Geri and I have only recently begun to integrate into EHS and our leadership the enormous amount of research that has been done on the neuroplasticity of the brain.  (I recommend The Mindful Brain and Parenting from the Inside Out by Daniel Siegel for starters). The implications for our spirituality and formation seem far-reaching. The following are a few insights that I have been considering as a I seek to build a healthy community at NLF and deepen EHS:

• Interactions with our primary caregivers directly shape our neural circuitry. Between birth and five years old, millions of messages are encoded into our circuitry.
• Our brains are innately structured to ATTACH to human beings. God created us emotionally, spiritually and physiologically to bond with others.
• We also need ATTUNEMENT in order to thrive. At the heart of attunement is the sharing of non-verbal signals – enables us to “feel” each other (eyes, face, tone of voice, gestures, body posture, timing, etc).
• We were created to need parents to pay attention to our interior world. When there is insufficient attachment and attunement in our family of origin, we may be avoidant, unresponsive, emotionally distant, have difficulty with certain emotions, or become easily triggered. In other words, parts of our brain circuitry are underdeveloped.
• New neural pathways can be formed through intentional mindful new behaviors – even as adults.  Providing new experiences for people (e.g. contemplative spiritual practices, new emotionally healthy skills such as community temperature reading, clean fighting, listening, etc.) promotes activation of new genes that enable new brain connections/synapses to form.

 This helped me put in words what Geri and I have observed the last 15 years as people engage emotionally healthy spirituality. When people learn to attach and attune (i.e, incarnate and be present), they experience spiritual, emotional and physiological changes.

Ted Roberts from www.puredesire.org has been working with sexual addicts for 18 years. He argues that sexual addiction is both a brain and a moral problem. I recently spent time with him on the phone talking through his work with brain-state technologies and the integration of neurochemistry into his ministry. It was fascinating.  

My initial readings and research have left me with a deeper passion to lead people into emotionally healthy skills and a more mindful, contemplative spirituality. It also has helped me understand why it is so challenging to build healthy church communities. We are redoing the hard-wiring in people’s brains!

How else do you see this research on the brain possibly serving our efforts to see Christ deeply transform peoples’ lives?

When I became a Christian my sophomore year in college, I was birthed into a community (IVCF) that linked the gospel and the bridging of racial, economic and cultural barriers.  It was not a specific “calling” for some but a biblical mandate that filled us with visiona and hope. I see the Holy Spirit moving in a similar way today as large numbers of young people are passionate to build multicultural churches that demonstrate the power of the gospel.

When Geri and I planted New Life Fellowship Church 22 years ago, we chose Elmhurst/Corona, Queens, as a strategic location for the church due to the fact that individuals from more than 120 nations live in the area. In addition, the neighborhood consisted then, as it does now, of poor, working, and middle-class New Yorkers. So while we recognized the benefits of such a location and desired to bridge the racial, cultural, and economic barriers for the sake of Christ, we underestimated the suffering this commitment would require for all us of in leadership.

I soon realized that our evangelical discipleship/spiritual formation model was too superficial to bring about the kind of in-depth transformation we would need to live in authentic community. There were tensions between Whites and African Americans, Columbians and Puerto Ricans, Arabs and Jews, Filipinos and Chinese, as well as Haitians and Dominicans, just to name a few. In fact, I remember one young Chinese- American woman who painfully left our church after being overwhelmed by conflicts and the direct approach of people from other cultures interacting in her small group.

Barriers of economic class and educational status also loomed large in our midst. For instance, educated African Americans struggled with other African Americans who embraced a “hood” mentality; and Asians, with their rich legacy of love for education, had great difficulty in embracing  high-school dropouts who now attended our youth group. In addition, middle-class Latinos struggled to empathize with Latinos who remained stuck in a cycle of poverty and dependence. Whites also struggled to embrace being minorities, many of them experiencing this for the first time.

We also underestimated the worldwide scope of racism based solely on the color of skin. For example, I learned that the darker one’s skin in Latin America, the generally lower he or she remained in social standing. In fact, part of the reason our Spanish congregation split in the early years was due to tensions between lighter-skinned and darker-skinned Latinos. We also had to consistently remind immigrants that they were now part of the American church. Biblically, they could not ignore the history of slavery and racism in the United States.

