Our witness before our neighbours matters. That is not just walking with integrity before them personally (though that surely matters too). But it means walking in such a way that we inevitably do good to them because of the gospel. It means serving our neighbours in real and practical ways so that, when they see the good works we do, we can point them to the gospel and they may give thanks to the true and living God who, because of his Son and in the power of his Spirit, we are compelled to do them.

Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven. – Matthew 5:16

I have argued before that the current context in which we broadly find ourselves in the Western World means that the church can no longer rely on being seen as an inherently good thing. Time was, people thought the church was inherently good, even if they themselves weren’t overly interested in it. They might send their kids for a bit of good morals, or spiritual formation, because the church was essentially alright, just not of interest to them in particular.
That clearly is not the situation we are in anymore. These days, we are not seen as a basically good thing. Indeed, we are no longer even seen as an essentially harmless thing. Now we are broadly seen as a bad, problematic thing. The world now sees itself as the good and the church as opposing what it stands for. We are, at best, viewed with a large degree of scepticism by many.
I say that not in any sort of despairing way. Just as a point of fact. Most people don’t actively hate us, they broadly nothing us. But what they do know about us, or think they know about us, is often not positive. Which means we are starting from behind with many people. They aren’t chomping at the bit to hear our gospel message of salvation. Some think they’ve heard it all before (but we know they haven’t) or think they know what we’re about already and aren’t that keen.
This matters because, if we are starting from behind and cannot assume people will view us as an unmitigated community good, we have to show them before they engage with us that it is so. I am minded to think many churches who sit in their buildings and do very little in their communities but run the occasional outreach event are rightly viewed as not being much of a community good.
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Written by R. Scott Clark |
Tuesday, October 19, 2021
What animates the confessional Reformed churches is a holistic theology, piety, and practice lived out in the context of congregations and in the life of the broader institutional church. We are animated by a theology that we share with our Reformed forebears, which we have not amputated or substantially revised. We are animated by our commitment to gathering Sabbath by Sabbath with the covenant community to hear the law and the gospel preached, the sacraments administered, and grace and mercy lived out during the week.

Recently, Trevin Wax crystalized the case for preserving the neo-evangelical coalition, which emerged after World War II and in so doing, for Reformed confessionalists, he has also made the case against the neo-evangelical coalition. What is that the coalition and what are its attractions and problems? Let us go back to the Reformation for a moment to set a baseline. As the Luther began to recover Augustine’s doctrines of sin (i.e., total depravity) and grace (sola gratia), Paul’s doctrine of imputation and his definition of faith (sola fide), along with the biblical distinction between law and gospel (with some help from Augustine) and the doctrine of sola Scriptura the Reformation message spread from Wittenberg throughout Europe and the British Isles. In the Reformation an evangelical was one who confessed those truths and others. To be an evangelical was to be about the gospel and a very particular understanding of it but, in the Reformation, the evangelicals were so within increasingly distinct ecclesiastical traditions and confessions. That process of distinction is known to scholars as confessionalism, when it is considered as a bottom-up movement and as confessionalization, when it is considered as a top-down movement. By the 1550s there were two distinct Reformation churches: the Lutherans and the Reformed. They had distinct views of the two natures of Christ, the way Scripture regulates worship, and the sacraments among other things.
The Rise Of Trans-Denominational Movements
There did develop in the seventeenth century a trans-denominational movement centering on religious experience, Pietism. This movement was the seedbed for the modern evangelical and neo-evangelical movements. In the eighteenth century another trans-denominational movement emerged, which was related to the Pietists: the revivalists. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries revivals of varying kinds swept across the American Colonies (the First Great Awakening), then Europe to a lesser degree, and again in the USA (i.e.,  the Second Great Awakening) and Europe (e.g., the Réveil).
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even as Pietism and Revivalism producing great fervor and social activity (e.g., poverty relief, anti-slavery movements, temperance movements) the eighteenth-century Enlightenment movements were conquering the universities, the intellectuals, and the elites. By the late nineteenth century most in those sets had accepted the rationalism (the superiority of reason over all other authorities), empiricism (the superiority of sense experience over all other authorities), or romanticism (the superiority of the inner life over all other authorities) and had lost confidence in Scripture and the historic Christian faith. In response the children of Pietism, Revivalism, and those who still affirmed the old Protestant confessions, theology, piety, and practice sought to defend the fundamentals of the historic Christian faith.
By the end of World War II, the West was tired of near constant conflict, whether marital or ecclesiastical and the fundamentalist movement had become increasingly narrow. The great hero of the early fundamentalist movement, J. Gresham Machen, was dead and some of those who had studied with him wanted to retain his high view of Scripture but they also wanted to move on. They wanted to influence the broader culture and to leave behind his commitment to the Westminster Standards and his Presbyterian view of the church and sacraments. Scholars call this movement, led by Carl F. H. Henry, Henry Ockenga, and Bill Graham, among others, neo-evangelicalism. This movement would seek to be both faithful to a small number of core theological commitments and culturally influential. To that end they began to build institutions. They built Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California where they would seek to produce theologically conservative graduates who were solid like Old Westminster (Machen’s school) but not ecclesiastically narrow like Machen nor pugnacious as he was accused of being. They founded a magazine and located it in Washington, D.C. the capitol of the USA and of the world.
That project lasted about three decades. The Baby-Boomer children of the neo-evangelical founders were a generation that knew not Machen. They did not see the point of holding on to the historic doctrine of Scripture while jettisoning so much of the rest of Christian history (e.g., the Reformation confessions, churches, and sacramental convictions). This move, symbolized by Fuller’s revision of their view of Scripture (i.e., “limited inerrancy”) provoked the “Battle for the Bible” in the late 1970s and early 1980s. At the same time, the leading edges of the progressive movement within the neo-evangelical establishment was also pushing the boundaries on the doctrine of God by arguing that God cannot know or control the future. They called themselves “Open Theists.” Others revised the doctrine of the Trinity so argue that the divine unity was more one of society than one of being. There were other revisions such as Daniel Fuller’s proposal that justification is not through faith alone but through faithfulness, which, mutatis mutandis, continues to reverberate in the theology of John Piper, one of the fathers of the so-called Young Restless and Reformed movement. About the same time, in the early 1990s, some of the older neo-evangelicals (e.g., J. I. Packer) along with their more progressive evangelical children sought to negotiate a settlement on the Reformation doctrine of justification in order to facilitate a cultural common cause in the face of an increasingly hostile and post-Christian culture. The late 1990s saw another wave of progressive evangelical movements, now increasingly led by Generation Xers. They called themselves “emergent” and they developed two factions, one slightly more conservative of the past and the other more critical of the past.
The YRR movement, which was stimulated by the theological drift among the evangelical children of the neo-evangelicals, sought to get the old neo-evangelical band back together. This impulse in the 1990s and early 200s produced a flurry of coalitions, e.g., The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, which was a response, c. 1995, to the “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” documents and movement. About a decade later we saw the emergence of The Gospel Coalition, and Together for the Gospel, among others.
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Expositional preaching requires a living context to be understood. While the Holy Spirit is powerful enough to make the right applications to a completely blinded heart, he usually uses the natural means of family, church, and human culture to give a context to truth. Barring common grace, much in modern culture is useless for teaching the right application of Scripture. That leaves redeemed families and gospel churches to put flesh on the bones of expository sermons.

