Okay, I’ll bite beautifulmess if you’re still reading. So the Gospel Coalition is only a coalition, and it is only a church assisting operation. So will they assist churches to baptize babies or not? Wouldn’t you think having such an agreement sorted out would be important for any organization that tries to follow the Great Commission since baptism is part of what Christ commissioned his disciples to do?

So if GC is made up of paedo baptists and credo baptists, does that make it an oxymoronic coalition?

Main Entry:
coalesce
Pronunciation:
\ˌkō-ə-ˈles\
Function:
verb

1: to grow together
2 a: to unite into a whole : fuse b: to unite for a common end : join forces
3: to arise from the combination of distinct elements transitive verb: to cause to unite

Main Entry:
co·a·li·tion
Pronunciation:
\ˌkō-ə-ˈli-shən\
Function:
noun

1 a: the act of coalescing : union
b: a body formed by the coalescing of originally distinct elements : combination
2: a temporary alliance of distinct parties, persons, or states for joint action

Coalitions, by definition, are a temporary alliance of *distinct parties* or persons for joint action. They involve a uniting of distinct elements. By defintion, Christians themselves should be a coalition.

I see absolutely nothing anywhere about anyone leaving their individual denominations. (Bryan Chapell would most certainly be out of a job, now wouldn’t he? And how scandalous that Mahaney would leave the denomination he founded!) Nor do I see anything remotely close to a denomination or church itself. (As far as the sacrament issue is concerned, the PCA table is open to all believers in good standing with any evangelical church - the BCO is quite clear there.) Nor do I see anything in the Bible which calls us only to unity with our own denominations. We are called to the Body of Christ, to the unification of Believers. I am SEVERELY bothered by the condemnation and assumption made in the post title alone, not to mention the ridiculous statements in the post itself or the comments, without any grounding in truth. (And here I thought this post would be about women in the deaconate!)

If there’s one thing presbyterians have historically been known for it is how quickly they will split into a new “presbyterian” denomination at the slightest sneeze. We should be ashamed that we are known for our own denominational divorces, rather than our unity. Kudos to these guys - PCA or not - for an attempt to counter our lack of unity within the evangelical, confessing church, and to counter a “replacing of the gospel” so rampant in so many churches - yes, even within some PCA churches.

Our lack of unity is tragic. If it is not breaking your hearts, it should be.

In everything I have read in their statements, I see the Coalition as a “church assisting” organization, rather than a “counter-church organization” (which is really what so many people implying with their throwing around of the term “parachurch”).

If you wish to read more of my opinion on the matter, you’re welcome to read a post I wrote over a year ago on the subject: http://michaelaforbes.com/archives/1451

Additionally, I’m sure you’d be a little upset if people starting making such assumptions without any real grounding or talking to you first. I’m quite sure the Bible DOES have some serious things to say about that.

Thank you for the dialogues. I trust that at this point we can see each other views in truth and love. Even we may be disagreeing on how best to proceed to advance God’s Kingdom, we can agree that our hearts are loyal to Him and have His Kingdom’s interest before us.

I pray that God would continue His work in us and through us to accomplish His plan.

Bumble, over and out.

I frankly don’t see how their endeavor is novel. It’s just one more denomination if it exhibits the marks of the church. What might be novel is this sort of denominational layering. Either way their unifying element, like any presbyterian denomination, is an abstract, legal construct. If the GC were disbanded tomorrow, we would be short one more imaginary institution. The local church lives on with Christ really present in word, sacrament, and fellowship.

It seems to me that the point here is that Keller and crew are taking upon themselves in the GC the work of the Church, which, granted, is different from souls taking their battle scar balls to another corner to play. One may be petty while the other may have a more noble purview; one may be characterized by ignoble political squabbling over the color of carpet while the other talks about “renewing our faith in the gospel of Christ and to reforming our ministry practices to conform fully to the Scriptures..intend[ing] to [serve the church] through the ordinary means of his grace: prayer, the ministry of the Word, baptism and the Lord’s supper, and the fellowship of the saints.”