Key early decisions, then, enabled our church to grow into a congregation where individuals from more than sixty-five nations are involved today. We mentored peoples from a variety of cultures, focused on our common mission and remained committed to the passionate worship of Jesus. And over time, we slowly built an elder board, pastoral staff, and worship team that reflected our diversity. At the same time we remained faithful to our commitment to quality. We made mistakes in the procesess but I am grateful for each of God’s lessons and His gentle leadership for us at NLF over the years.

Yet in our case, significant breakthrough came only when we began integrating emotional health and contemplative spirituality into our discipleship model fourteen years ago.

A spiritual formation paradigm that included emotional health began, for us, with a commitment to break the power of our past. Like Abraham, we responded to the invitation to leave our families, cultures, races, and countries behind to become part of the new family of Jesus (Mark 3:31ff.). We also learned to lament our losses—like David, Job, and Jeremiah. We realized that Whites, for example, needed to grieve their own losses if they were going to empathize with the losses of immigrants and minorities. And we began to value the character of loving well and brokenness as true measures of maturity, instead of knowledge, gifts, or anointing.

We then called our people to leave the contemporary, consumer church model so prevalent in the West for a more radical spirituality modeled after the Desert Fathers from North Africa. We moved our membership to a “Rule of Life,” invited people to contemplative practices such as Daily Offices and Sabbath-keeping, and began a strong emphasis on silence and solitude. In so doing, we intentionally left what I typically call “American Christianity” for a radical pursuit of the person of Jesus. In other words, we united around a passion for Him.

God has opened up a unique door for us at New Life  to demonstrate the power of the gospel. And I, for one, could not imagine doing anything else!  The following are a few practical steps for us at New Life to consider:

1. Pray. The miracle of reconciliation that breaks down demonic barriers of division is ultimately the work of God. This has always and continues to remain the foundation of all our genuine progress at New Life.

2. Worship and Music.Learn about different worship styles (e.g. gospel vs. contemporary Christian music). Music is closely tied to culture and history.  Listen and worship through CD’s from ethnicities different than your own.

3. Small Groups and Friendships. Consider joining a small group with people from a different race, culture or ethnicity. Develop intentional friendships with people from different social classes and cultures than your own.

4. Consider Relocating. Incarnate. Living in a different neighborhood, far from your cultural/racial/ethnic roots is an experience and learning you cannot gain through a book or seminar.

5. Work. Some of you may have the option to make changes within your work, or even consider another type or work, that would expose you to an entirely different world of people than those with whom you currently work.

6. Books, Movies, Plays.  Read books like Malcolm X and Joy Luck Club. Watch movies like Rosewood and White Man’s Burden. Attend plays like Memphis on Broadway.

7. Restaurants and Food. Intentionally eat at restaurants in different neighborhoods than you usually do. Queens is a great place for this!

8. Deepen your Contemplative Life and Learnings around Emotional Health. There is no doubt in my mind that this is key to our long term future at New Life. Our goal is loving Jesus out of which we love ourselves and others. Emotionally Healthy Spirituality remains the primary means by which we encourage people to bridge barriers in a healthy, meaningful way. Reconciliation is an outgrowth of this.

These are my first steps. What might you add or expand on this? Let’s keep the conversation going!

At New Life Fellowship Church we have launched a church-wide initiative to keep Sabbath during the seven weeks of Lent. We asked people to choose  a 24 hour period –either from Saturday night, 6 p.m.,to Sunday night, 6 p.m., or from Friday night, 6 p.m., to Saturday night, 6 p.m. We also asked them to mark the beginning and end of their Sabbath by lighting a candle.  To listen to the sermon and see further resources , go to www.newlifefellowship.org. 

One larger goal of Sabbath, I believe, is that the qualities of biblical Sabbath (STOP, REST, DELIGHT, CONTEMPLATE) infuse our other six days. John Freeman’s book, The Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox has been a gift to me these last few months as I seek creative ways to eliminate hurry and multitasking from my daily routine. The following are the suggestions that I found most helpful that I am adding to my “fast” this Lent:

1. Don’t Send.  E-mail only  creates more e-mail.

2. Don’t Check it First Thing in the Morning or Late at Night.

3. Check it only Twice a Day. This allows you to set the agenda for your day.

4. Keep a Written To-Do List and Incorporate E-mail into It.

5. Whenever Possible, Call or Talk in Person.

What might you add?

