Phill Sacre

Tag: conservative evangelical

  • The conservative evangelical obsession with preaching

    The conservative evangelical obsession with preaching

    A few days ago I read an interesting blog post by Sam Allberry called Reigniting Our Churches. There he says:

    Many, if not most, of my friends are at churches regarded as being among the best in the country for Bible teaching. But the repeated feedback I keep hearing from so many is that things feel dry. Sermons are warm but predictable. The text is handled faithfully, but there’s often a lack of connection with real life. There’s little sense of spiritual reality. Imagine the White House staffers diligently discussing matters of national policy, all the while not really believing in the power of the President or the Oval Office to enact any real change. I fear many of our churches are starting to resemble this. 

    It reminded me of a post I wrote a few months ago, What conservative evangelicals get wrong about preaching. That post seemed to touch a nerve, and so has Sam’s article – which I hope is a positive thing. There’s clearly a problem, but the fact that it’s being recognised means it can be addressed.

    What I’d like to do in this post is touch on another issue which I think conservative evangelicals often get wrong about preaching. And before we begin – these are mistakes which I, myself, have made. I think my previous post came across as having a dig at conservative evangelicals, which was unintentional. I want to write this as critiquing ‘from within’, as it were, as a critical friend.

    So, all that said. This is the problem: I think conservative evangelicals are obsessed with preaching to the exclusion of other important ministries of the Word.

    An obsession with preaching

    When I started attending a conservative evangelical church (when I was a student), it was very clear to me that the sermon was a big deal. The person who told me about the church sold it to me by saying “When you hear a sermon, you think ‘wow’”. You didn’t have to be around the church for long to realise that sermons were immensely important.

    Throughout my time in conservative evangelical circles – first as a layman, and then as an ordained minister – this message has been constantly reinforced. For example, at college we spent a fair bit of time learning ‘homiletics’ (how to preach). Each day in college chapel there would be a sermon, and most days one of us students would preach. The topic of preaching was never far away from our discussion as students, I think it was simply a tacit assumption that being at college was a lot about learning to preach well and effectively.

    The Priority of Preaching by Christopher Ash

    In the conservative evangelical world – on conferences or online blogs etc – there are a lot of books about preaching. I’ve seen recommended (and bought!) books such as Christopher Ash’s book, The Priority of Preaching, or Tim Keller’s book on Preaching, or Zack Eswine’s book Preaching to a Post-Everything World. But it’s not just books about the task of preaching – there are also commentaries and books to help you preach particular books of the Bible.

    One of the biggest names in the conservative evangelical world is the Proclamation Trust. They declare, on the front page of their website, that they serve “the local church by promoting the work of biblical expository preaching in the UK and further afield”. They put on many conferences which are explicitly to do with preaching. A few years ago I attended the Younger Ministers Conference, which was very much focussed on preaching – the afternoon sessions were by Bryan Chappell about application in preaching, and we had small groups focussed on preaching particular books.

    In short, you could be forgiven for thinking that preaching was about the ONLY thing conservative evangelicals are interested in!

    But here’s the problem. I ask myself: how many books and conferences have I read or been on which are to do with other aspects of Word ministry? For example, how many conservative evangelical books are there to do with pastoral visiting, or counselling, or catechising, or one-to-one work? There are a few, and they are growing (especially thanks to organisations such as Biblical Counselling UK), but I’d say there are not as many as there should be.

    A Holistic approach to Word ministry

    Gospel ministry should be “pulpit-centered, but not pulpit-restricted”

    Peter Adam

    I think this is a really helpful quote. Pulpit-centered, but not pulpit-restricted. This captures well the ministry of the Word. In the book of Acts we see the ministry of the Apostles described like this: “Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Messiah.” So the Apostles devoted themselves to the ministry of the Word – but sometimes that looked like proclaiming from the pulpit (in the synagogue), and sometimes that looked like teaching in someone’s house. Each was ministry of the Word.

    It’s this ‘house to house’ kind of ministry which I think is maybe lacking in conservative evangelical circles. Perhaps it’s because so many conferences, books, etc. emphasize the need for a good preaching ministry, but don’t emphasize the need for Word ministry in other contexts.

    So I think the conservative evangelical world has become unbalanced. But what are the effects?

    The negative effect of a preaching obsession

    Are people really taking it on board?

    Richard Baxter
    Richard Baxter

    As I mentioned recently, I’ve been re-reading Sinclair Ferguson’s book Some Pastors and Teachers. In the same chapter I quoted in that post, he also quoted from Richard Baxter’s famous work The Reformed Pastor:

    For my part, I study to speak as plainly and movingly as I can … and yet I frequently meet with those that have been my hearers eight or ten years, who know not whether Christ be God or man, and wonder when I tell them the history of his birth and life and death, as if they had never heard it before. And of those who know the history of the gospel, how few are there who know the nature of that faith, repentance, and holiness which it requireth, or, at least, who know their own hearts? … I have found by experience, that some ignorant persons, who have been so long unprofitable hearers, have got more knowledge and remorse of conscience in half an hour’s close discourse, than they did from ten years’ public preaching. [My emphasis]

    As a preacher, I can sympathise here with Richard Baxter! I can think of times when people have asked me questions about things which I know I’ve preached on recently. I sometimes get the impression with preaching that it goes “in one year and out the other”! Richard Baxter found something similar. But, crucially, he did something about it. Sinclair Ferguson summarises:

    It was this discovery that led Baxter to arrange for every family in his parish area to have a catechism. Then, together with his two assistants, he spent two days of each week, from morning until evening, moving from house to house in his parish, teaching, gently quizzing, and with great sensitivity leading people to Christ and to the Scriptures.

