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The Church is Bigger Than You Think

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Welcome to the first issue of 2008. We believe this year will be an especially important year for Christian Education and Publications and the Presbyterian Church in America. We ended 2007 with the topic of the church. The church and the kingdom will be the main themes for 2008 because we want to reflect the mind and heart of our triune God, and both the church and the kingdom are the objects of His deepest affections and concerns.

It becomes more and more obvious that people are deficient in understanding the church and the kingdom; hence, they have not embraced nor understood them as clearly as God would have. As a result, from a human standpoint, the church is taking a licking. People, lacking a biblical view of both, are saying things that should not be said about either. There is apparent confusion about how the local church fits into the universal church and then how the universal church, including the local, relates to and is part of the kingdom.

When we must from time to time critique the church, realizing that we as professing Christians are the church, we must remember that the church is the bride of Christ. It is His body, made up of many members. I think we should be very careful of how and what we say about the church that would suggest it is non-essential, out of date, or that our relation to the church is an elective. Using the marriage analogy of the church as the Bible does, there are times when the bride may need some counseling or help in the marriage; but there is never a time when the bride is to be abandoned or put down.

As Reformed, Bible believing Christians, we have a high view of the church. It is the place where we can demonstrate our love for God and our neighbor as ourselves more clearly than with any other institution. The church plays a key role in our spiritual lives, and how the church functions will be determined by how Christians are discipled. If that process does not include a “twenty-four/seven concept” of the Christian life and “doing all to the glory of God,” then the church will not have served the kingdom in a positive manner.

CEP is committed to assisting our local churches to be equipped to serve the kingdom. Through our training and resources, we focus on the triune God and how we best serve His purpose to this generation. The PCA’s concept of being a missional church focuses on the same, but how effective we are in that mission requires seeing the church holistically and not as separate parts. The lead article by Dr. Roy Taylor, Stated Clerk of the PCA, is a summary of a seminar from our 2006 Women in the Church conference. The article underscores the significance of our understanding the connection of the local churches. Of course, there is the sense in which all churches committed to the triune God, the Scriptures as God’s authoritative Word, the saving work of Christ on the cross and His Lordship seen in the lives of His people are connected; and we must look for opportunities to express that broader connection. However, there is a unique way in which our understanding of the church links us together with those of like mind doctrinally and missionally. It is simply not true that we can do ministry better independently. We are interdependent, and we need one another.

The truth is that you cannot serve the kingdom without a deep love for and involvement in the church; because it is to the church that God has given the assignment to disciple, train, and equip people for ministry.

CEP will be sponsoring a discipleship conference November 13-15, 2008 in Atlanta – Making Visible God’s Invisible Kingdom. It will feature speakers such as Chuck Colson, Christian Smith, myself, and a host of others. The conference is designed for those who want to make visible God’s invisible kingdom. We will keep that event before you, here, on our website, and by other means of publicity.

Our commitment to the ministries mentioned in this issue is to help and encourage local churches, and thus the PCA, to demonstrate a kingdom world and life view; to provide training and resources to equip people, young and old, to know how to interact with the ideologies of the world in order to be able to give a credible reason for our hope and faith in Christ. Our challenge is for the church to regain its God assigned position of helping its people know how to think God’s thoughts after Him and apply them to daily life. We have turned so many of those things over to other institutions that the church is “hovering on the brink of irrelevance,” and its influence is being continually marginalized, neutralized, and compromised. We must make every moment count, as we serve the King.

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Our prayer is that this issue will be helpful and challenging to you, first to pray for your local church and the PCA as a whole more intentionally and then that you will determine in no area of your life will you fail to serve His purpose to this generation. Pray that our denomination will have a kingdom perspective that will make a difference.

