was trained within the tradition) relates to its…
1. Spiritual disposition: There seems to be historic propensity for religiosity and harsh judgmentalism. I can’t see much change here in the new/neo Calvinist/Reformed expressions so far. Tim Keller being the major exception as far as I can see.
2. Ecclesiology: The ecclesiology is hardwired into the theology. It seems to lack the agility needed to be fully responsive missionally. Geneva still holds its imagination. In other words, its ecclesiology precedes and forms its missiology.
First, I think that there is harsh judgmentalism and religiosity among Calvinists. I know I certainly struggled with it much in the past and still do at times today when I encounter Christians from other traditions. But I do think that a true understanding of Calvinism (by which I mean a narrow – sovereignty of God in salvation as ultimately responsible, the inability fo man, God’s free choosing, God drawing sinners, and God preserving all of those he’s drawn) should promote humility. There are more examples of exceptions than Tim Keller. John Piper, D.A. Carson, Mark Dever, Philip Ryken, Ligon Duncan, C.J. Mahaney are a few that come to mind (if you want a solid understanding of Calvinism that humbles you to the dust and exhorts to continue in such humility, listen/watch these). But then again, I heard in a audio lecture, Hirsch said that he said he shouldn’t be so sure about something to preserve some humility. So maybe his definition of humility being unsure about a particular concept or assertion being true is humility. To that I can respond no better than G.K. Chesterton who said:
What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert–himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt – the Divine Reason. . . . The new skeptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. . . . There is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it’s practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. . . . The old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which makes him stop working altogether. . . . We are on the road to producing a race of man too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy [Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1957], pp. 31-32).
Secondly, if you take a broader view of Calvinism which includes Calvin’s ecclesiology then yes, Hirsch is correct, the ecclesiology is hardwired into their Calvinism/Reformed understanding. But if you define Calvinism in the narrow way as the doctrines of God’s grace saving man despite his rebellion and initial unwillingness, then the ecclesiology is not hardwired into their Calvinism. So the Presbyterians’ ecclesiology is intertwined with their Calvinism (I think, someone correct me if that is wrong). But Baptists, free church, congregationalists, Anglicans and Episcopalians, and Methodists (Whitefield was one) all have ecclesiologies that are not tied to their Calvinism. Furthermore, there are missional Calvinists who’s ecclesiology would be commended by Hirsch (like Tim Chester, Steve Timmis, The Crowded House, Soma, Kaleo). They scatter churches and reproduce in ways that are in line in large measure with Hirsch’s thinking (ecclesiologically), yet they are solidly Calvinistic (in the soteriological sense).