    Baxter rediscovered the importance of ministry ‘from house to house’. So here’s my question: why is it that modern-day conservative evangelicals seem to have lost touch with this? Why is it that so many of our books and conferences seem to focus around the public ministry of the word, and not about the house-to-house ministry? Why aren’t we having conferences about catechising? I appreciate things have changed a lot since Baxter’s day – but surely the problem remains?

    I wonder if a typical conservative evangelical ministry could be made more effective by spending a bit less time on preparing sermons and a bit more time spending time with individuals to disciple them.

    Preaching is not an intellectual exercise!

    In my previous post about conservative evangelicals and preaching I argued that, in conservative evangelical circles, preaching could become an intellectual pursuit rather than a spiritual one. One of the problems with making preaching the only thing we really talk about is that it puts preaching on a pedestal, where it shouldn’t be.

    Preaching is one aspect of the ministry of a pastor-teacher – a very important and fundamental one. But our primary calling is to love: to love God, and to love people – especially the people God has given for us to minister to (e.g., for Anglicans, in our parish). Preaching is an aspect of love – but it mustn’t be divorced from it.

    I wonder if the books, the conferences, etc. ultimately send out a message that preaching is a matter of technique: simply get the Biblical theology right, read the right books, have the right small groups – and you’ll become a better preacher. You just need to know a bit more information…

    And this is the problem – preaching is primarily a spiritual endeavour. Going back to Sam Allberry’s article we started with, perhaps the problem with preaching that’s dry is that it’s become an intellectual business. Ironically, it could well be the obsession with preaching in conservative evangelical circles which has led to the problem with preaching in conservative evangelical circles!

    I wonder whether the best thing we could do would be to start obsessing about God – to focus more on worshipping him, on his goodness to us. Perhaps if we were so full of him and the good news, we’d find our preaching naturally followed suit? “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks”. If our hearts were full of Christ, we would speak about him. Sam’s post was about a book, Truth on Fire, which looks like it might be a good start.

  • A few thoughts about safeguarding

    A few thoughts about safeguarding

    A couple of days ago, the organisation ThirtyOne:Eight released their review into what happened at Emmanuel Church Wimbledon and Jonathan Fletcher (see the report from the Independent Advisory Group for a shorter summary). This follows hard on the heels of the full report about Ravi Zacharias which was only released just over a month ago.

    Naturally, people have been talking a lot about these things. How could this happen? How can we ensure it never happens again?

    One of the things which came up with Jonathan Fletcher was “Fletcher Culture”. The problem with both Jonathan Fletcher and Ravi Zacharias was not with them alone but with the culture they created. Unfortunately in the case of Jonathan Fletcher, because his influence was extensive, that culture has managed to extend pretty widely into the conservative evangelical world.

    Over the past few months I’ve been thinking a lot about safeguarding, and I’d like to share a few brief thoughts.

    Safeguarding exists because of sin

    The first thing is, the reason safeguarding is necessary is because sin exists: if sin didn’t exist, there would be no need for safeguarding.

    Sin is a falling away from God’s standards. It is both actively doing what is wrong, as well as failing to do what is right. (This means that most sin falls within the second category – none of us love as we should.) Sin includes abusing power and authority as well as sexual immorality. Sin also includes failing to act when it’s in our power to do something about abuse. In other words, sin includes the specific wrongs done by an abuser as well as the culture which enables it.

    Now, of course, the church is made up of sinners. People don’t stop being sinners when they come to Christ! In fact, it’s almost the opposite: when people come to Christ, they realise how deep their sinfulness is. I’ve had several new Christians say to me that they thought they were doing OK before becoming Christians, but now they had only just begun to realise how bad they were.

    But – thanks be to God – there is good news!

    The solution to sin

    There is a remedy for sin! In Jesus Christ, God offers us not only forgiveness of sins – a complete cleansing – but the power of the Holy Spirit. We can bear the fruit of the Spirit in our lives (Galatians 5:22-24), not by our own strength but as the Holy Spirit works in us.

    Of course, that doesn’t mean that sin instantly disappears when we come to Christ. But it does mean that it has lost its power – we have a new master. Over time, as we walk in step with the Spirit, we are transformed day by day into the likeness of Christ.

    And because we are a church, we confess our sins to each other, pray for each other, and walk with each other. God doesn’t simply call us to run an individual race, but work together as a team. We encourage and help each other across the finish line, so to speak. In other words, as the Spirit works in our lives, he also creates a Christian community or culture. We grow in holiness not simply as individuals but as a church.

    The fundamental point I’m trying to make here is this: if the church is working properly, safeguarding should not be necessary. Safeguarding is something that should not be needed in the church full of people walking in step with the Spirit.

    Before anyone says anything – the fact that something shouldn’t be needed doesn’t mean it’s not needed. I’m not arguing here we should abolish all safeguarding officers and safeguarding best practices. That’s not the point I’m making here. Please bear with me…

    What about Ravi Zacharias and Jonathan Fletcher?

    I think you have to seriously question whether someone who is living in a pattern of unrepentant sin is actually a Christian. Sin is a powerful thing, and we can’t escape it on our own. But with Holy Spirit to convict us of our sin and help us to change, progress is possible. So, a Christian may have a battle over a sin like pornography, for example – but if the Holy Spirit was at work I would hope (even expect) to see that battle being won as time went by.

    I’ve seen a few people making the point over the last few weeks that we’re all sinners: any of us could have done what JF or RZ did. In a sense this is true. All of us are only what we are by the grace of God. At the same time, I think this is also doing a massive disservice to the Holy Spirit. Someone does not become a serial abuser without intent – no genuine repentance, no growth in holiness.

