From the blog post on Acts 29 Network

1. It is important to observe contradictory trends.

Interestingly, Don encouraged us to recognize the good things in our current culture. He said we have a lot more good commentaries available to us than we did fifty years ago. Yet, mainline churches have fewer conversions than ever before. This is a contradictory trend, according to Carson.

2. Current evangelical fragments are moving into a new phase — into polarized “clumps.”

3. The most dangerous trends in any age are the trends that most people do not see.

Carson made the case that 1920′s liberalism is no longer the issue-even though some churches are still fighting that shadow. Today’s issues like justification, inerrancy, primacy of family, gender roles, sexuality, pornography, modesty, race relations (very few race-integrated churches), tolerance, consumerism and human flourishing are the current issues at hand.

4. There is a trend in our churches to be consumed by social concern.

In the most intriguing point of his talk, Don said that the Gospel plus caring for the poor was an inseparable couplet. He cautioned that if the gospel was merely assumed (and not clearly articulated), our passion for social justice would overshadow the gospel. While we are not intentionally exalting social concern over the gospel, people learn what we are excited about (gospel over caring for the poor). Carson warned, “Our passion must first be the gospel and not assume it to be understood.” He continued, “We must be careful to keep the gospel central and not turn our responses to the gospel as the main target.”

Furthermore, Carson exhorted these Christian leaders to spend our time on prayer and the ministry of the Word and allow our people to begin and maintain efforts in social concern. He said we must distinguish between what the church as church must do and what the community of believers in the church must do (I did not personally see the difference but it seemed to suggest that the pastor was exempt from exemplifying an outpouring of the gospel into the community through social efforts).

Our calling, Carson said is to do good in the city (Jer. 29), because the person has an eternal destiny and we care for them. We are all poor beggars telling other poor beggars where they can find bread. Don concluded this section by warning us not to make the issues of gospel and social concern antithetical.

5. There is a trend in our churches to emphasize discipleship over the gospel.

It is crucial to teach the whole council of God centering on Christ crucified as the power of the gospel and salvation. If we see the gospel as what “saves” us and if we see discipleship as the actual place where real transformation takes place, it is not a biblical approach. Carson said this trend has a tendency to lead us to see discipleship as legalism; as what pleases God.

…

We need to be aware of the current trends in the church today and pastor our church with an emphasis on the gospel. Anything less leads to narcissistic religion and away from Jesus.

Tullian is pastor of New City Church in Coconut Creek, FL and grandson of Billy Graham. From his post Understanding Our Times.

Here are my top fifteen recommendations (in no particular order):
1. No Place for Truth by David Wells
2. God in the Wasteland by David Wells
3. Culture Making by Andy Crouch
4. Engaging God’s World by Cornelius Plantinga
5. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society by Lesslie Newbigin
6. Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon
7. American Evangelicalism by James Davison Hunter
8. The Gravedigger File by Os Guinness
9. Christian Mission in the Modern World by John Stott
10. The Way of the Modern World by Craig Gay
11. How Now Shall We Live? by Chuck Colson and Nancy Pearcey
12. Christ and Culture Revisited by D.A. Carson
13. Where in the World Is the Church? by Michael Horton
14. Lectures on Calvinism by Abraham Kuyper
15. Chameleon Christianity by Dick Keyes

And here are twenty-five more I highly recommend, listed alphabetically by title:

A Peculiar People by Rodney Clapp
The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis
Above All Earthly Powers by David Wells
All God’s Children in Blue Suede Shoes by Ken Myers
Christ and Culture by H. Richard Niebuhr
The Church Before the Watching World by Francis Schaeffer
The Contemporary Christian by John Stott
The Courage to Be Protestant by David Wells
Creation Regained by Albert Wolters
The Culturally Savvy Christian by Dick Staub
Culture Matters by T. M. Moore
He Shines in All That’s Fair by Richard Mouw
Heaven Is a Place on Earth by Michael Wittmer
Losing Our Virtue by David Wells
No God but God by John Seel and Os Guinness
Not The Way It’s Supposed to Be by Cornelius Plantinga
Prophetic Untimeliness by Os Guinness
Redeeming Pop-Culture by T. M. Moore
Rumor of Angels by Peter Berger
Surprised by Hope by N. T. Wright
The Transforming Vision by Brian Walsh and Richard Middleton
Too Christian, Too Pagan by Dick Staub
Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey
When the Kings Come Marching In by Richard Mouw
Where Resident Aliens Live by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon

