Over the past few years I have had opportunity to attend a lot of Christian conferences, sometimes to sit and learn but more commonly in a kind of official capacity as a speaker or reporter. From either perspective I enjoy them most of the time. I will grant that without some vigilance we can overdo it and allow conferences to feed a kind of celebrityism, but I am convinced that they have their time and place and can be genuinely beneficial to the Christian.

One thing conferences do well, and one thing I love about them, is their unique atmosphere of excitement and anticipation. Most people attend a conference expecting that they will be blessed by the teaching they receive there. Enthusiasm runs high and is contagious so that people listen attentively, work diligently to make personal application and go out of their way to express gratitude to the speakers. For the attendee, the reward is directly related to the expectation—they expect much from the conference and therefore they work hard to get much from it. It’s not that the messages or sermons there are so different or so much better than what they might hear in their local church; rather, there is an atmosphere that lends itself to listening and applying.

I’m grateful for this kind of expectation, especially when I am speaking. It many ways it makes my task easier and more immediately fulfilling. However, I also find myself a little bit concerned about it and here’s why: The excitement and the anticipation that marks a conference is often noticeably absent in the local church. A sermon preached at a conference can have a greater impact on a person than the very same sermon preached the next Sunday morning in the context of a church service. Why? Because the person attending the conference has prepared himself to receive that message. He believes he will be blessed, he applies himself, and not surprisingly, he finds in the end that he has been blessed.

I will grant that conferences have some notable practical advantages over church services: Parents can sit and listen without having to stop the children from squabbling and without having to take them for bathroom breaks. Neither do they have to be concerned about rushing home to prepare lunch for guests or about staying late to put away chairs. I get all of that. But I’m convinced that the primary distinguishing mark is the preparation and the anticipation.

Sometimes we talk about conferences as if they are intrinsically wrong or as if we should enjoy them less. I disagree. Let’s continue to support and enjoy conferences and continue to believe and anticipate that the Lord can use them in our lives as a, occasional, supplemental kind of blessing. But as we affirm the value of conferences, let’s also learn from them that there is value in elevating the preparations we make for worshipping in the local church, and elevating the anticipation we feel for Sunday morning’s sermon. Let’s learn from conferences that we can and should take that excitement and anticipation and bring it to church with us every Sunday.

It’s funny how life works, isn’t it? It is so often the little decisions—the decisions that at the time seem so inconsequential—that have such far-reaching impact. Exactly ten years ago today, rather on a whim, I paid a few dollars to register the domain www.challies.com. A few hours and a few clicks later I had launched a new web site. It was just one of many things I did that day I’m sure, but it was one that, in time, changed my life.

I can barely remember who and what I was ten years ago. Using a bit of math I can reliably say that I was twenty-five years old, I had been married for four years, I was the father of a two-year-old son and I had a daughter due in just a few weeks. I lived in a rented a stone’s throw from where I live now, had just been laid off from my position as a senior network administrator at a high-tech firm, and had recently founded my own web design business. I was a member of a nearby church founded upon the principles of church growth, and, to my recollection, owned exactly one Christian book (It was R.C. Sproul’s Following Christ, a gift from my parents that I hadn’t ever gotten around to reading). Only once or twice since escaping college had I written anything more than a birthday card. I was very, very shy and in front of a crowd could do little more than blush and sweat and stammer.

I had no great plans for the domain and I intended only to use it as a place to share family news. My parents and siblings had all moved down to the United States just a couple of years before. The reason I registered Challies.com is that this was to be the place where the Challies family would exchange news and photographs; it would be a site by and for Challies’.

Within days of beginning the site I had uploaded several sets of photographs, mostly of the children. Then it happened: Sitting in church a week or two later I heard the pastor praise Mother Teresa as the very paragon of Christian virtue. I went home and researched what I knew and what I suspected of Mother Teresa and wrote an article titled "The Myth of Mother Teresa." It was an inauspicious beginning to what would soon become an extensive list of articles.