    Christians can and do sin in serious ways. There are many examples of Biblical characters who sin in pretty big ways. King David, for example, committed adultery with Bathsheba, but more than that – covered it up by having her husband killed! Having an affair is sadly not unknown for Christians, even Christian leaders. When it happens, repentance and reconciliation is possible but it takes time to heal. But if someone had many affairs, continually, over almost their entire adult life, it’s a different matter. That’s not sinning and repenting – that’s brazen disobedience. That’s the kind of behaviour that Hebrews 10 is talking about:

    If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God … How much more severely do you think someone deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified them, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace?

    Hebrews 10:26-27, 29

    And that’s the issue with RZ and JF. They weren’t leaders who had a moral failure. They seemed to actively pursue what was wrong, again and again. They preached the gospel, but I’m not sure whether they really understood and believed the gospel.

    And this leads me on to the worst thing of all.

    What does it say about the culture?

    I would hope that a Christian organisation or network would be the kind of place where safeguarding happened naturally. If people were genuinely walking with the Spirit, in fellowship and prayer, then if someone was a bit ‘off’ I think it would show. It’s possible to preach an orthodox, Biblical sermon without being a believer – but it’s a lot harder to deceive people who know you well.

    If the whole church was truly growing in Christ and growing in holiness, than someone who wasn’t would stand out like a sore thumb. Except that… Ravi Zacharias and Jonathan Fletcher apparently didn’t stand out like a sore thumb. And that’s worrying: if Jonathan and Ravi were not walking in step with the Spirit, what does that say about the culture they were part of? (And the culture I am part of, to an extent?)

    What does it say about the conservative evangelical world that Jonathan Fletcher helped to create?

    What happened with Jonathan Fletcher and Ravi Zacharias is just the tip of the iceberg. It seems to me that we don’t need more safeguarding (as important as safeguarding is!). We need a much deeper spiritual reformation of the church. This is an issue which is not something which those people over there need to deal with (e.g. Emmanuel Church Wimbledon, or RZIM, or conservative evangelical churches). This is something that we, the church, need to deal with – in our own hearts and in our own churches.

    A new reformation

    Mike Ovey, late principal of the college where I trained for ordination, used to say that he was hoping and prayer for a new reformation. I’m more convinced by the day that he was right. We need nothing less in the church. I’ve talked about this a few times on the blog before (e.g. my previous post on Ravi Zacharias).

    We need to get on our knees and earnestly seek the Lord in prayer to renew and reform us.

  • What Conservative Evangelicals get wrong about preaching

    What Conservative Evangelicals get wrong about preaching

    I have spent pretty much my entire life going to evangelical churches. These are churches where the sermon is often the ‘main event’ in a service. This was especially true in the church I attended before going to theological college. There, a very high value was placed on having “good” preaching – it was really what the church was known for. The vicar at the time said he used to spend about twelve hours per week preparing the Sunday sermon. One person said to me that he travelled a long way to come because there were no other churches close to him which had “good” preaching. It was a church that was known to have “good” preaching, and – perhaps because it was near a university town – people would come to hear the “good” preaching.

    This seems to be a common theme among conservative evangelical churches (which I’ve talked about before on this blog). So the motivation behind the Proclamation Trust, for example, is to promote expository preaching – that is, preaching which aims to let the Bible set the agenda. They have whole conferences (some of which I’ve been on) which are dedicated to help with preaching the Bible. So much time and effort is spent on making sure that your preaching is as good as it can be.

    The default assumption seems to be that you should spend as long as possible preparing your sermon, over several sessions. This is reinforced by the people who speak at conferences (such as Vaughan Roberts, who I mentioned in my post about the EMA) saying that they spend several sessions over several days preparing to preach. You need to painstakingly analyse sentence flow diagrams, consult weighty commentaries, think about interesting ways to communicate. You really need to make sure you get into the text, so you can preach the main point clearly.

    There’s a huge amount of pressure to make sermons good. But I do wonder whether there is something lacking.

    A bit of background

    I came to the church I am now part of as a curate, straight from theological college. The church was (and is) conservative theologically and Biblically based. However, it is not one of the churches which people know by name – it’s not one of the ‘network’ conservative evangelical churches.

    One of the things which struck me early on was the preaching. Our vicar (now retired) was a very good speaker – but I don’t think his sermons would be very ‘Proc Trust’. His sermons were always based on the Bible passage and theologically orthodox. But I think sometimes they were a bit of a rush job – he was so busy during the week with his various jobs: at one time he was the Rural Dean of TWO deaneries (32 parishes!), and he was always busy pastorally. I once took a day to prepare a sermon and he said, “Enjoy it while you have the time!”

    Portrait of C.H. Spurgeon
    C. H. Spurgeon

    He had a very different style as well. Sometimes he would take the passage as a starting point and then ‘leap off’ to talk about something else – always Biblical! But there were quite a few occasions where I thought, “I agree with that, but I don’t think I would make that point from this passage”. In fact, his style reminded me a little of Spurgeon (another man who, despite being nicknamed ‘the prince of preachers’, would probably not preach ‘Proc Trust’ approved sermons!).

    The other thing that struck me was that the church was (and remains) a very loving and generous church family. Many in the church family did not simply hear the gospel, but they believed it as well. The Holy Spirit was and is at work in the hearts and lives of many people. People love the Lord, and each other. I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture – as with any church, there are many flaws. It’s what you would expect from a church made up of sinners! But, nonetheless, there’s a lot of spiritual life, which – I have to be honest – I haven’t always experienced in conservative evangelical churches.

    All this has made me wonder.

    What’s the point of preaching?

