EFCA -- What Is Our Culture?

Thought: It seems to me that the corporate culture of the EFCA is changing. I'm not a life-long EFCA-er, so I say this as a recent (c. 1998) arrival. I gather that the traditional corporate culture of the EFCA was congregationalist (almost ultra), dispensationalist, non-Pentecostal, 3-point Arminian, and Scandanavian. But it doesn't seem to me that the EFCA is quite that anymore. It seems to me that the congregationalist has become modified by the practice of multiple-elder leadership (flowing from influences by Gene Getz, Alexander Strauch, Presbyterian writers, and others). We've become much less dispensationalist and more covenantal (or some jumble of the two systems), with the exception of the Texas district. We're a lot less non-Pentecostal than we used to be, due to a continuationist view of the gifts taught at TEDS over recent years. We're a lot more Calvinist than Arminian -- or at least, a lot more Calvinist than many of our Arminian brethren wish we were! And it seems clear to me that the EFCA isn't culturally Scandanavian. That's one price of success and expansion -- growth brings variety.

Has our EFCA corporate culture settled down for awhile, or are we still changing at a rapid rate?

Biblical Theology, Debate and Balance

As is the case in any generation of Christians, there are issues that arise and trigger significant debate. In recent years, we've seen the Emergent Church/postmodernism debate, the Open Theism debate, a renewed "Battle for the Bible" to quote the late Dr. Harold Lindsell, the debate over the seeker-sensitive church model, and the list goes on. While we are not quite at the stage where a modern day Martin Luther is being hauled off to the Wartburg to escape Duke George and Pope Leo, the battle over theology is again getting quite intense.

It should be no surprise that this would happen. Scripture is replete with warnings about the last days and deception. The Lord Jesus Himself asked the question, "When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?" (Luke 18:8). The picture painted by the Apostle Paul in 2 Timothy is severe, marking out especially for condemnation those who "have a form of godliness, but deny its power." I think it is safe to say that, while Revelation speaks of a multitude that no man can number, this number - as vast as it apparently will be - is but a remnant of those who could have been saved. I believe Scripture also makes it clear that the Lord expects those who name Him as Savior to be faithful to His Word. "If you love Me, keep my commandments."

As of yet, I haven't said a whole lot about the debate in the Evangelical Free Church about our doctrinal statement, especially in reference to eschatology. But what little I have said has been pretty stark. In essence, I would have preferred it to be left as it was. I am thankful that the most recent change left premillennialism in there, but as has been pointed out, the argument isn't over. Both sides are keeping their powder dry for a future revisiting of the issue.

The EFCA has historically been a premillennial, largely dispensational fellowship. A change was made back in the 1970s to reflect other understandings of the word "imminence" in a historic premillennial sense. The changes that some wanted to introduce appeared to me to allow for amillennialism and other eschatological ideas. All of this rather confirms a long-standing belief of mine. I seldom see doctrinal statements strengthened by changes. Almost always, they get watered down. The EFCA was formed to stand for something. There are numerous other fellowships out there having amillennial views on eschatology. It's hard for me to understand or appreciate people coming in from the outside and then agitating for change. I would assume they knew of our fellowship's stance on eschatology before they became members. There are plenty of amillennial churches out there. Why cause a ruckus with us?

I know also that there are probably people who have always been E-Free, but their theological views have altered with time. I'll address that in a moment.

Lest I get chastised for it later, I should qualify the above with the following. I am not suggesting that one's stance on eschatology should be a test of fellowship unless the physical return of Jesus to earth is denied. I have friends who are amillennial whom I respect very much and their core theology is solid, despite my disagreement on that particular matter. What I AM suggesting is that we ought not try to force a fellowship to abandon its doctrinal statement or distinctives because we might happen to hold a different view. If it gets that bad, it's better to find a fellowship more in line with what you think. And most certainly, a pastor should not obtain or maintain credentials under false conditions. I am sorry to say that I have seen that happen in the past within my own circle of acquaintance (thankfully in another denomination, not the E-Free).

And that leads me to comment briefly on that issue, because it's bothered me for a long time. In many denominations, a pastor must reaffirm the doctrinal position of his denomination to remain in good standing with his credentials. I have seen it on more than one occasion that the pastor actually no longer holds to some of the doctrinal distinctives of his fellowship, but when it's renewal time, "nudge nudge..wink wink..say no more, say no more." This is dishonest and lacking in integrity. If you can't sign on to your fellowship's doctrinal statement, it's time to move on. But no, it seems some would rather engage in what amounts to a surreptitious campaign to change the doctrine of the fellowship in question while supposedly pledging to uphold it. Scripture says "let your yes be yes and your no be no."

In other cases, I think we've all seen rather high profile "pastors" (Bishop Spong anyone?) who plainly deny core orthodoxy, yet their fellowships do nothing to discipline or defrock them. I've seen in the past where Robert Schuller was questioned over some of the ridiculous statements he's made in his books, but all he'd do would be to wave a Reformed Church doctrinal statement at the interviewer or the camera and insist that's what he believed. He never would answer the questions.

