Yesterday morning, Mike Bullmore prefaced his sermon with an outstanding 135-second pastoral exhortation in light of the upcoming election on November 4.
An excerpt:
Let there be no loss of security, whoever is in office. . . . There’s no cause no matter what happens—ever—for those who belong to God to worry or complain or whine.
This weekend my wife and I watched parts of DVDs dramatizing the Gospel According to Matthew and Acts word-for-word from the NIV. Our hopes were high because we enjoy “The Gospel of John” film so much. If on a scale of 1 to 10 the “The Gospel of John” film is an 8 or 9, then the Matthew and Acts films are a 1 or 2—and that’s being generous. (That’s why we “watched parts” of them!)
Related: See this previous post on “The Gospel of John” film for an overview, evaluation, and links to other reviews.
Over the last couple of days, I read The Twelve Caeasars (cf. Wikipedia) by Suetonius. I marked up my print copy while listening to a 13-hour audio book. It is a gossipy chronicle with a fascinating perspective on the lives of the first twelve Roman Caesars that significantly intersects with Second Temple Judaism and the birth and spread of Christianity: [Read more…] about 4 Reflections on Suetonius’s “The Twelve Caesars”
An altar call is an “invitation” to “come forward” after a sermon to make a spiritual decision or commitment. I’ve endured hundreds of emotionally charged invitations characterized by man-centered manipulation. Unfortunately, my experience is not unusual.
Christian History just published a brief, impartial history of the altar call by Doug Sweeney and Mark Rogers: “Walk the Aisle.”
The most thorough treatment I’ve read on the altar call is this:
David Bennett. The Altar Call: Its Origin and Present Usage. New York: University Press of America, 2000. 261 pp.
Mark Noll describes Bennett’s work in the foreword as “the best sort of engaged history . . . . thorough . . . . fair . . . . unusually stimulating” (pp. v–vi). This work is a revision of Bennett’s (b. 1942) M.Th. thesis entitled “The Public Invitation System in Evangelism” for the Australian College of Theology in Sydney.
Here are some useful and brief analyses of the altar call:
Updates:
1. Sadly humorous:
2. How to Manipulate People to Make (Fake) Professions of Faith
Earlier this week Pillsbury Baptist Bible College, a fundamentalist college in Owatonna, Minnesota, published this announcement:
The Pillsbury Baptist Bible College Board of Trustees has announced that the college will cease academic activities on December 31, 2008. National economic conditions combined with deficits caused by declining enrollment have exhausted Pillsbury’s financial reserves, leaving the college without funds to complete the school year.
[Read more…] about Kevin Bauder on the Dissolution of Pillsbury
On November 20, 1998 in Orlando, Florida at the annual meeting and fiftieth anniversary of the Evangelical Theological Society, D. A. Carson and John Piper gave back-to-back hour-long plenary addresses to about 1,000 ETS members (mostly college and seminary professors):
James A. Borland reported this in the next issue of the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society:
On Friday afternoon, two plenary sessions were held. In Don Carson’s message, “Training the Next Generation of Evangelical Scholars,” he painted the landscape of the future for Christian higher academics. John Piper then addressed the subject of “Training the Next Generation of Evangelical Pastors and Missionaries.” He pointed out that one may learn much, but if the main thing is ignored or missing, all is lost. That one thing is to know God and to delight in him above everything else. Several questions succeeded Carson’s speech, but a holy hush of meditation followed Piper’s challenge before the large audience began to sing “Fairest Lord Jesus,” a capella (JETS 42 [1999]: 175).
On April 23, 2009 (over ten years later), D. A. Carson and John Piper will once again give back-to-back hour-long addresses on the same topic, only more focused: “The Pastor as Scholar, and the Scholar as Pastor: Reflections on Life and Ministry with John Piper and D.A. Carson.”
Update: Mike Bird reflects on DAC’s lecture.
In my recent post “D. A. Carson: ‘Making Sense of Suffering,'” I wrote this:
DAC also led a pastor’s session on “Preaching and Biblical Theology.”
After his hour-long address on biblical theology, DAC was asked to “say something about The Gospel Coalition” (59:24 to 1:06:10 in the MP3). Since people often ask, “What exactly is The Gospel Coalition?”, I turned DAC’s useful extemporaneous overview of TGC into this 7-minute MP3.
Related:
While addressing the question “Ought We to Pray to the Holy Spirit?”, Graham Cole notes that there are three “ways to spoil the gospel” (p. 64):
Here’s the context (from Graham Cole, Engaging with the Holy Spirit: Real Questions, Practical Answers [Wheaton: Crossway, 2007], 64):
To pray to the Spirit is not wrong theologically, but if that practice displaces prayer to the Father in the name of the Son in reliance upon the Spirit, then there may be another sort of problem that emerges. The problem is that of disproportion. There are many ways to spoil the gospel. [1] One such way is by addition: Christ plus Mosaic circumcision as the gospel for the Gentiles. Galatians addresses this error. [2] The gospel may be spoiled by subtraction. Christ is divine but not human. The recently publicized Gnostic Gospel of Judas appears to take this road. Jesus is depicted as saying to Judas: “You will be greater than all the others, Judas. You will sacrifice the man that clothes me.” This error subtracts human nature from Christ and turns him into only a seeming human. This docetic error was the problem facing the original readers of John’s first letter (1 John 4:1-3). [3] But the gospel may also be spoiled by a lack of due weight in theological emphasis, by giving an element in it either too much or too little accent. A biblical truth may be weighted in a way that skews our thinking about God and the gospel. Arguably, to make prayer to the Holy Spirit the principal practice in Christian praying would be such an error. The Holy Spirit may be prayed to. He is God. But the Holy Spirit is not to be prayed to in such a way as to mask the mediatorship of Christ and our location in Christ as members of his body. For to pray to the Father in the name of the Son in reliance upon the Spirit is to rehearse the very structure of the gospel . . . .
It would be wise to ask yourself (and others who know you!), “Am I spoiling the gospel by disproportion? Is there an area that I am failing to give due weight in theological emphasis by giving an element in it either too much or too little accent?”