    I started going to my previous church while I was a university student. One of my friends encouraged me to go. He said that, when you listened to a sermon there, you thought ‘wow’! He wasn’t wrong – the sermons opened my eyes to new ways of understanding the Bible. I encountered things such as Biblical Theology for the first time. It made a big impact on me as a young student. My understanding really grew.

    At the same time, I’m not sure that those days were times of great spiritual growth. Part of the problem is that I think the sermons encouraged understanding more than they encouraged obedience and trust. That is, I came to the church to hear the preacher help me to understand the Bible – and not so much to be encouraged in my trust in the Lord. Hearing the sermon was a bit like seeing a magician pull a rabbit out of the hat. You’d go into a sermon thinking, “I wonder what he’s going to get out of this passage.”

    The problem with this kind of preaching is that it encourages an intellectual view of the Bible. Preaching becomes simply communicating information to enable understanding. Now, of course, preaching is about understanding – I think of Romans 12:2, for example: “be transformed by the renewing of your mind”. Our hearts are changed as our minds are changed. But the two things – heart and mind – must go together.

    Liam Goligher recently wrote a wonderful summary of the difference between preaching and teaching on Twitter. There he said:

    Teaching provides things to learn and to do while preaching should leave us aghast and awed in the presence of God whose voice we have heard. Teaching must send us out to serve; preaching must lift us up to heaven!

    Preaching is something which lifts us up to heaven – I rather like that. Preaching is part of worship, as we build our relationship with the infinite-personal God (as Francis Schaeffer would put it). Teaching is more about understanding and information; preaching is about relating to and worshiping the God who made us. Of course, the two things are not mutually exclusive, but there is a distinction.

    When preaching becomes teaching

    A lecture

    I wonder whether part of the problem is that, for many conservative evangelical churches, ‘teaching’ and ‘preaching’ have merged into one. For example, I’ve heard it said by a few different people I know that good preaching should teach people how to read the Bible. That’s probably true. But I don’t think that should be the end goal. Sermons shouldn’t primarily be to teach believers theology, but to encourage them with the gospel that they may lead a transformed life.

    Maybe part of the problem is because churches have stopped catechising new believers. I think many churches try to do everything in Sunday sermons – perhaps because they do not realise there is another way. They tacitly assume that people will learn everything they need to through studying the Bible in sermons and home groups – rather than intentionally catechising people in the faith.

    Now, I do appreciate that every doctrine you would learn in a catechism you could also teach while preaching through a book of the Bible. But I think the goal of a catechism is different to the goal of preaching: catechesis is more about teaching. If you’re catechising people about the doctrines of grace, preaching can focus not so much on teaching those doctrines but encouraging people in their walk with the Lord using those doctrines as a foundation.

    I would say preaching is not about teaching people something from the Bible, but applying it to their hearts: encouraging people with the gospel, so that they go back to their lives with confidence to face with coming week. It’s not to teach people those doctrines but to encourage people with them. There’s an important difference.

    Our greatest need

    Robert Murray M’Cheyne, the 19th Century Scottish pastor, once said:

    Robert Murray M'Cheyne: "My people's greatest need is my personal holiness"

    Over the last seven years since I was ordained, I have come to believe that this is absolutely true. I’ve come to truly understand that the Word is not something which must simply be comprehended on an intellectual level but allowed to change our hearts. Books such as True Spirituality by Francis Schaeffer have really helped me understand this.

    A sermon is not about a transfer of information. It’s not about me reading the passage, understanding it, and then communicating that to others. It’s about the Word of God speaking to us, as Christians. I am not helping people to understand the Bible – I am helping people to apply it to our lives, now, as one Christian to another. It’s more than information – it’s God applying his word to our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

    Occasionally in preaching classes I’ve been given the advice, “First preach the sermon to yourself”. This is very good advice. If you can’t preach the sermon to yourself first, if it does nothing for you, then it won’t do anything for those who you’re preaching to. That is the exact thing we are communicating: not a piece of information, but a spiritual, life-transforming message.

    This is what I am getting at: the most important thing a preacher needs is not the intellectual grasp of a passage, but to be walking closely with the Lord. A simple man who has been humbled by the weight of his own sin and is depending on the Lord will accomplish far more than someone who has a lot of knowledge but is self-sufficient. In fact, a lot of knowledge could even be a barrier (1 Corinthians 8:1, “knowledge puffs up but love builds up”).

    What this means for sermon prep

    Over the last few years I’ve started to worry less about sermons. I don’t worry too much about spending hours refining my exegesis of the passage, or finding just the right words. That’s not to say I skimp on it! But I try to spend a bit more time dwelling on what the passage has to say to me as a Christian. How should I be changed as a result of this? What difference does it make to my life? In other words, the balance of my time in preparation has shifted in a more “spiritual” direction.

    I often find that a passage will speak into a particular situation going on in my life, or the world / church. I take that to be the voice of the Holy Spirit, helping me to direct what I say.

    Sermon preparation is not merely an intellectual exercise in terms of analysing sentence flow diagrams – it’s a spiritual excercise. We need to listen to the voice of the Spirit speaking to us through the words he inspired. That doesn’t mean we can skip over sentence flow diagrams (although I don’t usually do them for other reasons!) – but rather that at every point we need to be praying and asking God to guide us.

    Perhaps it would be helpful to see sermon prep as our whole lives before preaching: not just the actual tasks we complete in order to prepare a sermon, but our whole spiritual state before God. Spending time in prayer and humbling ourselves before God daily is sermon preparation. Speaking to people is sermon preparation. And so on. Perhaps that would help to get away from sermons being something we do intellectually to something we do with our heart, soul, mind and strength.

    Where does that leave us?