The early days of the site reflected several realities in my life at the time: I was a father of young children who was eager to share news and information about them (and who lived in a pre-Facebook world); I was an entrepreneur who was working long hours to put food on the table; and I was a Christian who had left behind the Reformed tradition but who was now forced to face my roots in the unexpected context of a church founded upon all the pragmatic principles of church growth. I had been content to leave behind the Reformed theology I had learned as a child, but in the context of this professedly non-Reformed church I found that my conscience screaming at me to examine what I really believed. I was beginning to see, even if in a very hazy way, that good theology really does matter and that a faulty root system will produce faulty fruit.

This church was blown by every wind of Christian marketing: The Purpose Driven Life and 40 Days of Purpose and The Passion of the Christ and everything else that promised great results and was endorsed by Rick Warren or Bill Hybels. Almost without my knowing it, my web site evolved into a place where I wrestled with these things, not in the abstract, but in the context of my own life. As the church led us through The Purpose Driven Life, I wrote a reflection every day, becoming increasingly concerned and perturbed, primarily by the misuse of Scripture. When the church leaders determined that The Passion of the Christ was, to use Rick Warren’s endorsement, “the best outreach opportunity in 2,000 years,” they dug deep and spent tens of thousands of dollars on tickets that they distributed through the community. I made my way to the theater on opening day and wrote a long review.

In these early days I wrestled through the five points of Calvinism, through what it means to evangelize, and through so much of what was popular in Evangelicalism simply because that was what was popular in my church. When I go back and read these early articles I can sense authenticity and urgency. While I had a measure of loyalty for that church, while I wanted to write off Reformed theology as old-fashioned and unnecessary, I was coming to see that the foundation was awfully shaky.

What I could only see later on, once my perspective had widened, is that the very same questions I was asking were the ones so many others were asking. Maybe you were asking them. As my church embraced The Purpose Driven Life, so did hundreds or thousands of others; as The Passion of the Christ became all the rage with Christians in Oakville, it became equally popular all across the world. Christians everywhere were asking very similar questions and growing in very similar directions. Many others were discovering or perhaps rediscovering Reformed Theology in this movement that would soon be labeled “New Calvinism.” This new medium of the blogosphere allowed me to ask and to attempt to answer these questions out loud and in public. It allowed others to follow along.

It was ten years ago that this all began. I never could have guessed at the time that I would follow “The Myth of Mother Teresa” with more than six thousand other articles and that the blog would some day see over ten million visits a year. I certainly never could have guessed that it would be such a formative influence in my own life, the place where I would work through so many issues, where I would rediscover Reformed theology, and where I would find that I just plain love to write. It would disrupt my plans to grow my business from a one-man operation to a full design studio. Instead it would open up opportunities to attend conferences and to write books and even to discover that I am capable of public speaking. Best of all, it would introduce me to Grace Fellowship Church where I would first meet the pastors, then become a member, then, several years later, be called to the ministry.

Registering a domain name, such a simple and insignificant thing, was one of those little acts that set my life on an entirely unexpected trajectory. I wouldn’t know how to think about this, how to interpret it, if I didn’t believe in the quiet hand of Providence that continually directs events, that knows the end (and the middle) long before the beginning. I look back on these ten years with quiet wonder and profound gratitude. At times I wish I could project what the next ten years might hold, but if I’ve learned anything, it is that I ought to know better than to make predictions.

I felt like this deserved a celebration of some sort, so I’ve gone ahead and put together a giveaway. Check in a bit later today and it should be ready to go. There will be some fun prizes to win.

A couple of weeks ago I invested an hour and a half in watching Lakeland: The Movie, a documentary about Todd Bentley and the Lakeland “Revival.” You may remember that in April of 2008, a preacher and revivalist named Todd Bentley was invited to Ignited Church in Lakeland, Florida. The plan was to have Bentley there for five days of revival services. In the end he stayed for four months. What was meant to be a small, local event soon saw hundreds of thousands of people from 65 countries travel to Florida. Millions more participated through the Internet. Night after night Bentley would hold wild services full of singing, preaching, speaking in tongues, prayer for healing and miracles and, of course, the inevitable collection of money.

