On the morning of last week’s THINK conference our satirical blogger, Saint Stuffed Shirt, tweeted: “Gathering with Calvinists today to consider ‘Is Calvinism incoherent?’ Can't for the life of me imagine what the answer will be!”

He joined 99 other delegates in a church in south London to consider questions under this heading, such as:
 
- Is Calvinism consistent?
- Why are so many people Calvinist in exegesis, but Arminian in apologetics? Does it matter?
- Is “five point Calvinism” biblical?
- Does God ordain all things, including evil human choices? If so, what happens to theodicy?
- Do the Scriptures teach double predestination? So what?
 
Eagle-eyed readers of this blog will have spotted that one bone of contention was, predictably, the issue of Limited Atonement (and thus the validity of TULIP as the perceived essence of Calvinism), and Matthew Hosier and Andrew Wilson have been continuing the discussion on this point for the last couple of days. Suffice it to say that, despite St Stuffed Shirt’s cynicism, the delegates found plenty to disagree over. I won’t enumerate all the points and counter-points aired through the day (not least because you’ll be able to watch and listen to them for yourself in these pages shortly), but wanted to look at the bigger picture: was this conference worth holding in principle, and did it work in practice?
 
“Deep theological reflection is something to be aspired to,” wrote Andrew Wilson in his blog post advertising the conference. The idea of the day, he explained would be “to take one important topic, invite one guest speaker who knows the issue inside out, and then spend the day exploring it, through a combination of plenary sessions, panel discussions, small group interaction and Q&A.” The speaker chosen to tackle this year’s topic was Mike Ovey, Principal of Oak Hill College, and he certainly displayed a formidable knowledge of the subject. His style wasn’t confoundingly dense, though, but achieved a good balance between challenging depth and engaging clarity. I found him a warm and witty speaker, and would have loved to have heard more from him than the hour and 40 minutes he was given.
 
Having worried that the level of thought would be completely over my head, I was pleasantly surprised to find it comfortably within my understanding – though that leaves me wondering whether the greater minds than mine assembled in the room may have found it less stretching than they had hoped.
 
Am I just brighter than I think I am? I don’t think so. I think in Andrew’s desire to keep the day moving along, with different types of content (small groups, panel discussion, Q&A) the opportunity for really digging deep into the topic was a bit lost. (Sorry Andrew. You did make me promise not to write a sycophantic review…!) Restructuring the day to have more in-depth teaching up front and raising specific difficult questions for the small group discussion would probably have solved this – the fact that Matthew and Andrew have felt the need to continue the panel discussion in these pages illustrates that there is much more to explore and to be said than the day gave opportunity for.

For me there were a couple of particular highlights and questions I’d have loved the opportunity to dig deeper into and reflect on. Things like the implications of a doctrine of God which affirms his freedom (if God is free, that must mean he is able to act arbitrarily, so it becomes incoherent for us to demand or expect ‘fairness’ from him); and the very practical, pastoral question explored (all too briefly) in the panel discussion about the Preservation of the Saints. I love thinking in depth, but I love it even more when, like these two examples, it has a practical implication for the way we relate to the church and the culture and the way we frame and conduct our apologetics.

So was THINK worth holding in principle? Absolutely, and this topic was well worth exploring, not least for the reminder that any human construct is inevitably going to lack perfect coherence, and any simplified schema (TULIP, FACTS, STUPIFAT) will be even more vulnerable to the danger of sacrificing truth on the altar of beauty. Did it work in practice? More or less. A little tweaking of the order of events, and a little more time given to the main speaker, and you’ll have a day in which pastors, teachers and interested others can engage together in thinking that really matters.

Yesterday, Matt Hosier made the case that if we could just disentangle five point Calvinism from the TULIP acronym, and get back to the essence of what the Canons of Dordt were saying, we’d find it much easier to accept it. It won’t be a surprise to those who were there, and probably many other readers of this blog, that I'm not so sure. (I’m also not sure that “much of the debate” at the THINK conference centred on Limited Atonement; by my recollection, it was discussed for about ten minutes out of a six hour day, but that's by the by). As someone who believes the scriptures teach both unconditional election and the preservation of the saints, yet still finds five point Calvinism as a system problematic in various ways, I thought I might explain why.

Matt’s main contention is that the TULIP acronym has caused many problems, and led to many misunderstandings, that the Canons of Dordt did not, particularly with respect to Limited Atonement. (Are there any others? I doubt Matt would rush to distance himself from Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Irresistible Grace or the Perseverance of the Saints). Quite rightly, Matt goes back to Dordt to see what the original source of the doctrine of Limited Atonement was:

Who make use of the distinction between obtaining and applying in order to instill in the unwary and inexperienced the opinion that God, as far as he is concerned, wished to bestow equally upon all people the benefits which are gained by Christ’s death; but that the distinction by which some rather than others come to share in the forgiveness of sins and eternal life depends on their own free choice (which applies itself to the grace offered indiscriminately) but does not depend on the unique gift of mercy which effectively works in them, so that they, rather than others, apply that grace to themselves. For, while pretending to set forth this distinction in an acceptable sense, they attempt to give the people the deadly poison of Pelagianism.

 
Matt’s point, which is well made, is that this citation says nothing at all about any “limitations” to the atonement. He’s right: it doesn’t. It simply says that the difference between those who believe and those who don’t is not “free choice” but a “unique gift of mercy” – which is effectively a restatement of Unconditional Election. The question to be asked here, then, is: why five points at all? Matt believes in five point Calvinism, but if he is to take the wording of the Canons of Dordt as his only launchpad for it, he should properly be a four point Calvinist on the basis of the above text: Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Irresistible Grace and Perseverance of the Saints. TUIP might not be as catchy, but on his reading (and mine) it would be truer to what the relevant paragraph actually said.
 
So why five points at all? The reason for the fifth point is probably that Dordt made this statement in response to the second Article of Remonstrance, and in doing so, implied a correction to the Arminians’ statement:

That, agreeably thereto, Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the world, died for all men and for every man, so that he has obtained for them all, by his death on the cross, redemption, and the forgiveness of sins; yet that no one actually enjoys this forgiveness of sins, except the believer.

