William Chong

This is a very rough type-up from notes I took during the Q&A session from the Impact Conference (Sunday 30 May, 3.30pm). The panel included Rick Holland, Russell Hohneck, Donald Stevenson and Jerry Wragg. Note that this is written from my notes and not from the audio, so I’m picking there will be inaccuracies and things I’ve misheard/misread until I have the opportunity to revise it according to the session recording.

Q: What books do you read?

Rick: Iain Murray – “The Forgotten Spurgeon”, has impacted John Macarthur’s ministry.
The pastoral letters of Samuel Rutherford, which Spurgeon describes as “the closest thing to Holy Scripture since the closing of the canon.”

Russell: There’s no time to read books if you’re on Joe Fleener’s email list! But should mention Charles Jefferson – “The Minister as Shepherd”.

Donald: “Agape Leadership”, on the life of RC Chapman, and his testimony of being involved with people on a long-term basis. “The Courage to be Protestant” by David Wells. Also refers continually back to C.J. Mahaney’s “The Cross-centred Life“.

Jerry: Feels that David Wells has a keen insight on the Evangelical movement over the past 100 years. Names a number of books: “My Heart for thy cause” by Brian Borgman; “Ministry Exposé” by Albert Martin; “Lectures to my Students” by Charles Spurgeon; “Practical Wisdom for Pastors” by Curtis Thomas. Advises a gradual approach to building up a reading habit, taking the time to gain an appetite for the subject matter.

Q: Why does God command all to be saved, but only elects some?

Rick: The simple answer is we don’t know for sure. This is one of the doctrines we can explore and may not figure out totally. It’s important to note that the Bible affirms human responsibility, but never affirms free will. Note the passage in Romans which contrasts being a “slave to sin” and being a “slave to righteousness”. Those who are spiritually dead don’t have free will – look, Arminianism is not a heretical view. But the burden of proof has been placed on the Calvinists but shouldn’t be… if you think through passages like Ephesians 1, the book of Romans, even Deuteronomy 7. Yes, Israel was elect too. Note that this issue hasn’t been answered fully in 2000 years of Christian history… but the eventual risk is that one says that “man is sovereign, God is not.”

On free will, I haven’t met a honest Arminian – I mean, they will still pray for someone’s salvation. Is that not the same as asking God to save someone? Also, in the Bible, election is always discussed with Christians who need comfort, not a place you begin regarding evangelism. No Calvinist would really evangelise by saying, “This is the gospel. Are you elect?”

Jerry: There’s this concept called a wall of worship, which I think Arminians shy from fully approaching. The other error is where hypercalvinists jump over the wall of worship/revelation and try to resolve all of it, when really we sometimes have to admit that we have hit tension and instead of shying from approaching the wall, or jumping over it, we should bow down before it.

Here’s a question to ask yourself: is God unjust if He saves no one? You would say no (given our depravity). So why do we say He’s unjust if He saves some? Because we’re proud.

Donald: I’d like to add as well, that the doctrine of election is freeing with regards to evangelism. We see in Acts 20 that Paul went from house to house to preach – his “Calvinism” didn’t affect his zeal for evangelism. I think it was Spurgeon who once said, “I believe like a Calvinist, but preach like an Arminian.”

Q: Are infants and young children who die early elect?

Rick: Macarthur has a book on this subject. My theological extrapolation is that babies and toddlers prior to the ability to make a decision would be redeemed. I mean, beyond passages of the Scripture such as 2 Samuel 13 – where King David’s child died as a punishment for his sin, there is not much re: clues on this issue. It’s worth noting though that Rev 20 refers to the final judgement based on deeds. The works reveal your belief or lack of belief in Christ, so if a child/infant is pre-deeds when they die, then he/she is redeemed.

Jerry: (Explained further re: David’s story in 2 Samuel 13). Also in Revelation 20, the people cast into the Lake of Fire are revealed as “unbelievers”, not “unelect”. So the implication is that those without the mind to comprehend it is elect. The Bible also talks about unbelievers without excuse – this implies that for some, there would be one. (Explained further that this was different to an adult not exposed to the gospel)

Q: What are the doctrinal implications of the book “The Shack“?