The revival was marked by what were said to be great manifestations of the work of the Holy Spirit--speaking in tongues, ecstatic prophecies, miraculous healings and even the claim that somewhere around thirty people had been raised from the dead. Just about every major media outlet covered it at one time or another. Most of them went looking for evidence that miracles had actually happened; not surprisingly, not a single miracle was ever verified.

By August the revival was beginning to slow down a little bit and Bentley decided to leave Lakeland and to take the revival on the road. Teaching that the Holy Spirit could be passed from him to others by the laying on of hands, he would tour the country and take this outpouring of the Spirit with him. But no sooner did he leave Lakeland than the media exploded with reports that Bentley and his wife would be separating. Apparently he had been carrying on an inappropriate relationship with one of the women connected to his ministry. He and his wife soon divorced and shortly afterward he had married this other woman. The revivals and his ministry came to a screeching halt, at least for a time.

This documentary made me both angry and sad. I was outraged to see Bentley's complete disregard for Scripture, his disregard for what the Bible tells us about the miraculous gifts, about maintaining good order in services, about so much else. What made me sad were the many looks at the people who had followed Bentley. There were many people, well-intentioned, I am sure, who gave up everything they had to follow him. They sold their houses, they walked away from their normal lives, and drove down to Florida where for a time many of them even lived together in a tent city. They looked to Bentley as their leader, the one who would be ushering in an age of revival, of constant miracles and supernatural deeds. They were enraptured by him, entranced by him, as they lived in a charismatic glow of constant prayer, prophecy, speaking in tongues and unusual manifestations of the Holy Spirit.

But then Bentley committed adultery and divorced his wife and walked away from his family. And then what? What about those people who gave up everything to follow him? What were they to do? What did they have left? He left them with nothing. He had called on them to follow him. He had gained their trust and their allegiance and their finances. And then he indulged in his sin and walked away. Like so many religious leaders before and after, he promised so much: He promised new life and new prosperity and new depths of religious experience. But in the end he abandoned those who followed him. The ones he hurt the worst were the ones who had trusted him most. The ones he hurt the worst were the ones who had given up the most to follow him.

A couple of years ago Microsoft put together a clever marketing campaign for Windows Phone 7, their new mobile operating system (which is to say, the software they were introducing that would power the new generation of Windows-based cell phones). The commercial poked fun at the fact that so many of us spend so much of our lives staring at tiny little LCD rectangles. And then it asks the simple question, "Really?"

Microsoft acknowledges that mobile phones are an integral part of life today and that we will be unwilling to get rid of them altogether, so what they suggest is that their software can make your time staring at the phone more productive, allowing you to get in, get out, and get to the rest of life. They want you to "be here now." Of course Microsoft's new software doesn’t actually do anything to solve the problem--we all know that. They make a half-hearted attempt to suggest that this software will make a difference but obviously they are hoping that in identifying a problem many of us are feeling guilty about, they'll convince us that they have found a solution. It's nonsense. It’s like a commerical that shows a bunch of drunken people staggering around and that presents a new high-octane vodka as the antidote. The problem cannot be the solution!

Microsoft is acknowledging in their advertising that we depend upon our phones and that these phones call us to depend upon them. The slave has become the master; we've become tools of our tools. They do a great job of showing life experiences missed, of displaying the distraction. But in the end they've really got nothing to offer by way of solution, except, as is so often the case, more technology to solve the problems caused by our technology. If only our phones were a little smarter or a little faster, then we'd get back to living. That's always the way we try to solve these problems. But it rarely works. And in the case of Windows Phone 7 (or the iPhone 5, for that), it definitely won't work.