 
From reading Matt’s article, I’m not sure whether he believes (a) the Remonstrants were wrong that Christ died for all men, and needed correction, or (b) the Remonstrants were right, and they didn’t. So my question for him is: is the Remonstrants’ statement above - that Christ died for all but only believers enjoy the benefits of it - true, or false? If he says it is true, then I am with him all the way, and simply express my puzzlement that he sees the need for a fifth point of Calvinism at all. If he says it is false, because Christ’s death is not actually for all people, then I submit that the label “Limited Atonement”, even though not expressed in the Canons of Dordt, fits him like a glove, whether he likes the language or not. (The five-point Calvinist, on top of saying that “unique mercy” is required to believe, typically makes the additional claim that the death of Christ is not for everyone, thus shifting the ground from the predestining work of the Father (U) and the regenerating work of the Spirit (I) to the atoning work of the Son (L). For my part, I simply cannot find any scriptural text anywhere that indicates this is true, or that indicates the Second Article of Remonstrance requires any correction whatsoever.)
 
Moreover, I’m not sure that TULIP is as unfair a representation of five-point Calvinism as Matt implies. Leading Calvinists today frequently express Calvinism in those terms, and when asked to defend the L, use exactly the same blend of logical inference and texts-that-don’t-really-say-that (John 10:11 et al) as we heard at THINK (mentioning no names!). Not only that, but Matt’s article quotes Carl Trueman’s robust defence of Limited Atonement, which includes the L-word in its noun form, and Matt strongly implies he agrees with it. All of which is to say that, when Matt objects to the term “Limited Atonement”, I can’t tell whether that is because he doesn’t agree with the doctrine (as implied by his insistence that the Canons of Dordt don’t teach it), or because he agrees with it but doesn’t think it sounds very nice (as implied by his apparent affirmation of Carl Trueman). Humph.
 
One final point to raise: Trueman’s defence of Limited Atonement, which Matt quotes in support, is (with the greatest respect to two of my favourite bloggers), very weak. He says:

The claim is that Amyraldian [= four point Calvinist] views of atonement allow the evangelist or the pastor to say to the people in an unequivocal way that then undergirds both evangelism and assurance, “Christ died for you!” Anyone who understands the Amyraldian scheme, however, is not going to be impressed by such an answer; what they will really want to know is whether Christ is interceding for them. The problem of limitation has simply been shifted from Calvary to the right hand of God the Father.

 
The reason I say this is weak is that the “problem of limitation” is shifted from Calvary to the right hand of the Father, not by Amyraldians, but by Scripture itself. The idea that Jesus died for everyone, but intercedes for the elect only, comes from the Bible, not from four-point Calvinists. The two biblical passages that speak directly of the intercession of Christ make it clear that believers, rather than all people, are the focus of his prayers (Rom 8:33-34; Heb 7:25). The death of Christ, however, is regularly said to be for “all”, and nowhere limited to the elect. So when Trueman says that Amyraldians believe Christ died for every person but aren’t sure if he is praying for every person, I happily concede the point. But from what I can tell, Paul and Hebrews would agree. (It’s also worth saying that, when I tell unbelievers that Jesus died for them, they never sound unimpressed because they aren’t sure if Jesus is interceding for them. Believing in Limited Atonement does, I think, make preaching the gospel harder than Limited Intercession would).
 
So: either we say that Christ died for all, and become four-point Calvinists (like Calvin), or we say that he only died for some, and face the fact that Limited Atonement is a good description of what we actually believe (like Trueman). But I’m not sure we have the option of retaining the five points, and binning the acronym because we don’t like the sound of it. A TULIP by any other name would smell as fishy.

Giving last week's THINK conference the title, “Is Calvinism Incoherent?” might have been expected to produce a rather binary response of either “Yes” or “No”. Almost inevitably though, a more “shades of grey” picture emerged. Helpfully, our keynote speaker, Mike Ovey, pointed out that no human has entirely coherent thought, so it would be unfair to expect Calvinism to be without its anomalies. However, much of the debate focussed on the coherence or otherwise of the TULIP system, and in particular on the “L” of limited atonement.

Andrew had asked me to be on a panel at THINK to discuss some of the issues raised. Being reluctant to appear completely ignorant I did what any sensible person would do and brushed up on my reading before the event. One of the things that stood out for me in a fresh way as I did so was the relative novelty of TULIP as the defining way to express Calvinism. In fact, this device only seems to have appeared in the early years of the twentieth century, and while easily memorable is of limited use in explaining Reformed theology. Yet so ingrained has the TULIP become that, for most people, it is Calvinism. As Andrew has previously expressed it on this blog, “The five points of Calvinism refer to the Canons of Dordt, which are the decisions of the Synod of Dordrecht on the five disputed points of doctrine in the Netherlands in 1618-19. The latter are usually known by the acronym ‘TULIP’.” However, as Michael Horton notes, “It’s always better to read a confession than to reduce it to a clever device.”¹

It is a real problem that so much of the debate about the coherence or otherwise of Calvinism has been reduced to a defence of, or attack upon, the TULIP. If we could forget TULIP and deal with what the Canons of Dordt actually say, and why they say it in response to the Articles of Remonstrance, we might make rather more progress. (If you have stuck with me this far you are probably interested enough to do some further reading, in which case I would strongly recommend Ten Myths About Calvinism by Kenneth Stewart which very clearly demonstrates the historical novelty and theological limitations of TULIP.)

As an example, and because it is the main bone of contention, let’s take a closer look at that pesky “L”.

My observation (and my personal wrestling over the years) has been with the apparent problem posed for preaching if the atonement really is limited. “How,” goes the question, “Can I possibly say, ‘God loves you, Jesus died for you, respond to him!’ if in fact I have no way of knowing whether Jesus actually did die for my hearers?” This is why many end up as “4-point Calvinists” or Amyraldians, to use the technical term. (And on this blog we should be able to use the technical term!) According to Amyraldianism Christ died for all, but intercedes only for the elect. This sounds much more palatable that limited atonement. However, it still leaves us with a problem. As Carl Trueman notes,

The claim is that Amyraldian views of atonement allow the evangelist or the pastor to say to the people in an unequivocal way that then undergirds both evangelism and assurance, “Christ died for you!” Anyone who understands the Amyraldian scheme, however, is not going to be impressed by such an answer; what they will really want to know is whether Christ is interceding for them. The problem of limitation has simply been shifted from Calvary to the right hand of God the Father.²

Spot on.