Until recently, we have been spared (at least to my knowledge) battles over serious doctrinal error in the E-Free, that is until the Emergent Church nonsense began having an impact on us. As time marches on to its denouement, the struggle over fealty to the Lord and to Scripture will only grow more pronounced. I would like to see us throw out all the best sellers we're buying with the latest pop theology, and get back to the time tested, proven Word of God. A biblical theology is a balanced theology, and is the best guarantee for the church having the impact on the culture.

Is Millennialism Trivial?

Respected Baptist pastor Mark Dever recently said was that any church group that requires premillennialism is sinning. Check out http://expositorythoughts.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/devers-big-statement/

My first thought is to ask is when Mark Dever will start allowing infant baptism in his Baptist church? It turns out we all have important secondary issues, don't we?

Being accused of movement-wide sin bugs me as an EFCA pastor, especially when what I'm being accused of isn't a sin, and when the idea behind it -- the idea that millennial views have no practical impact on Christian spirituality or world missions -- is so wrongheaded. Anyone who says that either has a hidden agenda, or is not familiar enough with the historical or psychological affects of eschatology in Christian history.

Millennial beliefs do have practical consequences. The apostle Paul thought eschatology was so important that he excommunicated three men for being nascent preterists. Alexander, Hymenaeus, and Philetus were three men who taught that the general resurrection had already taken place (2 Timothy 2:18). Paul compared this loony teaching to infectious gangrene (v. 17).

Their eschatological doctrines reflected defective faith, bad consciences, and they wrecked othe rpeople's faith (1 Timothy 1:19). Eschatological error was so important in this case that Paul turned them over to Satan, so that they would learn not to blaspheme (v. 20). Paul obviously didn't think that eschatology was trivial.

So-called "partial" preterism, which teaches that most of the events described in the book of Revelation happened at the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, maintains its partialness only by brute force of will. Partial preterists, like R.C. Sproul, still maintain a future return of Christ, and a future resurrection of the just and the unjust. This keeps the partial preterist inside the boundaries of Christian orthodoxy. But the interpretive method of partial preterism, that leads it to say that everything described in Revelation 4-19 already happened back in 70 AD. should be applied to Revelation 19-22 for the sake of consistency.

But the informed partial preterist knows that "Danger Lies In That direction". So they rein up their apocalyptic horses up short at Revelation 19. But there's no good logical reason that they should, given their method of interpretation and their hostility to premillennialism. This is what I mean by mere force of will. Their decision to stop being preterists at Revelation 19 is arbitrary.

Postmillenialism teaches us that it is our task to politically and culturally take over the world! This teaching results because the postmillennialist takes all of the Old Testament predictions of a militarily victorious Israel in the future, and applies them to the Christian Church in the present. Postmillennialism is a member of the amillennial "family", with optimism regarding the end of days replacing pessimism, and a denial of the future existence of Antichrist replacing an affirmation of the same. If amillennialism didn't exist, postmillennialism wouldn't exist either. Amillennialism is the gateway drug to postmillennialism.

Under the influence of postmillennialism, the Christian Church pours millions of dollars and millions of man-hours into a fruitless crusade to Christianize the current world order. Postmillennialism would turn the EFCA away from world missions, and bog us down in theonomist militancy. We would be taught that we will turn the darkness to light, in spite of the fact that the unregenerate mind cannot obey the laws of God (Romans 8:6-9), and Satan rules the unregenerate world (1 John 5:18-19, Ephesians 2:1-2).

Postmillennialism leads you down a dead-end street. Eventually postmillennial Christians are forced to water down what the kingdom of God is supposed to look like, so that lame claims can be made that the kingdom has come, sort of. (In one case I was told that Jonas Salk discovering the vaccine for polio was the Millennium).

Please! We should not defame God's great and glorious future work this way. And we shouldn't confuse the gifts of common grace, of which Jonas Salk's discovery was a wonderful manifestation, with the Millennial kingdom!

The Christ who told Peter, "Put down your sword" is replaced with an avenging Christ clothed in garments stained purple with the blood of His enemies. This is the fruit postmillennialism eventually brings you. It regresses the church back to a European-style merger of church and state, which is everything the Free Church stood against!

Does it matter how we define the kingdom of God, and what we say it will look like when it comes, or by what means it will come? If we say that, yes, these questions are important, then let us not inconsistently preach that millennial views have no vital, direct affect on the EFCA!

These are good and compelling reasons to maintain premillennialism as a standard of doctrine and fellowship. Premillennialism teaches us the right view of the kingdom of God; and as a result, it molds our doctrine of the church's nature, authority, and mission. It represents the Reformation method of interpretation, the historical-grammatical method, but with this one crucial difference -- it is the historical-grammatical method applied to prophecy, an application that Luther and Calvin were unwilling to make.

