Reflecting on 1966

These are questions/issues arising in my mind following on from yesterday's postings on MLJ's call to evangelical unity in 1966.

No, I don't ask these questions glibly. No, they're not solely aimed at the anglicans, if you think about it they're as pertinent for indies and FIECers as well, especially 6, 7 and 8. No, I don't think I have the answers 'sorted' yet myself. Yes, I think we cannot avoid these issues. And yes, quite a lot is at stake in the answers we give.

1. Is it legitimate to stay within a denomination because it’s paper definitions are orthodox, even though the people we are therefore ‘in fellowship’ with in the denomination are clearly heterodox?

2. At what point does the ‘denominations are not churches’ argument break down? (i.e. does denominational affiliation equate to genuine fellowship).

3. At what point does denominational loyalty (‘visible’ or ‘institutional’ unity with a mixed range of confessions/theologies, often with those we are in serious disagreement with) impede loyalty/visible unity with other evangelicals (those who are confessionally most similar to us, those who we are confident we can call brothers and sisters).

4. Can we/should we plan to reform a denomination from ‘above’ (by full participation in its hierarchy) and will becoming accepted/welcomed to the ‘conversation’ necessarily mean compromise?

5. Can we/should we plan to reform a denomination from ‘below’ (by grassroots/congregation-level action)?

6. Is there such a thing as ‘guilt by association’? If yes, to what extent (when does association mean guilt?). If no, are there any limits to the associations we form and what defines these limits?

7. Over what is it legitimate for Christians to divide? Are there levels of division/fellowship and if so how do we define these?

8. What is our doctrine of the Church?

Right, I'm off to nail a copy of these to the doors of St Helen's Bishopsgate and Capitol Hill Baptist Church.

Schism and 1966

It is forty years since the sad rift between evangelicals was sparked by an address on evangelical unity by Dr Martin Lloyd-Jones. Today I’m blogging some of the more pertinent parts of his appeal, confident that they raise issues for us today, issues that the forty years of sad disunity ought not to obscure.

MLJ went on to make a compelling case that it is only evangelicals who can really be guilty of schism. Any emphasis added to a quote is mine.

‘…schism is a division among members of the true invisible church about matters which are not sufficiently important to justify division.’

‘So I argue that people who do not believe the essentials of the faith, the things that are essential to salvation, cannot be guilty of schism. They are not in the church.’

‘You and I are evangelicals. We are agreed about these essentials of the faith and yet we are divided from one another. We meet like this, I know, in an occasional conference, but we spend most of our time apart from one another, and joined to and united with people who deny and are opposed to these essential matters of salvation. We spend our time with them. We have our visible unity with them. Now, I say, that is sinful.’

‘I am arguing that for us to be divided – we who are agreed about everything that really matters – for us to be divided from one another in the main tenor of our lives and for the bulk of our time, is nothing but to be guilty of the sin of schism. And we really must face this most urgently.’

Evangelical Unity

It is forty years since the sad rift between evangelicals was sparked by an address on evangelical unity by Dr Martin Lloyd-Jones. Today I’m blogging some of the more pertinent parts of his appeal, confident that they raise issues for us today, issues that the forty years of sad disunity ought not to obscure.

One of the major themes within MLJ’s address was the nature of the Church herself. Here are some quotes (any emphasis added will be mine) on this very issue from the address (which quotes are by no means a comprehensive statement of his ecclesiology).

‘Are we content, as evangelicals, to go on being nothing but an evangelical wing of a church?[1]...Are we content to be an evangelical wing, making our protests, exerting our influence, hoping that we can gradually infiltrate so that others may come to see the wrongness of their ideas and the correctness of ours?’

‘The church, surely, is not a paper definition. I am sorry, I cannot accept the view that the church consists of articles or of a confession of faith. A church does not consist of the Thirty-Nine Articles. A church does not consist of the Westminster Confession of Faith. A church does not consist of the Savoy Declaration. A church consists of living people. You cannot have a church without living people. You can have a paper constitution with a majority in that church denying that very constitution. That is no longer a church as I see it … So I say we must come back and realize that this is our basic view of the Christian church, and that what we need, above all else at the present time, is a number of such churches, all in fellowship together, working together for the same ends and objects. They are one already in their views, in their faith, in their ideas, and they must not, as our general secretary so excellently put it, divide upon secondary, subsidiary, and non-essential matters.’

