Evangelicals try to win back New England

Slate had a piece today by Ruth Graham about efforts to plant evangelical churches in New England, which Graham calls “the most proudly and profoundly secular region in America.” She opens with the following anecdote:

The pastor of a small church in rural Vermont is not the kind of guy you’d expect to speak with a slow North Carolina drawl. But Lyandon Warren felt a calling to New England ever since he heard a speaker in his college Christian Studies program explain that less than 3 percent of the region’s population is evangelical Christians. By his denomination’s definition, those numbers indicate an “unreached people group”—a whole population without a viable Christian community. “My heart was opened,” he says. “To be a foot-soldier on that battleground is a joy and a privilege.”

In 2006, Warren moved to Vermont to open a new Baptist church in a town whose last church had closed its doors the year before due to lack of attendance. His congregation, which meets in the closed church’s old white clapboard building, grew slowly but steadily, and in early September, Warren opened up a second new church in a nearby town. Similar churches have sprung up throughout the region: New England has become a mission field, and there are seeds of a revival sprouting.

In her story, Graham links to this post by Collin Hansen about a regional Gospel Coalition conference held in Boston, and one of the people connected to this, Presbyterian minister Stephen Um, is a major figure in Graham’s story.

Roots of the New Calvinism

From where I sit, the most dynamic trend in evangelicalism today is the re-energized Reformed movement. I ran across an old post by Justin Taylor that brings together some resources analyzing the movement. They’re all by people inside the movement (Mark Dever, Trevin Wax, and Collin Hansen), but they’re valuable nonetheless.

As Joel noted some time ago, Molly Worthen is doing some valuable analysis from outside the movement.

Calvinism. Hip hop. Moody Bible Institute.

Even putting two of those terms together might have been difficult in the past.  But it’s the 21st century now.

Reach Records’ Unashamed tour will be making a stop at Moody in a couple of weeks, and I will probably be going with a group from church.  Should be fun!

What Augustine can offer to Reformed theology today

John Piper writes that Augustine offers a corrective when Reformed theology becomes joyless:

And we need to rediscover Augustine’s peculiar slant—a very biblical slant—on grace as the free gift of sovereign joy in God that frees us from the bondage of sin. We need to rethink our Reformed doctrine of salvation so that every limb and every branch in the tree is coursing with the sap of Augustinian delight. We need to make plain that total depravity is not just badness, but blindness to beauty and deadness to joy; and unconditional election means that the completeness of our joy in Jesus was planned for us before we ever existed; and that limited atonement is the assurance that indestructible joy in God is infallibly secured for us by the blood of the covenant; and irresistible grace is the commitment and power of God’s love to make sure we don’t hold on to suicidal pleasures, and to set us free by the sovereign power of superior delights; and that the perseverance of the saints is the almighty work of God to keep us, through all affliction and suffering, for an inheritance of pleasures at God’s right hand forever.

Source: The Legacy of Sovereign Joy: God’s Triumphant Grace in the Lives of Augustine, Luther, and Calvin, p. 73.  You can download the book for free in PDF format.

A theological critique of the New Calvinist movement

Recently, Kevin DeYoung linked to an article in The Christian Century about the New Calvinist movement.  In the article, Western Theological Seminary Professor J. Todd Billings evaluates the movement’s faithfulness to the broader Reformed tradition.  He believes that “The New Calvinists, with their God-centered message and their focus on dogmatic theology, make a robust contribution to contemporary ecclesial theological conversation.”  As DeYoung notes, Billings briefly highlights some of the ways that the movement has crossed racial boundaries (click here for my thoughts on this development):

Moreover, the New Calvinism displays considerable diversity. African-American rapper Curtis “Voice” Allen is known for his distinctively Calvinist lyrics (“I been exposed to bright lights, the doctrines of grace, I’m elected, imputed perfected . . . Cuz nothing can stop his plan, and as far as the east is from the west more than time zones, man”). The New Calvinists admire not only white Puritans but “black Puritan” voices like Lemuel Haynes and Anthony Carter, who gives an African-American take on the themes of the New Calvinism in On Being Black and Reformed.

