As I look towards the fall and starting an Ann Arbor-focused church planting cooperative called Planting in Tree Town, one of the things that I’m starting to think about is the level of co-operation between the different churches and organizations involved. Of the people on my radar so far, I would categorize them all as broadly Evangelical, but there are differences as far as church polity, Reformed vs. Arminian understanding of salvation, and others. At some level, co-operation may be simply praying together, encouraging one another, and sharing resources. Might there be possibilities for actual co-operation in planting? Possibly, but that will require determining what are the non-negotiable issues that would prevent partnership. Tyler Jones, of Vintage21 in Raleigh, recently talked with Scott Thomas of Acts 29 about Vintage’s level of relationships with other organizations in their city. These are helpful categories and could provide a framework for our work here in Ann Arbor.

1. Family
   • Have the same “DNA” – agree theologically on the authority of Scripture, Jesus’ life, death, resurrection and what that accomplished, etc.
   • Can plant churches together
   • Highest level of sharing resources and interaction
2. Friends
   • Christians who clearly love Jesus.
   • Have differing views on things like church polity, etc., which affect how closely they can work together.
   • Some activities and resource sharing is possible.
3. Partners
   • Ministries that may not be Christians at all.
   • Often social justice groups.
   • Provides an opportunity for evangelism to happen with those who they are serving alongside as well as those they are serving directly.

The Point Community Church in Frankfort, KY is a member of Acts 29 and committed to planting churches. Here’s an overview of what they do

Church Planting Initiatives (CPI) is our focused and intentional effort to be a church planting church. Church planting is a key strategy of The Point Community Church.

Through church planting we aim not just to plant a church, but to plant churches which are committed to our Core Values of Teaching Truth, Worshipping Jesus, Living in Community, and Missional Living which are expressed through members and extended to the community.

Our church planting vision is to plant new churches led by a plurality of male elders who share our mission and vision, who gladly embrace our statement of faith, and who are committed to identifying with being evangelical, reformed and missional.

CPI includes

• Monthly Lunches and Roundtables for Church Planters
• Quarterly Meetings with regional Acts 29 Network churches
• A Church Planting Residency Program

Their residency program is something that I would love to model someday at Ambassador. Here’s their description

The Church Planting Residency is a specialized training track focused on developing an appropriately gifted and qualified man into a lead church planter. Success in this leadership development endeavor requires:

• Identifying the core competencies that are crucial to successful church plant leadership
• Assessing the resident’s current capacity in these areas
• Implementing an customized action plan tailored to the specific needs of the resident

Pray for The Point Community Church as they seek the kingdom’s growth in Central Kentucky

A tip of the hat to the Sojourn Church Planting blog for this link.

From Kevin DeYoung, pastor of University Reformed Church in East Lansing, MI. This is an issue that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, as I continue in my Acts 29 application process and begin the membership process at Grace Ann Arbor, which is part of a denomination (Reformed Church in America) that ordains women.

1. Historically, opening the door to egalitarianism in one generation leads to bigger errors in the next. I know slopes aren’t always slippery, but this one seems to be. Once your hermeneutic allows for egalitarianism, it becomes hard to stand firm on homosexuality. I’m not saying that all egalitarians believe homosexuality is acceptable, only that blurring gender roles and overstating the implications of Galatians 3:28 has often slid, over time, into an acceptance of sexual immorality.
2. The role of men and women is a huge issue for our day. Our millennial views matter, but in terms of ministering in and to the culture, where we stand in gender issues matters more. There is so much confusion on manhood and womanhood, that wherever we can speak clearly and with one voice that’s a good thing.
3. Complementarianism tends to signify a number of other important convictions. I don’t know any complementarians who don’t also affirm inerrancy, penal substitution, and eternal punishment (I’m not counting Catholics because though they don’t ordain women, the reasoning has more to do with their view of the priesthood than a complementarian theology of manhood and womanhood). In other words, if someone is a Calvinist and a complementarian I can generally assume a lot about their theology. These are not the two most important issues of the faith, but they are two issues that if embraced in our day, almost always include a lot of other important theological beliefs.

