This panel discussion led by D. A. Carson features a deep dive into theological issues and the role of the church in society. Speakers include notable figures like Tim Keller and Mark Dever, discussing topics from understanding sin in a postmodern context to practical ecclesiology and community engagement. The conversation also touches on effective pastoral practices and the broader implications of gospel teachings in contemporary settings.
Male: If you haven’t read or seen the video series The Holiness of God, I really encourage you to do that. I’m sure many of you have. It is outstanding, because if we don’t understand.… It’s when we’re in the presence of a holy God that all this starts falling into place. There are many others out there. Tim Keller.
Don Carson: Yeah, Tim Keller. I don’t know anybody in this country who is better at getting across what sin is to postmodern biblical illiterates than Tim Keller. He works, first of all, out of the basis of idolatry rather than out of the basis of law. It comes down to fundamental issues that are similar.
He has seen as much genuine transformation amongst twentieth-century secularizing urbanites as anybody in the country. He has become a dear friend. We might not see eye-to-eye on everything, but he certainly understands the difference between law and gospel in a broadly reformed context. Tim Keller is at Redeemer Presbyterian in Manhattan.
Mark Dever. The place to go is 9marks.org. He is at Capitol Hill Baptist, and he has done a lot of good work in this area. He is very keen on the significance of right thinking, godly, biblically informed ecclesiology. He offers a six-month boot camp on ecclesiology. Some of it is sort of exclusively Baptistic, but 95 or 98 percent of it is the sort of things almost any gospel church could latch on to and very keen to get what the church really is worked out in people’s lives and how they operate and live within the church.
He has two volumes out: The Message of the New Testament and The Message of the Old Testament. It’s one sermon on each biblical book. That becomes a way of helping you to think through how the whole Bible is put together, because he has enough biblical theology and historical theology into all of this that he is helping you to see how ultimately it really does end up on Jesus. Do you see?
It’s 66 chapters across those two volumes, and they’re worth giving away, widely distributing them. They’re sermons. They’re not sort of technical things for highbrows. These were sermons that were preached in the church, so they can be read by virtually any parishioner anywhere who can read.
There are others who are less well known who are nevertheless doing wonderful jobs in all kinds of places. Mike Bullmore is a young guy who needs to be watched at CrossWay Community Church in southern Wisconsin. I do love that brother. In terms of their corporate worship and thinking through what goes on in a church and the freedom of the gospel but the seriousness and the joy of it all.… He is just a young guy (45). Well, not quite as young as some that I.… But on the other hand …
Male: You can pinch my cheeks later.
Don: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. I’ll give a nice little pat on the head. He is certainly someone to watch. I’ve never heard Ryan, so I can’t even comment about him, but Mike is certainly someone to watch in the future. All of his sermons for the last 10 years will be downloadable on the Gospel Coalition website in about three weeks. They’re all free.
There’s another chap who is Presbyterian (EPC), Sandy Willson, in Memphis, Tennessee, from another background as well. I have to tell you about that church. It’s a pre-Civil War church, so it goes way, way back to the early 1800s. It came out of sort of the white South, but it has turned around in all kinds of fronts. I mean, it is doing really good work and reaching out in the city.
Memphis perhaps has the worst school system in the country. Last year, 25 percent of all schoolchildren had interactions with the police. Twenty-five percent! The vast majority of people in this church (which is several thousand) actually send their kids to private schools and the like. They don’t have anything to do with the school system. Sandy became concerned about this as a gospel issue. “How do you live in this world?”
He went to the head of the school board (an African-American woman) and said, “Look. You have to know most of our families don’t even use the system here, but what can we do to help?” She looked at him, and she said, “Do you love us?” Out of this then came a commitment by this one church to adopt a school. I don’t know how many kids were in the school. A couple thousand? Something like that.
They started off by (I mean, they didn’t have much money in the school) painting, making sure everything was in good repair. They just looked after that. Every time there was a PTA meeting (Parent Teacher Association), the church threw a barbecue on the school grounds, which immediately quadrupled the number of people who were showing up at PTA meetings.
Then they eventually invested 385 of their own people to do one-on-one tutoring in reading, writing, and arithmetic with the kids in this school as an ongoing commitment. This was not a one-shot deal. This is now year two or year three. Now they’ve conscripted a whole bunch of other churches in Memphis, churches that are too small to adopt a whole school. Several churches are banding together to adopt another school.
They’re tackling the school system. This is not because these guys are so committed to social justice that they’ve forgotten the gospel. These are gospel churches through and through and through, but out of the overflow of lives that want to be lived under the lordship of Christ, they are looking around and saying, “What can we do for Christ’s sake to Christ’s glory for the sake of the cross?” Do you see? He is worth listening to. He is not one of these fire and brimstone types.
Even to listen to John Piper and Tim Keller one after the other, you realize the issue is not style. You could not find two more diverse preachers in terms of style. One is intense, and the other one is, “Well, I guess so. I’ve found the balance. I think I’d probably put it this way.” Yet they’re both extremely compelling in their own styles. Sandy is a low-key kind of guy, but he has just thought through about absolutely everything. He is another one to watch.
A lot of these ministries are available on the Web or elsewhere increasingly. As I said, after about three weeks, you’ll be able to get access to almost all of them for free on one site (the Gospel Coalition website) and get back to their ministries and their sites through that one grid in due course.
Male: Good stuff. Their resources are available on our website as well (desertspringschurch.org). There’s a resource page that has links to these ministries and some of the things you’ve heard been mentioned just now.