Joseph Pieper (1904-1997), German philosopher and theologian, wrote Happiness and Contemplation in 1958. In this short work, he summarizes much of the theology of Thomas Aquinas.  If you are willing to read slowly and thoughtfully, you will encounter rich, life-transforming spiritual food on these pages. The following are a few of the quotes I noted in my journal:

• Every human being, without exception, is called to eternal contemplative happiness with God.
• The human craving for happiness may be distracted by a 1000 small gratifications but “one sweet fruit is sought” (Dante).
• The ultimate satiation of man’s deepest thirst takes place in contemplation.
• Many joys in the course of everyday life come to us. They are a foretaste and beginning of perfect joy. The whole good cannot be quenched by anything less than God!  It cannot be found in realm of created things.  What then is the drink known as happiness that can ultimately suffice this thirst of the whole human being? GOD.  – Eternal life, eternal banquet, glory, salvation.
• When you taste God, there is nothing else to wish for. A surpassingly happy person has everything he/she wants. Everything is “in him” and nothing can happen to him… he lacks nothing.  He cannot even be disturbed. – For Christian martyrs, not even torture could tear from them the happiness of contemplation.

G.K. Chesterton, considering his life in retrospect, said he had always the mystical conviction of the miracle in all that exists and of the rapture dwelling essentially within all experience.

There are three separate assertions here:

1. That everything holds and conceals at bottom a mark of its divine origin;

2. That one who catches a glimpse of it “sees” that this and all things are “good” beyond human comprehension;

3.That seeing this, he is happy. Here in sum is the whole doctrine of the contemplation of earthly creation.

It is the requisite for the good of the human community that there should be persons who devote themselves to the life of contemplation. It is “useless” and the yardstick. Contemplation keeps the true end in sight, giving meaning to every practical act of life! For man here on earth, there is nothing more meaningful than the love of God.

The greatest menace for capacity for contemplation – busy! Dry, empty stimuli that kill the receptivity of the soul. If we have not escaped from harried rush, mad pursuit, from unrest and from the necessity of care, we are not happy. Its’ very premise is freedom from the fetters of workaday busyness!

The happiness of contemplation is not a comfortable happiness  – Teresa of Avila asserted that more courage is required to lead a life of contemplation than to elect martyrdom.

How different do you find this from the kind of Christian sermons/messages we hear  today?

Leadership is intense –both inside and outside the church.  The pressure, conflicts, and resistances we encounter touch “raw material” and powerful dynamics deep beneath the iceberg of our lives.

We go to seminars and conferences on how to do better strategic planning, cast vision, delegate, better manage conflicts, and hire to our weaknesses. We read books on leadership and listen to podcasts on how to grow and expand our impact. That is good and commendable. I do those things myself.  It is simply not enough.

Our executive leadership team at New Life recently had two half-day meetings around a recent difficult event that we experienced together. We resolved the leadership/organizational issue well, but I was painfully aware profound “hot buttons” deep within our icebergs had been touched (i.e. issues coming out of our own early family histories). I knew God wanted me, and us, to stop and listen to Him. These “triggers” needed to be explored.

We dedicated two half-days together around two questions:

1) What painful issues from our own histories got touched and;

2) What could each of us have done differently?

I brought in a former professor mine who taught in my Doctor of Ministry program in marriage and family for one of those days. The process was fabulous. God came to each of us individually and as a team.

Leadership offers a wonderful opportunity to mature into our true selves in Christ. That is good news. The bad news is that looking at our insecurities and vulnerabilities from our past can be terrifying – especially when it is triggered in present relationships. It is easier to simply blame and project my own shame, destructive automatic thoughts, and wounds onto others. I was surely tempted to do so in this most recent challenge we faced as a staff.

I was reminded of a concept out of the therapy field called introjects. This referes to millions of film footage we take in growing up the first 10-15 years; we then organize ourselves around certain key themes. For example, it may be:

• rejection
• abandonment
• constantly put down/criticized,
• feeling invisible
• incompetent/dumb
• impotent

These emotions and thoughts become part of the self-concept and the “lens” through which we see life. We unconsciously look to create and repeat these negative experiences, especially in more intimate relationships like marriage and the church. It leads to all kinds of gross misinterpretations and assumptions.

The grace and love of Jesus Christ offers us safety and freedom.  But it is only in taking the counter-intuitive journey of letting down my defenses before others, as I did the last couple of weeks, that I realize my immense need to saturate myself in the gospel. I also realized afresh how much more remains within my own iceberg and my need for His mercy.

What do you think might be the long-term benefits of looking at our process of leadership this way? What are the difficulties in doing this?

As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love (John 15:9).