So, if 4-point Calvinism won’t really do, where can we turn? Well, to the original documents of course!

The Articles of Remonstrance have this to say about the extent of the atonement:

That, agreeably thereto, Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the world, died for all men and for every man, so that he has obtained for them all, by his death on the cross, redemption, and the forgiveness of sins; yet that no one actually enjoys this forgiveness of sins, except the believer.

I guess 4-Pointers, like Andrew, find themselves “wholly in agreement” with this article. So what is the response of the Canons of Dordt? Well, among other things it says the following,

This death of God’s Son is the only and entirely complete sacrifice and satisfaction for sins; it is of infinite value and worth, more than sufficient to atone for the sins of the whole world.

(Don’t just skip over that sentence!)

Moreover, it is the promise of the gospel that whoever believes in Christ crucified shall not perish but have eternal life. This promise, together with the command to repent and believe, ought to be announced and declared without differentiation or discrimination to all nations and people, to whom God in his good pleasure sends the gospel.

However, that many who have been called through the gospel do not repent or believe in Christ but perish in unbelief is not because the sacrifice of Christ offered on the cross is deficient or insufficient, but because they themselves are at fault.

But all who genuinely believe and are delivered and saved by Christ’s death from their sins and from destruction receive this favor solely from God’s grace – which he owes to no one – given to them in Christ from eternity.

What’s not to like about that? It is every bit as delicious, and winsome, and worship-generating as the second Article of Remonstrance. In my estimation, it is more so.

What Dordt then goes onto reject, and from which our very inadequate “L” is derived, is the teaching that,

All people have been received into the state of reconciliation and into the grace of the covenant, so that no one on account of original sin is liable to condemnation, or is to be condemned, but that all are free from the guilt of this sin. For this opinion conflicts with Scripture which asserts that we are by nature children of wrath.

Which of course is to deal with the danger of a slide into universalism. The Canons then continue in rejecting those,

Who make use of the distinction between obtaining and applying in order to instill in the unwary and inexperienced the opinion that God, as far as he is concerned, wished to bestow equally upon all people the benefits which are gained by Christ’s death; but that the distinction by which some rather than others come to share in the forgiveness of sins and eternal life depends on their own free choice (which applies itself to the grace offered indiscriminately) but does not depend on the unique gift of mercy which effectively works in them, so that they, rather than others, apply that grace to themselves. For, while pretending to set forth this distinction in an acceptable sense, they attempt to give the people the deadly poison of Pelagianism.

And that is really the nub – that Arminianism by emphasizing the freedom of man over the freedom of God opens the door to Pelagianism. Which serves to remind us that what we are dealing with is the argument between Augustine and Pelagius as much as that between Calvin and Arminius.

So where does this leave us?

Where it leaves me is with a commitment to the five points of Calvinism, but with some reservations towards the TULIP. “Limited atonement” is a clumsy and easily misunderstood term; the second point of the Canons of Dordt is full of grace and wonder!

Did Jesus of Nazareth exist? Well, obviously. It's one of those questions that answers itself just by being asked; the only people who answer in the negative are cranky mythicists, professional atheists and conspiracy theorists. Aren't they?

Well, Bart Ehrman recently released a popular level book, Did Jesus Exist?, attempting to settle the question once and for all. (As a first century historian and New Testament scholar, albeit one very sceptical to the claims of Christianity, Ehrman knows the answer is yes). But Richard Carrier, the radical sceptic best known for his writings on the Infidels website, thinks Ehrman has been grossly unfair to mythicists. Carrier responded that Ehrman had unfairly implied that all mythicists (that is, people who believe Jesus didn’t exist) were oddballs who believed things no serious scholar believes, and that this was unfair; he argued that Ehrman had made a whole host of errors in the book, which made him guilty of the same shoddy scholarship of which he had accused mythicists. Ehrman then made a lengthy reply to Carrier’s accusations of incompetence, conceding that he had made one or two errors, but that on all the main issues he had accurately represented ancient sources and modern scholars. Then Carrier replied again, reiterating his charges of slovenly research, and for all I know, the debate may well continue.
 
My guess is that only a handful of apologetically minded readers will want to read the lengthy, and sometimes bad-tempered, exchange between these two men; some will find it colossally uninteresting, and some may even be pleased that two people who have made their names being antagonistic towards Christianity have come to blows. But I mention it for three reasons. One, it is a helpful reminder that we mustn’t tar all atheists or sceptics with the same brush, as if people who don’t believe in God are all effectively saying the same thing (what I sometimes refer to as the Stephen Dawkins phenomenon).
 
Two, it demonstrates the importance of rigorous fact-checking in published works, lest a discussion about something very important (the existence of Jesus) be hijacked by a squabble about something very trivial in comparison (whether procurators and prefects are the same thing). I’ve made errors here in the past, most farcically when a font change left me announcing in the US version of Incomparable that your brain amasses “between 109 and 1020 pieces of information” in your lifetime, so I’m talking to myself here as well.
 
And three, the whole discussion shows how enormous the evidence is for the existence of Jesus. Even if we were to concede that on every point of disagreement in these articles, Carrier was right and Ehrman was wrong - which seems extremely unlikely - we would still be left with the conclusion that a tiny minority of scholars in history, and all-but-none today, agree with Carrier on the details of his theory. Carrier’s objection in his correspondence is that Ehrman has made it look like no self-respecting, credible historian would agree with any particulars of the mythicist view; what he may have succeeded in establishing, at best, is that almost no self-respecting, credible historian would agree with any particulars of the mythicist view (let alone the whole caboodle). Which I suspect Ehrman would be happy to concede.
 
So yes, Jesus of Nazareth existed. Next week: Grandma - friend or foe?

——————

Andrew is the author of several books including, most recently, If God, Then What?.

Carl Trueman’s posts on the Reformation21 blog are eagerly anticipated by some of us who post here at WYTM. His theology and emphases do not correspond exactly with where we stand, but often they do, and more generally Trueman writes the kind of punchy, thought-provoking pieces that we aspire to.