Russell: It’s a radically different and havoc-inducing presentation of who God is. And it’s also a very engrossing read, offering the reader a glimpse into a fictional intimacy of fellowship with God that is enviable. However, the premise here that God speaks outside the Word is questionable. The book did not draw me to holy living – it’s dangerous theology.

Jerry: It’s an attempt to depreciate revelation about God. It’s an issue when people say “this book changed my life” – what principle did you learn from “The Shack” that you didn’t learn from Scripture? Also, fiction pretending to be theological truth is not a new idea, e.g Frank Paretti’s series.

Rick: When you read fictionalised accounts of a truth, it is hard to bifurcate between the truth and the speculation that clouds it. E.g. “Left Behind” series.

Q: Rick, should I get a tattoo?

Rick: There’s two extremes on this: those who say “I’m free in Christ”, and those who quote Leviticus 19:26-28 – though I’d say this Scripture is not a reason not to get a tattoo. Ultimately it’s between you and God, but from my experience with the youth I work with, most of them hide their tattoos in certain contexts anyways.

Q: Can you give a fair critique of Mark Driscoll?
Donald: He’s referred to by some as “the cussing pastor”, which is a 6-year-old term.

Jerry: Cussing is not the issue. Look, none of us would say that he’s not in Christ. He professes Christ crucified and I commend his understanding of the gospel. I’ve read all his books and listened to his sermons. My concern is that his missiology is presented as this: “If you are going to be intentionally missional to society and be an effective minister of the gospel, you’d engage and advocate filthy speech, raw sensual behaviour, smoking and drinking as a way to remove barriers.

Here’s the problem: the gospel of Jesus Christ is for the atoning. We are covered by the holiness of Christ, and we are then to mortify sin in our lives as a reflection of that. Mark communicates to me a denial that transformation is necessary for his life. Some of his open and frank sermons have blurred this line, and I think he will enslave his generation to carnality – that’s the ultimate danger. (Retold the story of a man in his church who fell into unholy living after missional teaching at college).

When you preach on atonement but don’t do holy living/sanctification, then you’ve got a problem.

Rick: (edit: 4/6/09) (Rick responds to Driscoll’s Scotland sermon)

Donald: 1 Peter sets the standard: “Be holy, for I am holy”.

Russell: I see disaster for MD and his followers and disciples if there is no obedience, no sanctification, no holiness.

Q: Regarding contextualising the gospel, what role does technology, dance, music, drama play in church?

Jerry: The gospel itself is offensive in its basic, biblical dress. Look, the methodology itself is not evil. Technology shouldn’t be about repackaging the gospel. It becomes a problem when the gospel message is marginalised in the process of contextualisation, or we offer entertainment and then do a bait-and-switch for the gospel.

Also the preaching of the Word is a supernatural event. It’s a priority, and has always been since the foundation of Israel, even.

On Sundays, none of us should be here to uphold our preferences – we’re here to lift up our voices, pray, serve, listen to preaching. I mean this is related to the “worship wars” issue as well. Ultimately, if the words are biblical, we look at Hebrews 13:17 – obey your leaders, and put to death your own preferences. Look, the worship music leaders can focus on choosing the songs – I’ll focus on teaching the congregation to put away preferences and self-centredness. Worship wars dishonours Christ.

Rick: You can’t win with music – someone won’t like it. Music ministers are marked men! The higher principle though is this: older and younger are to defer to each other. I like something John Piper’s said: “Don’t compare the best hymn with the worst chorus… and don’t compare the best chorus with the worst hymn.” (e.g. How Great is our God vs The Great White Throne – which is about hell…)

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Twitter updates: http://twitter.com/wchong
Jono’s writeups: http://bit.ly/jonomac/

General session 4: Jerry Wragg started Day 2 of Impact Bible Conference delving into the meaning behind Paul’s word to the Corinthian church (1:30-31). A lengthy sermon where he stressed continuously the sufficiency of Scripture as given: “We have no business changing evangelism from what it is in Scripture.” Also a thorough tracing of justification, sanctification and glorification plainly described in Scripture.