I  have just concluded an active season, more active than I would have liked. I am sobered how easily, through one or two new commitments, the pace of my life quickened. Rushing increased.  My anxiety level heightened. I struggled to remain thoughtful.

Contemplative Leadership of ourselves, out of which we lead others, is challenging. I have to remind myself of the following four guidelines that are indispensable if I am “to remain in His love.” 

1. Do One Thing At A Time– For me this means being present in every meeting, whether it is in worship, a one-on-one mentoring time, answering an e-mail, or watching my daughter’s track meet. This means limiting e-mail to fixed times during the day and not trying to squeeze more into the day than God intends.

2. Honor Transitions- Taking time between meetings at church is very difficult but key for me. This past week, for example, I went from a meeting with a staff person, to a stimulating meeting with architectural drawings, to an elder meeting  — without a pause. They went well, but I could sense the adrenalin in my body. Pausing before I walk in the door at home after a day at New Life is another key moment. Gathering my thoughts together along with a brief Office (i.e. prayer) transforms my day.

3. Reflect -As this very active season came to a close, I set aside an additional day alone with God. Yes, Sabbath keeping and Daily Offices are indispensable.  But leadership is particularly intense, especially as issues around our own insecurities and vulnerablities get touched by people and new situations. This happened to me last month. I found myself reactive and grossly misinterpreting a situation.  I needed time, along with a wise mentor, to help me calm down, reflect and ask: “What nerves got touched deep beneath my iceberg?”   It soon became clear God was coming to me, eager to grow and mature me in new areas.  

4. Read Widely and Continue Growing — It is easy to become stagnant, especially when we are busy. I like to have my hands in 5-6 books at a time, often on a variety of topics. I love going to my local library on Sabbath and taking out a few books. Again, this takes space and time, a currency in short supply in our culture.

Remember: We lead out of who we are and the most important person we lead each day is ourselves. Everything flows out of that.

Thoughts? Additions you might make?

A number of people have asked me about where God is amidst the devastation of the recent earthquake in Haiti. What do we tell our children, our young people, our church, and seekers? Last Sunday I preached a summary of the Book of Isaiah to our church as we concluded a recent teaching series. We distributed two weeks of a Daily Office based on Isaiah that you are welcome to download. It can be found at: http://newlifefellowship.org/resources/sermons   

 Why does God allow evil like the earthquake in Haiti? The answer is: “I don’t know.” Nobody does.

 The Jews went through repeated tumultuous, confusing, often disastrous, events during the time of Isaiah. The country was shaken to the core after King Uzziah died. He had provided 52 years of stability and relatively good leadership. They were invaded by the Assyrians and later conquered by the Babylonians. They lost everything and were carried into exile 500-700 miles from their homes. Isaiah had a Word for them; he has a Word for us:

 1.  Remember: God is on the Throne

God reveals Himself as “the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted (Isaiah 6). He is sitting, relaxed and not anxious. He is the Lord Almighty and in control over all historical events! God is beyond us. We can’t figure Him out. The nations are a drop in the bucket and we can never wrap our arms around His massiveness.  He works through and in the stumps (Isaiah 6:13, 11:1) — that is the small, ugly, seemingly dead things in life. The kingdom is a mustard seed and we can trust that our God, who sits on the throne, is good. He suffers with the people of Haiti today. It is a stump. He will bring seeds of His kingdom, somehow, in this tragedy.

2.  Waiting Patiently for God is the Foundation of the Spiritual Life

This is what the Sovereign LORD, the Holy One of Israel, says: 

       “In repentance and rest is your salvation,
       in quietness and trust is your strength,
       but you would have none of it.” (Isaiah 30:15)     

Waiting on God patiently is not something we do once in a while. It truly is the foundation of a solid, mature life in Christ. There is no other way to develop a genuine spirituality. God offers us His strength and salvation amidst the confusion and difficulties of life.  The people of Isaiah’s day would not wait on the Lord, but insisted on rushing headlong to disaster. It is painful to watch the footage on Haiti. God invites us to pray, wait, trust and hope in Him alone during these difficult hours.

3. God Invites You to Join Him in Transforming the World (61:4)

They will rebuild the ancient ruins

And restore the places long devastated;

They will renew the ruined cities, that have been devastated for generations 

God is in the process of renewing and transforming the world. He invites us to join Him in that renewal process, using our time, gifts, talents, and energy on behalf of this renewal He is doing. We are the ones to rebuild the ancient ruins that exist in our broken world (Isaiah 61:4). Let’s do all we can to contribute to the recovery effort in Haiti.