While they may run the gammit of nobility, they both seem to comport under the idea that an individual or group of individuals knows better than the collective cloud of witnesses of the visible church, which really is ignoble. Keller’s reminds me of the high opinion/ low view of the confessional forms, for instance, in my own CRC as it contemplates a horrid post-modern Revision to the Form of Subscription. Just as we ought not mistake a high opinion of the forms for a high view, we ought not mistake Keller’s et. al. noble effort for a churchly one.

Steve

I had some battle scars fighting the denominationalism in my own visible church and so that may colored my view on the issue of whether Keller is with the PCA or not. I agreed with you it is harmful to “pleading with souls to stay in the boat no matter what” as well as “enticing souls to others or to leave them altogether”. I recently asked the question about our own parochialism, “If there are so much problems here, why cann’t I just leave?” Then of course I learned that any other denominational system will have the similar problem: the problem is the sinfulness of the people involved in the denominational system. The visible churches constantly need the Godliness of the invisible Church to make it more Godly.

Dr. Hart: If you used this URL instead of the generic one I gave earlier, you could skim through my heartaches for yourself and evaluate how Keller’s explanation of the Gospel could help the simple foot-soldiers like me on the front line: http://www.xanga.com/I12Know/tags/trial

Thank you for your kind words and dialogues. Thank you for the referral to Mike Horton, I am bookmarking him for further reference, especially as I need to learn more about presuppositional apologetics in order to deal with the onslaught of the new waves of the militant atheists of Dawkins and Hitchen.

Ministerial celebrities are not the only options, but in this day and age of information overload, the loudest ad will get our attention (and when I say “our”, I meant to regular ignorant foot-soldiers who receive all tidbits about God through random media bombardment and not through intentional transmission). Therefore, ministerial celebrity grab our attention, we says “Kewl”, we listened to their interpretation of Scripture, we “double-checked the scripture as the Berean did”, and if it sounds right, we believed and followed their theological trajectory.

In fact, when I heard of Keller, his lack of celebrity status made his message more skeptical to me. None of the people in my circle even heard of Keller, except for a young doctor in my congregation who used to attend Redeemer back in the late 90s. But the young doctor is no theologian, and so he was no great help besides for just personal testimony. Worse, Keller didn’t write books (except that one book on Mercy Ministry 10 years ago). So it takes a great deal more from my part (to listen to his sermons/lectures) to consider him at the same “celebrity” level.

What I am trying to say is this: the culture we live in is saturated with noises, what could you do to be heard among these noises? As I said before, through Keller I learned about the PCA and the “confessing” church, I also learned that there is a Westminster Seminary around here. Interestingly as I selected a seminary a few years ago, it was not even “on my radar.” The “big three” were Talbot, Fuller, and Claremont, and the “celebrity schools” were Master Seminary, Calvary Chapel Bible College, and perhaps Azusa Pacific. If I knew about Keller at the time, I would have considered Westminster. Who knows?

So while I understand that some of you in the PCA may worry that Keller has left the denomination, I would encourage you to embrace some of the positive side effects like free promotion as I have recounted above. Of course, some may object, “we don’t really care about name recognition because the Gospel is all we care about.” Sure, if a Gospel-tree fall in the forest corner, which is filled with all the non-celebrity noises; would anyone hear its sound?

Keller’s work is appealing because it cuts through the denominational layers to the core of the Gospel, and makes sense of the Gospel’s implication to the foot-soldiers like me in any denomination. Surely Keller kept his own PCA distinctiveness at his church. But the Gospel is the core below all denominational distinctiveness. We are not a “confessional” church, and I doubt if we will ever becoming one. And the beauty of the parachurch-like Gospel Coalition is that it will allow the foot-soldiers to come together base on the commonality of the Gospel central core, rather than the denominational distinctiveness of how we do things. And the idea of Harvie Conn (which Keller amplified) will help us all apply the Gospel in our cultural context.