Mark Driscoll’s eight-point definition of the church from Adrian Warnock’s blog

1. Regenerated Church Membership
2. Qualified Church Leadership
3. Gathering Regularly for Preaching and Worship.
4. Rightly Administered Sacraments
5. Unity and Affection, which is evidence of the Holy Spirit
6. Discipline for Holiness
7. Obey the Great Commandment to Love—Church and Neighbor
8. Obey the Great Commission to Evangelize and Make Disciples

These sure to line up well with the 9Marks

1. Expositional Preaching
2. Biblical Theology
3. Biblical Understanding of the Good News
4. Biblical Understanding of Conversion
5. Biblical Understanding of Evangelism
6. Biblical Understanding of Membership
7. Biblical Church Discipline
8. Promotion of Christian Discipleship and Growth
9. Biblical Understanding of Leadership

Question and Answer for C.J. Mahaney about Priorities + Single-Staff Pastors]

Question: With 18 to 20 hours of study a week, small-group training and leadership, parent-teen leadership, generational leadership, etc., for a guy like myself who is pastoring by himself, what do we do? Obviously we should preach on Sundays at the gathering, but where do we back off? And how do we gauge our family hours?

C.J. Mahaney: Your challenge will be the consistent temptation to compare yourself unfavorably to other pastors and other contexts. You hear about other churches and what they are accomplishing, and you can be tempted to think this is immediately transferable. Always look behind the immediate illustration to the history behind that church. That is too often what we don’t do. So realize that behind that other individual is a body of experience and a number of years. That church didn’t begin the way you now see it. And that is no small challenge for someone who is serving by himself in pastoral ministry, but it is your challenge, and it is one that I think you can walk wisely through.

Your priorities at present sound like they are in place.

(1) First is the priority of caring for your own soul before God, cultivating affection for the Savior, and growing in your appreciation for his death on the cross for your sins.

(2) The second priority is caring for, serving, and leading your wife and children.

(3) Then we arrive at preparation for the Sunday meeting. If I were to open your planner and study your calendar, I would want to see reflected in your schedule a sufficient number of hours to prepare for the Sunday meeting. This meeting must be your priority because, until you have a team around you, this is the most effective way you can serve the entirety of the church as it exists now.

From C. J. Mahaney’s blog Recommended Chapters on Preaching

Jeff Purswell’s recommended chapters

1. “Why Preach?” by J.I. Packer. The Introduction to The Preacher and Preaching (P&R, 1986).

2. “Theological Foundations for Preaching” by John Stott. Chapter 3 in Between Two Worlds (Eerdmans, 1982).

3. “Preaching Christ from the Old Testament” by Ligon Duncan. Chapter 2 in Preaching the Cross (Crossway, 2007).

4. “The Gravity and Gladness of Preaching” by John Piper. Chapter 4 in The Supremacy of God in Preaching (Baker, 1990).

5. “Paul’s Theology of Preaching” by Dennis E. Johnson. Chapter 3 of Him We Proclaim (P&R, 2007).

Mike Bullmore’s recommended chapters

1. “A Redemptive Approach to Preaching” by Bryan Chapell. Chapter 10 in Christ-Centered Preaching (Baker, 2005).

2. “The Preacher” by Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Chapter 6 in Preaching and Preachers (Zondervan, 1971).

3. “The Goal of Preaching” by John Piper. Chapter 1 in The Supremacy of God in Preaching (Baker, 1990).

4. “The Blind Eye and Deaf Ear” by C.H. Spurgeon. Various chapters in editions of Lectures to my Students.

5. “The Minister’s Fainting Fits” by C.H. Spurgeon. Various chapters in editions of Lectures to my Students.

C.J. Mahaney’s recommended chapters

1. “Expository Preaching: Charles Simeon and Ourselves” by J.I. Packer. Chapter 9 in Preach the Word (Crossway: 2007)

2. “The Whole Man” by R.C. Sproul. Chapter 4 in The Preacher and Preaching (P&R, 1986).

3. “The Pattern of Illustrations” by Bryan Chapell. Chapter 7 in Christ-Centered Preaching (Baker, 2005).

4. “The Preparation of the Preacher” by Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Chapter 9 in Preaching and Preachers (Zondervan, 1971).

5. “Unction” by Tony Sargent. Chapter 3 in The Sacred Anointing: The Preaching of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (Crossway, 1994).

Something that the T4G guys talked about at the conference in April has been chewing on the inside of my brain. I think it was Lig Duncan who said it, and then the whole gang discussed it. But the gist of the quote is: pastors don’t get their report cards until heaven.