4.  Loving Your Enemy is at the Core of the Christian Life (Isaiah 58:3-4)

The most recent enemy to come out of the news the last few days has been about Pat Robertson. He apparently said that Haiti deserved this earthquake for making a pact with the devil, that it was sent from God as a form of judgment. When I first heard this, I was indignant and joined the conversation around me (at least in my heart) in murdering him. Watch his remarks on video and see what you think. It seems to me some words were put in his mouth. I did not sense a vindictive spirit from him. Yet even if he did utter such remark, we are to love him and hide his faults, not expose them. I do not agree with everything he says. The issue is the condition of my heart. Is it now hard? I have said many, many foolish things in my life!  God have mercy on me, a sinner.   Christians, and others, who drive us crazy are not interruptions to us. They are the place where God happens!

 So where is God? He is in Haiti. Let us join Him there as God enables.

How can this be true?

The answer is simple: If I pray and spend large amounts of time and energy meditating on Scripture, fasting, silence, solitude, along with other spiritual disciplines, but do not love my enemies, it is not worth much. I think I am finally connecting the dots that the degree to which I love my enemies really does indicate the measure of my spiritual maturity. I have some growth to do!

I attempted to summarize my learnings on this in my sermon last Sunday on Isaiah 58 called “Love Your Enemies, the ‘Saint Makers.”   I began by asking: “Who is your enemy today (someone who drives you crazy, irritates you, you avoid or resent, or simply have a hard time loving)?

The following are a few of the themes I continue to meditate on this week as I ask God to help me connect what I so often disconnect:

1. Nothing is more important than learning not to despise others, i.e. harden our hearts against people, deciding they are not worthy of love.  (Note: “despise” is a synonym for “judge.”)

2. The whole of the Christian life can be summarized as the refusal to judge and despise others.

3. A spiritual person hides the faults of others rather than expose them. “Interior freedom is not yet possessed by anyone who cannot close his eyes to the fault of a friend, whether real or apparent” (Maximus the Confessor, theologian 600’s).

4. A person can be so right they are wrong (i.e., if it comes out of a hard, despising heart).

5. Nothing is more important than learning that your enemy is a ’saint-maker.’ The place to get connected to God is with your “enemy.” They are not interruptions but gifts sent from Him.

6. The more we draw close to God in love, the more we are united to our neighbor in love. Our solitude with God is meant to connect us to people, not separate us from them (Dorotheus of Gaza, 6th century).  The place to get connected to your “enemy” is with God. Thus we so desperately need silence and solitude with Him.

7.  When you despise someone, you despise Christ. When you harden your heart to someone, you harden your heart to Christ . As Jesus said, “Whatever you did to the least of them, you did to me” (Matt. 25).

And why do  you think it is so easy for us to have such a wide and deep disconnect between our love for God and our love for our enemy?

It is ironic that Christmas is often the time we as pastors find ourselves least centered on Jesus. With the emergence of social media and new technologies, this problem has reached proportions.

The following is an adaption of my top 10 lessons for leadership applied to this Advent season.

1. Be yourself.

You and I are uniquely crafted by God to lead. That means we cannot do what others can. You may be able to do more or less. The great challenge of leadership is to calmly differentiate your “true self” from the demands and voices around you. Discern the desires, vision, pace, and mission the Father has given as you lead. Take off Saul’s armor. How much activity can you sustain without losing your soul? And remember, “to live unfaithfully to yourself is to cause others great damage” (Rumi).

2. Your first work is to be contemplative before God (to be with him).

Our goal during this season is to lead people to Jesus and help them center on him. But you cannot bring people where you have not gone in God. We are not CEOs or even preachers first. We are called to be contemplatives first (Psalm 27:4). Above all else, cultivate a pure heart before God, loving him.   

Adele Ahlberg Calhoun, in her book, Spiritual Disciplines Handbook: Practices that Transform us (IVP), introduces a creative, unique spiritual practice called slowing. This includes things like: intentionally driving in the slow lane, choosing the longest line at the store, sitting longer over a meal, or taking a longer shower. “Slowing,” she writes, “is a way to counter our culture’s mandate to tend to the bottom line, to move it or lose it, to constantly be on the go. It is a way we honor our limits and the fact that God is found in the present moment.”  

