Audio Transcript

We’re back, and we’re back into an online controversy — a “brew-haha,” as it was called. Pastor John, on September 30 you tweeted about coffee. You posted Hebrews 12:28, which says, “Let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe.” And in light of this reverent, awe-filled vision for our worship, you posed this open question: “Can we reassess whether Sunday coffee-sipping in the sanctuary fits?”

As I mentioned last time, the tweet was loved and hated and spread all over the Internet to the point that, after a couple weeks, it had 1,000 retweets, 1,500 comments, 3,000 likes, 2.7 million views, and feature articles online from Fox News here in the States and the Daily Mail in the UK. None of which you saw, which we talked about last time, on Monday.

Now, there’s a lot behind that tweet, a whole worldview really. So, we are building out the context behind it, and you are talking about how to build and shape a church with this “reverential vibe” in everything that happens on Sunday morning. Last time, you signaled that you wanted to get into the nitty-gritty of helping church leaders move their church away from casual worship toward something better and more fitting to what Hebrews, and all of the Bible, calls for. So, get practical, and pick up the discussion for us at this point.

I argued last time that sipping coffee in the holiest hour of congregational worship does not fit with the reverence and awe that Hebrews 12:28 calls for. “Let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe,” Hebrews says.

But I argued that sipping coffee is not the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is that people and leaders don’t have a heart that resonates with what I mean by “reverence and awe” and the holiness, the sacredness of that hour of congregational worship on Sunday morning (usually). Those realities are not prominent in their mind and heart, those reverent realities. They know those words: reverence, awe. They know the words, but the words don’t have compelling existential content, with the kind of serious joy that makes people eager for reverence and awe. They’re just words.

And I argued that you don’t solve that problem by creating external rules. You solve it by awakening internal, heartfelt reverence. So, things that are unfitting don’t get outlawed; they just fall away. I think that’s the way I tried to do it. I don’t think I ever laid down rules for 33 years of preaching.

What I’d like to do here now is to point a way, a possible way forward for pastors to lead the church gradually — say, over five to ten years. You’ve got to be patient to move from the atmosphere of a casual, chipper, coffee-sipping, entertainment-oriented gathering to a more seriously joyful, reverent, deeply satisfying encounter with God. So, maybe in this episode, Tony, we could talk just for a few minutes about the kind of preaching that would lead in that direction.

Developing a Godward Mindset

But before I say that, the pastor’s mindset overall should be that it’s fitting for one hour a week, or an hour and a half, that the people of God meet him with a kind of radical Godward focus that has weightiness to it and seriousness to it, and that this weightiness and seriousness of God-centeredness become the most satisfying experience in our people’s lives. That’s the mindset we’ve got to have: “I want to do this in a way so that they love this, they want this, they come for this. This is not tolerated — it’s desired.” That’s the mindset.

We will never out-entertain the world. I just need to settle that. We’ll never out-entertain the world, nor should we try, because we have something infinitely better, something our souls were made for.

And most of our people don’t know this. They don’t know what’s better than the fun they have in watching videos and other kinds of entertainment. They just don’t know. They’ve never tasted the real thing. Something profoundly stabilizing, strengthening, refining, and satisfying at the depths of our being is what people long for, and they don’t know what they’re longing for until they’re shown it over time.

So, here are five appeals to pastors with regard to preaching.

1. Build Bible-people.

Rivet the people’s attention on the Bible, the very words of the Bible. Deal in great realities, and show them those realities from the text. Build trust in the Bible. Build trust in yourself as a Bible man, so that people say, “We can trust him because he’s a Bible man.”

Some people will leave the church because of this orientation; it’s too frightening and threatening to submit to the Bible like this. Others are hungry for this, and they’re going to come. Over time, seek to bring into being a people whose mindset is self-consciously and happily under the Bible’s authority. Seek to create a people who measure everything by the Bible. Every thought, every emotion, every word, every action, put through the sieve of Bible teaching — and what the Bible really teaches about everything.