Read any book dealing with technology and before long you'll run across Marshall McLuhan and his famous aphorism "the medium is the message." What McLuhan meant to say in that phrase is that buried within every technology is some kind of an ideology, some kind of an idea, that will make itself known in time. And that message is the most important component of the technology. When we look at our cell phones today--the latest generation of smartphones, that allow us to make calls, send text messages, check our email, update Facebook, surf the web, listen to music, watch movies, etc, etc, etc--we can quickly start to see the ideology buried within. These phones demand all of us. They accelerate the pace of life, they demand constant attention.

Here's an interesting phenomenon. On the one hand we have become dependent upon our mobile phones. After all, they bring us great benefits that we do not wish to give up. But on the other hand, we need to face the truth that these devices are prone to draw us away from the important things in life, including—or perhaps especially—the people who are closest to us.

We live in a culture of celebrity, a culture where fame and greatness have little to do with heroism and accomplishment. The people who influence us, the people who dominate the headlines and the covers of magazines, are so often people who are famous for being famous rather than being people who have contributed anything profound and lasting to the human experience.

I have been finding myself thinking a lot about Christian celebrity—not the people as much as the phenomenon itself. It’s undeniable that there is a celebrity culture in Christianity and it is equally undeniable that we New Calvinists like our celebs as much as anyone else.

Now let’s be clear: The fact that we esteem some people is not necessarily wrong. The Lord has gifted certain people to such an extent that we admire them for who they are and what they have contributed to the church, usually through the written word or the spoken word. There are others who may have less natural gifting or talent, but who have been consistently faithful with the remarkable opportunities they have been given and we admire these people for what they have contributed through words or through example. As we honor them, we honor God who has so gifted them. Well and good.

So where do we cross a line into some kind of celebrity culture? This has consumed my mind for some time now. It feels like a celebrity culture exists in the church, but what makes it so? Can I prove it?

Here is where my thinking has led me. We cross into a culture of celebrity when we assume that merit in one field or one discipline necessarily carries that merit to other fields or disciplines. More particularly, it comes when we transfer the authority of one field into another, so that we assume the guy with the popular blog must be a great expositor of the Bible (thus transferring the authority of his success in social media into authority the pulpit). Christian celebrity comes when we assume that the songwriter must be a noteworthy teacher, that the YouTube phenom is worthy of our pulpit, and that the guy who sells so many books must be able to craft a sermon on any topic or any text. Merit in one isolated field convinces us that this person has earned the right to every other platform. When we do this we have elevated not on the basis of merit, but of celebrity.

Thus we have men who have never preached a sermon in their lives standing before hundreds or thousands who have been told that this man will necessarily bless them. We put these celebrities in the difficult position of raising them to a platform they are just not equipped to handle well. We do them, and we do ourselves, a disservice. This leads to books written by authors who are well-known rather than authors who are truly equipped; it leads to conferences that boast a-list celebrity speakers even though there are other men who could be much more faithful and much more skillful in expositing those texts or preaching on those topics.

I believe I can speak to this topic because in some ways I have been the recipient of this transfer of authority. I have had to reconcile myself to the indisputable fact that many of the opportunities I have been given have come not by way of merit, but by way of transfer of merit (which is to say, by way of celebrity). There have been times where I’ve been asked to stand before a large crowd and speak on a topic that is near and dear to me and which I have studied deeply; I love to do that and can do that with a measure of boldness and confidence. But there have been many other times I’ve been asked to stand before a large crowd and to speak on a topic on which I really have no business speaking and where I bring so little authority. I have sat on panels and been in way over my head, put at the front of that room because of a measure of success in an entirely different field.

What I have come to see plainly and simply in my own life is that achieving a level of social media success does not make me a theologian, but that people may begin to treat me like one. Writing thousands of blog posts and collecting millions of page views will open up many opportunities to speak on an endless variety of topics, but it will do very little to equip me to do this well. There is no necessary correlation between social media success and the ability to understand and exposit God’s Word, but there is a definite correlation between social media success and the assumption that I must be a gifted preacher. So many of the opportunities I have been offered have far exceeded any kind of legitimate merit. Yet both I and others have bought into the belief that success in one area equips me for success in others.