[1] It must be stressed that MLJ was referring to a ‘territorial, comprehensive, national church’ as was envisaged by the ecumenical movement, a church that would include the Roman Catholic Church. We must judge for ourselves whether the Dr’s comments apply also to the ‘ecumenical mix’ of modern day denominations.

It was forty years ago today...

On the 18th October 1966, Dr Martin Lloyd-Jones (see here and here for previous posts on MLJ) gave the opening address at the EA-organised Second National Assembly of Evangelicals. The context was that the First Assembly had set up a Commission to look into the ecumenical movement and attitudes amongst evangelicals towards a future United Church. The Commission had asked MLJ to speak on the subject of evangelical unity, knowing his views beforehand.

After MLJ’s address (which turned out to be an appeal for greater church-level unity between evangelicals, asking them to prize their own unity greater than their denominational affiliation) the Chairman, Rev. John Stott, stood up and expressed his disagreement with MLJ, based mainly on his fear that some younger evangelicals would secede from their denominations overnight in response to the Doctor’s address (there is still much debate over whether or not the Dr necessarily meant for evangelicals to leave their denominations, clearly that was the impression of some). What ensued was an increasingly deeply felt rift amongst evangelicals over the issue of unity and, especially, involvement in ‘mixed denominations’. What had been intended as an appeal for unity ended up sparking off a deep and long-lasting division. In particular Stott and MLJ took increasingly different attitudes towards the mainline denominations, with MLJ increasingly feeling he could no longer work with those who would compromise with the ecumenical movement, and Stott spearheading the 1967 Keele revolution in Anglican Evangelical church politics.

Not wishing to re-open old wounds (isn’t it great that in many ways the ecumenical movement has come to nothing since 1966?), but, because evaluation of the period has tended to evaluate Stott’s politics more favourably, I’m going to blog some of the highlights of MLJ’s address from 40 years ago. Although debate rages on as to what MLJ wanted evangelicals to do, and although undoubtedly part of his thinking was coloured by his own background, and whilst there is no doubt he made mistakes in the way he handled the crisis afterwards (as did Stott, as did Packer), I for one think the Doctor says some striking things in his appeal for unity. Many of his evaluations remain pertinent for today, and raise questions that evangelicals have yet to find adequate answers to. The sad events that ensued from his appeal must not be allowed to obscure these probing questions which demand our attention today as much as forty years ago.

First up then, a couple of quotes[1] (any emphasis added will be mine) about the state of evangelicalism with relation to issues of unity;

‘Can we deny the charge that we, as evangelical Christians, have been less interested in the question of church unity than anybody else?...Surely, with our view of scripture and with our knowledge and understanding of it, we, of all people, ought to be the first to preach the vital necessity of church unity; but we are the last to do so. Not only that, the position is that we are confused and divided among ourselves.’

‘The most pathetic thing of all, to me, is that our attitude towards the question of church union is always a negative one. You can be sure that every time you read the report of an annual assembly of any one of the branches of the Christian church in this country you will find that what evangelicals have been doing at these assemblies is make protests…We are always negative; we are always on the defensive…’

‘…and added to that is our silence in the light of things that have been happening round and about us. It is to me a tragedy that, as evangelicals, we have been silent several times this very year when certain things have taken place. Certain visits have been paid to certain places. And on many other issues we remain silent. It has been left to some eccentrics among evangelicals to make the protest, and we have said nothing.’

[1] All quotes come from ‘Evangelical Unity- An Appeal’ in D. M. Lloyd-Jones, Knowing the Times, (Carlisle: Banner of Truth, 1989) pp. 246-257.

1966 and all that

Following on from comments in a lecture this afternoon, some might find THIS an interesting read. It's my brief thoughts after reading the first volume of Dr D. M. Lloyd-Jones' biography by Iain Murray and offers an insight into something of the ministry and legacy of the man other than the controversy surrounding 1966.