The way you handle the Bible and the glories you see in it will bring about this kind of congregation. They’re not their own. They belong to Christ, and his word is their life and their law. That’s what needs to come into being through your Bible-saturated preaching.

2. Make God the dominant reality.

Make the glory of God and all that he is for us in Jesus the main reality people sense over the years, as they hear you preach week in and week out: “God is the main reality here. God is big. God is weighty. God is precious. God is satisfying. God is near. Don’t mess with God. God loves us.” I mean, it’s just a massive, weighty vision of God. Make the greatness and beauty and worth of God the dominant reality.

Be amazed, pastor, be amazed at God continually — that God simply is, that he just is, without beginning. This blows the mind of every four-year-old, right? “Who made God, Daddy?” the child asks. “Nobody made God,” responds the father. “Woah.” Eyes get big. “He just always was there.” God is absolute reality. All else, from galaxies to subatomic particles, is secondary. Everything we see is secondary.

God is the primary reality. Help your people to see this and feel this, that God relates to everything in their lives, all the time, as the main thing. He is the main thing in their lives. He’s the supreme treasure, the main value, the brightest hope, the one they are all willing to live for and die for.

3. Tremble at God’s wrath.

Make sure that the ugliness of the disease of sin in us and in the world and the fury of the wrath of God against that disease are felt by your people. God’s grace, precious grace, will never be amazing — not the way it should be — if our people do not tremble at the majesty of God’s transcendent purity and holy wrath against sin. If they do not feel the fitness of the outpouring of the cup, of the fury of his wrath against sin, they will never be amazed that they’re saved.

This is one of the main contributors to the happiness of serious reverence. It’s paradoxical, I know, that you would have a high, holy, trembling view of God’s wrath be the main contributor to the happiness of the seriousness of reverence. But it is so.

The 1,500-degree fire of the building from which we have just been snatched by the firemen can still be seen. We see it. We feel it. We see the smoke. We hear the crackle. And the trembling of our unspeakably happy thankfulness is anything but casual.

4. Exalt Christ and his work.

Exalt Christ in his majesty and lowliness, in his suffering and resurrection, and in the unimaginable riches of what he purchased for us. Romans 8:32, “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” Every single good that God’s elect receive, from now to eternity, is owing to the blood of Jesus Christ. Knowing that I don’t deserve this and what it cost him makes me tremble in my ecstasy.

5. Wonder over the new birth.

Finally, teach your people the miracle of their own conversion. Nobody knows from experience the glory of the miracle of new birth. We only know the wonder of the new birth from Scripture.

“Even when we were dead in our trespasses, [God] made us alive together with Christ . . . and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:5–6) — nobody knows this. Nobody knows this stupendous reality from experience. We know it because God tells us it is so.

We have to teach our people that they are supernatural beings. Most people come into the sanctuary feeling very natural, right? We have to help them feel another way: “You’re a miracle. You’re a walking resurrection from the dead. You’re not merely natural anymore. This is not a moment of gathering natural people. Our faith, which is our life, is a miracle. God created it. It is trust. Our saving faith is trust in a supremely treasured Savior and Lord.”

May I venture to say that preaching like this will, over time, create in your people an eagerness to encounter God in his word in a way that will make coffee-sipping seem out of place?

What is Look at the Book?

You look at a Bible text on the screen. You listen to John Piper. You watch his pen “draw out” meaning. You see for yourself whether the meaning is really there. And (we pray!) all that God is for you in Christ explodes with faith, and joy, and love.

It is often difficult to know how to navigate between religious factions on the right and the left. To the right may be those who emphasize good doctrine but seem to stand at arm’s length from the world. To the left may be those who emphasize social engagement and activism but seem to have compromised theological fidelity.

Yet we are not the first generation of evangelicals to grapple with this tension. The evangelicals of the early twentieth century also found themselves uncomfortably sandwiched between two increasing extremes. But, by God’s providence, several evangelical theologians in the mid-twentieth century began championing a different way. The most influential of them was Carl F.H. Henry.

