From reading some blogs, you’d think that the response in the blogosphere to the Baptist Press article on Mark Driscoll’s continued vulgarity was almost unanimously negative. However, I ask you to please consider the following:
Expository Thoughts is a blog that has a number of young pastors as contributors. Any objective observer would have to admit that they are not disposed to be “anti-Driscoll.” (Indeed some of Driscoll’s most ardent defenders often express concerns, albeit usually failing to articulate just what it is that they are concerned about.) Although they don’t specifically interact with the BP story, there are several recent posts that are pertinent. See here (don’t miss Jerry Wragg’s comment,) here for a take on the NYT article and here where we see that Driscoll evidently missed an opportunity to preach the gospel on CNN.
Bart Barber compares Mark Driscoll with an exemplary pastor of his youth. I find the juxtaposition intriguing given that we often hear that a major problem in the SBC is the preoccupation with numbers.
Here is a careful and comprehensive take on the issue.
Peter Lumpkins weighs in here, here, and here. In his last post, Bro. Lumpkins gets to the heart of the issue:
Alas, as it is, I suppose those of us who foolishly questioned the liaison with a ministry which strangely but fully and clearly endorses encouraging husbands and wives to prayerfully consider sodomy as a viable Christian option to enhance intimacy together will just have to face reality: we are apparently woefully out of touch with what’s hip today in reaching the multitudes with the gospel.
Sadly, the counsel of these men is rejected by many of the young Southern Baptists in the blogosphere due to the misguided perception that they are too old, too traditional, that they belong to the wrong political faction or whatever, and that the old paths just aren’t going to cut it today.
Harry Emerson Fosdick said that the soldiers returning home from the horrors of World War I simply wouldn’t believe the fantastic tales revealed in the Bible about the Virgin Birth and the bodily Resurrection, so we have to give them something else lest the church become irrelevant in the 20th Century in the wake of Darwin and the destruction of war. The church growth gurus of the past few decades used similar reasoning to justify their practice of preaching to felt needs and proclaiming a message of positive thinking, rarely if ever getting around to clearly proclaiming the law and the gospel.
Mark Driscoll is certainly more sound doctrinally than the above examples, but the rationale behind his appropriation of the coarser aspects of our culture is the same. (And can doctrine ultimately be divorced from practice?) I simply ask those who think this continued parade of vulgarity is what is necessary to reach lost people today to consider the following comment from Scott Shaffer:
“I’d wager that if you went back through church history, you’d be hard pressed to find orthodox ministers of the gospel discussing sex in the same manner Driscoll does. Yet, the topic has always been relevant to mankind. So, are we to believe that MD is the first gospel minister to get it right?”
The Sixties radicals refused to listen to anyone over 30. It appears that some young (and some not so young) Southern Baptist radicals refuse to listen to anyone over 40 or anyone who they perceive to be too “traditional” in their methodology. When “young leaders” are more alienated by editorial judgment and journalistic practices than they are by Driscoll’s actions, then I submit that it isn’t Baptist Press who has the problem. If the blog responses to this controversy are indicative of the views of “younger leaders” as a whole, this 35 year old Southern Baptist layman has no small degree of trepidation about seeing the baton handed over to them, as some say needs to be done. Why should older leaders have to get out of the way to begin with, assuming they are still faithful to their calling?
One searches in vain to find the concept of retirement in the Bible. Did Moses get out of the way when he reached “retirement age?” How about the apostle John? The ministry is a calling, not a profession. On the subject of retirement, I once heard John MacArthur say something like “What am I going to retire from? Preaching the Gospel?” If a young leader who is truly gifted to teach is being stifled in his current context, then why wait to be “promoted” at “his church?” Instead, why not seek out some other avenue of ministry in which he may be useful, even if it means changing churches or locales? Did William Carey let the naysayers hold him back? No doubt there are many small churches in rural as well as urban areas would be happy to have some gifted young people come and serve. I can think of once such church now that may well have had to close the doors by this point were it not for a friend of mine going there and taking up the preaching and teaching ministry.
Earlier I charged that the problem isn’t so much a Generation Gap as it is a Discernment Gap. Although it pains me greatly to say so, I don’t hesitate to say that I’d rather see the Southern Baptist Convention fade away rather than see it given it over to those who who evidently fail to see (or even consider) the issue when a prominent evangelical pastor places a link to (at best) a borderline porn site on his church website. I wonder how many people will visit a site like the one Mars Hill has linked right now, and once they’ve had their fill of that and find that it doesn’t satisfy them, will eventually move on to harder core sites? Depravity being what it is and the fact that we are never free from sin in this life, it’s not much of a leap for a man to go from a site like the one to which Driscoll links to one that allows him to gratify his lusts to the full.
The standard reply of his defenders is “This is what has to be done to reach people today,” especially those who are considered “unreachable.” Haven’t we heard that before? My friends, no one is beyond the reach of God’s grace! Many such “unreachables” have been reached by very “traditional” ministries. The church certainly has failed in many cases in reaching out to the prostitute, the stoner, the gangbanger, the frightened unwed mother to be, and others who would make many church folks who don’t understand the mission of the church uncomfortable. But we don’t have to get down into the gutter ourselves to reach the “unreachable.” I may not literally be the chief of sinners, but neither am I a prude who has lived a sheltered lifestyle far removed from the realities of today’s secular culture.
I live in the Greater New Orleans area. Technically it may be somewhat more churched than Seattle, but who would disagree that New Orleans is practically unrivaled when it comes to open wickedness and depravity? As a man who has during the course of his life wasted many years in indulging in nearly all of what this world has to offer, has stared into the abyss and has now been granted repentance toward God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, I can assure you that there are few things that I find shocking, including the material to which Driscoll links. However, it is disappointing to say the least when the church embraces the more vulgar aspects of our culture out of an apparent conviction that it is what has to be done to reach the lost in this postmodern age.
A preacher once told me, “What you win them with is what you will have to keep them with.” That’s true whether it is clown shows, promoting the power of positive thinking or demonstrating how cool and liberated one is when it comes to modern sexual practices.
In closing, let’s consider the following:
The glory of the gospel is that when the Church is absolutely different from the world, she invariably attracts it. It is then that the world is made to listen to her message, though it may hate it at first. That is how revival comes. That must also be true of us as individuals. It should not be our ambition to be as much like everybody else as we can, though we happen to be Christian, but rather to be as different from everybody who is not a Christian as we can possibly be. Our ambition should be to be like Christ, the more like Him the better, and the more like Him we become, the more we shall be unlike everybody who is not a Christian.
D.Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount
The subject [The World] is one which demands the best attention of all who profess and call themselves Christians. In every age of the Church separation from the world has always been one of the grand evidences of a work of grace in the heart. He that has been really born of the Spirit, and made a new creature in Christ Jesus, has always endeavoured to “come out from the world,” and live a separate life. They who have only had the name of Christian, without the reality, have always refused to “come out and be separate” from the world.
He that desires to “come out from the world, and be separate,” must steadily and habitually refuse to be guided by the world’s standard of right and wrong.
In all doubtful cases let us often try ourselves by recollecting the eye of God. Should I go to such and such a place, or do such and such a thing, if I really thought God was looking at me?
J.C. Ryle, Practical Religion
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