3. Practice Sabbath.

Take a 24-hour period each week to Sabbath – to stop, rest, and contemplate God. You are not God. This essential spiritual formation practice is not something to drop during the celebration of Christ’s coming. I take from 6:00 p.m. Friday to 6:00 p.m. Saturday at a minimum. Large spiritual issues are at stake, especially with regard to trusting God to be in control. Relinquish the ministry to Jesus.

4. Embrace the gift of your limits.

Remember that “a man can receive only what is given him from heaven” (John 3:27). You will be present to your spouse and children in proportion to what you’ve received from being in God’s presence. It takes time and effort to think through thoughtful gifts with meaning for your family and key leaders. I encourage you to make sure you have the margin in your life to do that. 

5.      Wait on the Lord.

This is your life. You will finish the end of your days waiting on the Lord.  This is the most important work there is if you are to allow your soul to grow up and be what God wants you to be. Be sure to carve out time for this.

6.  Don’t neglect ministry to yourself.

“Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers” (1 Timothy 4:16). Investing in your development is your first ministry. This includes monthly and quarterly retreats, utilizing the gift of therapy along the way, finding a good spiritual director, and seeking mentors at different stages of the journey. It is the most loving gift you can give your church. What does this mean for Christmas? Take a few moments now to ask God what you need to remain connected to him over the next few weeks.

7. Lead out of your vow of marriage.

Scripture is clear about marriage between one male and one female as a taste of Christ’s free love for his bride, the church. And central to this marriage vision is the sexual relationship. It is essential, not peripheral, to your spiritual formation and discipleship as a Christ-follower.

8. Live what you preach.

Good sermons take a lot of time to gestate. If the sermons aren’t changing you, they will not transform anyone else. This is both a joy and an agony if fresh revelation from Scripture is going to come through the unique prism of your life. This never changes, whether you have been preaching for six months or 30 years.

9. All the work of pastoring is holy and sacred.

It took me 19 years to learn this hard lesson, and I am still learning it. Preparing budgets and job descriptions, hiring, firing, planning a good meeting, handing in reports, confronting conflicts, etc. is every part as holy as prayer and Bible study. Be sure to fight against the sacred/secular split first in your own life and then in the life of the church. Recover a biblical theology of work and spirituality.

10.  Things are not as they appear.

So often what looks like a blessing is not. What looks terrible in the short run is, very often, a rich gift. When you think you are going forward, you may be actually going backwards. What appears as success, oftentimes ends up being a failure and setback. Failures will teach you much more than success every time.

The pressures of Christmas can distract us from what’s most important. I hope these 10 lessons will help you focus on Christ and enjoy this holiday season.

A friend of mine from Singapore was visiting NYC recently. He is well-respected Christian leader in that part of the world. Over lunch I asked him his view of the American church and evangelicals in particular. He was reluctant to answer, but after some prodding on my part used the following words to describe us- reductionistic, black and white (resistant to nuances and mystery), and more of a civil religion tied closely to culture, than biblical.  I wanted to explore more but our lunch table with family had other more fun topics to talk about.    

David Wells was one of my professors I had at Gordon-Conwell in the mid1980’s. In his book, The Courage to Be Protestant, he recommends we abandon the term evangelical because it has outlived its usefulness, arguing that it is now sagging and disintegrating.  He writes:

“There have been just too many instances of obnoxious empire-building going on, too much in evangelicalism that is partisan and small, too much pandering to seekers, and too much adaptation of the Christian message until little remains.  Too many of its leaders have been disgraced.  There have been too many venal television preachers.  There are too many of the born-again who show no signs of regenerate life.  For many people, the word “evangelical” has become a synonym for what is trite, superficial, and moneygrubbing, a byword for what has gone wrong with Protestantism.  Those who still think of themselves as being in the tradition of historic Christian faith, as I do, may therefore want to consider whether the term “evangelical” has not outlived its usefulness.  Despite its honorable pedigree, despite its many outstanding leaders both past and some in the present, and despite the many genuine and upright believers who still think of themselves as evangelical, it may now have to be abandoned. If not evangelical, what?…If the word “evangelical” has outlived its usefulness, what is the alternative?  Here, I am flummoxed.  My own labels are too ponderous to be used widely.  I am reaching out for help…  I am nevertheless going to think of myself as a biblical Christian first and foremost, as in continuity with Christians across the ages who have believed the same truth and followed the same Lord” (p. 18-20).

For a evangelical theologican of the stature of Dr. Wells to make these statements is, at the very least, quite shocking. I think he may right.  I like the label “biblical Christian in continuity with Christians across the ages” and will continue to ponder that for a while.

What are your thoughts?