Yes, there will be some misguided foot-soldiers, who will attempt to replicate Keller’s Redeemer effectiveness in the middle of rural Idaho with the approaches intended to reach Manhattanites. But that’s their fault and irresponsibility. I myself have been studying Keller’s church planting manual for a few months now, and is still trying to figuring out how the Gospel would shape our immigrant church. (Keller has exactly one paragraph about low-income/immigrant church in his book, but since he is working with the Manhattanites, he would not know the implementation details for our church type either).

Similarly, I will have to work out some other theological implications that Keller has. For example, when Keller speaks about “The City” his audience is often Anglo-American and hence “The City” is the culture. Whereas for us, since our audience is first generation immigrant, the exilic message of Jer. 29 can be applied to us in a more direct way, and “The City” could have “The Host Country” implication. By keeping his theological focus consistent at the central core of the Gospel, Keller helped everyone, regardless of their denominational background.

Is it just “less filling and tastes great”? On the contrary, this is the most costly encounter for my 40 years walk as a Christian. As I told you before, I didn’t listen to Keller until last year. I got started in July 06 because I was wrestling with how to communicate with the church’s kids. (The first generation Christians were great, they knew that they were sinners, and so I understand grace. But their kids were growing up in the church, being nice kids all the time, and they don’t see themselves as “sinners” – the may be intellectually agree with the doctrine, but not functionally/experientially in their lives). Keller’s lecture “preaching to believers and unbelievers” about the third way gave me some direction for it.

But then disaster struck. My brother-in-law got arrested and thrown in jail with charge of child-abuse. His family was shredded apart by Child Protective Services. The mother is in one end, each of the children is in different place. His older daughter is with us; his younger son is diagnosed with brain-damage and was placed in a group home. He is facing a life-in-prison sentence if convicted.

My wife is completely devastated. She couldn’t eat, couldn’t functioned. And it was very strange because she is not even closed to her brother. Then as I listened to more of Keller, I realized that our idols were being unmasked. My wife’s main thing was control, and when that was taken away, she’s undone: God, what’s the point of a good man following you and you fail to protect them? (Her brother has always been a good man, mortgage agents, no criminal record, no smoking, drinking, gambling, fighting - not even a traffics ticket in all his life). My idol was comfort, and therefore I didn’t really want to get involved with the situation. After all, it’s wasn’t my family, and if the man committed the crime, he deseseves it, right? (That was the acceptable logic for the religious leaders like me).

But besides unmasking our idolatry, what is the relevance of the Gospel in our situation, (and more importantly in any other situations)? As pastors, we often know how to pat our answers with “Trust in the Lord, the Gospel will transform you!” But in practicality, we have no idea of “How?” As I turned to Keller and listened to how he guided his NYC church deal with the aftermath of Sep. 11, I learned how to apply the balm of the Gospel into my own souls. We stepped up and battled Child Protective Services to have custody of our brain-damaged nephew; we stood by the mother in her long battle trying to get her kids back; we mortgaged our house to help the dad with the legal fee. And all of this was done according to what we have learned about the Gospel from Keller: not to earn any merit before God, but because we want to be like Him. The Gospel also gave us so much liberation to know that even if we failed in our efforts, our standing before God will never be in jeopardy. For our righteousness is because of what Jesus had done, and not because of us. (This is the stuff that filled my journal on http://www.xanga.com/i12know for the last year anyway)

The beauty of grace is that we know that even our suffering won’t bring about any positive end results a few years from now (our brother may ends up in prison row, our nephew may ends up like another Terri Schiavo, my family iis getting in debt, etc.) we would still experience lots of joy and grace and glory living out the Gospel anyway. If that is truly “less filling and taste great”, praise be to God!

May blessing be on you as you consider the implication of what Keller have done to the people of God outside of the PCA so far…