In a recent post about the role of elders (“Honour the Vanilla Men”) Trueman made this observation,

In 1 Timothy, Paul sketches out a blueprint of how the gospel is to be preserved after the passing of the apostles…he specifically does not tell Timothy to look for the big personalities, the beautiful young things, the heavyweight scholars or the hit-and-run itinerant preachers of the parachurch world. What he advocates is the appointment of rather bland, non-descript, respectable men as elders. These vanilla men, basically competent and with no skeletons in the cupboard, are to be entrusted with keeping the church on the straight and narrow.

If, like me, you are an elder, I wonder how you feel about the ideal of your role being described as “vanilla”? And if you are not an elder, I wonder how you feel about honouring such men?

It is often easier for us to be critical than honouring, and when it comes to appraising those elders who preach my guess would be that the readers of this blog have fairly highly developed critical faculties. Even though I preach more sermons than I sit and listen to I am aware how quickly my assessment of another preacher can be shaped by the winsomeness of his personality, the depth of his learning, or the fluency of his presentation. Not that winsomeness, learning or fluency are to be despised, but that living in a culture whose values are shaped by the likes of “The Voice” means we are predisposed to make judgements on faulty criteria and fail to honour vanilla where honour is due.
 
Trueman explains why we should honour the faithful vanilla man,

The teacher is the herald of good news. Like a messenger from a battlefield, he brings the goods news of the triumph of the king against the armies that seek to destroy the church. That makes him a target for those who would wish that such news never be proclaimed.
 
It should also make him an object of honour for those who hear and rejoice. It is hard to imagine that the villagers would not honour that man who brings word to them that the army which threatened their destruction has been destroyed. The herald did not win the victory but he would no doubt be carried shoulder high through the village that night.

So it should be for the one who proclaims God’s word each week. He should be honoured not for who he is or what he has done but for the glorious good news which he brings.

This means that even if the preacher at your church is bland, non-descript and respectable, you should not despise the vanilla of his delivery. Instead, as you sit down to listen to this Sunday’s sermon, let your predisposition be one of honouring what you are about to hear by honouring the one who is to deliver it because by so doing you are honouring The One whose message of triumph it is.

The other day I was having dinner with some other pastors and the conversation worked around to the ubiquity of electronic communication and entertainment. One of my colleagues was lamenting the umbilical cord that seems to exist between young people and their electronic devices – iPod permanently on, phone ceaselessly examined, you know the story. Another pastor interrupted him, pointing out the extent to which we, too, were wired up – I had been playing online chess with another pastor via my phone, we had been looking at someone’s photos on their iPad, texting had taken place. Rather than seeing our electronic connections as worrisome, argued my friend, we should recognize how useful they are, and the extent to which they can build communication, and thus community. He had a strong point, and is the kind of person who expresses his points strongly, so the discussion rather fizzled out at that point and we moved onto something else.

It’s worth thinking about though.
 
One of the interesting things I have observed is the strong opinions that can be generated by the subject. Any perceived attack against TV or Facebook or gaming, or whatever it may be, tends to get pretty hostile feedback. And when something like that generates that kind of defence it tends to make me think, “Oh – maybe there is something deeper going on here. Maybe an idol has just been exposed.”
 
The arguments for technology are generally as hackneyed as those against them, and thus barely worth the effort of articulating. But let’s try to clear some ground – let’s assume, for the sake of the argument, that:

- Every media development since the Guttenberg Press has upset someone, and could be used for either good or bad ends – it’s not the tech that is the problem, but the use to which it is put.
- I am not anti-tech.
- I recognise the irony of using a blog to discuss the subject.
 
What, then, are some of the cautions we might want to think about in our use of tech? The kind of questions I would want to ask are these:

- Are we being entertained to death?
- What is the balance between the potential benefits to community of connecting via electronic media to its potential downsides? E.g., if I spend lots of time on Facebook, does that mean I end up with more meaningful relationships or fewer?
- At what point (assuming there is one) does our dependence on tech become unhealthy? Is it a problem if we never unplug?
- Is there a point at which our enthusiasm for the utility and fun provided by tech elevate it to the place of our god?
 
I have a sense that for many people the use of tech does become problematic. This sense is similar to what I feel about the place of music in our lives. Music is good. Music is God’s gift to us. But I have a sense that the role music is meant to play has become somewhat distorted when we are unable to live without it – when we are so nervous of silence that every gap in our lives has to be filled with sound. And then we find ourselves in the place where we don’t even notice the ubiquity of music. It’s like porn – porn is now so ubiquitous that we don’t even notice that many of the images we see every day would have been considered pornographic not that many decades ago. And if we have to check Facebook, or email, or Twitter every day, or couldn’t imagine living without a TV, or never switch off our phones, then perhaps – and this is no more than a suggestion – perhaps we have a problem.
 
As a personal spiritual discipline, for the good of my own soul and emotional health, I like to unplug on a regular basis. So it is my habit to have one day a week when I turn off the phone and don’t check email or social media (or even WYTM!). I find that helpful. In a similar way I often choose not to listen to music, although I love music, and listen to it often.
 
So I think I would want to affirm the observations of both my friends over dinner the other day. Yes, tech can be great. But, yes, tech can be a real problem. And here’s the clincher – the fact that we were actually physically present with one another, sitting around an actual table, eating real food, made the whole experience much more meaningful than if we’d merely been communicating electronically. Presence counts.

Yesterday, I explored some of the ways in which the charismatic-missional tension is felt by those of us who are convinced that we as churches are called to mission, and called to experience the person and work of the Holy Spirit in greater power and intimacy. Today, I want to suggest some ways forward. I have already started by doing the unforgivable, and coining a new piece of jargon, charismissional, for the fusion of spiritual and evangelistic zeal I am hoping for. (It may not be new; who knows?) As someone who regularly mocks Christian leadership jargon being used without irony - my favourites of late are being invited to a "roundtable" and asked to help "set plumbline" for people - and who has written pieces trying to disentangle words like "missional" and "Reformed", this might seem out of character. I hope it does. But whatever you say about neologisms, they do have the power to make people stop and think about how their constituent parts work together. So charismissional it is.

My aim today is simply to suggest how, in the light of the challenges I highlighted yesterday, we may both experience the fullness of life in the Spirit and be as evangelistically fruitful as possible. I’m aiming primarily at church leaders, though I hope all sorts of people will find something of interest here. So, in anticipation of more facetiousness from my fellow bloggers about my passion for enumeration, here are ten things which I think may help us.
 
