The Deliberate Church
From Neoredemptive
| The Deliberate Church | |
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Mark Dever and Paul Alexander
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Synopsis
The authors, like many of us, are sick of pop church trends - emerging, purpose-driven, connecting, disciple-making, market-driven, seeker-sensitive, multi-sensory, and so on. They argue that any talk about how the church should be built, administered, and directed begins and ends with the content of "the Gospel", by which they mean:
... that God is our holy Creator and righteous Judge. He created us to glorify Him and enjoy Him forever, but we have all sinned, both in Adam as our representative head, and in our own individual actions (Rom 5:12; 3:23). We therefore deserve death--spiritual separation from God in hell (Rom 6:23; Eph 2:3)--and are in fact already spiritually stillborn, helpless in our sins (Ps 51:5; Rom. 5:6-8; Eph 2:1) and in need of God to impart spiritual life to us (Ezek. 37:1-14; John 3:3). but God sent His Son Jesus Christ, fully God and gully man (Phil 2:5-11), to die the death that we deserved, and He raised Him up for our justification, proving that He was God's Son (Rom 5:1; 1:4). If we would have Christ's perfect righteousness credited to us, and the penalty for our sins accounted to Him, we must repent of our sins and believe in Jesus Christ for salvation (2 Cor. 5:21; Mark 1:14-15). (p.28)
Doc's Take
The authors probably wanted to call this tome The Gospel-Driven Church, but Ian Stackhouse beat them to it.
This book is rife with cessational congregationalist assumptions regarding theology, praxis, and polity. For example:
- The definition of the "gospel" (see above) is entirely individualistic and does not sufficiently account for the role of the Church in the lives of believers or its cultural expression (particularly the cultural mandate).
- Only the (vocational/staff?) pastor is authorized for the public preaching of "the word" (the gospel).
- The sufficiency of scripture is presented in the strictest and most cessational sense, i.e., God has never said anything and will never say anything which He has not said clearly and directly through a correct exegesis of the Bible.
- The pastor is an employee of the congregation.
- The church should have a formal membership process, including interviews.
- The church should have regular congregational meetings to conduct its important business, and these should be governed by Roberts' Rules of Order.
- Formal church discipline (excommunication) is the prerogative of the congregation and should be decided at the regular congregational meeting.
- The Regulative Principle is a viable model for the events of the gathered church.
- The abiblical idiosyncrasies of Congregationalist/Baptist praxis are self-evidently valid in light of the Regulative Principle.
- There is clear and incontrovertible scriptural evidence for a congregationalist-style eldership polity as the "most faithful" model, so it does not need a meaningful defense based upon exegetical or hermeneutical rigor.
- Eldership is an office elected by the congregation, but only elders should nominate elders.
- There should be "elders' meetings" apart from common gatherings of the congregation.
- The elders should decide matters by a vote.
- Elders' meetings should have a functioning chairmanship, who has the authority to close debate.
- A pastor who believes that "Scripture teaches that he must chair the [elders] meeting" is being unfaithful to Scripture.
Unfortunately, the execution fails to live up to the premise - the authors frequently confuse particular flavors of evangelical praxis and groupspeak for the content of the gospel (as they have defined it, above), or the content of scripture.
While the authors' first premise is true - that all things should be ordered first by scripture and around the work of the Gospel - they seem to fail to recognize that a wide swath of the content of their preferred theology, polity, and practice are neither biblically mandated nor contra-biblical, but rather one example of a faithful expression of biblical principles. As such, they conflate particular flavors of evangelical praxis and group-speak for the content of the gospel, consistently blurring the boundary between principle and method, between mandate and implementation, between faithfulness to the scriptural tradition and faithfulness to a particular cultural tradition. While I do not think they have done so deliberately, I do think thoughtful church leaders who have thoughtfully arrived at vastly different but equally biblical positions will be tempted to cast this book aside instead of laboring to sift its worthwhile insights from its unnecessary methodological bias.
Ultimately, this book suffers from the same weakness as many from the fundamentalist camp - an over-statement of the specificity of scripture and of the Gospel's demands upon believers and the church.
As such, the Gospel alone must both shape and evaluate any ministry method we use. (p.28)
Consequently, this Gospel alone deserves to shape and evaluate both our methods and our ministries. (p.29)
This is true, in so far as it makes sense for it to be true. However, an honest man must come to the end of the day and admit that he will find a very, very wide range of methods which meet or exceed the bar of faithfulness to scripture; how does he then set about determining which to employ? The answer lies somewhere in the realm of applying sanctified, scripturally informed, Holy Spirit-directed wisdom, and any suggestion that the practical application of ministry methods can be judged without that flows from either naivety or dishonesty.
Similarly, the selective application of scripture in formulating their model of a regulative church service and a congregationalist eldership reveals that something besides scripture is clearly informing their faith and praxis. For example, the irony should not be lost on the reader when they quote Paul in saying our God is a God of order and our services should therefore be well-ordered, but then promptly disregarding Paul's injunctions only a few verses away for the gathered church to consistently engage in highly charismatic practices like prophecy, public tongues, and spontaneous singing!
It also does not escape my attention that shockingly little attention is paid by this book to the Holy Spirit. The book goes so far as to suggest prayer topics and durations for "elders' meetings"; to my ears, such a suggestion always demands to be balanced with an exhortation to not get caught up in formulas at the expense of listening, both in preparation and in the moment, for the voice of the Holy Spirit to dismiss our pretenses and direct our attention rather toward that which is on His heart.
In spite of some serious structural flaws, there is much that is worthwhile hanging off of the bones of this book -- good, practical counsel on church organization and administration, helpful and wise discussions of how they have shaped their church's institution, people, and processes. If read as a case study instead of a prescription, the thoughtful church leader will find a lot here to chew on and consider integrating into his ministerial toolkit.