   Egalitarians can also believe in the sort of core doctrines listed above, but it is far less automatic. For example, the Common Loon mentions several Calvinist/Egalitarian academics: Roger Nicole, Nicholas Wolterstorrf, John Webster, Mark Husbands, Todd Billings, Bruce McCormack, Richard Mouw, Bill Dyrness, Laura Miguelez, and Donald Bloesch. With the exception of Nicole, how many of these scholars would embrace inerrancy? Some perhaps, but I best most wouldn’t. This doesn’t mean they aren’t worth listening to, but it does suggest that the Calvinist/Egalitarian package is different from the Calvinist/Compelementarian package in more ways than one.

4. Practically, it is very difficult for groups and organizations and movements to make both complementarians and egalitarians happy. If a new movement tried to embrace both views, how would this work? Would women be asked to be part of the leadership team? Would women preach to pastors at their conferences? This would not fly with most complementarians. And yet many egalitarians would see this as a matter of justice (they do in my denomination). Someone is bound to be upset. It is simpler and better for the long-term peace of an organization to take a stand on this issue. Cross-denominational movements can allow for different views of baptism, because they don’t ever have to baptize anyone. But such movements will have to make decisions on leadership structures and speaking requests. So going one way or the other on the gender issue becomes a practical necessity.

From Kevin DeYoung’s article in Christian Research Journal as posted on his blog. Summarizes many of the reasons that I’m a Calvinist as well

Young Christians have been drawn to Calvinism not because they were looking for Calvin or an “ism,” but because they were drawn to a vision of a massive, glorious, fall-down-before-Him-as-though-dead kind of God who loves us because He wants to.

The influence of Calvinism is growing because its God is transcendent and its theology is true. In a day when “be better” moralism passes for preaching, self-help banality passes for counseling, and “Jesus is my boyfriend” music passes for worship in some churches, more and more people are finding comfort in a God who is anything but comfortable. The paradox of Calvinism is that we feel better by feeling worse about ourselves, we do more for God by seeing how He’s done everything for us, and we give love away more freely when we discover that we have been saved by free grace.

I’d like to think that we are Calvinists because of what we see in the Bible. We see a God who is holy, independent, and unlike us. We glory in God’s goodness, that He should save miserable offenders, bent toward evil in all our faculties, objects of His just wrath. We rejoice in God’s electing love, which He purposed for us before the ages began. We are grateful for God’s power by which He caused us, without our cooperation, to be born again and enabled us to believe His promises. We take comfort in God’s all-encompassing providence, whereby nothing happens according to chance, but all things—prosperity or poverty, health or sickness, giving or taking away—are sent to us by our loving heavenly Father.

As Calvinists and Christians, we praise God for His mercy, shown to us chiefly on the cross where His Son died, not just to make a way for us to come to Him, but effectually for us such that our sins, our guilt, and our punishment all died in the death of Christ. We find assurance in God’s preserving grace, believing with all our might that nothing—not even ourselves—can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. We delight in the glory of God and in God’s delight for His own glory, which brings us, on our best days, unspeakable joy, and on all other days, still gives purpose and order to an otherwise confusing and seemingly random world.

What draws people to Reformed theology is the belief that God is the center of the universe and we are not, that we are worse sinners than we imagine and God is a greater Savior than we ever thought possible, that the Lord is our righteousness and the Lord alone is our boast.

The attraction of the New Calvinism is not Calvin, but the God Calvin saw—not some new fad, but something old with new life blowing through it from the Spirit of God.

I grew up in a Christian home under the godly discipline of two loving parents. I would classify our beliefs as generically evangelical, not leaning too much either way toward Arminiasm or Calvinism. God was over all, but the specifics of election and predestination didn’t mean too much to me. Over the past year and a half, though, my faith has been radically transformed as I have read about and studied Reformed theology. Whether it’s reading books or listening to messages by Anyabwile, Dever, Driscoll, or Piper, or, most importantly, reading the Bible and examining it deeply, I have come to see God’s entire role in my salvation, in my regeneration, justification, and sanctification. It has opened up my eyes to evangelism, seeing my role as simply sharing God with others and trusting the Holy Spirit to work on them, not having the actual responsibility to getting someone to “say the sinner’s prayer.” It is in the midst of this growth that I have read with great interest some of the recent dust-ups over Calvinism / Reformed theology.