1. Believing that being charismissional is possible. This is the biggest one, because as soon as people concede that it is impossible to be both charismatic and missional at the same time, they will give up trying, and simply choose between them on the basis of preference. The book of Acts, and particularly the Pentecost story, is absolutely critical here: the age of the Spirit began with a dramatic outpouring of God’s power, resulting in strange yet captivating charismatic phenomena (languages, tongues of fire, a rushing wind), but also in a clear explanation of what was happening alongside an articulation of the gospel, with the result that many were converted. It was the ultimate charismissional moment, and in Luke’s narrative it is intentionally paradigmatic for the church’s activity in the world. That doesn’t mean we will always get it right, or that if we do, 3,000 will respond to the gospel. But it does mean that giving up is not an option. It is possible, and biblical, to be charismissional.
 
2. Being honest about how charismatic you really are. In a comment on a recent post, Phil Moore asked the provocative question: “Do elders who allow weak blessed thoughts to masquerade as prophecy actually despise the gift of prophecy more than those who forbid it?” Some of us, I suspect, may believe our meetings are more charismatic than they are because we have “contributions”, and we may then make a value out of having members of the congregation speak into the microphone during the singing time - as if this, rather than the manifest presence of God, was the essence of being charismatic - even if many of the contributions are not spiritual gifts as Paul describes them at all. Be honest: are the things people contribute in your Sunday meetings truly charismatic? Do unbelievers hear the prophecies that occur and fall down before God in awe? Or have the prophecies become blessed thoughts, the testimonies become anecdotes, the tongues/languages become random babble, and the interpretations become attempts to fill the awkward silence afterwards? It may be a bit of both, and that’s fine; we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But be careful not to make a virtue out of being charismatic rather than missional, if you’re not being genuinely charismatic in the first place.
 
3. Being honest about how missional you really are. There’s no shortage of online material on this; bloggers of all stripes seem to love tweaking the noses of highly contextualised, missional pastors who all dress, talk, live and sound the same. But behind the bluster lie some important questions: is your church seeing lots of people saved, or lots of people transfer in from other churches? (In my church, we feel this challenge deeply, because the more “missional” we try and become, the more Christians turn up on our joining the church course, which is both kind of amusing and kind of troubling.) Are the people in your community sharing the gospel with people regularly? Or are they relying on the church to do that sort of thing, whether through programmes or Sunday meetings? Again, the answer may well be a bit of both - but be honest about it, and if you see yourselves as missional, avoid like the plague a sense of superiority towards your more charismatic brothers and sisters. Their people may well be preaching the gospel with more boldness than yours.
 
4. Thinking carefully about terminology. It may just be me, but I was a church leader in my late twenties before I realised that “O for a thousand tongues to sing” wasn’t about having one thousand red muscles in your mouth. Why on earth don’t we just call them languages? Why do we talk about bringing a “prophetic word”, or being “slain in the Spirit”, or for that matter a “ministry time”? Why not, instead of talking about “a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation” (1 Cor 14:26, ESV), talk about “a song, some teaching, sharing what God is saying now, a language, or an interpretation”? Spiritual gifts can appear odd enough to an unbeliever, without needing weird names to accompany them.
 
5. Explaining things really, really well in public meetings. Many leaders introduce meetings, link between different sections, present notices and oversee prayer times somewhat on the fly, which can make things less clear and more weird than they need to be. If used well, however, the explanation bits of a meeting - the welcome, the links, the conclusion, and so on - have the potential to make spiritual gifts really quite comprehensible and accessible to new people, including those who are not yet Christians. “Good morning everybody, and welcome to Kings! My name’s Andrew, and I’m one of the leaders here - if you’re new, let me just explain what’s going to happen today. We’re going to have about half an hour of singing songs of praise to God, and during that time, people from the church may share things they believe God is saying, speak in other languages, read from the Bible, and so on. During our time together, feel free to sit, stand, participate, watch: whatever makes you feel comfortable. We’re not going to make you do anything strange, but if you have any questions, do just ask. After that, we’ll have a financial offering, which is for people who come here regularly, then a few bits of information, and then Graham, one of the leaders here, is going to come and speak from the Bible. We’ll be finished around 10.30, and we’d love to chat to you afterwards in the Visitor Cafe.” That’s what I say every week; a great example of another sort of explanation comes from the aforementioned Phil Moore: “If you’re new, then please don’t think what we’re doing is weird. Praying for God to heal people / speak to people / encounter his people powerfully is not weird. If there is a God who made everything, there’s nothing weirder than believing that he can’t heal, speak to or encounter his people.” Whether or not these particular examples work for you, I submit that being charismissional means explaining things well.
 
6. Interpreting 1 Corinthians 14 accurately. Both sides have a pitfall on this one. While writing this very post, I heard a missional-leaning leader explain that “biblically, the priority for spiritual gifts is intelligibility for unbelievers”, on the basis of 14:23-25. This is far from the case: the priority is the use of gifts that build up the church (1-19, 26-40), in this case prophecy rather than uninterpreted languages, and intelligibility for unbelievers is an extra argument Paul adduces to encourage the Corinthians to do this (20-25). It is hardly the main point of the chapter, and when people use this logic to become lukewarm about prophecy or prohibit speaking in languages altogether, they fly in the face of Paul’s direct instruction in v39. On the other hand, I cannot count the number of times I have heard exhortations to contribute in meetings, charismatic-style, on the basis of verse 26, without noticing that in this verse, and in this chapter, Paul is speaking negatively of this practice rather than positively. So, rather than “when you come together, make sure you all use your various gifts of prophecy, teaching and so on to build people up”, the emphasis is, “when you come together, everyone’s so preoccupied with their gifts that they’re talking over each other without reference to building each other up” (the rest of the paragraph makes this context clear). I’m just saying: interpret 1 Corinthians 14 carefully.
 