Whilst on that subject, suffice to say I am of the opinion that Lloyd-Jones has been proved right in much of what he called for and warned against back then, even if the results of his disagreement with Stott were tragically damaging. And it is interesting to note that many of John Stott's heirs at least implicitly recognise the rightness of some of the Doctor's insights. Evangelical Anglicans (conservative ones anyway), who are John Stott's closest theological heirs, have been spearheading the 'gospel partnership' movement, whilst those evangelicals who've most rigorously pursued the politics of Keele have often (not always of course, but often) gone on to lose sight of John Stott's gospel. I say this tentatively and humbly, and in full knowledge that hindsight is a wonderful thing, all the while prayerful that the mistakes I make in my life (whether theologically or politically) don't damage the cause of the gospel too much.

Perhaps I will dare to comment more when I have finished reading the second volume of the Lloyd-Jones book and the relevant Stott volumes.

The Welsh Factor

Dr David Martyn Lloyd-Jones (yes, how many names does one man need?) was one of the most significant western evangelical figures of the 20th century. And he was was Welsh (not sure if there's a connection between those two sentences).

Much of what we take for granted as basic to the teaching of 'good' churches nowadays was revived at least partly due to Lloyd-Jones' ministry and influence (under God). Much of what is wrong with ‘Christianity’ today Lloyd-Jones’ fought against in his day, and things would’ve been very different today if perhaps more attention had been paid to his prophetic voice back then. So, no wonder I enjoyed reading the first volume of Iain Murray’s excellent biography of ‘the Doctor’ during my hols.

I’ve been trying to think of an appropriate way to draw together all of the things I learned and noted from just the first forty years of the life of this great man of God, but that would take too long, (for example – the necessity of strong confidence in God’s power and sovereignty, the importance of prayer, the need to preach a God-centred gospel not a human-centred one, the importance and place of preaching and teaching, the need for preaching and teaching to be in the power of the Spirit, the vital (truth-driven) experiential side of the Christian life, the importance of the local church with real relationships and genuinely spiritual fellowship, and so on).

Instead I’ve settled for two major themes that emerged as I read, partly because they’re a helpful corrective to what is often true of evangelicalism today.

1) We must preach sin and judgment

Lloyd-Jones was serving at a time when many in all the major denominations (especially his own) were abandoning the preaching of sin and judgment because it was seen to be too negative or not intellectual enough for modern sophisticated 20th century people. By contrast, Lloyd-Jones recognised that understanding sin and judgment was necessary both for converting the unbeliever and for firing up the believer to evangelise;

‘The sinner must feel his own sin and the Christian must feel for the sin of others’[1]

He followed up this statement with a plea for Christians to pray for God to save people rather than spend time looking down on unbelievers. It seems Lloyd-Jones preached such a ‘negative’ message out of genuine love for people and a passionate desire to see revival in the church. As a Doctor (he gave up a lucrative career as a Harley Street Doctor to become a minister) he fully understood the necessity of telling people the bad news so that they could receive the remedy; in his view it was cruel to say that ‘all is well’ when ‘In the name of God, all is wrong’.[2] He only told people about sin so that he could tell them about grace.

2) The Gospel is for all people.

Two quotes will put this clearly enough;

‘He (Lloyd-Jones) was preoccupied with the need for evangelistic work amongst the poorer, working-class people. This conviction arose not simply out of interest in them as people, but equally out of a persuasion that modern Christianity, unlike the apostolic faith (which was as relevant to the “Barbarians” and to the “unwise” as to the “Greeks” and the “wise”) seemed to appeal largely to only one social and cultural group. That was evidence to him that the transforming power of real Christianity was largely absent. He wanted to see the message which he believed had been given to him of God tested in a place where social habits did not support church-going.’[3]

Secondly, writing about a particular phase of growth at Sandfields - the first church Lloyd-Jones was minister of, Murray says

‘…probably the clearest lesson he gained from this period was the lifelong assurance that, in days when the church’s influence is limited and restrained to certain types of people, the power of the Holy Spirit is able to reach and convince all classes. No single section of the community was left unrepresented in Sandfields…’[4]

He believed in a universal problem for all people (Sin and God’s Judgment) and a universal remedy (Christ and God’s grace) and then he preached and lived it. The result was a church with prayer meetings over two hours long, a church where congregation members constantly brought friends to services, and a church with a steady stream of new Christians from across the social spectrum.

What could things be like if there were only more of that sort of gospel work today?

[1] Iain H. Murray, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: the first forty years 1899-1939 (Pennsylvania: Banner of Truth Trust, 1982) p.208
[2] Ibid., p.216
[3] Ibid., pp.105-6
[4] Ibid., p.226