    A year ago I wrote about Jonathan Fletcher and Steve Timmis. There I said that part of the problem in conservative evangelical circles is that orthodoxy is reduced to holding a set of intellectual propositions. If you sign up on the dotted line of various doctrinal beliefs, you’re in the club.

    I think something similar could be said for preaching. Why is it that people like Jonathan Fletcher and Steve Timmis could do the things they did, without anyone really noticing? Is it because it’s possible to preach a “biblical”, exegetically-correct, theological sermon – without really preaching from the heart?

    Over the last few days I’ve been reading The Church at the End of the 20th Century by Francis Schaeffer. I’ve really benefitted from reading his works, and I’d recommend them to anyone. One of the things he says in the book is that everything starts with relating to the God who is there. The whole reason we exist is because God made us and we are his, we are made for him. Without him, without relating to him, we are nothing. Our natural sinful condition is to think that we can cope without him. I think this can be true of spiritual exercises such as preaching.

    Yesterday I read this, which sums things up for me:

    Suppose that when we awoke tomorrow morning and opened our Bibles, we found two things had been taken out. Not as the liberals would take them out, but really out. Suppose God had taken them out. Suppose the first item missing was the real empowering of the Holy Spirit; and the second item, the reality of prayer. Consequently, following the dictates of Scripture, we would begin to live on the basis of this new Bible in which there was nothing about the power of the Holy Spirit and nothing about the power of prayer. Let me ask you something: If that were the case, what difference would there be today from the way we acted yesterday?

    If God is real, the Spirit is real, and prayer is real – our sermons should reflect that. My fear is that too often they don’t.

    Cover image is the EMA at the Barbican back in 2017, borrowed (without permission) from this page – sorry!

    Further reading…

    Ray Ortlund’s sermon on 2 Timothy 1:3-8 and then his seminar on suffering were very helpful for me in beginning to think about these things! (The seminar was what put me onto Francis Schaeffer in the first place). I think what he says about Reformed Christianity in an American context would apply to the conservative evangelical British context.

    Also I think Humble Calvinism by J.A. Medders is relevant.

  • Jonathan Fletcher, Steve Timmis and the danger of tribalism

    As you may have seen in the news last year, Jonathan Fletcher, former vicar of Emmanuel church, Wimbledon, has been caught up in a storm over abuse – without going into all the details, see e.g. this article. Then, in the news last week, I read that Steve Timmis, CEO of the Acts 29 network (a global church planting network), had been removed amid accusations of abuse.

    A lot of ink has been spilt about Jonathan Fletcher, and I’m sure there will be lots more about Steve Timmis. I think there are serious questions that need to be asked about how two people in high positions in the church could get to where they are and be allowed to continue abuse without being stopped, how it could continue for so long, and so on. There are lots of uncomfortable questions and I think the evangelical world will have to do a lot of soul searching and hard wrestling.

    There is one thing I’d like to say at this stage which is something which has been on my mind for a while – I started thinking about this on my previous post about conservative evangelical subculture, but I want to expand a bit on what I said there. I want to focus on conservative evangelical subculture because I think that is probably where these two incidents happened, although I think the issue affects all different subcultures in its own way.

    Let’s start by focussing on the label “conservative evangelical”. An evangelical is simply a Christian who believes in the final authority of the Scriptures over anything else (see my post from a few years ago). A conservative evangelical is more specific – it involves holding on to a set of conservative theological beliefs, historically the distinctive one is over the role of women, i.e. whether women should be ordained / preach / exercise positions of leadership in the local church etc. (I believe open / conservative evangelical originally reflected taking an open / conservative stance on this issue, although both terms have since evolved).

    Conservative evangelical is also more than a theological label: it has become something of a tribe. The problem is there aren’t many conservative evangelicals around, and so they (we, as I include myself) have tended to band together. The reality is that it revolves around certain churches, individuals, and organisations. There are certain names which we all know. For example, I’d say the Proclamation Trust (who run the EMA which I wrote about last time) is one of those organisations. (I don’t want to single them out – just as an example!) I think it’s fairly safe to say that Steve Timmis and Jonathan Fletcher would have fitted in conservative evangelical circles, I was aware of them both (although I knew very little about Fletcher before last year, I’d never heard him preach for example).

    One of the problems with a tribe is defining who is in and who is out. I’ve noticed that, with conservative evangelicals, the particular standard applied is doctrinal orthodoxy: that is, whether someone believes a particular set of things, whether someone is “sound”.

    If you sign up to those particular (unwritten, unspoken) beliefs, you’re in the club; if you don’t, you’re out. This has practical implications for how church is on the ground: at a previous church we attended, my wife used to have real difficulty. There was an unspoken assumption that people in the congregation were “sound”, that they believed certain things, and that everyone in the congregation was “one of us”. It wasn’t written down anywhere, it was just the culture. My wife often felt like she wasn’t “one of us”, even if it wasn’t actually intended or verbalised.

    I think this is a dangerous place for a church to be in. Ultimately I think we should judge people by their love for the Lord and their love for Jesus, whether they have repented of their sins and turned to Christ. Every Christian will be at a different stage of maturity, people need a bit of space – especially to begin with – to grapple with the Bible, to come to understand for themselves that it is indeed God’s good word to us and trustworthy. You can’t expect everyone to become a Christian and immediately start believing all the ‘right’ things!

    Now what relevance does this have to Jonathan Fletcher and Steve Timmis? I’d say one of the common characteristics of conservative evangelicals is a love for understanding. We love doctrine, we love the Bible, we want to see how it fits together, and we especially love sermons which show that. Understanding, however, is not the same as genuine love for the Lord. It is, sadly, possible to know a lot about the Bible and theology without actually knowing God, or at least, knowing him very well.

