My gratitude goes to TGC for sponsoring the blog this week to let you know about another series of their always-interesting Good Faith Debates.

Today’s Kindle deals include a good selection of titles.
(Yesterday on the blog: Navigating the Space between Singleness and Marriage)
Hope for Those Tempted to Control Their Children’s Spiritual Lives
This is so important. “So much of our parenting is built on control, which is not always a bad thing. We want to control the influences around our child, so we don’t let them watch inappropriate TV shows. We filter the internet in our home, we get to know the parents of the friends they hang out with, and we tell them not to walk anywhere alone or to talk to strangers. But control in parenting can easily take a negative turn.”
‘No Celebrities Except Jesus’: How Asbury Protected the Revival
Hopefully you’ve got the ability to read this article at CT about the revival and how the administration at Asbury did their best to foster and protect it.
From WEIRD to Absurd
“As I watch the debates in Scotland, and talk with my Anglican friends – agonizing as they are over the implications of their bishops’ absurd decisions around same-sex blessings – I grieve but also feel a growing conviction that we shouldn’t take any of this too seriously. The devil loves to be taken seriously, he hates to be mocked. What we are living through is ridiculous, absurd, and passing.”
One Year Later, Moscow Pastor Says, ‘I Know God Is Going to Judge Us All’
“The first week after Russia began ‘special military operations’ in Ukraine, Russian pastor Evgeny Bakhmutsky couldn’t sleep.” My Worship Round the World journey was meant to take me to this church though, for obvious reasons, we’ve had to go elsewhere.
Facts Don’t Care About Your Healings
This is yet another interesting and challenging reflection from Samuel James.
Rethinking the Value of Potential
Melissa has “noticed that a common pro-life talking point needs reforming.”
Flashback: Only the Christian Faith Begins At the Top
Only the Christian faith begins at the top. We are made right with God first, then obey his law as it is suspended from above, as it is revealed from the heavens.

As I go into a cemetery I like to think of the time when the dead shall rise from their graves… Thank God, our friends are not buried; they are only sown! —D.L. Moody

What is your church really made of? Or perhaps better said, who is your church really made of? This is something we all do well to ponder from time to time, for there are good ways and bad ways, better ways and worse ways to fill a church.

The best way to fill a church is by seeing the lost get saved. This involves the children of church members growing up and putting their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and it involves evangelizing the community so unsaved people hear the gospel and become believers. Wonderful.

The worst way to fill a church is to undermine and destroy other healthy churches and compel the Christians within them to come to yours instead. In the end, one church has died and another has grown fat by plundering it. Evil.

But there is a middle ground as well. It is not necessarily the worst way to fill a church but it is also not the best. It has been my experience and observation that many churches see their most substantial growth not by salvations but by transfers—by slowly drawing people from a variety of other nearby congregations. This was certainly and demonstrably true of the church growth movement but I fear it may also be true of Reformed churches.

We need to acknowledge that there are often very good reasons for transfer growth. Perhaps a family has moved from one city to another or perhaps a church they attended nearby has decided to close its doors. Perhaps they were true believers who realized they were in a false church and for the sake of their souls needed to move on. Or perhaps a core theological conviction changed and they decided they needed to politely slip away. Well and good.

More often, though, Christians move from church to church on the basis of matters that are less significant. They move because their previous church lacks a certain amenity or ministry. They move because they prefer the preaching or the music. They move because of relatively minor points of doctrine. They move on the basis of preference more than necessity.

I am not saying this is necessarily wrong. It’s possible that most of us have at one time or another left a church not because it was false or heretical but because another one seemed like it would better serve us or better align with our convictions. So I am not saying transfer growth is intrinsically evil.

But what I am saying is that it can be deceptive and can mimic a sign of health. Therefore, a church should check itself from time to time to consider the nature of its growth. That’s because a church can gain size and, therefore, have an appearance of health even when it is evangelistically lazy and disobedient. It can be a church that grows and thrives at the expense of other churches rather than a church that grows by saving the lost.

God’s Kingdom doesn’t grow when we transfer members from that church to this one. We wouldn’t think much of the farmer who boasted of the size of his flock if we knew he had been hauling them over the top of the neighbor’s fence. We wouldn’t honor the angler who catches fish from a stocked pond when he claims he has been catching them from wild rivers.