Now, in context, this quote was meant to be encouraging. If you’re serving faithfully as the pastor of a church and you’re not seeing much evident fruit, then be encouraged. Pastors don’t get their report cards until heaven. Don’t allow yourself to be judged by the world’s standard. Your “report card” will be based on your faithfulness, not your evident fruitfulness. Look forward to the day when you will hear the Master say “Well done, good and faithful servant.” Yes, I could see how that would be very encouraging.

But when I heard those words, I puked in my mouth a little. Because if we’re being honest (and I can trust you not to tell anyone, right?), I worry sometimes that my ministry is more “fruitful” than I am faithful. The report card cuts both ways, n’est-ce pas? If many pastors struggle faithfully with little that we would identify as success, isn’t it also true that many pastors see fruitful ministries despite their own lack of faithfulness? When I look at my ministry, generally see my failures: laziness, ineffectiveness, lack of love for God’s people, selfishness. And I’m not being super-humble (really. ask my wife, humility’s not my style). I’m serious: the church I serve is doing far better than my ministry warrants.

And so it was a sobering reminder to me. A pastor gets his report card in heaven. Don’t judge your ministry by the fruit you see in front of you. In God’s sovereign wisdom, he can use me to build his church even if I’m not faithful.

Maybe you’re there with me. If so, what should we do? Here’s how I’ve been trying to respond since April:

1. Examine your life. Make a list of specific ways you need to change and grow as a pastor. Ask other pastors for advice and help. Get some trustworthy people in your church to pray for you and hold you accountable (if possible).

2. Make necessary changes. As Paul Tripp puts it, you haven’t changed until you’ve changed.

3. Remember the gospel. The great news is that ultimately, we get Jesus’ report card in heaven. He took my selfishness and foolishness on himself. I get his perfect life of obedience. There is now no condemnation for any of us who are in Christ.

That’s always the silver lining in seeing your sin and failure more clearly… it makes grace all the sweeter! Turns out, there is plenty of grace and power and forgiveness for us to serve in.

Well, enough time blogging, back to serving the church (faithfully)…

[From Report Cards in Heaven by Michael Mckinley]

[From Mark Driscoll's post Your Weaknesses]

Work on your weakness
Once you discover whether you are more naturally a contemplative or an activist you must then work on your area of weakness. In my years as a pastor I have found that most of us lean heavily toward the contemplative or the active disciplines at the expense of the other. Furthermore, it is not uncommon for people to read about Jesus in their Bible and only see His contemplative or activist scenes at the expense of seeing the healthy tension that Jesus lived in. As a result, when a contemplative thinks of Jesus they are prone to imagine Him sitting alone in the wilderness and silently reading Scripture and praying. Conversely, when an activist thinks of Jesus they are prone to imagine Him performing miracles, preaching, and casting out demons, never sitting down or taking a day off. The truth is that Jesus practiced every contemplative discipline and every active discipline (with the exception of lovemaking). To follow in His example means we must follow in His entire example.

Immature Christians
One of the worst things I have witnessed is immature Christians who judge another Christian as immature because they do not have the same natural strength in a particular spiritual discipline. This takes many forms, such as the spiritually disciplined evangelist who looks down on people who don’t share their faith every moment of every day with everyone they encounter. Another example is the spiritually disciplined student who looks down on people who do not read enormous books written by dead guys for hours at a time and geek out learning the difference between things like transubstantiation and consubstantiation.
If the distinction between contemplatives and activists is not understood in marriage, the result can be very painful; conflict ensues when spouses try to impose how they do their spiritual disciplines upon one another. Perhaps the worst case I am personally aware of was a well-intentioned young husband who had his wife sit on their couch while he gave her theology lectures complete with a white board and then expected to quiz her. He was shocked to realize that she did not find this romantic. She would have preferred that he put the white board away and got a job to feed their family; they could not eat all his theology books and they were getting hungry.

You must begin with humility
In short, when it comes to the spiritual disciplines we must each begin with humility. Every Christian is spiritually disciplined in some areas of their life and spiritually undisciplined in others. Therefore, each Christian we meet is a potential teacher of sorts, able to help us grow as disciples more like Jesus. We must be willing to inquire of their strengths and learn from them.
As a final word of preface, two items are important to note before we study spiritual disciplines here together in the coming months. One, the spiritual disciplines are not something we have to do to make God love us. Rather, because God already does love us, the spiritual disciplines are something that we get to do as we love Him back and enjoy growing in our loving relationship with Him. Two, the spiritual disciplines are not intended to enslave us. Rather, they are intended to lead us into growing freedom in the same way that a trained athlete or musician is free to enjoy the task more than a novice.

