Mark Dever on Evangelism

Here are some videos in preparation for next year’s Desiring God Pastor’s Conference.

• On the Gospel
• On the Motive for Doing Evangelism
• On the Gift of Evangelism
• On the Difficulty of Doing Evangelism as a Pastor
• On What It Means to Fail at Evangelism
• On Creating a Culture of Evangelism in Your Church

(HT: JT)

Hiestand on the Differences between Ecclesial and Academic Theology

Gerald Hiestand is pastor of Harvest Bible Church and Executive Director of The Society for the Advancement of Ecclesial Theology (SAET).  Hiestand has been dedicated to reforming the misconception that theology is reserved for the realm of academics and not the local church.  One of the difficulties he notes is distinguishing between “ecclesial theology” and “academic theology”.  In his most recent post he compares and contrasts these two “theologies”.  Read the whole post here.  He is also encouraging any comments and thoughts you might have on this subject.

Gerald Hiestand:

My article, “Pastor-Scholar to Professor-Scholar: Exploring the Theological Disconnect between the Academy and the Local Church” is now out in the current issue of Westminster Theological Journal (vol 70, 2008). In the article, I argue that the eighteenth-century transition from pastor-scholar to professor-scholar has had significant implications for North American evangelical theology, namely that evangelical theology has become too apologetically focused and has lost sight of distinctly ecclesial concerns. In the paper I argue for a resurrection of the pastor-scholar.

But “pastors writing academic scholarship” is not my vision of a pastor-scholar. Instead, I’m calling for a return to the sort of theological reflection done by past pastor-scholars such as Augustine, Athanasius, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Edwards, etc.–theologians who wrote from within the social location of the Church, whose reflection was driven by ecclesial concerns, and who were unashamedly Christian and prophetic. As Luther has said, theologians who are willing to “assert”.

You May Be Too Fashionable If…

Tullian Tchividijian presents this “unfashionable quiz” in his upcoming book:

1. You can look around at church and notice that everybody is basically the same age and they look and dress pretty much like you do.
2. You can’t stand singing a worship song that was “in” five years ago—much less singing a hymn from another century.
3. You believe social justice is more important than evangelism OR evangelism is more important than social justice.
4. The church you go to is so dimly lit during worship that you can’t see the person singing next to you, much less the person singing across the room.
5. You’ve attended a “leadership” conference where you learned more about organization and props than proclamation and prayer.
6. Your goal in spending time with non-Christians is to demonstrate that you’re really no different than they are and to prove this you curse like a sailor, drink like a fish, and smoke like a chimney.
7. You’ve concluded that everything new is better than anything old OR that everything old is better than anything new.
8. You think that the way Jesus lived is more important than what Jesus said–that his deeds were more important than his doctrine.
9. You believe that the best way to change our culture is to elect a certain kind of politician.
10. The church you’ve chosen is defined more by its reaction to “boring” churches than by its response to a needy world.
11. You’ve decided that everything done by the church you grew up in was way wrong and you’re now, thankfully, part of a missional “community” that does everything right.
12. The one verse you wish wasn’t in the Bible is John 14:6 where Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father but by me.” That’s way too narrow!

(HT: blog.worship.com)