New Calvinism and holy hip hop

I just finished listening to a 9Marks Audio installment where Mark Dever interview Christian hip hop artists shai linne and Voice.  I’ve heard shai linne’s “Atonement Q&A” before; it’s something like a rap catechism that’s part of his album “The Atonement.”  Shai and Voice are both theologically Reformed, and they view their work as a way to build up the church with “lyrical theology.”  If you’re interested in their explanation of the purpose of their work, the best 15 minutes to listen to are from about 40 minutes in through about 55 minutes in.  They see their artistry as God’s redemption of a sinful medium to be used for his glory.  It’s not intended to replace preaching or congregational music, but instead to do what rap does very effectively: communicate a worldview.  Dever has become a fan and actually says that no other form of music matches the “theological density” of shai linne’s music.

In the last 30 years or so, there have been a lot of Christian “knock-offs” of secular music, clothing, etc.  I think that the “holy hip hop” movement is more original and edifying, although I don’t know for sure yet.  For one opinion, check out Thabiti Anyabwile’s short explanation here.

Adding to the list of great things about the New Calvinist movement is that it’s building relationships between black and white Christians, something that the church desperately needs to do.  The unity of believers across racial lines has long been one of John Piper’s passions, and Desiring God Ministries cooperated with Christian rap laber Reach Records and artist Lecrae last summer.  Thabiti Anyabwile seems to be a leading figure in New Calvinist circles, part of the core group for Together for the Gospel and speaking at one of Dever’s conferences.  Dever’s interview and commendation of shai linne and Voice fits right in with this exciting trend.

I now want to check out two albums from shai: The Atonement and Storiez (a children’s album).

Calvinism in China

Andrew Brown, blogging at the Guardian’s website, writes about his conversation with Rev. Dr. May Tan, who seems to be a Chinese Christian from Singapore.  She explained that Reformed Christianity is growing rapidly in China among university students, which contrasts with the growth of Pentecostalism among the poor of Africa and Latin America.

And in China, the place where Calvinism is spreading fastest is the elite universities, fuelled by prodigies of learning and translation.Wang Xiaochao, a philosopher at one of the Beijing universities, has translated the two major works of St Augustine, the Confessions and the City of God, into Chinese directly from Latin. Gradually all the major works of the first centuries of the Christian tradition are being translated directly from the original languages into Chinese.

Dr. Tan believes that the future of the Chinese church is in the house churches, which “have youth, future, and money,” and that the majority of university students may become Christian.  Interestingly enough, one of the attractions to Reformed theology was that it dealt with resistance to a hostile government.  She even argues that the Communist China’s assault on Confucian traditions had an unintended consequence:

And, though the communists stigmatised Christianity as a foreign religion, they also and still more thoroughly smashed up the traditional religions of China: “The communist, socialist critique of traditional religion, and of Confucianism has been effective”, she says: “The youngsters think it is very cool to be Christian. Communism has removed all the obstacles for them to come to Christianity.”

Brown seemed to overstate a couple things in his post.  When he says that “Calvinism is shrinking in western Europe and North America,” he doesn’t seem to be taking into account the Reformed revival in the US.  Also, his statement that “Calvinists despise pentecostalists” might be generally true (is “despise” too strong a word?), but it’s not true of this new wave of Calvinists in the US (see here and here for examples).

Overstatements or not, his conversation with Dr. Tan adds another vantage point from which to view the dynamics of global Christianity.

Paul Tripp: the American dream compromises Christian community

I’m excited that the New Calvinists are challenging the American-evangelical synthesis that blesses the assumptions of American life with religious approval.  At the Desiring God blog, Paul Tripp states it about as strongly and as well as it can be said:

I read a book on stress a few years back, and the author made a side comment that I thought was so insightful. He said that the highest value of materialistic western culture is not possessing. It’s actually acquiring.

If you’re a go-getter you never stop. And so the guy who is lavishly successful doesn’t quit, because there are greater levels of success. “My house could be bigger, I could drive better cars, I could have more power, I could have more money.”…

You can’t fit God’s dream (if I can use that language) for his church inside of the American dream and have it work. It’s a radically different lifestyle. It just won’t squeeze into the available spaces of the time and energy that’s left over.