Premillennialism teaches the right view of the relationship between Church and State, and keeps us from kingdom-on-earth dreams. What its critics deride as pre-mil pessimism is, in reality, reality, and it is they who are seduced by utopian dreams, which are not good things.

Edit August 10: As I mention below in the commbox, I've changed my opinion back to a more moderately toned version of my prior view, that we should retain premillennialism in the EFCA. I think the harm that preterism and postmillennialism themselves do outweigh the "we don't even include Calvinism/Arminianism" principle I used a couple of years ago at conference while at the mic. In fact, I am concerned that the EFCA not be flooded with Reformed guys who would have the unstated goal of making the EFCA partisanly Reformed in its theology. Opening up the door to amillennialism, postmillennialism, and preterism would do this, and I fear we would lose our character.

Prophets & Priests, Church & Mission

We had opportunity during our recent vacation to visit with a Christian family that is deeply involved with mission outreach to a very particular ethnic/religious group in the Washington D.C. area. They sponsor and lead a special meeting in their house, and seek to involve religiously-observant members of their community in Bible study, seeking to lead them to faith in Jesus Christ.

Their methods are stripped of all local-church trappings. Indeed, they are quite cautious about the use of certain particular words, even Biblical words such as "conversion", because of their target audience's historic psychological aversions. It was very interesting to observe this family's adherence to lifestyle distinctives that would make them seem like true insiders to their target group.

It seems to me that the local EFCA church automatically becomes stagnant when this sort of local mission work is abandoned or neglected. Indeed, many of our EFCA churches dawdle in this very state of mission stagnation, due to the lack of mission work. It's one thing to enthusiastically support world missions, in the sense of financially supporting foreign missionaries, or even going out on short-term trips (all good things, and both of which should be more done than we do). But it is quite another matter to plunge into the colors and sounds of someone else's turf, not just with the Gospel, but with one's self carrying the Gospel.

A church with no local mission work is like Solomon's temple with no synagogues; or like priests with no prophets. The priests rightly concerned themselves with the apparatus of running the tabernacle correctly. Are the poles in good order? Are the walls going up properly? Are there holes in the fabric that need mending? Is the altar grate scrubbed and ready? Is this lamb really blemish-free? And so on. Everyone is expected to come inward to the temple. A fixed geographical location, with stated times of service and an administrative system to keep it running. This is as it should be.

God also thought there needed to be prophets as well. The prophets, for the most part, went forth. They took the Word out to the localities. The prophets traveled by foot, or on horseback. They went to Saul gathering his father's mules, they went to David's throne room, they went (reluctantly) to Nineveh. They stood on the marshy bank of the Jordan, in the open air, or literally in the Jordan. Later, Jesus used the prophet pattern by ordaining seventy workers whom He sent out to every town and village in Israel. He even compared them to the prophets, as far as reward for persecution may apply. These were men on mission projects. They, unlike the priests, were outward bound.

But the prophets were tethered to the temple, even when the temple was in disrepair, because the temple was of divine origin. The outward-bounding prophets called for fidelity to the law of Moses, which taught God's laws about the temple. In theory, the prophets were obliged to return thrice yearly for the mandated festivals. The prophets had their sins ceremonially covered on Yom Kippur by the work of the high priest, in the Holy of Holies.

There are believers involved in mission work who become so focused upon it that they detach themselves altogether from the local church, and this is sin. They value the flexibility of mission work, the lightness of administrative oversight, the quickness of decision-making, the lack of burdensome overhead costs. And these are good things. You can see in the book of Acts how differently Paul's mission teams worked, compared to how the settled churches in Antioch or Ephesus must have worked, with their elder and deacon teams, and their established pastors exercising authority (see 1-2 Timothy, Titus). And yet Paul and his team were commissioned by Antioch (Acts 13). They were accountable, and reported back to Antioch. They still worshiped on the Lord's Day, baptised converts, and partook of the Lord's Table --- both of which are local-church-oriented ordinances.

Herein lies the mistake of the seeker-focused church, in that it tries to turn Sunday church into a mission project. Or of rebellios groups who wreck the local church in their rebellion against local-church rules, pastoral authority, and diaconal oversight, as happened in the case of at least one EFCA church of my own acquaintance. "Mission" became a hypocritical excuse for revolt against a system of pastoral and elder leadership that Christ Himself set up.

Church and mission in the EFCA need to exist symbiotically with each other, with church holding the upper hand. A church without local mission work is in a state of stagnation and unhealthy self-absorption. But a mission team with no anchors down in a specific local church has to be considered renegade, even if they do reach people for Christ, Mission groups like this are vulnerable to the sin of the personality cult, and doctrinal deviations due to their lack of iron sharpening iron. Christ never said that He would build His mission team. He said He would build His church. Paul in Romans 10 said that those who go in mission must be sent. Sent by the local church. Baptism publicly identifies you as a disciple of Christ. The bread and the wine state that we are one bread and one body. We are a temple and a collection of prophets. We are a church and a mission. We are a denomination and a movement -- not just the former, or just the latter.