We wouldn’t think much of the farmer who boasted of the size of his flock if we knew he had been hauling them over the top of the neighbor’s fence.Share

What I fear we like to do in Reformed churches is cast our line into other church’s ponds. We cast it this way to draw a Presbyterian, cast it that way to draw a Baptist, and cast it a third way to lure someone who is Anglican, Brethren, or Dutch Reformed. We save people from the clutches of Arminius as much as the clutches of Satan and deliver them from the wrong position on the millennium more than from unbelief. We lure them with our worship or ministries or theological distinctions rather than the gospel. We entice them based on our adherence to whatever is popular in a Christian subculture at any given time—hymnody, liturgy, expository preaching, gospel-centeredness, and so on. We build our churches out of other churches.

Again, this is not necessarily wrong. A person who comes to embrace the Five Points should probably make their way to a Reformed church. A person who embraces cessationism will probably need to leave a church that is committed to prophecy. And then there is depth to the Reformed faith that is often lacking in other traditions and therefore attractive to those who have begun to grow in their faith. We understand this. But the church receiving such new members should be aware that they have not delivered souls from death but merely helped existing Christians mature.

The fact is, growing through transfers can mimic growing through evangelism. And if the Reformed tradition already struggles with faithfully sharing the gospel compared to many others—and I think it does—we need to doubly guard ourselves against being content to add members without baptisms, to add seats without salvations, to grow without evangelism.

The Apostle Paul refused to build on another person’s foundation, but we sometimes delight to. We take it as a mark of a healthy church that people want to join it and that may be true. But we cannot be truly healthy unless we are fulfilling the Great Commission which is not a call to go to the churches but to the nations and not a call to glean among the sheaves but to glean in the farthest of fields.

The God of peace be with you today, my friends.

Today’s Kindle deals include several excellent books by and/or for women. You will also find a small collection related to Christianity and science.

If you’re looking for deals on printed books, perhaps as Christmas gifts, you might be interested in CBD’s Black Friday Kickoff sale which has a lot of good options for you. I’ve collected the best of them here.

(Yesterday on the blog: The Practice of Accepting Disappointment)

Aimee Gray reflects on the experience of welcoming King Charles III and Queen Camilla to her church. “The experience was everything you might expect. It was electric in atmosphere, a little bit pompous but tastefully polished—from the Bible readings to the hymn lyrics, and everything in between. The experience led me to reflect deeply on the King of kings, the Lord Jesus. We welcomed a majestic person—arguably, one of the most majestic in the world!—to our church. How can it be that afterward, I was left more in awe of Jesus than ever?”

I really appreciate what O. Alan Noble has to say about a recent documentary (and other recent situations and scandals). “Our social media algorithms, our sinful hearts, and our access to endless information all work together to develop inordinate desires to know titillating, scandalizing, shameful stories (whether true or false matters less than how scandalizing they appear to be). This is the vice of curiositas, a perverse, restless desire for knowledge that goes beyond what is respectable, reasonable, and appropriate, that goes beyond all limits. And the right response to curiositas is the virtue of temperance or self-control.”

Today we hear more and more charges of narcissism. In this article, Dr. Keith Evans, associate professor of biblical counseling at the Reformed Theological Seminary, tries to describe narcissism according to biblical terms. “For all the attention on narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder in our current culture, it is straightforward to see how the issue relates to biblical principles. Narcissism is but a half-step away from the concept of pride. More jarringly, it is an idolization of oneself.”

Greg Koukl and Amy Hall tell why God cannot forgive without punishment—a common concern for people who are uncomfortable with Christ’s substitutionary death.

You’ve probably heard people speak of two kingdom theology, but perhaps haven’t known what it’s all about. Brad Littlejohn offers a brief (and a link to a less-brief) explanation. “Many Christians have some vague familiarity with the doctrine, and a general sense that it has something to do with the distinction of church and state, sacred and secular, or perhaps the authority of Scripture vs. natural law. And they’re not entirely wrong—it does have something to do with those distinctions, but it’s not quite that simple.”

The point of this one is clear and important: God calls us to love people through slow change.

Disrupting a family is difficult and painful; marrying an unbeliever is bound to be difficult and painful. Sadly, sometimes the only options available to us are painful and less-than-perfect ones. 

The more outrageous the wicked are against the truth, the more courageous the godly are for it.
—Thomas Watson