7. Acknowledging that unbelievers are different. I have in mind here the tendency we have to say things like “non-Christians hate it when ...” or “unbelievers encounter God if ...”, when what we should say is “some non-Christians hate it when” or “unbelievers I know encounter God if ...” Some people love quiet, reflective meetings and thoughtful, undemonstrative, persuasive preaching; others find these things boring, lifeless and irrelevant. Some people love sweeping, emotionally expressive meetings and passionate, heartfelt preaching; others find these rabid, aggressive and invasive. By the same token, I suspect, unbelievers will vary in their preferences for spiritual manifestations in meetings. For stereotypical Manhattan-dwellers, Tim Keller is wonderful and Bill Johnson is wacky. For many others, however, Bill Johnson is dynamic and Tim Keller is dull. We need to be a bit careful, I think, of equating “missional” with “effective at reaching middle class white people.” In many cultures, and for many individuals within every culture, deep end meetings may be far more evangelistically fruitful than shallow end ones.
 
8. Training people to use their spiritual gifts in an evangelistic way. I’m not sure why, but most of us train musicians, train leaders, train preachers and teachers, train people on health and safety, and counselling, and how to recognise signs of child abuse, and first aid ... but we fail to train people how to bring spiritual gifts in an evangelistic way. There’s a slightly dualistic, even gnostic, flavour to this sometimes - you can’t train people to bring spiritual gifts, because that’s a spiritual thing, and the Spirit blows where he will, and so on - so we need to ask the question: what does it look like to bring a language, or an interpretation, in a missional way? How can the gift of discerning spirits be used evangelistically? If we wouldn’t let people preach or lead worship without ensuring they were trained, not least on how to do so missionally, is there a good reason why we should let people prophesy without training them in the same way?
 
9. Teaching as a team. Very few of us, if any, can teach publicly in a way that excels at clarifying doctrine, communicating the gospel, and increasing faith and expectation for charismatic experience, all at the same time. But while in some models of church leadership this could be regarded as a weakness - and in many, of course, either only the first one or the first two are regarded as necessary - in a team teaching model it is a potential strength, because no one individual can do it all alone, and this forces us to vary the diet of public communication in the church. So, in practical terms, leaders who excel at speaking doctrinally and evangelistically can look to involve someone on their teaching team who brings charismatic expression to the forefront, and so on. I can’t prove there aren’t any, but I can’t think of any charismissional church that operates with a one man teaching ministry, and I suspect there’s a reason for that.
 
10. Living charismissionally as a leader. This is undoubtedly the most important of the ten, and also the one that I find most personally challenging. If leaders live charismatic and missional lives - if we are seeking God for more of his Spirit, stepping out in faith regularly, eagerly desiring spiritual gifts and especially prophecy, keeping in step with the Spirit, loving the people around us, making strong friendships with those who don’t know Jesus, engaging with the culture(s) we’re part of, preaching the gospel with courage and dealing with the tough questions - then we will lead meetings that are like that, and ultimately churches that are like that. Church leadership is more than this, for sure, but it is certainly not less. Again, I can’t prove it, but my guess is that churches which are missional but not charismatic are often led by leaders who don’t especially pursue spiritual gifts, and that churches which are charismatic but not missional are often led by leaders who don’t especially connect with unbelievers. Charismissional pastors, in general, will produce charismissional churches.
 
So there you have it: ten suggestions for becoming charismissional (several of which I am addressing to myself as much as to anyone else). What d’you think?

I've been thinking quite a bit about the "charismatic-missional tension" recently. Some prefer not to think of it as a tension for theological reasons (since to be truly charismatic and truly missional are, surely, one and the same), and many will object to framing it as one because it makes it sound like a spectrum - highly charismatic and non-missional at one end, highly missional and non-charismatic at the other - that necessarily requires believers, and leaders, to compromise. But that said, I am confident that most readers of this blog will know what I mean when I call it that.

When David Devenish from Newfrontiers speaks of the challenge of becoming more missional while remaining charismatic, as he did recently at Together for the Nation, and when Dave Smith from Kingsgate, Peterborough talks about a shallow end / deep end approach to spiritual gifts in meetings (Sundays are shallow end, prayer meetings are deep end), they are addressing the issue I am talking about when I refer to the charismatic-missional tension, even if they don’t call it that. So I’ll use the phrase for now, because it’s a convenient shorthand, although I happily acknowledge that another way of framing it, like Simon Brading’s picture of an aeroplane with two jet engines on full blast, is probably needed.
 
But here’s what I’ve been wondering about. What, specifically, are the areas of concern, compromise or even conflict when we think of a charismatic-missional tension? What are the trade-offs, if that’s what they are? And what are the practical decisions we have to make about them? Because I’m not persuaded that the superficial analysis - that is, that being charismatic is entirely about encouraging spiritual gifts in meetings, and being missional means banning them - is accurate. I think the issues can be more subtle, and less explicitly biblical, than that. So here are a few areas where, in my experience, some of us can feel a tension between being fully charismatic and being fully missional.
 
Spiritual Gifts in Public Meetings. Having just said that this is not the whole story, it clearly is a sizeable part of the story. At the charismatic end of the spectrum, there are those who believe that encouraging spiritual gifts in public meetings is a core value, based on exhortations like 1 Corinthians 14:1 and summary statements like 14:26, and that a decision to ban them or discourage them in the interests of being “missional” is to sell out, and to directly disobey 14:39. At the missional end, there are those who argue that the Holy Spirit’s intention is always to draw unbelievers to Jesus through the gospel, and that expressions of spiritual gifts in the church are always to be subordinated to this wider purpose, on the basis of 1 Corinthians 14:23; doing this, and administering a meeting in a way that is “fitting and orderly” (14:40), might well (in some cultures) involve restricting spiritual gifts in public meetings for the sake of the outsider.
 
The extremes are relatively easy to see. I’ve been in Sunday meetings which are full of spiritual gifts but virtually incomprehensible to me, let alone to any unbelievers who might be present. I’ve also been in formerly charismatic churches which are so seeker sensitive that spiritual gifts have been all-but-banned in public contexts. But in between those extremes, there are lots of us who think that prohibiting spiritual gifts in a meeting is unbiblical, and that Paul sees prophecy in particular as highly missional, but who also think that everything should be done in a fitting and orderly way, that wackiness doesn’t necessarily glorify God, and that it is important for unbelievers to be able to understand what they see and hear. Navigating that one is not impossible, but it can be challenging.
 
