Today the church can be more connected to culture than ever, in part because of emergent technologies. Services are streamed on social media. Sermon series are tied to the latest trend in TV and film. YouTube has become a trusted source for information and entertainment. You have a reaction to this. You may love it. You may hate it. You may be somewhere in between.
This familiar passage has been proclaimed in just about every leadership course in every seminary in the United States. It is a foundational text in the field of “servant leadership.” Pastors across the world know this verse and know how different our calling is to lead than the calling of the gentiles. So many of us desire to live out the “not so with you” by which Jesus shapes his followers’ vision of what it means for us to be pastors in His Church. Any yet, so often, it is so with us. Christian leadership is like the Gentiles, becoming a lording-over leadership that leaves a trail of pain and trauma in its wake.
It’s time for evangelicals to update the way we talk about false teaching and false teachers. Specifically, we need to reevaluate our criteria for labeling false teachers as such.
The recent podcast series The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill has evangelicals revisiting the drama (and trauma) of pastor Mark Driscoll’s ministry in Seattle. As a former Driscoll fanboy, this series has given me a lot to process. For instance, I’ve been wondering why some are quick to identify someone like Joel Osteen as a false teacher but hesitant to do so with Mark Driscoll. Some evangelicals are, it seems to me, fairly quick to assign the label “false teacher” to those with whom we disagree. Recently I’ve seen this label casually re-applied to Rachel Held Evans (God rest her), and this in juxtaposition to Mark Driscoll. This grieved me, and not because I feel personally aligned with Evans. In many ways I don’t. But this also made me ask: What are our criteria for assigning the label “false teacher”? Are these criteria biblical? Are we applying them consistently?
As I finished listening to “Who Killed Mars Hill?” the first episode of the podcast series The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill produced by Christianity Today and hosted by Mike Cosper, I sat in stunned silence trying to process and metabolize all the lessons and questions raised by the episode. I, like many, am familiar with the Mars Hill story—its impressive rise to a church of more than 15,000 in the notoriously secular city of Seattle under Mark Driscoll and its meteoric fall in 2014. I lived in Seattle during the church’s heyday. I was also a college student when the evangelical ecclesial landscape in the United States was shaped by complex movements like the emergent church and the young, restless, and Reformed. I remember the way Mars Hill was held up as an exemplar of a kind of church and brand of ‘conservative’ Christianity that could succeed and reach America’s cities. I also remember how many (not all) detractors and critics displayed a certain amount of schadenfreude (pleasure or self-satisfaction from the troubles or misfortunes of another) when Mars Hill collapsed as if the demise of the church represented a definitive verdict on Driscoll’s brand of Christianity.
For two years pressure from controversies about Critical Race Theory and investigations about sexual abuse built anticipation around the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. Finally, in mid-June, the largest gathering of Southern Baptists in decades convened in Nashville. Here’s the upshot of what happened: Southern Baptists took their stand quite clearly on the side of historic evangelical theological and missionary conviction instead of on the side of an emerging hard-edged and suspicious vision of conservatism, one which I believe represents a nascent neo-fundamentalism.
I have a book problem. Most pastor-theologians I know have a book problem too. The problem goes something like this: a thorny issue hits the congregation and as the pastor, I have a responsibility to educate myself on the issue. Especially because of my background in research and writing, my first impulse is to buy books - lots of books - on whatever issue is at hand.
Critical Race Theory is sweeping the nation, and the Southern Baptist Convention is no exception. In fact, many in the SBC seem to be terrified that CRT is the current which will lead to a liberal drift in the convention. So, the question stands, is there a theological drift happening in the SBC? Yes. But perhaps not in the way you suppose.
In 2004 I took a graduate-level seminar on Jonathan Edwards with Douglas Sweeney—then professor of American Church History at Trinity Evangelical School. Sweeney pointed out that in Edwards’ day, the most important theologians of the colonies were pastors. This was largely because theologians, like poets and artists, don’t typically produce a saleable product sufficient to provide a living. Theologians (then and now) need patrons—people or institutions that are willing to support them in their craft.
The pastor theologian would do well to see that the knowledge and wisdom that they possess is not for their soul alone. To be sure, there is a great joy and satisfaction in the work of research and writing. But the joyful quest of the individual is not the driver of ecclesial theology. Its very name denotes otherwise. Ecclesial theology is concerned with imparting truth, beauty, and care to the church. This bears itself both in the immediate, local church context of the theologian, be that in their preaching, counseling, or otherwise, as well as the broader context of the movement towards the universal church, in their writing or teaching. The pastor theologian is a servant of the bride.
It’s always seemed strange to me that reading good literary works—poetry, drama, short stories, novels—is something that needs defending, particularly among Christians. After all, most people seem to understand (even if we don’t make time to do it often) why we visit art galleries, attend symphonies, and go to plays.
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