A New Ministry: SBTS in the Fall

In God’s great mercy I will be joining the faculty of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the fall. Here’s the story in the Towers Online.

Here’s what I said when I shared this news with our church family at Baptist Church of the Redeemer:

Psalm 139:16, “Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.”

Psalm 139:16 tells us that every day of our lives is written in God’s book before they come to pass. God is sovereign over every day of our lives.

Acts 17:26, “And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place . . .”

Acts 17:26 is describing nations, and it states that God has determined how long a nation will exist and what its boundaries will be. I think the same is true of individuals: God has determined how long we will live on this earth and what the boundaries of our dwelling place will be.

Ephesians 2:10, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”

Ephesians 2:10 tells us that God has prepared beforehand good works for us to do.

2 Timothy 2:4, “No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him.”

2 Timothy 2:4 tells us that Christian ministers are like soldiers. Soldiers receive orders, and they obey, seeking to please their superiors.

The circumstances of our lives have made clear that new orders have been given to me.

It has been a high privilege to serve Southwestern Seminary for the past 5 years. The students have been eager to learn, encouraging to me, and what a joy to see them enter the harvest! The administration has been generous to me, always showing a sincere pastoral love, and God blessed me with dear friends in my faculty colleagues.

It has also been an unexpected, unlooked for joy and privilege to serve at Baptist Church of the Redeemer for the last three years. I never intended to get swept up in a church plant, but God blessed us immensely through this group of families who wanted to plant a church. We are so grateful that we were drawn into this endeavor. We have never been happier at a church than we are at Redeemer. We have learned and continue to learn from our brothers and sisters, and I am spurred on by their godliness and devotion. What a privilege to serve such a people!

I would be a fool to choose to leave.

But it has not ultimately come down to my choice. Months of thinking over and praying through this possibility have made me certain that if The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary invited me to join the faculty, it would be the call of God to leave Houston and move to Louisville to labor in a different section of the Lord’s vineyard.

God has opened this door and has called us to this new ministry. We are sad to leave home, family in Texas, and most of all our church, but at the same time we are excited about what the Lord has for us.

Lord willing, I will take up the post of Associate Professor of Biblical Theology at Southern in the Fall of 2008. I am humbled and honored to have the opportunity to serve in this role. May the Lord prosper his Word!

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On a logistical note, if anyone is looking to buy a house in southwest Houston, let’s talk!

Twelve Challenges Churches Face, by Mark Dever

The Bible is clear, but that doesn’t mean that it is easy to rightly interpret it. Interpreting the Bible rightly is one of the hardest things in the world to do. And if interpretation is difficult, proclamation is even harder. We move beyond the meaning of the points made in the text to questions like: What is the best way to proclaim the gospel from this text? What are relevant contemporary illustrations of this text?

One of the most helpful things to have when thinking about preaching a text is a sermon done by someone you trust to get the message of the text right, to surprise you with applications or illustrations that stimulate your thinking, and to show you strategies for undermining unbelief you haven’t thought of yourself. Because reading this kind of thing is so helpful, I am very thankful that Crossway is publishing Mark Dever’s sermons.

Anyone trying to get their head around how to do expository preaching should read Twelve Challenges Churches Face. Anyone preaching through 1 Corinthians will want to add this book to the things used in preparation to preach. Anyone teaching a Sunday School class on 1 Corinthians could study this book along with their “teacher’s curriculum.” Anyone leading a Bible Study on 1 Corinthians will gain from this book. Anyone who has decided to study 1 Corinthians over the course of a month or a semester or for the whole year will be helped by this book.

Have I mentioned that I like this book and am glad to recommend it?

The Church: Not Another Interest Group

How can evangelicals best influence the United States of America?

I submit that there is a better answer than the one that would be given by either Chris Matthews or Rush Limbaugh.

The greatest influence evangelical Christians can have upon American society and politics will not come by lobbying Washington, getting out the vote, or doing anything overtly political. The greatest influence evangelical Christians can have upon American society and politics will come through investing themselves in a local church where the gospel is proclaimed, where the Scriptures are faithfully taught, where people understand what regeneration is, and where church discipline draws a clear line between those who live as though they have been born again and those who do not (and when people don’t repent of sin, they live as though they are unregenerate).

At the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in 2006, I presented a paper entitled “The Church Militant and Her Warfare: We Are Not Another Interest Group.” That piece has now appeared in the latest issue of The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology.

My article can be accessed here, and the table of contents of the current issue, on the theme of “Church and State” can be accessed here.

Dr. Russell D. Moore writes:

The SBJT, edited by Southern Baptist theologian Stephen J. Wellum, is an excellent resource for pastors and church leaders. . . . You can (and should!) subscribe here.

You can read Dr. Moore’s essay here.