Henry was a brilliant theologian, journalist, seminary professor, and evangelical luminary, best known as the intellectual giant who served as the first editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, the magazine founded by Billy Graham. One of the magazine’s later editors, David Neff, said, “If we see Billy Graham as the great public face and generous spirit of the evangelical movement, Carl Henry was the brains.”

More than anyone else, Henry set forth compelling intellectual arguments in favor of a new strand of evangelicalism — an evangelicalism that combined passion for right doctrine with passion for cultural engagement. Henry emphasized both evangelism and social activism. He insisted that evangelicals prioritize both theological scholarship and practical ministry training. And he modeled how to properly challenge those with whom you disagree, calling evangelicals to do so with kindness and humility. Henry gives us a blueprint for how we can be committed to both orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

Fiery Bolt of Lightning

Carl Ferdinand Howard Henry was born on January 2, 1913, to German immigrants and grew up in Long Island, New York. He was baptized in the Episcopal church and attended Sunday school, but religion was not important in the Henry household.

After graduating high school in 1929, Henry began work as a freelance reporter. Within three years, he was the editor of a major newspaper in Long Island. He had become a “hard-nosed journalist given to pagan pleasures,” as Timothy George writes in Essential Evangelicalism (9).

One day in 1933, however, Henry was sitting alone in his car during a violent storm, when a lightning strike frightened him. He described the experience like this:

A fiery bolt of lightning, like a giant flaming arrow, seemed to pin me to the driver’s seat, and a mighty roll of thunder unnerved me. When the fire fell, I knew instinctively the Great Archer had nailed me to my own footsteps. Looking back, it was as if the transcendent Tetragrammaton wished me to know that I could not save myself and that heaven’s intervention was my only hope. (Confessions of a Theologian, 45–46)

Soon after, Henry had a long conversation with a young evangelist named Gene Bedford. After that conversation, Henry embraced Jesus as Savior.

Henry enrolled at Wheaton College in 1935, where he met Helga Bender, the daughter of Baptist missionaries. Carl and Helga married in 1940, beginning a 63-year marriage. He also developed a friendship with fellow classmate Billy Graham during his Wheaton years. Their friendship would last a lifetime and yield much fruit.

After earning a BA and an MA from Wheaton as well as a BDiv and a ThD from Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, Henry pursued a PhD at Boston University. It was during his time in Boston that he strengthened his friendship with Harold John Ockenga, pastor of the historic Park Street Church. Together, Henry, Ockenga, and Graham became the three primary leaders of the resurgence of evangelicalism in the mid-twentieth century.

New Kind of Evangelical

Henry and Ockenga wanted to propagate a new brand of evangelicalism that avoided the social pull to both left and right extremes. The proponents of this new strand — often called neo-evangelicals — wanted to be more socially conscious than the fundamentalism of the previous decades, even as they stood for the same basic doctrines. They also were willing to work across denominational lines, hoping for a broader coalition of Christian leaders.

Henry and Ockenga believed that Christianity had faltered culturally due to a lack of intellectual rigor among Christian leaders. The neo-evangelicals were convinced that if they were going to influence society, they needed to regain respect in academia. Evangelicalism would need to produce world-class scholars who could engage the elite intellectual centers, and thus “meet theological liberals on their own ground and beat them at their own game,” as Albert Mohler puts it.

With these goals in mind, Henry helped pioneer several key evangelical initiatives, including the National Association of Evangelicals (1942) and the Evangelical Theological Society (1949). In 1947, Ockenga and radio evangelist Charles Fuller launched Fuller Theological Seminary to be the flagship neo-evangelical institution, and they immediately recruited Henry to be the school’s founding dean. Henry remained on the faculty of Fuller until he became the first editor-in-chief of Christianity Today magazine in 1956. The magazine quickly became tremendously influential, largely due to Henry’s leadership.