Scot McKnight is a New Testament scholar at North Park University, the author of the recent book The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible, part of the leadership team of The Origins Project, and a leading Emergent thinker. He has recently written and spoken about the “NeoReformed”, his term for many active in the current Reformed resurgence. Here is his blurb from N.T. Wright’s Justification God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision

“Tom Wright has out-Reformed America’s newest religious zealots–the neo-Reformed–by taking them back to Scripture and to its meaning in its historical context. Wright reveals that the neo-Reformed are more committed to tradition than to the sacred text. This irony is palpable on every page of this judicious, hard-hitting, respectful study.”

He also recently posted two articles on his blog Jesus Creed. In Who are the NeoReformed? he wrote

The NeoReformed, for a variety of reasons, some of them good, don’t recognize that evangelicalism as a village green. Instead, they want to build a gate at the gate-less village green and require Reformed confessions and credentials to enter onto the village green. Put differently, they think the only legitimate and the only faithful evangelicals are Reformed. Really Reformed. In other words, they are “confessing” evangelicals. The only true evangelical is a Reformed evangelical. They are more than happy to call into question the legitimacy and fidelity of any evangelical who doesn’t believe in classic Reformed doctrines, like double predestination.

and in his followup Who are the NeoReformed? 2 he wrote

If I had to sum it up I’d put it this way: the NeoReformed are those who are obsessed with God’s holiness and grace and have not learned that grace makes people gracious. These folks are America’s newest religious zealots and they are wounding, perhaps for a generation or two, evangelicalism.

Both of these articles caused quite a stir among many of the Reformed blogs that I read. In the first article, I particularly disagreed with McKnight’s assigning to classic Reformed theology the “doctrine” of double predestination, that God actively chooses some for salvation and actively chooses others for eternal judgment. I can find no biblical warrant for such an idea. In fact, we are all due eternal judgement due to our active and willful disobedience and rejection of God and it is only through His life-giving mercy that some are saved. R.C. Sproul writes of it this way

The decree and fulfillment of election provide mercy for the elect while the efficacy of reprobation provides justice for the reprobate. God shows mercy sovereignly and unconditionally to some, and gives justice to those passed over in election. That is to say, God grants the mercy of election to some and justice to others. No one is the victim of injustice. To fail to receive mercy is not to be treated unjustly. God is under no obligation to grant mercy to all — in fact He is under no obligation to grant mercy to any. He says, “I will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy” (Rom. 9). The divine prerogative to grant mercy voluntarily cannot be faulted. If God is required by some cosmic law apart from Himself to be merciful to all men, then we would have to conclude that justice demands mercy. If that is so, then mercy is no longer voluntary, but required. If mercy is required, it is no longer mercy, but justice. What God does not do is sin by visiting injustice upon the reprobate. 

Some people think that McKnight was referring to people like John Piper and John MacArthur in both the book blurb and in the “NeoReformed” group, but he never offered clarification. That seems both a cop-out and a classic straw-man argument, building up an imaginary opponent only to strike him down quickly and thoroughly.

In the second article, McKnight refers to the NeoReformed caring more about God’s grace than His command to be gracious to others. I also find little evidence in my reading and listening, especially since McKnight offers no specific names. “Gracious” here also seems to imply the idea of “tolerance”, where everyone’s ideas, beliefs, and doctrine are okay since they are their own and who are we to judge? One of the things that I have greatly appreciated about many of the Reformed believers that I read and listen to is their absolute devotion to Christ and examining all things in light of God’s revelation through the Scripture. One of my concerns with the Emergent movement is their willingness to stray from what I see as clear Biblical teaching on issues like homosexuality and gender roles in favor of a trajectory hermaneutic, looking at where the Bible seems to be going, not where it actually is and was. McKnight writes about gender roles in The Blue Parakeet, arguing for the full inclusion of women in all church offices, even though I see clear evidence in the Bible to the contrary (1 Timothy 3:2 and Titus 1:6 ). If “graciousness” means glossing over and ignoring differences where Scripture is clear, then I’m not sure “graciousness” should be our goal. McKnight also closes the second article by writing that the NeoReformed are “wounding, perhaps for a generation or two, evangelicalism”, which I greatly disagree with, as does Time Magazine. Wait, Time Magazine?

