We are the ones trying to teach and pass on covenantal, generational faithfulness and blessings to these same people. If you are a church planter with the PCA or OPC or Bible Presbyterians (or even looser associations like the SBC or Acts 29), what sort of body are you bringing those new believers into? What sort of tradition are you bringing those poorly taught evangelical believers into? And remember, we (the so-called “reformed”) are the ones who understand how covenants work. Understand that it was fully possible for good-hearted scribes and Pharisees to be out in the field laboring to make converts while other scribes and Pharisees were back home crucifying the Messiah. Jesus Himself warned of this very thing: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves” (Matt. You cannot say you love the lost if you are merely laboring to bring them into a Hellhole. “Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood. For I know this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock. Also of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them” (Acts 20:28-30).īut let me press the point harder in two different directions.įirst, if you have a heart for the lost, for church planting, for gospel outreach, you must take heed about the harmful and dangerous teaching infiltrating the church because that is the very same church you are laboring to bring the lost into. If you are shepherds in the church of God, then you must not only be about bringing sheep into the flock of God, if you truly love those sheep, you must be about fighting the wolves that attack the flock of God. No, in a war, we all have our particular assignments, we also have our particular skills, and then we have to do whatever needs to be done. But no minister of the gospel has the luxury of seeing a wall in the castle of Christendom being breached and shrug and say he’s just in charge of the archers.
Some men are particularly gifted in hauling the fish in and others are particularly gifted to disciple and discipline the fish.
Granted, some men are better at the guarding and some men are more gifted at the fishing. Who wants to go to war and risk any of that?īut here’s the deal: there is simply no way to love the church of Jesus Christ, to love the gospel of Jesus Christ, and to love lost men with the gospel of Jesus Christ without guarding the church of Jesus Christ. And good men often have good lives: happy families, leisure time, hobbies, and friends. These things turn nasty political, these things eat up time and energy, tensions get high, friendships get frayed, and meanwhile there are still sermons to prepare, fundraising to do, and millions of people who don’t know Jesus, who need to hear the gospel of grace. I know why good men don’t have time for this. What I want to lay out here is a sketch for why many good men on the ground who care about missions and church planting and evangelism really have to care about this kind of thing and the hundreds of others like it. And nothing about the announced change of venue from the South City PCA elders should calm anyone down, since their statement amounts to a paper shuffling “nothing to see here.” But men of conviction in the PCA really do need to rise up with their Bible in hand and bring a bunch of questions to their sessions, pastors, and presbyteries in a spirit of holy consternation. Those qualifications included a full-throated insistence on biblical standards for justice and due process and the complete rejection of mobs, virtual or otherwise. Douglas Wilson already explained the general lay of the land in the latest PCA, Covenant Seminary sexual confusion fiasco, including a number of well-framed paragraphs qualifying the overarching call to arms.