And I’m as much seduced by that as anybody. We have sold our four-bedroom house because our kids are gone, and we’ve bought a loft in Chinatown, Philadelphia. And we’re amazed at how simple our life has become. We’re grieving over how we let our life get so complicated.

Last year, for example, I put almost $2,500 worth of gas in my car. This year, I’ve put $159 in the first quarter. It’s because we’re walking places, and that slows our life down, and we’re near the people in our church because we’re within walking distance of the church. And we’ve had so many natural encounters with people because of that.

We’re living in a much smaller place. We got rid of most of our stuff. As we went through it, we laughed about how we just collected stuff. All that stuff has to be maintained. It grabs your heart, it grabs your schedule, it grabs your time. It becomes a source of worry and concern and need to pay.

So we’ve just been confronted with how all of those things that aren’t evil in themselves become the complications of life that keep us away from the kind of community that we need in order to hold on to our identity.

Let me be clear about a couple of things.  First, I’m a beneficiary of the American dream and of the incredible opportunity that America offers to so many of its citizens.  I’m not suggesting a political overhaul that would deny that to others, but rather that we as Christians may want to reevaluate how living a fully American life might compromise the higher priority of living a fully Christian life.  Second, as in so many things, I’m much more in the thinking and talking phase of this than in the acting phase, so I don’t want to pretend that I’ve got it figured out.  I did think that this was worth sharing, though.

I think that the New Calvinism seems to share some of the same concerns that the Emerging church movement does.   The best example of this that I know is Mark Driscoll’s ties to the Emerging leaders early in his career, before they parted ways.  Adherents of both seek a more authentic commitment to God and the Christian life than they find in the American evangelical mainstream.  What’s so exciting about the New Calvinism, in my opinion, is that it addresses the concerns of the Emerging movement in a biblically faithful and confident way, in contrast to some in the Emerging movement’s uncomfortableness with traditional doctrines.  As I’ve said before, I’m watching the New Calvinist movement with great excitement.

If you want to see what I’ve written on the New Calvinist movement, check here for of my posts with this tag.

If you want to see my analysis of the Emerging movement from the perspective of challenging the American-evangelical synthesis, you can see it here.

Kevin DeYoung on the New Calvinism

DeYoung has a concise take on the appeal of the New Calvinism (spoiler: he doesn’t think it’s really new).  Here are three especially good paragraphs:

The influence of Calvinism is growing because its God is transcendent and its theology is true. In a day when “be better” moralism passes for preaching, self-help banality passes for counseling, and “Jesus is my boyfriend” music passes for worship in some churches, more and more people are finding comfort in a God who is anything but comfortable. The paradox of Calvinism is that we feel better by feeling worse about ourselves, we do more for God by seeing how He’s done everything for us, and we give love away more freely when we discover that we have been saved by free grace….

What draws people to Reformed theology is the belief that God is the center of the universe and we are not, that we are worse sinners than we imagine and God is a greater Savior than we ever thought possible, that the Lord is our righteousness and the Lord alone is our boast.

The attraction of the New Calvinism is not Calvin, but the God Calvin saw—not some new fad, but something old with new life blowing through it from the Spirit of God.

Hat tip: Andy Naselli (and as he said, read DeYoung’s whole post)

The Resurgence loves the environment. Cool.

Jonathan Dodson at the Resurgence has a list of practical ways to integrate ourselves into our communities and share the gospel with our neighbors.  I’ve thought about some of these practices before as a way to escape the individualism of modern society, but not much (if at all) in the context of evangelism.  One that I’ve already been trying for environmental and personal reasons is this one:

Walk, Don’t Drive

If you live in a walkable area, make a practice of getting out and walking around your neighborhood, apartment complex, or campus. Instead of driving to the mailbox or convenience store, walk to get mail or groceries. Be deliberate in your walk. Say hello to people you don’t know. Strike up conversations. Attract attention by walking the dog, carrying along a 6-pack to share, bringing the kids. Make friends. Get out of your house! Last night I spent an hour outside gardening with my family. We had good conversations with about four of our neighbors. Take interest in your neighbors. Ask questions. Engage. Pray as you go. Save some gas, the planet, and some people.

I hadn’t thought of it as a way to talk about the gospel with those around me too.  If you have a couple of minutes, check out the whole list.

Hat tip: Justin Taylor