These initiatives led to an explosion in evangelical scholarship. Before the neo-evangelical movement, evangelicals heavily relied on nineteenth-century conservative scholarship. Evangelicals were mocked for “relying on book reprints,” as Roger Nicole says (quoted in Awakening the Evangelical Mind, 168). However, in the second half of the twentieth century, evangelical scholars “produced works on history, psychology, pastoral theology, homiletics, family relations, the devotional life, denominational distinctive, and scores of other subjects,” Nicole says. “The problem in 1945 was that we had relatively few new conservative books; the problem now is that there are so many that few people can afford to purchase all those they would like to own.” As evangelical scholarship exploded, Henry led the way, earning his nickname “the dean of the evangelicals.”

Henry wrote more than forty books and countless articles, essays, and reviews throughout his career. His magnum opus was the three-thousand page, six-volume work God, Revelation, and Authority. This remarkable work thoroughly explores epistemology, divine self-revelation, hermeneutics, authority, and the nature of truth. Gregory Alan Thornbury sums up the project by saying that Henry wanted to present a theology that was “epistemologically viable, methodologically coherent, biblically accurate, socially responsible, evangelistically oriented, and universally applied.”

What Can We Learn from Henry?

If Henry were alive today, what might he say to modern evangelicals? An examination of Henry’s life and writings gives us insight into how he might address us.

Evangelism

Henry’s first exhortation might be toward evangelism. He writes,

It would be a supreme act of lovelessness on the part of the Christian community to withhold from the body of humanity, lost in sin, the evangel that Christ died for sinners and that the new birth is available on the condition of personal repentance and faith. (Evangelicals at the Brink of Crisis, 36)

Henry observed that far too many Christians had relegated evangelism to the professional evangelists — absolving themselves from any responsibility in the Great Commission by claiming that they weren’t gifted for the task.

During the early years of Fuller Seminary, Henry’s fervor for evangelism permeated the school’s culture. He fostered an “evangelistically alive missionary minded and warm collegial side of early Fuller community life,” as John Woodbridge puts it. Historian George Marsden has shared one student’s memory of Dr. Henry often arriving to lecture at early Saturday morning seminars looking “bedraggled in an old baggy overcoat [because] he would periodically spend half the night out in Los Angeles witnessing to derelicts and helping them find shelter” (Reforming Fundamentalism, 91). Henry was just as much an evangelist as he was a theologian or journalist.

“Henry was just as much an evangelist as he was a theologian or journalist.”

Henry balked at the idea that evangelism and theological studies were at odds. In his 1966 opening address to the World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin, he proclaimed the urgent need for biblically faithful theologian-evangelists. He knew that evangelistic efforts uninformed by good theology would lead to doctrinal confusion and weak discipleship. But he also knew that when theologians lack evangelistic fervor, they become too insular and persnickety. Henry challenged the delegates to “become theologian evangelists, rather than to remain content as just theologians or just evangelists,” John Woodbridge writes (Essential Evangelicalism, 82).

Justice

In 1947, Henry published his most famous book, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, in response to the idea that there were only two options for Protestants: theological liberalism or a culturally detached fundamentalism. This book was a clarion call for evangelicals to reject this false dichotomy.

Henry wanted evangelicals to lead the way in both theological integrity and social activism. He often said, “God is both the God of justice and justification.” Henry believed that the most important task was “the preaching of the gospel, in the interest of individual regeneration,” but he also believed that Christians ought to present the gospel “as the best solution of our problems, individual and social” (The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, 89).

God, in his self-revelation, gives us the best definition of justice. Therefore, Christians should be the greatest advocates for justice, on God’s terms, in any society — presenting God’s ways as the perfect picture of justice and righteousness. Henry writes, “Evangelicals know that injustice is reprehensible not simply because it is anti-human but because it is anti-God” (A Plea for Evangelical Demonstration, 14).

Uneasy Conscience challenged evangelical leaders to address justice-related issues and to condemn social evils such as racism, exploitation of labor, and aggressive warfare. According to Henry, we should not be able to “look with indifference upon miscarriages of justice in the law courts, usury, plundering the needy, failure to feed and clothe the poor, and over-charging for merchandise” (33). In true Kuyperian-fashion, he writes, “The evangelical missionary message cannot be measured for success by the number of converts only. The Christian message has a salting effect upon the earth. It aims at a re-created society” (84).