General session 5: ”Heaven is a comforting term,” said Rick Holland as he continued his exposition of 1 Peter, this time focusing on the ways God satisfies three aspirations of the human heart. In writing to persecuted Christians, Peter expounds on how God gives believers hope upon Christ’s grace, provides security in the imperishable certainty of heaven, and the assurance that “this life is the closest a believer will ever come to hell.”

General session 6: Jerry Wragg asks how far we should go regarding the phrase “all things to all men”, tackling the issue of contextualising the gospel. A few provocative statements, such as: “I don’t care how reformed your teaching is, if you’re repackaging the gospel, it’s not sanctified.” Wragg highlighted points from 1 Corinthians 2:1-5 to consider, including:

- preaching is not preeminence: not flaunting brilliance and turn of speech nor dressing the gospel at clarity’s expense
- preaching is not about personal charisma; Paul in particular came “in weakness, fear and much trembling”

Question for the day: Does the next generation of preachers act, dress and speak like Rick Holland, Jerry Wragg etc, and to what extent is this shaped by culture?

Twitter updates: http://twitter.com/wchong
Full write-ups: http://bit.ly/jonomac/

As I’m sitting here at the end of Day 1 of Impact 2009 Bible Conference, Hastings has chilled up like a popsicle and my seat is not heated. But a good 400+ folks have been warming their voices on powerful songs, and listening to powerful preaching through the day.

A brief run-down:

General session 1 - Rick opens the plenaries by outlining the life and character of the Apostle Peter. He’s shown in Scripture to be passionate yet flawed (definitely not infallible Pope material from what the Bible records). Peter was a regular, Christ-exalting, fallible, arrogant, passionate, broken, and eventually restored man.

General session 2 - Jerry Wragg opens his series by listing a multitude of ways evangelical Christians have been affected by the postmodern worldview. Wragg laments the perceived decline of absolutes, depreciation of propositional truth-claims, and the exaltation of human wisdom. He looks forward to delving through 1 Corinthians in addressing issues, including how far should contextualisation and the “all things to all men” principle go.

General session 3 - Rick Holland unpacked the opening two verses of 1 Peter by highlighting three points: the Father elects, the Spirit sanctifies, and the Son redeems. Holland skirted around the election/predestination debate, focusing more on the astute observation that Peter mentions these points to the persecuted church not for theological challenge and controversy, but for pastoral comfort and spiritual security. Definitely a good challenge in getting doctrine turned into practice.

As a side note, the Driscoll contextualisation controversy got a mention by Holland during the first seminar session, titled “what’s wrong with youth ministry today?” I’m picking interesting debates on that issue during the Q&A session on Sunday.

Twitter updates: http://twitter.com/wchong
Jono’s writeups: http://bit.ly/jonomac/

Rick Holland. Jerry Wragg. Martha Peace. Joe Fleener. Hugh Rorrison.

Beautiful weather in the Hawkes Bay, clear skies and over 500 folks from New Zealand, Australia and further afield for the Impact Bible Conference 2009.

Jono and I and about 30 others from Howick Baptist are down here too. Tonnes of good Bible teaching from many great teachers: Jono’s grand idea is that we’ll keep folks updated over the weekend on the talks as they happen.

Rick’s going through 1 Peter 1:1-12, and a seminar series on youth ministry. Martha Peace doing a whole series on Titus 2 teaching – great for the ladies. If you’re interested in keeping up with the talks and seminar sessions, we’ll put notes and main points up as they come:

Jono’s blog updates
William’s Impact blog updates
William’s Twitter updates

Have a great long weekend everyone!

I have a minor love affair with haloumi at the moment. (So does C, incidentally.)

It’s a Levantine cheese popular in many a Mediterranean restaurant (including that beautiful meal at Ima and Ibn). You can read more about its backstory at Wikipedia, but in my opinion the best thing about it is that you can fry it, like a steak.

We bought a block of it a couple of weeks back and thought it would be fun to try cooking it for ourselves. To ensure they fry properly and not melt, you need to cut them into reasonably-thick slices (about a 1-2 cm, or the thickness of your index finger), and use a high heat to get the beautiful seared look. Also, haloumi does not end well when microwaved (lunch leftovers the next day proved this).