I am still grappling with these things, still trying to understand the implications in my own life. There are two measures I’ve quietly tried to put into place. The first is that whatever ministry I have in the wider Christian world ought to grow out of ministry in my local church. The authority to speak on a topic will grow outward from here to there. I would never want to travel to a conference and speak on a topic for which the people closest to me see no authority and no growth. The second measure is that I have tried to narrow the scope of the topics I speak on to those few where I have expended a lot of effort, where I have studied the Bible closely, where I have emphasized personal application, and where I believe that by God’s grace I may have something to say.

Earlier this week I posted a short article showing how the Toronto District School Board has chosen to effectively drive churches out of the public schools by pushing through a massive fee hike. In a city of small congregations and expensive real estate, renting space from public schools has long been one of the few affordable options for churches. Grace Fellowship Church of East Toronto, a recent plant of the church I attend, is faced with a 391% increase in the fee they pay to rent a gymnasium for their worship services; Grace Toronto, another local church with which we have a close association, has seen their fees rise by 142%, up to $192,000 a year for just four hours of weekly use. Many other local churches face similar circumstances.

At the time I wrote the article I asked for action and for prayer. Both must have happened in abundant measure!

I posted the article on Monday morning and by the next day I had been contacted by several local and national newspapers, radio stations, and television channels. I opted to direct all media inquiries to Julian Freeman and Dan MacDonald, the pastors of those two churches. In the few days since, it has been a thrill to see those men appear all over the news.

• CTV News covered the issue immediately and headlined their article “Churches scramble after school board raises rental fee.” They published another titled “Church stunned by major TDSB rental fee hike.”
• The Toronto Star published an article titled “School rental hike wallops small faith groups.”
• The National Post went with the long headline “Church groups see rent for meeting rooms spike as much as 400% as Toronto schools try to fill budget gap.”
• WORLD Magazine titled an article “Blatant Discrimination.”
• Christianity Today published a brief story titled “Toronto Churches Face Eviction As School Rental Fees Skyrocket”

And that was not all. This issue was the subject of discussions on local talk radio, including 1010 CFRB, a station well-known to Torontonians. WDCX, a Christian radio station based in Buffalo (but which broadcasts across Lake Ontario into the Toronto area) had a feature. Global TV, a national television network, apparently intends to air a feature this weekend.

I’d ask you to continue to pray and, if you are a Toronto resident, to continue to take action by getting in touch with your Member of Provincial Parliament and your School Trustee. While I have not yet spoken to the Toronto School Board representatives, I am hearing from one pastor they may soon be willing to offer some kind of a compromise to the churches. Please pray that they do. From other pastors I am hearing that the School Board is digging in their heels.

Every Christian parent longs for his children to trust in Christ and to make this profession public. In Baptist churches such a profession is made public through baptism. One of the ongoing discussions among Baptists relates to the age at which children can or should be baptized. Many children raised in a Christian home--perhaps even most of them--profess faith at a young age. Many parents then ask, Should my child be immediately baptized? Here is my attempt to answer this question.

Defining Baptism

Baptism is an ordinance of God given to the New Testament church. It symbolizes that the recipient has been buried and resurrected with Christ and serves as public profession of faith and admission into the local church community. It precedes both membership and partaking of the Lord's Supper, and as such, is the gateway to full participation in the life of the church.

Three Premises

Here are three premises related to the age of baptism.

Premise #1 - Those who make a credible profession of faith are to be baptized. 
Without exception, the New Testament pattern for baptism is that it follows a credible profession of faith (see Acts 8:12, Acts 9:36, Acts 16:29-34). What makes a profession of faith credible? I look for credibility to be displayed in knowledge and maturity.