Restoring Integrity in Baptist Churches

It’s great to see this volume on Restoring Integrity in Baptist Churches appear.

Dr. Mohler writes:

“The loss of a biblical vision of the local church–indeed the collapse of biblical ecclesiology in many congregations–is the greatest threat to Baptists. Restoring Integrity in Baptist Churces is a book urgently needed and well timed. The writers of this book are some of the brightest theologians and scholars in Baptist life today, and they are deeply committed to the recovery of integrity in Baptist life and in Baptist churches. We have needed this book for a long time.”

May the Lord use this book for the beauty of his bride!

The Church of England Ordained More Women Than Men Last Year

Informative story here from David Kotter at the CBMW blog.

You might also check out Kotter’s post where he summarizes Wayne Grudem’s reflections on his experience in the gender debate over the last 20 years.

I commend this blog to your attention, and may the Lord grant us grace to glorify him as we enjoy his gift of gender!

reThink: Decide For Yourself, Is Student Ministry Working?

My friend Randy Stinson sent me this book my Steve Wright and Chris Graves. I’ve only thumbed through it, but it looks to me like this is a very important book. If you’ve wondered how best to shepherd your own children, or how the church should shepherd its young people, you’ll want to consider this book.

There is a spectrum of opinion on the question of youth ministry today. At the one end are the churches that take the kids completely away from their parents and the rest of the church and have their own student worship services. These folks conduct themselves as though they might say to the parents, “Don’t try this youth ministry thing at home. Leave it to us. We’re the professionals.”

At the other end of the spectrum are those “family integrated” churches who speak as though God gave the family as the primary means of advancing the gospel. I’m all for the family, and I am against age-segregation in churches, against the idea that the youth will benefit from their own worship service (while the old fuddyduds do their own thing in “big church”), and I am most certainly for encouraging parents, and especially fathers, to disciple their kids and lead their families in family worship. But I would say that the Church, rather than the family, is the means God has given to us for advancing the gospel.

In this regard, reThink seems to offer a helpfully balancing perspective. I appreciated in particular three subtitles that I saw in reThink as I thumbed through: “Championing the Family,” “Championing the Church,” and “Co-Championing the Family and the Church.”

If you’re wondering what this looks like, you’ll want to read this book. Here’s the table of contents:

reSearch: Gauging Student Ministry Today

reValue: Shifting the Values of Student Ministry

reModel: A Biblical Framework for Student Ministry

reShape: Beginning a Transition

reSource: Locking Arms with Parents

reDiscover: Spiritual Formation

reGroup: Facing and Overcoming Obstacles

reVision: A New Perspective

Thanks to Steve Wright and Chris Graves for helping us think through these issues, and may the Lord bless our efforts to transmit the faith to the coming generations.

Trevin Wax Interviews N. T. Wright

From an email that I’m grateful to have had forwarded to me:

I thought you guys might be interested in the latest Said at Southern interview. Trevin Wax has recorded an interview with NT Wright for the Said at Southern podcast. You can listen to the Mp3 Interview or read the full transcript. Topics covered include Wright’s views on justification, the new perspective on Paul, and penal substitution. He also discusses his critics and John Piper’s new book The Future of Justification.

Spiritual Formation and the Internet: Making Good Use of the Mammon of Unrighteousness

The paper that I presented last week at ETS is here.

May the Lord be pleased to help us leverage all we have–including the internet–for his glory in the church and in Christ Jesus.

Local Church Seminar Audio Available

Baptist Church of the Redeemer recently hosted a seminar on The Local Church: God’s Program for Evangelism and Discipleship.

Thanks to the labors of some good brothers, the audio is available for the two sessions:

Session I: What Is The Church?

Session II: How Does the Church Militant Wage Her War?

The Future of Justification: John Piper’s Response to N. T. Wright

N. T. Wright is perhaps the most influential clergyman in the United Kingdom, and John Piper is perhaps even more influential here in the United States.

And the two have crossed swords.

This might be the most significant pastoral interchange of our time.

In the Acknowledgments Piper relates that he sent the first draft of the book to Wright, and that Wright sent back an 11,000 word response! Piper’s The Future of Justification gives us Piper’s response to N. T. Wright’s views on justification, and Piper recounts that the book is twice as long as it was before he received Wright’s interaction.

This is an important book. We can thank John Piper for teaching us how to engage in controversy, and we can thank Crossway for publishing a series of books that contend for the heart of the gospel: John Piper, The Future of Justification, Steve Jeffery, Michael Ovey, and Andrew Sach, Pierced for Our Transgressions, and Brian Vickers, Jesus’ Blood and Righteousness.

Last night Piper gave a great address here at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. The address made me want to read this book closely, but even more it made me want to read the Greek New Testament closely. May this book so inspire you, too.