What is Happening Around the PCA? Making Kingdom Disciples of Men

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What is Happening in The PCA



Interview with Charles Dunahoo: Making Kingdom Disciples of Men

Article originally part of “Get in the Game”
a periodic email communication from CEP
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January/February 2008 Vol. 4 No.1


Introductory Comments by Gary Yagel. Men are made for mission. That mission, in Genesis 1:27-28, was to exercise dominion over the earth for its true King. Now, redeemed men are restored to the same mission, but must accomplish it in a fallen world. We are to seek first the kingdom of God, expanding the rule of Christ into every sphere of our lives, culture, and world. If men’s ministry is to be effective, we must challenge men with a vision big enough to resonate with their internal drive to accomplish a great mission. That vision is to live out the values of God’s kingdom-to make the invisible kingdom of God visible, everywhere we go, in every sphere of our lives, over every square inch of planet earth.

Charles Dunahoo has challenged the church to recover a proper view of discipleship, i.e. discipleship centered in an understanding of the Kingdom of God and our role in that kingdom.

GITG: Charles, you believe the calling of the church is to make kingdom disciples. What do you mean by that?

Charles: To be a kingdom disciple means to consciously think like a Christian and live with a holistic world and life view, which is oriented to the kingdom of God, seven days a week. It involves more than Bible study and prayer; it is doing all things to the glory of God.

GITG: What key elements of kingdom theology has the church failed to grasp?

Charles: The relationship between the church and the kingdom– we have confused the church’s role in general and this impacts individuals about their role in the church and kingdom. For example, in my view, the church errs, when it directly speaks, as an institution, on political issues or establishes its own institutionalized mercy ministries. The church’s main focus should be making kingdom disciples and doing so in a way that equips them or kingdom living in all of life.

GITG: But doesn’t the church today need to call its members into a greater commitment to mercy ministry?

Charles: Absolutely. in fact that is the other side of the failure. We are failing to call our members to be kingdom disciples who are committed as individuals to living as kingdom members, which includes engaging in mercy ministry. The church must make disciples who are holistic in their thinking about seeking first the kingdom. Mercy ministry belongs with gospel ministry. The church should call Christ-followers to use their gifts to set up orphanages, build hospitals, begin crisis pregnancy centers or to address human needs issues. The church should not directly build or administer such institutions but rather serve as the catalyst encouraging Christians to do those things.

GITG: Get In the Game is about men’s ministry. How would seeing himself as a kingdom disciple change the way a man goes about his everyday life?

Charles: He sees his relationship to Christ in a holistic way. He is committed to serving the Lord in whatever he does. He is committed to doing all he does for the glory of God. In my book I mention the story of Mr. Pump, the haberdasher in A. A. Milne’s novel, Two People. Mr. Pump has one top hat for church on Sunday, and another hat to wear the rest of the week. He never confuses the two, because in his mind his spiritual life and secular life are completely separate. But a kingdom disciple understands that we don’t have two hats. His motivation for leading his business is the glory of God and he operates his business in a way that is consistent with kingdom values set forth in God’s Word.

GITG: How does a man seeing himself as a kingdom disciple engage that man’s heart?

Charles: He learns to love the things Christ loves. For example, Christ loves his bride, the church. One of my problems with the emerging church is its tendency to de-emphasize the church. Kingdom disciples are committed to the church, because it is the bride Christ loves. The King also has a heart for widows and orphans. This requires that we too have heart for them, as we follow his example.

GITG: How can the church do a better job of producing kingdom disciples?

Charles: In the discipleship process we need to think like Christians in order to see the big view.. We need to be intentional about teaching our members how to think Biblically about issues, helping them learn how to connect the dots. Men like to see the big picture. They like to know the reason why they should do something. We must equip our people to take every thought captive to Christ and apply them to our daily lives.


GITG: What else would you say to church leaders in men’s ministry about making kingdom disciples?

Charles: We must be gospel centered in all that we do, but we must remember that the gospel is the good news of the coming kingdom. Mark tells us, “Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, ‘The time has come,’ he said, ‘The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the gospel'” (Mark 1:14-15). There is a lot of emphasis today on spiritual formation, but as important as that is, we tend to have a man-centered approach in that it is about me and my spiritual life and development. In reality it is about God and his will. The kingdom perspective is God-centered. Men want significance and they respond to challenges. The kingdom perspective challenges everyone from lawyers to grocery store owners to teachers and mechanics to view their vocations as service for the king.