    Which brings me to Jonathan Fletcher and Steve Timmis. I cannot comprehend the mindset of a genuine Christian leader, someone who walked with the Lord, doing the kind of things that they are accused of doing. The Bible is very clear about what Christian leadership should look like. For example:

    …be shepherds of God’s flock that is under your care, watching over them – not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not pursuing dishonest gain, but eager to serve; not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock.

    1 Peter 5:2-3

    Jesus himself said:

    ‘You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.’

    Mark 10:42-45

    And we could go on. The point is that being a Christian is fundamentally about love and service – loving and serving God and others. Laying our lives down, as Jesus Christ laid his life down: he is our model. Christian leaders have an especial responsibility here: Christian leadership is servant-leadership at its heart. If you’ve missed that, you’ve missed the heart of Christian leadership.

    Now I don’t know either Fletcher or Timmis, all I know is from the things I’ve read online. It seems to me, from the limited amount I do know, that Jonathan Fletcher and Steve Timmis did not embody servant-hearted leadership. Of course, I don’t know where their hearts are before the Lord, and I am not passing any judgement on their salvation. But it seems to me, from a position of limited knowledge, that their actions are not consistent with the understanding of servant leadership as embodied in Christ Jesus.

    And I have to wonder: (1) how did people in positions of Christian leadership and responsibility seem to have so little grasp of the basics of what it means to be a Christian? They didn’t seem to demonstrate much Christian character and maturity; (2) how did they get away with it for so long?

    I think the answer to those two questions is related and uncomfortable for conservative evangelicals. I wonder if tribalism plays a part: if the criteria for being “one of us” is reduced to holding a particular set of doctrinal convictions, then the more fundamental matter of actually loving the Lord becomes secondary. And, as I think we have seen, it is possible to hold a particular set of doctrinal convictions, even to preach a “sound” expository sermon, as a sort of intellectual exercise without a real spiritual maturity.

    Were people prepared to overlook other issues with Fletcher and Timmis because they were “one of us”? Did people think, “they can’t be that bad, they’re sound“?

    Over the past few days I’ve been re-reading Don Carson’s book “A Call to Spiritual Reformation”. (Carson is, of course, a household name to conservative evangelicals…) And these words jumped out at me:

    Paul does not simply pray that we might know God better, but that God might give us the Spirit of wisdom and revelation to the end that we might know God better. There is a set means to the desired end. What is required is wisdom and revelation mediated by the Spirit. This is not simply a corpus of truth to be picked up by reading a book on systematic theology (though such reading may do us a great deal of good!). It is growth in wisdom – probably here referring to how to live in God’s universe so as to please him – and revelation.

    This is important. We are called to believe right doctrine, absolutely. Conservative evangelicals are good at that. But we mustn’t stop at simply stating it, or even preaching it, as if it’s some sort of intellectual exercise. We have to put it into practice. When we say God is good, we can’t just say it – we have to believe it. We read what Psalm 19 says about the law of the Lord being “sweeter than honey” (Psalm 19:10) – but we should act as if that were the case as well. We should take delight in the law of the Lord, becoming more Christ-like, becoming more willing to serve others and to take up our cross and follow Jesus.

    Of course, we are all sinners and no-one is righteous – no-one can obey the law of God perfectly. But Christian leaders in particular should exhibit a certain maturity, a certain level of understanding. It’s notable that the pastoral epistles focus a lot on character, as well as a believing in and teaching sound doctrine. In fact, the two things should go together – I think Paul and the other apostles would have absolutely rejected the idea that you could separate right living and right doctrine.

    Personally speaking, I am immensely grateful for my theological training under the late Mike Ovey – a man who did embody the fact that knowledge and character should go together. He did practice what he preached, and he taught us as much by his example as he did by his words.

    In conclusion: every culture will have its own problems and blind spots. But, every culture should at the same time, by the grace of God, be seeking to overcome its problems and blind spots. I am hoping that conservative evangelical culture will come to recognise its own blind spots and change. I am hoping that revelations of leaders like this will bring about godly sorrow which leads to repentance (2 Corinthians 7:10). Perhaps it’s time at least to have a conversation about these things.

  • A few thoughts on the EMA and Conservative Evangelical Subculture

    I’ve just spent three days at the EMA – Evangelical Ministry Assembly, organised by the Proclamation Trust. I very much enjoyed my time – it was wonderful and refreshing to be out of regular ministry for a few days, and to take some time to receive some encouraging Biblical input.

    However – I did have one or two thoughts about the conference. I’ve been to Proc Trust conferences before (including the EMA, a few years ago back in 2015) but this was the first time that I’ve actually felt uncomfortable. I have struggled about whether to make my feelings known – it’s very difficult for criticism to come over in the right spirit on the internet, plus I know how hard the people who run the EMA work, and how much it is appreciated. In a sense, any criticism here is going to be unfair.

    So why am I writing? On the final day of the conference, there was a panel discussion talking about the situation regarding Jonathan Fletcher (more on that later). One of the things to come out of that discussion was Johnny Juckes saying they needed to listen to various different voices to identify blind spots – which convinced me that it was right for me to write something.

    Here, then, as concisely as I can, are three reasons why I felt uncomfortable.

    1. Class

    It has become something of a cliche that conservative evangelicalism has a problem with class – although, to be fair, this is a problem which is shared by a lot of the UK church. The particular problem with conservative evangelicals, however, is that the leadership seems (to me, as an ‘outsider’ in these kind of circles) to be predominantly public school / Oxbridge educated. It really struck me this week how many of the people up front probably fitted that description. Of course it’s not possible to tell whether someone has been to a public school, but two of the speakers did make reference to studying at Cambridge.