Yes, Time Magazine. In their March 23, 2009 issue they list the 10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now. When I was alerted to this list by a Tweet from Pastor Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church (Seattle), I couldn’t believe what was #3 – The New Calvinism. Author David Van Biema writes

Calvinism is back, and not just musically. John Calvin’s 16th century reply to medieval Catholicism’s buy-your-way-out-of-purgatory excesses is Evangelicalism’s latest success story, complete with an utterly sovereign and micromanaging deity, sinful and puny humanity, and the combination’s logical consequence, predestination: the belief that before time’s dawn, God decided whom he would save (or not), unaffected by any subsequent human action or decision.

All in all, the article is a pretty fairly written one, which is pretty incredible since its competition, Newsweek, seems to have gone off a cliff with denouncing Christians. In contrast to McKnight’s dire predictions that the NeoReformed are “wounding evangelicalism”, Van Biema quotes Ted Olsen, a managing editor at Christianity Today, saying

“everyone knows where the energy and the passion are in the Evangelical world” - with the pioneering new-Calvinist John Piper of Minneapolis, Seattle’s pugnacious Mark Driscoll and Albert Mohler, head of the Southern Seminary of the huge Southern Baptist Convention

I have to say I agree with Olsen. Whether it’s Together for the Gospel filling a convention center in Louisville with pastors waiting to hear gospel-saturated messages, or the Acts 29 Network seeking to raise up 900 men to plant churches throughout the world, the New Calvinism is seeking to proclaim a great God who calls all to repentance and reconciliation to Him available only through the crucification of His Son Jesus on the cross and the Holy Spirit’s regeneration of hearts. It’s too bad that some people, including Scot McKnight, continue to caricature Reformed believers by assigning unbiblical heresies to them. There is plenty of room in evangelicalism for people who disagree on secondary issues (mode of baptism, mode of communion, music style), but as the distinctions begin to move into areas of clear biblical teaching, the true challenge will be to include or exclude those who differ from what God reveals in His Word. May we seek after humble orthodoxy, not announcing our disagreements for the world to see and hear, but petitioning God through prayer to change people’s hearts.

Peep #3. The New Calvinism: David Van Biema on Calvinism as a new destination religion for conservative Christians 

I’m very, very interested to read the article and see if Time treats conservative Christians any better than Newsweek does.

From EditorandPublisher.com via Mark Driscoll’s Twitter feed.

*Update*

The article doesn’t have much new. Much better is Mark Driscoll’s post on TheResurgence.com about New Calvinism vs. Old Calvinism

1. Old Calvinism was fundamental or liberal and separated from or syncretized with culture. New Calvinism is missional and seeks to create and redeem culture.
2. Old Calvinism fled from the cities. New Calvinism is flooding into cities.
3. Old Calvinism was cessationistic and fearful of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. New Calvinism is continuationist and joyful in the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.
4. Old Calvinism was fearful and suspicious of other Christians and burned bridges. New Calvinism loves all Christians and builds bridges between them.

I received a copy of Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey with the New Calvinists at the Magnifying God converence at University Reformed Church in East Lansing. The book is a very easy read and an enjoyable one. I knew many of the stories from reading blogs, but it was still an entertaining read. 

Quotes

Humanly speaking, God’s sovereignty seems to threaten human responsibility. But Scripture affirms both truths. Even when we don’t understand, we can thank God that he does not limit himself according to our understanding. God gives Christians all the motivation they need to share their faith. We evangelize for God and his glory, out of love for our neighbors. We have confidence because there is no greater evangelist than the Holy Spirit (page 88)

At its best, Calvinish makes a differnece. Transcendence doesn’t just give Christians an excuse to sing songs that mention “glory” in ever other verse. The transcendent God inspires fear and trembling. He demands holiness, but not without offering his Son as a sacrifice for our sings and sending his Holy Spirit to comfort us. Scripture refuses to condone any response but humility. 

As it did for the apostle Paul, humility should engender action. God goes before us. What greater comfort in evangelism could there be, what greater hope for social justice?