Knowledge. For a person's profession of faith to be credible, he must display at least a basic knowledge of the gospel and of the meaning of baptism. Baptism is not a rite performed upon a person, but an ordinance in which he is a full participant. Therefore the one who is baptized must have knowledge of what is being done and why.

Maturity. Maturity displays itself in autonomy and in counting the cost. The mature person is autonomous in that he has the ability to make independent decisions. He is also one who counts the cost, who has seen some of what a decision may cost him in terms of relationship, prestige or suffering, yet still desires to proceed.

Premise #2 - Children may, and often do, become believers at a young age.
We must be careful never to communicate to children that they are too young to understand the gospel or respond to it. Jesus said, "Let the little children come unto me." God calls us to share the gospel with our children and to call them to repentance and faith. God graciously allows many children to come to a saving faith, even at a very young age. For this reason every member of a church ought to be active in sharing the gospel with every child in that church, calling on them to respond to it and trusting that God does work in the hearts of young children.

Premise #3 - This is a matter of wisdom and conscience.
The New Testament contains no clear example of a child receiving baptism; neither does it contain a clear example of a child being refused baptism. In the absence of clear commands, the leaders of each church must prayerfully exercise charity and wisdom as they seek to determine whether or not they will make it their practice to baptize children who profess faith.

The Age of Baptism

With these premises in mind, I believe there is wisdom in waiting until children are older before baptizing them. My reasoning is primarily grounded in the second test of credibility: maturity.

Toronto is a city of 2.6 million where churches are small and real estate is costly. For this reason many churches meet in gymnasiums and cafeterias they rent from the Toronto District School Board. But now, very suddenly, the TDSB has taken action to get churches out of its schools. At the end of August each of these organizations was notified that they would face an imminent increase in rental fees. The next day they learned that this increase would range from 140% to 800% and that it would begin to go in effect in just four days. Unless the Board can be convinced to change course, they will effectively drive hundreds of churches from its nearly 600 schools.

At the end of August, the TDSB announced to their permit holders that effective September 1, 2012, they would streamline the organizational categories under which they distribute rental permits. As of that date, religious organizations (and only religious organizations) would no longer receive subsidies offered to other not-for-profit and charitable organizations. These subsidies are provided by Ontario's Ministry of Education in their Community Use of Schools Program which allocates funds to underwrite many of the costs associated with fair, equal and diverse use of school buildings.

As the Board revoked subsidies, it simultaneously announced that it intended to raise rental prices for all tenants by 43.7% effective January 1, 2013. Between the rental increase and the loss of subsidies, most churches will no longer be able to afford to rent school buildings. Many of them will have nowhere else to go.

Grace Fellowship Church of East Toronto, a two-year-old plant of Grace Fellowship Church (where I am one of the pastors), has approximately 70 people in regular attendance and meets in Greenland Public School in the heart of Don Mills, a neighborhood on the east side of the city. Pastor Julian Freeman received notification on August 27 that his church's rental rates would be subject to an imminent increase. The next day he learned that effective September 1, just four days later, the rental fee would increase from $468 for 4 hours of weekly use to $2,300 per month for 3.5 hours of weekly use, a 391% increase.

Pastor Freeman told me,

We were saddened by the news of our rate hike. I grew up going to TDSB schools, and worked for the School Board as a young adult. I'm glad to be in this facility, which is situated in the middle of a residential neighborhood, close to malls and bus lines. On the School Board's website they indicate that they desire for their facilities to be "hubs" for community activity, and that permits will not be seen as an opportunity for revenue, but rather, as a service to the community. It's too bad that they are not living up to their word.

But more important than just the cost issue, it seems to me, is the blatant discrimination against religious groups in general, and Christian churches in particular. The changes to the permitting policy specifically target "faith-based groups" alone. This doesn't affect anyone else and is for no other reason than the fact that we are "faith-based." It seems to me that decisions like this sets a reckless trajectory for the future of our city and our country. Our Trustee was friendly and helpful and offered to help us work on bringing down our cost somehow, but to me the issue is the systemic discrimination even more than the particulars of the cost increases we've incurred. The TDSB must be called to account for this.