Asking the Right Questions About Youth Ministry, Part 1

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I recently heard a veteran PCA youth pastor say that only 6% of the current generation of students claim to be evangelical Christians, compared to 65% of the Baby Boomer generation. I then read an online study conducted by LifeWay Research (www.lifeway.com) which found that two-thirds of adults between the ages of 18-22 who were involved in church as high school students will stop attending church for at least a year, with only 35% of those returning to regular church attendance. Also, researchers such as George Barna, Walt Mueller, and Christian Smith are finding a disconnect between what evangelical teens profess to believe and the moral choices they are making, especially in the area of sexual activity.

It is hard to know what to make of these statistics, but I am convinced that they should lead those of us involved in youth ministry to start asking each other honest, hard questions about student ministry in the PCA. Jamie Lambert, youth director at Covenant Presbyterian in Fayetteville, Georgia, pointed out to me that in order to find the right answer, you have to ask the right question. I believe this axiom can be rightly applied to the trends above with the question being: What is the theological foundation that empowers youth ministry?

My concern is that without a clearly-developed theological foundation, we a re building our youth programs on sinking sand. For example, there was a time when those of us in youth ministry thought the answers to the spiritual problems facing teenagers could be found by getting them to attend youth events. So we spent money on technology and marketing, wore chicken suits at youth group, and gave away t-shirts at every event. Success was determined by how many students showed up. We then read that we needed to be “relational” to be successful. Borrowing ideas from Young Life, we started “meeting students on their turf.” Then someone informed us that we needed to be relevant, so we learned the idioms of the day, grew goatees, listened to popular music, and added a few profanities to our vocabulary. Doug Fields came along and told us to have a “Purpose Driven Youth Ministry,” so we all wrote carefully-crafted purpose statements. Now the Emerging Church folks are pushing us to be missional, authentic, and to rediscover the ancient (for more on this topic see A New Kind of Youth Ministry by Chris Folmsbee). So we are burning candles in our youth rooms, working to build community in our youth groups, and talking about social injustices around the world. Yet no matter which of the latest methods we try, the statistics continue to grow more alarming.

This is why I believe the first question of youth ministry is one of theological foundation. I am convinced that the particular model of ministry that a church uses is secondary to the theological foundation on which the model is built. I will suggest in the next issue of Equip that God’s covenant relationship with humanity is the proper theological foundation for youth ministry. However, I am afraid that all too often the theological implications of that relationship have little to do with the planning of our youth ministry calendars.

Is youth ministry a lost cause in the PCA? Absolutely not. There are hundreds of churches doing great work around the country, as well as a number of quality youth ministry resources within the Reformed community. For a list of these refer to the youth ministry section of the CE&P website www.pcacep.org. However, for many of us it is time to deconstruct much of what we have been doing in youth ministry in order to build a proper theological foundation. Somehow the cart (the ministry model) has gotten ahead of the horse (the theological foundation). Getting those back in the proper order is, I believe, a process that will begin when we start asking the right question. What is the theological foundation that empowers youth ministry?

Let’s Not Lose the Basics

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The great football coach, Weeb Eubank, had a tradition at the beginning of every season. He would take all the new and seasoned players, sit them down, and then begin his lecture. He would take a football, stick it in their faces, and say to them, “Gentlemen, this is a football! Get to know it all over again.” He would go on to explain that unless they remembered the basics of the game of football, they could not win.

The same is true of the church. Unless we keep going back to the basics of who we are and what we believe, we will not continue to grow in the truth, for the truth starts with the basics.

When I was teaching in South Africa, I would tell the students the same thing every year. No matter what aspect of Christian work you go into, when you start in your new position always start by going back to the basics. If the people a l ready know them and can explain them, you are not wasting your time because we all need to keep going over them. If the people don’t know the basics, then you can only succeed, because to not teach the basics to your people means that you will have no foundation on which to build.

