Don Carson lessons from the years of rapid growth

December 14, 2010 I 0 Comments

Interesting that by the by Carson mentioned a couple of marks of the years of rapid growth:

  1. A keeness and willigness to prayer and listen to the Bible for hours and hours and hours. The kind of thing we'd find exhausting in other seasons of church life happens naturally in years of rapid growth: speak for over an hour, answer questions for over an hour, pray for several hours (all for non-Christian friends)
  2. The instinct to write indigenous songs to express the faith of the new movement.
  3. A higher number of male conversions in proportion to female conversions. In normal seasons it often tends to be the other way around. 'We never thought of focusing on Sunday Schools and women's Bible studies as our main evangelistic strategy. We went after them men and the rest followed from that'.

Lessons from the years of rapid growth

  1. Think especially hard about training. This was part of the problem with the Welsh Revival of 1904-1905. You can begin to crave after experience of the Lord, instead of the Lord himself. No theological training also means no protection from liberalism. It can look differently. There is a time for 3-4 years of seminary training. There is also a time for modular courses by correspondance. But set the bar as high as you can and then keep raising it higher.
  2. What do you do with all the energy of a revival. 'If I was ever by the grace of God put at the hear of a move of God like this again I would:'
    1. Do everything I could to keep the press out. Downplay it. People get made into gurus. Experience becomes the focus. Talk about the gospel, not about revival. No interviews. It becomes a feeding frenzy and motives get skewed.
    2. Do everything you can to funnel energy into Bible study and teaching. If not there, the energy will go elswhere, probably into passion for experience. It is like a drug. It devolves into rules for singing and meeitngs to create the experience and in the end becomes self-righteous and merit-based. Places of rapid revival (eg Ethiopia 30 years ago) are almost all awash now with moralism and legalis because they tried to preserve the special thing by rules. Focus on the Bible and the gospel and let the rest take care of itself.
    3. Start humbly and carefully institutionalising. These things are almost never begun by a big plan.  Emerging church prides itself on being non-institutional, which is good because that means it will be dead in 20 years. The early days give impetus and passion. But the intitutionalising preserves and passes on the core. It can become legalistic, but need not be. Whitfield was generally considered the greater preacher, but consider how much great impact Wesley had, because he organised things.

 

Commenting is not available in this channel entry.