Great series of posts by Greg Gilbert, senior pastoral assistant to Mark Dever at Capital Hill Baptist. I met Greg at the 9Marks Weekender and was greatly encouraged by some thoughts he shared as I related my time at New Life.

What is the Gospel?—There Are Really Two Conversations Going on Here, Not Just One

What we need to understand is that neither of these two questions is wrong, and neither is more biblical than the other. The Bible asks and answers both of them. Sometimes it says that “the gospel” is that message which a person must believe in order to be forgiven of sin—and that, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians, is the message that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures and was raised on the third day. Other times the Bible uses the word “gospel” to refer to the whole complex of promises that God intends to keep through Christ, such as in Matthew 4, Mark 1, Luke 4, and Acts 13.

Once we acknowledge all that, and once we realize that we aren’t all answering the same question when we say “The gospel is . . .”, I think we’ll be able to avoid some of the tension in the conversation. Not only so, but it seems to me that we’ll then be able to understand more clearly why the Bible uses “gospel” in both a broad and a narrow sense, and how those two senses fit together.

And that in turn will help us understand why (and this is important) the New Testament puts pastoral and evangelistic priority on the narrow sense—and why it expects us to do the same.

What is the Gospel?—The NT Uses the Word “Gospel” In Two Ways

To proclaim the inauguration of the kingdom and the new creation and all the rest without proclaiming how people can enter it—by repenting and being forgiven of their sins through faith in Christ and his atoning death—is to preach a non-Gospel.

What Is The Gospel?—Tying It All Together

I think we can get at an answer to all those questions by realizing that the Gospel of the Cross (that is, the narrow sense of “gospel”) is not just any part of the Gospel of the Kingdom (that is, the broad sense of “gospel”).* Rather, the gospel of the cross is the gateway, the fountainhead, even the seed, so to speak, of the gospel of the kingdom. Read the whole NT, and you quickly realize that its univocal message is that a person cannot get to those broad blessings of the Kingdom except by being forgiven of sin through the death of Christ. That is the fountain from which all the rest springs.

That, I think, is why it’s perfectly appropriate for the biblical authors to call that fountainhead “The Gospel” even as they also call the whole package—including forgiveness, justification, resurrection, new creation and all the rest—”The Gospel.” Because the broad blessings of the gospel are attained only by means of the narrow (atonement, forgiveness, faith and repentance), and because those blessings are attained infallibly by means of the narrow, it’s entirely appropriate for the New Testament writers to call that gateway/seed/fountainhead promise “The Gospel.”

It’s also perfectly appropriate for the NT to call that fountainhead “The Gospel” and at the same time not call any other particular blessing of the broader package “The Gospel.” So we don’t call human reconciliation “The Gospel.” Nor do we even call the new heavens and new earth “The Gospel.” But we do call forgiveness through atonement “The Gospel” because it is the fountainhead of and gateway to all the rest.

So how do we effectively confront doubt? We need to remember that the “largest part of doubting comes simply from ignorance of what God has said and done” (pp. 34-35). The cure for doubt is preventative—we cultivate an active and vibrant life of faith in what God has said and done.

“What is more, faith, like health, is best maintained by growth, nourishment and exercise and not by fighting sickness. Sickness may be the absence of health, but health is more than the absence of sickness, so prevention is better than cure. Equally, faith grows and flourishes when it is well nourished and exercised, so the best way to resist doubt is to build up faith rather than simply to fight against doubt” (pp. 33-34).

Much of In Two Minds is dedicated to the topic and excellent quotes abound. Here is one—“We do not trust God because he guides us; we trust and then are guided, which means that we can trust God even when we do not see guided by him. Faith may be in the dark about guidance, but it is never in the dark about God” (p. 261).

In fact, “God proves not only better to us than our worst fears but better to us than our wildest dreams” (p. 184).In fact, how we handle doubt is largely a reflection of the health of our faith because “since the object of Christian faith is God, to believe or disbelieve is everything. Thus the market value of doubt for the Christian is extremely high. Find out how seriously a believer takes his doubts and you have the index of how seriously he takes his faith” (p. 31). [From Faith, Doubt, + Unbelief]

“If we are to change we must be regularly preaching the gospel to ourselves and believing it. We must be continually showing ourselves, and those we counsel, the depths and greatness of God’s love for them. We must stop wasting our time trying to convince ourselves that we are lovable, and instead rest in the glorious fact that we are loved. It is this message which God uses to change us at the motivational level.”

—Redeemer Presbyterian Church, Fellowship Group Handbook, 9

(HT: Second Mile Church)

[From “Rest in the glorious fact that we are loved”]