I enjoy conferences for pastors and training workshops, and recommend them heartily. But I often return from them a little disturbed by the way expository preaching is viewed by some Christian leaders. According to them, expository preaching is the main ingredient for healthy Christianity, and the lack thereof is the reason for its sickness. If only, they say, all pastors were committed to expository preaching, the church would be reformed and revived.
I am committed to expository preaching. I have attempted it (however unsuccessfully) for over twenty years. We teach students in our seminary how to do expository preaching. I prefer to make the mainstay of my preaching expository series of books of the Bible. I believe expository preaching grows out of a conservative view of Scripture. If you believe that God has verbally inspired Scripture, making it the rule for all Christian life and practice, it follows that you submit to its meaning. Therefore, you desire to understand what has already been revealed, submit to it yourself, and make it plain to others. Expository preaching usually goes hand-in-glove with inerrancy, for when you believe the Bible has been given without error, you are fastidious in your approach to understand the very words of Scripture, not just the themes. Expository preaching also reveals a desire to preach the whole counsel of God, not our pet themes or popular topics.
But having said all that, I think many Christian leaders have a faith in expository preaching which is overblown and looks to expository preaching to do what it cannot accomplish by itself.
It is a tempting position to hold. After all, the Bible teaches us about worship. Surely if we preach expositionally, biblical worship will take place, right? The Bible speaks about what affections we should have for God. If we preach the whole counsel of God, won’t it automatically lead to ordinate affection?
Look around for the answer. You have any number of Reformed or conservative evangelicals who are committed to expository preaching, but who come out on almost opposite ends of the worship and affection spectrum.
This elephant-in-the-room fact leads many to relativize our applications of Scripture. If such good preachers who are so committed to biblical authority come out at completely different answers as to what it means to worship, it must be because we’re just talking about ‘styles’ and various ways of “contextualizing” the gospel. So as not to shake anyone’s faith in expository preaching as the be-all and end-all, the quite obvious disparity in worship and affections by those committed to expository preaching is played down in favor of a shared commitment to Reformed doctrine.
I think ignoring this disparity is part of the problem. It’s my contention that expository preaching is not a magic bullet, but it must be accompanied by something to have its desired effect.
The fact is, preaching occurs in a context.
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