We are part of a denomination with many great traditions, but it is not our traditions which make up our foundation – it is the Bible! Our people have either grown up in our churches, or they have come from other churches and traditions where the basics may or may not have been emphasized. We are witnessing, even in the PCA, a weakening of our understanding of the Bible’s doctrine of the church. Because of this, some of our churches are accepting the teachings and practices of the Emergent Church Movement without even realizing what they are doing. We must never allow our churches to lose our understanding of the Bible or our traditions. In the day that happens, we will be like all the other churches who have stepped onto that slippery slope, moving further and further away from the truth, unaware of what is happening.

Here is my suggestion for pastors as well as teachers. Presume nothing! Find out exactly where your people are in their belief system. If they can articulate the basics, then you can move on. I emphasize articulate because if you simply ask people if they believe the Bible is the Word of God or that Jesus was born of a virgin, most of them will say yes. But if you ask them to explain and prove from the Bible these truths, you might be shocked by how little they really know. Read the lead article and ask your people if they understand the issue Charles is bringing out. Did you know that 60% of those that are won to the cults are won out of born again, Bible teaching churches? How can this be? This statistic occurs because we have wrongly presumed that our people truly know the basics.

THE BASICS: Teach them again for the very first time!

After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty- Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religon

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Editor’s note: In the book Making Kingdom Disciples: a New Framework, I included a chapter in part two on the importance of understanding the different generations. I was recently asked again why that is an important thing to know and do. I want to answer that good question by reviewing a new book which highlights why I believe that to be important.

Here is another book that pastors and other church leaders should read, especially in light of the above question. I know you feel you already have more than enough to read, which no doubt is true. However, because leaders are readers, I do not apologize for encouraging you to read. While pleasure reading is important, it is also crucial that we read strategically as well. This is a strategic read.

Over the years we have reviewed a number of Robert Wuthnow’s books. He is professor of sociology at Princeton University, as well as the director of the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton. I value his books, research, and challenging ideas.

This book will become a sequel to Christian Smith’s book, Soul Searching, on the American teenager that we have used, recommended, and sold from CE&P. After the Baby Boomer’s deals with young adults ages 21-45. While we have been placing much emphasis on rising generations and senior citizens, two very critical segments of our population, we have now realized that unless we understand the place of “buster and older millennial” generations, we may be missing the ones who will indeed shape religion in America. The church will run the risk of missing the young adult generation if it fails to understand it. In some situations, this is already the case.

Understanding the different generations is a part of understanding our world. You cannot read a book like Soul Searching (Christian Smith) or After the Baby Boomers (Wuthnow) and conclude that we can ignore what they are saying. Wuthnow explains what is happening as we experience in America an estimated six million less churchgoers today than in the past. We have also been aware of how the younger generations of adults are often taking a different route in dealing with spirituality and religion than previous generations. Wuthnow explains why and how that is the case, and he challenges us as to what it means for organized religion. His research in this book will make clear the impact of the internet, as well as how young adults can talk about “virtual” church.

After the Baby Boomers contains 11 chapters on various aspects of understanding the 21- 45 year olds. The appendix goes to great lengths to explain to the reader how the research was done, which is an education in itself. Wuthnow says in the preface that for our churches and synagogues, mosques and temples to exist, resources and people are needed. “These places of worship exist only to the extent that they are able to adapt to their environments. They are products of opportunity structures within those environments.” His challenge: “The fact that baby boomers are rapidly moving into the ranks of the elderly means that it is essential to understand how the next wave of Americans are thinking and behaving. The current generation of young adults cannot be understood historically through connections to the civil rights movement or the Vietnam War the way baby boomers are.”

This young adult generation numbers over 100 million and makes up one third of the American population. Wuthnow describes this age category as young adults who are taking longer to reach adulthood and fraught with uncertainties such as job security and national security. Add to those concerns information technology, immigration, and globalization and you easily see how important it is to understand these young adults. This not only refers to areas such as mentioned above, but also to their struggles with how to relate or not relate to things such as spirituality and religion. At one time these were one and the same but not for this generation. How they describe or define those things have direct implications on their thoughts and views of the church. You will be both fascinated and challenged by what you read in this book; and believe me, it must be read and understood.