    Maybe I’ve spent too long in Clacton, or maybe it’s because I’ve been thinking about this kind of issue due to Brexit (the divide it has exposed in society e.g. David Goodhart’s book The Road to Somewhere). There is a divide in society which is definitely there in politics – Goodhart does a good job at showing how politics has benefitted one particular class (which he calls the ‘anywheres’) at the expense of another. But it’s a shame when a Christian conference or organisation seems to display something of that same division.

    One of the passages quoted approvingly at the conference (on the second day – I can’t remember quite in which context) was this:

    Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things – and the things that are not – to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.

    1 Corinthians 1:26-29

    Paul here makes the point that most of the Corinthian believers were not wise, influential, or of noble birth by human standards when they came to Christ. In fact, Paul explicitly makes the point that God goes out of his way to choose the weak and lowly things of this world to shame the strong.

    With this in mind – why is it that the EMA main stage seemed to be dominated by people who, superficially at least, could in the world’s eyes pass as wise, influential, and of noble birth?

    This is not to say they shouldn’t have been there: I often think of the Countess of Huntingdon when I read those verses – she used to say she was saved by an ‘m’: Paul says not many, instead of not any! Clearly God has a purpose for people at all levels of society, privileged background or not. But it seems to me that there is something wrong when there is a majority from a more privileged background.

    There were some things which (to my mind) were notable by their absence: people from the BAME community. People with regional accents. People who minister in small towns rather than university towns. People who minister in small ‘ordinary’ churches rather than big ones – more on that in a moment.

    Now, let me be clear – I’m sure there is no intentional bias against anyone! But I think these things so often happen unintentionally because appointments are made, people are invited to speak, on the basis of relationships – and, often, the people you know are people who are similar to you with a similar background – i.e. known from Iwerne camps, or university missions, etc.

    I’m not accusing the Proc Trust of doing anything wrong, per se, but maybe there are steps that could be taken to increase the diversity of those invited to lead.

    2. Success

    This ties in with the first point. Many of those invited to lead sessions were from large and ‘successful’ churches. I say successful in quotes because, of course, success in God’s eyes is different from success in the world’s eyes. A small church may be more successful in God’s eyes than a large church, so long as it is preaching the gospel faithfully.

    I think this point came home to me when Vaughan Roberts was leading a session on preaching Hebrews. He was talking about the length of time that he takes to prepare a sermon – he said that he usually booked out Fridays, for example, but before that would spent a couple of 2-3 hour blocks of time working on it. By contrast, when I was a curate, I once took a day to prepare a sermon and my training incumbent at the time told me to enjoy that luxury while I could! He found it a real struggle to carve out sermon preparation time.

    The truth is that many pastors are feeling the heat right now. From my own networks I know a lot of Anglican clergy are struggling under a heavy workload – I can think of one vicar in a nearby town who is a part-time chaplain, part-time minister of a parish with three churches. Additionally, the country is growing increasingly secular, and ministry can be a real slog with very little to show for it. Here in our parish we have seen little numerical growth – people have joined and come to Christ (praise God), but the number of people joining has largely been offset by the number who have died or moved away. Sometimes it feels like a matter of running full pelt just to stay where you are! I’m sure many ministers across the country feel like this.

    So, what’s the problem? As in the first point I made, ultimately it comes down to diversity: what is being held up as a model? Is a church where the lead pastor has enough free time to spend many hours working on a sermon being held up as the ideal? Most of those given a platform in the EMA were from churches with large staff teams.

    Where were the voices of ordinary pastors? Where were those who represented the majority of those in the audience? Do we want to send out the message that you’re only qualified to speak at a preacher’s conference if you have a ‘successful’ (in worldly terms) ministry?

    Again – just to be clear – I don’t think this is at all intentional. Of course the Proc Trust want to invite people who are well-known, who are going to preach and speak well. And, of course, it is those who have ‘bigger’ ministries who can afford the time in the first place to prepare for a conference. And those who have ‘successful’ ministries shouldn’t be penalised for that reason! That would be just as big a mistake as choosing them for that reason.

    However, I wonder if there is anything which could be done to make the conference better reflect the conviction that the key is Biblical faithfulness rather than popularity. (And, of course, this is a charge that could be levelled at many different Christian conferences – not just conservative evangelical ones!)

    3. Theology

    This is the area which I’ve been most hesitant to include. Nonetheless, I think it is important and linked to what has gone before. God has given us a whole church for a reason, and I think diversity is important in order to understand our own blind spots. This is why it’s important to listen to those in the church who are different from us. When that doesn’t happen, it can become a bit of a ‘bubble’ where we are unable to see flaws in our own thinking.

    One of the ways I think evangelical churches (including, and perhaps especially, conservative evangelical churches) subtly distort the gospel is by portraying the Christian life like this: it’s all about avoiding sin.

    It’s a bit like one of those car-racing video games – every time you see a pothole or an obstacle coming, you have to move so you don’t hit it. I think we often unconsciously visualise the Christian life in this way: we live our lives day-to-day, trying our hardest to avoid sinning, and asking God for forgiveness when we fail and the help not to sin again. I call this view ‘almost the gospel’ – it’s so close, and yet not quite there. You could probably live your whole Christian life with this view, and in fact I think many people do. I spent the majority of my Christian life up until 2-3 years ago with something like this view. It has become so deeply ingrained it’s simply the air we breathe: we don’t even notice we are doing it. Over the past few years I’ve gradually become aware of it, largely around what I’ve been thinking about with my other website Friend Zone.

