Turpin // Shyness at Church // Precious Life

This thing with the Turpins in California is really sad.
The level of misguided, self-deceived wickedness and cruelty that parents can reach, in the name of strict parenting is truly awful.  I'm not sure if there is a religious aspect - were they doing this with the intent to raise their children in the discipline and admonition of the Lord? 
How easily the anger of a parent slips into cruel words and actions, into turning against the child instead of loving him and thus shepherding them away from their sin.


On shyness:
I've seen it in myself and in church members a lot.
The middle of the article on conference going got a bit tedious, but the last paragraph is a real thought provoker...


Kevin DeYoung on life being precious - good pro-life argument here.

Autopsy of a Deceased Church

Autopsy of a Deceased Church: 12 Ways to Keep Yours Alive by Thom S. Rainer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A depressing book about churches so dysfunctional that they die.
A family member asked me to review it - I hadn't heard of it before.

The premise is not very attractive or marketable, but as a pastor of 13 years there is plenty of experiential truth in here.

Rainer’s main theme seems to be the need for the church to serve and to look like the community around it. The dying church serves its own members instead of those outside who need to hear the gospel for the first time.

An assumption made throughout: change or die. This one is tricky. If you take this in the modern evolutionary sense or in the Christian marketing world of Lifeway (the author is its president and CEO) it is false. Society is changing and the church has to change with the times to stay relevant. I detest this view.

But there is a theological sense in which this cliché is true. Change or die? John Owen said it best: “Be killing sin or sin will be killing you.” Churches like individual believers have sinful defects remaining that must be attacked with a holy warfare. Sanctification is the mortification of sin by the grace of God. We either kill the sinful parts of ourselves (or keep trying to) or we die spiritually.

We need to face this ugly fact, though perhaps not in the way Rainer gives it to us. Lifeway is a statistics machine, and Rainer seems to measure false versus true hope by the statistics, instead of by God’s ability to revive churches out of the blue. I appreciate the defibrillating jolt he gives dying churches with the premise of the book, but more on the solutions and hope side would have been better.



View all my reviews

The Calvinistic Concept of Culture

The Calvinistic Concept of Culture by Henry R. Van Til

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Writing in 1959, Van Til’s basic thesis is that culture is not some add-on to our Christianity. We will necessarily live out our faith somehow. Culture is not a high-brow, snobbish pursuit only for the upper classes in opera houses. All our work and recreation and customs and lifestyle expectations shape the culture we live in. “The church is weak in its approach to the problem of culture, often uncritically accepting the worldly pattern, because it does not appreciate the full implications of its creed for life in its fullness” (198).

Van Til avoids the Pollyanna cultural optimist approach and the pessimistic “hell-in-a-hand-basket” view, too. He brings some needed corrective even to Kuyper’s view of common grace without rejecting it. He does the same with Schilder, who I have not read. He is decidedly opposed to the radical two-kingdom approach: there is not one realm of life covered by common grace and another realm (the church) covered by saving grace. This “leads to a tolerant neutralism and makes men indifferent to the demands of the Christian warfare” (238). Anyone who advocates and emphasizes that view needs to deal with this book.

Minor weaknesses:
1. The chapters felt a bit disjointed at points
2. Van Til’s overview of Augustine and Calvin felt at times like he was reading his views of culture onto them.
3. The style of writing is often over the head of the typical layman – more abstract and academic than was necessary or profitable. A challenging and helpful read!



View all my reviews