There is no doubt that the future rests with these young adults. But as Wuthnow points out, you cannot conclude that they are always alike. Things such as marriage, children, and background make a big difference in their outlook, as does independency, no marriage, no children, no roots. Wuthnow says, “The future of American religion is in the hands of the adults now in their twenties and thirties…They are not as easily defined as other generations.”

We definitely need to spend more time studying and thinking about the role of these young adults in our society in general. One of many examples will highlight this. “The popular literature also makes arguments about ’emerging’ congregations that are somehow the wave of the future because they follow a new paradigm or hark back to models from the first century of Christianity.” They are much more oriented to “experience as opposed to creeds or novel liturgical styles.” Wuthnow says in another example, “a growing number of young adults do not marry, marry later, or do not stay married. Those are the realities of life that pose worries during young adulthood, affect one’s self-identity, and cause people to seek emotional support.” They are taking longer to establish themselves and settle into their communities, and they are tending to be dependent on their parents for a longer period of time.

The younger adults are characterized as tinkerers. “A tinkerer puts together a life from whatever skills, ideas, and resources that are readily at hand.” Within the tinkering process, the married young adults are given to church shopping. The unmarrieds are given to church hopping-some of this and some of that.

This study was funded both by the Lilly and Pew Foundations. Basically it concluded that unless those of us in church leadership roles understand these young adults, we are going to wake-up one morning and say, where is our church? Where are our ministries? Where are our missionaries?

Chapter 1 gives an overall synopsis of the book, but you have to read the other ten chapters to see the data which supports these conclusions. This is a must read and source of study for the church. We cannot bury our heads in the sand or fail to grapple with the issues impacting this young adult population. My challenge to you as you read this book is to ask yourself, “How can we not take time to understand them?”

Keeping the Church Front and Center

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In this issue of Equip to Disciple, the focus in this lead article is the church. To develop this theme we will refer to two main writings by two familiar names to us: one is a chapter by J.I. Packer and the other a forthcoming book by John R.W. Stott. As we expound this theme, our intent is not only to make some general observations but also some specific ones which we hope will encourage readers to take the time to read Stott’s latest book, The Living Church: Convictions of a Lifelong Pastor.


The subject of the church has been on our hearts lately for several reasons. It appears that for some, the church is not viewed as the bride of Christ and given the place it deserves within the Christian faith. The famous saying of John Calvin, “He who has God for his father, will have the church for his mother,” is not taken very seriously nor is the strategic place of the church in God’s design. This is especially true today. We are seeing and hearing more and more negatives regarding the church. Things such as the church is an institution vs. a movement, or the church rep resents a paradigm that doesn’t apply to today’s concept of Christianity, or the church lacks authenticity and integrity. George Gallup Jr. and George Barna are serious when they warn that the church may be only one generation from extinction. Of course, they are referring to the organized church as we know it.

Bruce Hindmarsh states in the opening chapter of Evangelical Ecclesiology: Reality or Illusion? (John G. Stackhouse editor), “When one thinks about the evangelicals and what they hold dear, one would be forgiven for not thinking immediately of the church. Indeed one might even suggest, given the history of schism among evangelicals, the ‘evangelical ecclesiology’ is an oxymoron.” Therefore, he suggests that maybe the church is a non-ecclesial form of religion and evangelicalism is merely a sociological movement. I have been particularly aware of evangelicalism’s attempt to be transdenominational and international- to be inclusive but at the same time not seeing the role and place of the church in that area.

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J. I. Packer in the book Ancient & Postmodern Christianity wrote a chapter entitled “A Stunted Ecclesiology.” He writes, “I am making a case for genuine churchliness of today’s evangelical church, a churchliness that is directly in line with that of the churches that separated from Rome at the time of the Reformation. It is a case, I believe, that urgently needs to be made, both because this recovered churchliness is a significant fact that is often overlooked and because much of evangelicalism is in a state of cognitive dissonance about it, affirming churchliness yet retaining an ethos and mindset that seems to observers to deny it.” After stating five reasons why evangelicals have a stunted ecclesiology, he concluded, “My hope is that in this new century the churchliness of evangelicalism will become evident. As my analysis shows, the difficulty here is more practical than theoretical. Evangelical ecclesiology is not stunted, but evangelical churchliness as a mindset and an ethos is, and without rethinking and adjustment this will continue, so that the credibility of the evangelical claim to mainstream status as church will remain suspect and perhaps be forfeited….We wait and see.”