For this dinner, we added radish slices, boiled potatoes, tomatoes, red onion (all from our trusty Foodbox) and served it with rice.

Yum!

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As an aside, we dropped by Barracuda in Bucklands Beach for our most recent date night. We didn’t eat too much to warrant a proper review, but I felt compelled to say a few things anyways:

• They had the worst antipasto platter I’ve come across in a restaurant setting. To be fair, it’s not a popular order, but C and I were given a hodge-podge of stuff that had seemed to have come from sitting in the fridge for weeks – vinegared cauliflower, olives, cold bread, some feta and cold sausage. My stomach definitely disagreed.
• They did serve us some tasty green-lipped mussels, drenched in a rich tomato pasta-style sauce. Which was tasty.

I’m sure others will have had more pleasant dining experiences – anyone else been before?

I’m normally very careful in keeping my posts on this site away from work-related affairs. I work with hundreds of confidential documents and with commercially-sensitive information, so it’s generall unwise to blab about my office-time writing endeavours.

However I think it should be OK for me to tell everyone a bit about my current project. Our company’s basically been hired to fix up another agency’s bad work, some of which I’d like to share – for laughs, for serious criticism, and for a general sense of bewilderment.

Bear in mind the copy should be written for a medically-literate audience, and should normally be in a formal, scientific tone.

On the topic of diets:

“People do not have too [sic] eat as much on an organic diet as it contains more (e.g. nutrients) and tastes better.

There are zillions of diets available … Unfortunately, no successful programmeme [sic] for primary prevention has yet been established. …”

On drug adduction:

The brouhaha surrounding addiction is probably anecdotal. As the drug is a CNS stimulant like caffeine, ephedrine and amphetamine then there is the potential for people to become addicted or dependent on that feeling…

On weight loss programmes:

Calorie or point counting and weight loss programmemes [sic] (e.g. Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig) work because they are successful in restricting the calorie intake by providing tools, meals, weekly visits and support in reaching weight loss goals.

These were just a few of the many painful-to-read examples we found. I was also disappointed to also find that of the content that wasn’t purely rank opinion, poor spelling and wild conjecture, there were entire sections that were not-so-subtly plagiarised from published journal articles.

For example, the following paragraph was puzzling because it didn’t seem to be written with the audience (pharmaceutical reps) in mind…

Prevention is the first choice. It has to be our first commitment, particularly to our children and adolescents. Unfortunately, no successful programmeme for primary prevention has yet been established. We have a pervasive culture, reinforced by powerful commercial forces, that promotes eating and physical inactivity. To challenge this established culture will take strong political will and a multidisciplinary approach.

… until I discovered it was word-for-word from the first page of this article.

You could conceivably turn a blind eye to that sort of thing for primary-secondary school essays, but for paid agency work? It was worse than Noelle McCarthy, that’s for sure.

The moral of the story – don’t pay anyone to give you half-baked, plagiarised writing. You might just have to hire someone else to fix it!

Congrats bros!

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“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” – Jeremiah 29:11

On our way home from a long and tough week at work/uni, we caught a radio advert for Nosh Food Market in Glen Innes, offering the following deal:

On a whim C and I decided to give it a go, so we bought a butterflied chicken and a bit of pumpkin, took it home, and tried to make our very first roast.

The advantage it seems with a butterflied whole chicken is a faster cooking time, due to its wider surface area. After accompanying the bird with diced pumpkin and baby potatoes on the side, we cooked it in the oven for 45 minutes at 230 degrees Celsius.

And that’s it – you’re done! The smells wafting through the air while we prepared our other dish (pretty much a basic stir-fry of long beans, beef mince and a healthy serving of oyster sauce) was fantastic – almost like sitting inside Nando’s, or next to Oporto’s.

The great thing with doing a whole roast chicken is that it’s possible to use the roast chicken again for other meals. The next day we enjoyed using the chicken in toasted sandwiches; other possibilities include stirfries, soups, salads and much more.

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