Pursuing Breakthrough in Healing. This might sound odd, because healings in Scripture, as well as today, present such an excellent opportunity to preach the gospel. What could be more missional, some wonder, than seeing a healing happen in front of you? Well, yes. But the point is, it is almost incontestable that pursuing breakthrough in healing as a church - as opposed to, say, being satisfied with the occasional sick person getting well - requires a commitment to stepping out in risk-filled faith, and an openness to failure. The churches today that see the most people healed in response to prayer are, almost without exception, the churches that also see the most people not healed in response to prayer. They take more risks, pursue greater and more dramatic signs and wonders, and frequently find that people don’t get healed. As John Wimber apparently said, I’d rather pray for a thousand people and see one healed, than pray for nobody and see none healed.
 
So how do you handle it when unbelievers are around, and you say that God heals today, and pray for people on that basis, and then nobody gets healed? In practice, I’ve found myself in that situation on several occasions: how do you respond in a way that doesn’t fake it, doesn’t patronise the unbeliever, and doesn’t destroy faith in the church? How, also, do you handle partial, temporary or unimpressive healings: with a potentially faith-diminishing honesty (“OK, you didn’t really get healed, but people often don’t; we’ll carry on praying, though!”), or with a potentially honesty-compromising faith (“that’s amazing that you’re a tiny bit better! Praise God”)? The charismatic guys might decide to pursue and testify to healing come what may, even if unbelievers are led to conclude that they’re deluding themselves; the missional guys might shut the whole thing down, in corporate gatherings at least, for fear of making the church look weird to outsiders. What to do?
 
Corporate “Ministry Times” in Public Meetings. Another area where some will perceive a charismatic-missional tension is in the handling of so-called “ministry times” (I say so-called, not to cast aspersions on them, but just because the phrase itself is not a biblical one, and “ministry” simply means “service”). Fifteen years ago, any charismatic church worth its salt would have had a “ministry time” at the end of their meeting, in which people would respond to the message, pray for each other, lay hands on one another, prophesy over each other, and (often) respond to God in a variety of visible ways including crying, laughing, falling down, shouting out, and so on. These days, any missional church worth its salt would be highly sceptical of things that would appear bizarre to a visitor, and would often regard such “ministry times” as a rather self-indulgent practice that should be reserved for corporate prayer meetings. Again, in the middle, there are many who want the people of God to experience him in a deeper way when they gather together, and who suspect that if something gets bumped from Sundays the saints will instinctively think it doesn’t matter much, but who also don’t want to seem needlessly strange to visitors, and who struggle with how to fit a thirty minute ministry time into a ninety minute meeting alongside a forty minute worship time, a forty minute talk, a few necessary notices, breaking bread, and whatever else.
 
Even when ministry times take place, some leaders will wonder which sorts of responses should be allowed, encouraged or pursued. As anyone who has heard Kim Walker will testify, laughing out loud in the middle of a song can bring a huge sense of joy to the Christians - but then again, it might also seem strange to visitors. An individual crying out as they encounter God’s love often raises the spiritual bar significantly for believers who are present, and it can thereby foster greater openness to the Spirit - but it can also spook people who have no idea what is going on. We could say similar things of falling down, whooping, dancing, and the like. We could also say it of the lengthy silences that often precede people encountering God in power. So even if “ministry times” are unequivocally embraced as a powerful way of engaging with God, it remains the case that leaders, not to mention individuals in the church who have brought guests along, may feel the charismatic-missional tension.
 
Preaching and Teaching on Sundays. Preaching and teaching in such a way that is faithful to the biblical text, teaches doctrine clearly to Christians and communicates the gospel clearly to non-Christians is hard work. It’s not impossible, but it’s hard work. If you then add into the mix the need to encourage, exhort and equip Christians regularly to pursue spiritual experience, ideally by modelling it yourself, things become even more difficult. It is probably no coincidence, then, that virtually every gifted preacher or teacher I can think of excels at one or two of these (doctrine and mission, mission and Spirit, Spirit and doctrine), but not all three. It’s just an awful lot to achieve in forty minutes.
 
Websites and Social Media. This is a curveball, but: I know of some church websites, and some Facebook friends, that by being charismatic express things in ways that alienate some non-Christians. I know of others that, in the name of being missional, say next to nothing about what God has done or is doing in their lives. The former raise faith amongst Christian friends but risk freaking out others; the latter remain friends with everyone, but miss opportunities to testify to God’s power for the benefit of their fellow believers. Just a thought.
 
So there we have it: the “charismatic-missional tension” boiled down to five issues. There are some other notable examples - the planning vs spontaneity spectrum, the issue of the church’s focus in its efforts and its prayers, etc - but those strike me as the main ones. And I think they need some thoughtful reflection, particularly from those of us called to lead and pastor God’s people. Tomorrow, I’ll try and make some sense of it all.
 
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Andrew is the author of several books including, most recently, If God, Then What?.

“Among you stands one you do not know. He is the one who comes after me, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.” (John 1:26-27)

John wasn’t the only one who drew a lot of unwanted attention from the celebrity chasers at Ephesus. They still held John the Baptist in such high regard that when Paul‘s church-planting team arrived there in 53AD, they found the foremost Christian preacher in the city telling the Ephesians to be baptised into John the Baptist instead of into Jesus.¹ The desert preacher who revived backslidden Israel in 27-28AD was still held in such high regard by the early Christians that an Arabian merchant named Muhammad would even list him as a prophet alongside Jesus over five centuries later in the Qur’an.
 
John had more reason than Matthew, Mark or Luke to give in to his readers’ desire to place John the Baptist on a pedestal. He is the unnamed disciple in verses 35-40, so he and his fishing partner Andrew had been some of John the Baptist’s earliest disciples. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that he spends much of chapters 1 and 3 clarifying what his former teacher’s message was. He, more than anyone, knew that John the Baptist was a good man, but he is alive to the danger that our admiration for a good man may actually distract us from obeying his call to look and see the God-Man.
 