For space reasons, I will mention three of the five reasons for his conclusion regarding the church’s stuntedness.
1. The church is too centered on salvation. While Packer states the extreme importance of fully grasping the gospel, the focus of the church has been so much directed in that area that it has led to a human centered theologizing which sets human needs center stage and makes the Trinity’s role simply one of saving individuals. He says “church life is thought out and set forth in terms of furthering people’s salvation rather than of worshiping and glorifying God.”

2. The parachurch-centeredness is virtually an evangelical trademark. While maintaining that parachurch ministries are needed for the kingdom, they tend to take away from or divert resources and people from the church to the parachurch direction. He writes, “Sadly, by the same narrowing process that was described above, these agencies of God’s kingdom draw interest, prayer, enthusiasm, and money away from the wider-ranging, slower-moving, less glamorous realities of congregational life, so that the parachurch body comes to have pride of place in supporters’ affections and in effect to be their church.”

3. The independent church syndrome. Packer says this matches the above but goes further than the parachurch centeredness. While we thank God for the churches, Packer says, “A problem lurks here. Independent congregations are such through declining connectional bonds with other congregations- such bonds, I mean, as synods, councils, superintendent ministers, bishops, and court systems provide.” (Packer is an Anglican by church affiliation).

Our experience would concur with the above characteristics listed by Packer, and we are not encouraged because such characteristics are proliferating. As we highlight some of John Stott’s thoughts and comments on the church in his latest book, we are reminded of his statements in other articles that the churches of the West are tired and in need of a rest. Of course, the implication is that the church cannot afford to be tired and in need of a rest. I believe there is a clear correlation between a low view of the church and a lack of understanding of the Kingdom of God and how the church fits into and relates to the broader kingdom, although there are so many ways we could go with this if space allowed. Much of evangelical Christianity has not appreciated nor gotten that relationship straight in the past, and much of today’s broad emerging church paradigm doesn’t have a clear biblical theological model for the church and its place within the kingdom. Hence, the church is not taken with the seriousness that I believe one should take with the bride of Christ or His body.

While I have made it a point over the years to read everything I can by Stott, this little book on the church is outstanding. Even though I could have wished for the reader’s sake that he would have dealt more with the kingdom in connection with the church, this is an excellent book. I was privileged to read the galley proofs before going to press. I could not put it down. Here is a churchman in his late 80’s, actually 86 years of age, writing about his observations and challenges regarding the church. The opening statement of the pre face regarding the Church of England equally applies to the Reformed and Presbyterian churches, especially to the Presbyterian Church in America. Quoting the Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie, Stott writes, “If the current evangelical renewal in the Church of England is to have a lasting impact, then there must be more explicit attention given to the doctrine of the church.” Stott mentions the increased number of books focusing on the theme that the church is “out of tune with contemporary culture and that unless it comes to terms with change, it faces extinction. “Of course he said the church will prevail. When the paradigm in western culture began to shift from modernism to post modernism, the shift had a definite impact on the church.

Stott is right to suggest that how the shift plays out requires much discernment, especially for those identified with the church. He wisely counsels, “It seems to me that the traditional and emerging churches need to listen to one another, with a view to learning from one another. “The traditional church is a reference to the church as we have generally known it over the years. The emerging church is a general statement referring to those who are attempting to develop new paradigms for the church following much of postmodern philosophy.

He further reminds us to remember that while culture goes through constant change, Scripture is unchangeable. Then he states that the purpose of this book “is to bring together a number of characteristics of what I will call an authentic or living church, whether it calls itself ’emerging’ or not.”