    And, interestingly, this is how it ties in with what happened with Jonathan Fletcher. On the final day of the conference, instead of the second session there was an announcement about what happened with Jonathan Fletcher (you can read the transcript online here). After that announcement, there was a panel discussion about safeguarding and how we should respond to these events.

    One of the panel said in closing that we should be much more careful in the future – for example by a man not counselling a woman one-to-one. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that this would have had absolutely no bearing on the issues with Jonathan Fletcher (what happened with him was exclusively with other men), this sounds very much like the Billy Graham rule – which, strangely enough, had been mentioned from the front the day before by Hugh Palmer in his pen sketch of Billy Graham. I’ve written about the Billy Graham rule before, the summary being this: we are to love others, not to avoid them out of fear of sin.

    There were a group of people in the New Testament who saw purity as a problem, and who saw the solution to that problem in putting up additional laws to ring-fence God’s laws. “We’ll make sure we never, ever cross God’s law by creating a new law which stops us even getting near breaking God’s law”. They were called the Pharisees, and you may recall Jesus didn’t have many kind words for them. Their fault was in thinking that you could create righteousness through observance of rules, when in fact all the additional rules created is a lack of love.

    Love can only come from God, we need to look to him and the power of the Holy Spirit – not to human rules. The real irony is, rules actually lead to the kind of thing which happened with Jonathan Fletcher: if you divorce God’s rules from his goodness, you’ll never obey him joyfully. This is a lesson I particularly learned from Sinclair Ferguson’s book The Whole Christ. Jesus came to give us life to the full, and living life in his ways is the best kind of life it’s possible to live. How does David describe the Law of the Lord? “Sweeter than honey” (Psalm 19:10). David is not exaggerating. I have come to believe that what he says is absolutely true – the law of the Lord is sweeter than any of the filthy, polluting effects of sin – however attractive Satan may make it appear to us.

    If we see God’s laws as morally righteous but not intrinsically good for us, then our obedience to them will only be half-hearted. Maybe we will even try to get as close to breaking them as possible without actually breaking them. We must come to obey from our hearts, knowing that God is supremely a good law-giver, with our best interests at heart. The Lord knows what is best, because he is the Lord, our maker: “I am the Lord your God, who teaches you what is best for you, who directs you in the way you should go” (Isaiah 48:17).

    All this is not to say that human guidelines have no place – but rather that they should be just that, guidelines. Making a rule of anything beyond the rules God has actually given us is missing the point. This is exactly the point that Jesus is making in the Sermon on the Mount. God asks a deeper obedience of us than rules – adding extra rules to God’s rules will not increase our obedience!

    And – ultimately – we should obey God from love, rather than from fear. One seminar at the conference was how to grow as a young preacher. I was left at the end of that session feeling a bit negative, thinking about my sin, idolatry, and all the things that can go wrong! Whereas my experience has been over the last five years that despite my hopeless inadequacy and sinfulness in every way, yet God has been immensely faithful. I have seen some wonderful answers to prayer in my own life and God working through me in ways I couldn’t imagine before. Yes, we need to be concerned for our own sin, but we need to have a greater picture of the God who is capable of transforming us and using us despite our failings.

    Let me finish by quoting a couple of things from books I’ve read recently which I think are relevant. The first is from C.S. Lewis’ sermon The Weight of Glory, which I blogged about on Friend Zone recently:

    If you asked twenty good men to-day what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire.

    Although Lewis preached this sermon in 1941, almost 80 years on I think it has continuing relevance for the church today. We in the early 21st century needs to hear these words: the Christian life is about love, as Lewis observed, not simply self-denial. Although I doubt that many Christians today would say that unselfishness was the highest virtue, I think we often live as if that were the case. Our lives betray our beliefs.

    The second quote is from Francis Schaeffer, whose writings I have recently discovered to be a treasure-trove. This is from his book True Spirituality, which I blogged about on Friend Zone recently (again; I’m sorry for promoting things I’ve written! I’ve just been thinking about this issue a lot lately.)

    The Christian’s call is to believe right doctrine; true doctrine: the doctrine of the Scripture. But it is not just a matter of stating right doctrine, though that is so important. Neither is it merely to be that which can be explained by natural talent, or character, or energy … Preaching the Gospel without the Holy Spirit is to miss the entire point of the command of Jesus Christ for our era… Whatever is not an exhibition that God exists misses the whole point of the Christian’s life now on this earth. According to the Bible, we are to be living a supernatural life now, in this present existence in a way we shall never be able to do again through all eternity. We are called upon to live a supernatural life now, by faith.

    Again, I think Schaeffer could be speaking to the church today. The church is not supposed to be doing “that which can be explained by natural talent, or character, or energy” (does that hark back a little to what I said about success?) – but rather to be an exhibition of God’s existence. In other words, the church shouldn’t look just like the world in accomplishing things through its own strength. The church should be unlike the world in accomplishing things which it could only accomplish through God’s power working in us.

    Of course, I don’t doubt that all those involved with the Proc Trust / EMA believe this. But we know as Christians that our beliefs don’t always match up with our actions. (And, to be fair – exactly the same criticism could be made of many churches and church traditions. This is absolutely not a problem confined to the conservative evangelical world.)

    Although more could be said, I think I have gone on long enough. You can refer to the links I’ve put to my further thoughts on this matter! I will close with Paul’s words to the Corinthians, after he talks about pleading with God to take away his ‘thorn in the flesh’:

    Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

    2 Corinthians 12:8-10

    These verses have become very precious to me over the last few years. I pray that the Lord may teach me, a weak sinner, and all of those who belong to him in his church how to depend on him more deeply at all times, to know deeply that apart from Christ we can do nothing.