John has already told us in verses 6-8 that John the Baptist was simply a witness sent from God to prepare the Jewish nation for its Messiah.² He called them to be baptised, which was not new in itself because Gentile converts to Judaism were baptised at the same time as they were circumcised as part of their entry into the People of God. What made John’s baptism new was that it was a baptism for Jews as an outward sign of their inner repentance and their confession that Jewishness was not enough to save anyone. When some Jews refused to be baptised, he warned that being descended from Abraham didn’t change the fact that they were the “offspring of vipers” until they surrendered to the Lord.³
 
Now, in verses 19-28, John clarifies his former teacher’s message further. He tells us that John the Baptist freely confessed that he was not the Messiah predicted by Moses when he talked about the coming of ‘the Prophet’ in Deuteronomy 18:15-19.⁴ Even though the three Synoptic gospel writers rightly link him to the prophecy in Malachi 4:5-6 that a man like Elijah would lead Israel in revival before the Messiah came, he insists in verse 21 that he is not Elijah in the sense that most Israelites assumed. The prophet who had ascended to heaven in a chariot of fire without dying nine centuries earlier in 2 Kings 2 had not returned.⁵ John the Baptist was merely like Elijah in his calling to turn Israel away from false objects of worship in order to see the Living God.⁶ Those who truly honour John the Baptist as a good man are those who gaze beyond him to the God-Man whose shoelaces he was too unworthy to untie. “Look!” he pointed in verse 29, “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”⁷
 
John knew that many of his readers were so in love with their human hero that their admiration stopped them from doing the very things he said. Therefore he does not tell the story of Jesus’ baptism like Matthew, Mark and Luke, but tells us in verses 30-34 what John the Baptist finally realised when Jesus came up out of the water. They were close relatives and had known one another from early childhood,⁸ but he hadn’t guessed that Jesus was the Son of God until he saw the Holy Spirit descend on him at his baptism and remain on him for ministry.⁹ At once, he recognised his own frail limitations and beat a hasty retreat out of the limelight so that Jesus could take centre-stage. The Bridegroom gets noticed and the groomsman gets forgotten, he insists in 3:29-30. “He must become greater; I must become less.” He refused to let a good man take the focus off the God-Man.
 
To help us, John tells us in verses 35-39 that he has already had to walk the road he is telling us to travel. He had once fixed his eyes on John the Baptist with all the eager devotion of a young disciple, but he had learned to honour his teacher by doing what he taught and shifting his gaze from the messenger and onto the Messiah. “Look, the Lamb of God!” John the Baptist had told him, and John had started following a new rabbi instead. Unlike the starstruck Ephesians, he had let nothing distract him from the one who could forgive him and change his life from the inside out by baptising him with the Holy Spirit.¹⁰
 
I recently spent time with a group of young church leaders who were concerned about what will happen when the ageing leader of their denomination retires. It brought home to me how easy it still is for us to let respect for a good man dilute our faith in the God-Man who has worked through that great leader and will continue to work through many fresh leaders when he has gone. That’s one of the reasons why the Lord has only granted each one of us a brief lifespan, because Church history has room for only one hero and it isn’t one of us. Retirements and deaths are God’s way of shifting his People’s gaze away from the unhealthy human hero worship which infected the church at Ephesus. As John prepared the believers for the day that he would die, as the last of Jesus’ twelve disciples, he warned them not to fix their eyes on any good man who might distract their focus from the God-Man.
 
Charles Wesley was inspired many centuries later to write a hymn from John the Baptist’s words, when he and his brother were at the height of their fame:

“His only righteousness I show, His saving grace proclaim;
‘Tis all my business here below to cry ‘Behold the Lamb!’
Happy if with my latest breath I may but gasp His Name,
Preach Him to all and cry in death, ‘Behold, behold the Lamb!”¹¹

 
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This is one of a series of extracts from Phil Moore’s book Straight to the Heart of John. This and other books in the series can be purchased through his website.

“Nah, don’t be like that. Just because I’m proposing to her, doesn’t mean we’re going to get married or anything!”

The bloke behind me on the bus had been chatting on his mobile for quite some time when he came out with this gem. He’d been counselling his friend on how to deal with a difficult work situation and then, to move the conversation along, had confided that he was planning to propose to his girlfriend. He seemed genuinely surprised that his friend’s thoughts immediately went to marriage. He explained himself: “I’ve been looking at rings a bit, but you know what I’m like with commitment…”
 
Now this is pure speculation, and may be a gross misreading of the situation, but from this snippet of conversation I deduce that the man’s girlfriend had been getting restless. She wanted to know if their relationship had any future, and he, afraid of commitment, but almost equally afraid of losing her, decided that a proposal was what she was looking for. A ring on her finger would assure her enough of his commitment to her that she wouldn’t leave him and they could carry on as before for an indefinite period.
 
Unfortunately, he’s probably about to get the shock of his life. If his girlfriend is like the majority of women out there, a ring won’t mean the end of a conversation but the beginning. She will immediately go into wedding-planning mode and start thinking about dates and dresses, guests and gift lists, flowers and photographers. She will see the circle of gold and the sparkly stone as an indication that his heart has changed, and will expect further actions to follow.
 
He will discover that he hasn’t bought himself an easy life, but a whole new raft of expectations. Does this remind you of anyone? For me it brought to mind the Israelites in Isaiah 58, asking ‘Why have we fasted and you have not seen it?’
 
Sermons on this passage usually move quickly onto verse 6, exhorting us to loose the chains of injustice, share our food with the hungry, clothe the naked and generally get involved in social justice ministries – and rightly so. I had not noticed before, though, the very first, simple but all-inclusive reason God gives the people for his silence: “On the day of your fasting, you do as you please.”
 
This is exactly what the man on the bus was doing, performing an outward act of commitment to his girlfriend, but at heart simply acting to please himself. The Israelites fasted so God would grant their requests, the boyfriend bought a ring so his girlfriend would stay with him.
 
It will be no revelation to readers of this blog that we should avoid legalism and not expect our outward shows or even our private prayers to force God’s hand and persuade him to act in our favour. We all know that the purpose of prayer and obedience is in order that our relationship with God may be deepened, that we would be better able to hear his voice and serve him. For those, like me, who sometimes find illustrations easier to relate to than abstract concepts, though, I hope this is a useful illustration of the kind of attitude that we can so easily slip into. 
 
We can’t just give God an outward display of commitment and hope that will keep him quiet. We need to have more courage, and more honesty, than the bloke on the bus and either commit ourselves fully, or make a clean break and walk away. Which will it be?