Politics

Henry called upon more evangelicals to call out injustice in their writings, believing this would change hearts and minds. He also knew, however, that merely changing minds was not enough. To inspire societal change, he knew Christians needed to help change policies too.

In his editorials, he often made arguments for specific pieces of legislation and policy changes. In Henry’s mind, it was not enough to simply get people to agree if such agreement did not lead to any practical effect. So, he was willing, as an editor, to publicly endorse specific ideas and frameworks in which the proper solutions to social ills could be found.

“Henry would challenge us to cut against the harmful ideologies of both the left and the right.”

The key for Henry, however, was to focus on ideas and frameworks rather than political parties. Henry would challenge us to cut against the harmful ideologies of both the left and the right. He would tell us to endorse good policies, regardless of which side of the aisle they come from, and he would warn evangelicals against becoming too loyal to one political party. Henry mostly agreed with conservative politics, but he insisted that evangelical leaders ought to avoid becoming mouthpieces for the conservative political movement in America. This put him at odds with the more conservative board members and financiers of Christianity Today, who wanted an outspoken politically conservative voice for the magazine’s editorials. This eventually cost Henry his job as editor-in-chief.

Henry understood the power of politics, but he also understood the limitations too. He knew that policy changes could go only so far in the effort to reshape society. If Henry were alive today, he would exhort us to be careful to not put too much stock in political efforts. He knew that evangelicals needed to pour their greatest energies into gospel preaching and evangelism.

Rhetoric

Along with greater social engagement, the neo-evangelicals wanted to strike a more positive tone than the fundamentalists of the previous generation. Henry did not shy away from giving scathing warnings whenever necessary, but he often voiced striking notes of optimism and hope.

In Uneasy Conscience, Henry asserts that evangelicals need to present their doctrine and ideas with a “dynamic to give it hope” (55). He wanted to engage with society, not just win an argument. After hearing the evangelical message, Henry wanted people to feel a sense of hope that there is indeed a better way.

He also understood that our rhetoric matters. He knew that irenic and hopeful rhetoric would allow him to build rapport with people who otherwise might discredit or ignore him. For Henry, however, being irenic and hopeful was not merely a tactic in some quest to win more people to his side. Rather, such rhetoric was theologically informed.

The ministry of Christ was personal and incarnational; therefore, Henry believed that the theologian must also be personal and incarnational. He wanted people to see the Savior through his life, so he sought to interact with others in the same manner as Christ. Timothy George, who spent significant time with Carl Henry, says, “The thing that stands out was his extraordinary humility and kindness toward others. . . . I never heard him speak in a bitter or disparaging way about anybody, not even those with whom he disagreed” (Essential Evangelicalism, 14). Modern evangelicals would be wise to follow Henry’s model.

Humble Giant

Marvin Olasky, former editor-in-chief of World magazine, shares an anecdote (recounted by Thornbury) from the life of Henry that gives us great insight into his humility.

For several years toward the end of his life, Henry wrote op-ed columns for World. Olasky said that every few weeks he would get a letter in the mail from Henry — typically a three-page article. And in each letter, Henry always included a self-addressed stamped postcard with the handwritten words: Accept or Reject. He never presumed that what he had to say was worthy of being published.

Henry was a remarkable leader and scholar. He was an impressive theologian. His evangelistic fervor was contagious. His kindness was sincere. His body of work is second to none in his generation. And his humility ran deep.

Soon after Henry’s death on December 7, 2003, David S. Dockery wrote this tribute: “Those who met him for the first time often stood in awe of his giant intellect. But soon, almost without exception, they became more impressed with his humility and gracious spirit.”

Banner Illustration taken from Essential Evangelicalism: The Enduring Influence of Carl F. H. Henry, edited by Matthew J. Hall and Owen Strachan, Copyright © 2015. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org.