As of August 30, Grace Toronto Church, with approximately 450 attendees under the leadership of Pastor Dan MacDonald, was already paying the highest rental rate of any church renting Rosedale Heights School for the Arts for $6,561 per month. On that day Grace Toronto was notified that effective September 1, only two days later, they would be reclassified so they would now have to pay premium rather than charity rates. This nearly doubled their rent to $12,224 per month; effective January 1 the rate will rise to $15,895 per month, an increase of 142% over the previous year.

Pastor MacDonald is calm but perplexed:

Has anyone ever seen God? This is a question that arises naturally when reading through Scripture. You’re making your way through Exodus and then you read in 24:9-10,

Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up, 10 and they saw the God of Israel. There was under his feet as it were a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness.

And then just a few chapters later, you read God’s response to Moses’ request to see his glory:

And he said, "I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name 'The LORD' … 20 But," he said, "you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live." (Exodus 33:19-20)

In the first passage, Scripture says that Moses saw God, but in the second, God tells Moses that he cannot see his face, because no one can see him and live. How do we make sense of these two statements? Did Moses and the other elders really see the God of Israel on the mountain? If so, why does God tell Moses in 33:20 that he cannot see him?

Old Testament professor Walt Kaiser, commenting on 24:9-10, provides an answer:

That Moses and his company see “the God of Israel” at first appears to contradict 33:20; John 1:18; and 1 Timothy 6:16; but what they see is a “form [‘similitude’] of the Lord” (Nu 12:8), just as Ezekiel (Eze 1:26) and Isaiah (Isa 6:1) saw an approximation, a faint resemblance and a sensible adumbration of the incarnate Christ who was to come. (Expositor’s Bible Commentary, 508)

In other words, when we come across passages in which God is said to be seen, whether by Abraham, Moses, or one of the prophets, we are to understand that these men did indeed see the Lord, but that they did not see him in his full glory. This is what Moses asked to see in 33:20 and this is what God denied him.

Throughout Scripture God makes his presence known to his people in different forms (such as passing visitors to Abraham and Lot, a burning bush to Moses, a pillar of fire and cloud to the people of Israel, etc.). But his pure essence no man is able to see, due to his radiant holiness (1 Timothy 6:16). It’s like trying to stare at the sun--it cannot be done without destroying your eyes.

Even Christ himself, who is the “image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15), relinquished his heavenly glory when he came to earth. We saw him, but he “had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2). Yet when John sees him in Revelation, his appearance is unbearable, his face “like the sun shining in full strength” (1:16).

The sure hope of heaven is that we will one day be able to experience the full glory of our God. Our blood-bought, resurrected bodies will be equipped with new, indestructible eyes, we will see his face, and we will bask in the light of his glory forever (Revelation 22:4-5).

Justin Taylor recently revived Mark Dever’s 2007 series of articles titled “Where’d All These New Calvinists Come From?” This was a ten-part series that looked to the rise of New Calvinism and sought to discover the sources of a theological resurgence. Dever said,

Of course, theologically, the answer is "because of the sovereignty of God."  But I've never been convinced by hyper-Calvinism's argument that because God has determined the ends, the means don't matter.  Means do matter.  And as a Christian, as an historian who had lived through the very change I was considering, I wondered what factors had been used by God.

Dever originally offered ten of these factors:

1. Charles H. Spurgeon
2. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
3. The Banner of Truth Trust
4. Evangelism Explosion
5. The inerrancy controversy
6. Presbyterian Church in America (PCA)
7. J. I. Packer
8. John MacArthur and R. C. Sproul
9. John Piper
10. The rise of secularism and decline of Christian nominalism

With the benefit of another five years of data-gathering, Taylor offers several more:

• The publication and explosive success of Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology
• The Passion conferences
• September 11, 2001
• The role of Christian publishing (Eerdmans, P&R, Baker, and now Crossway and a number of smaller publishers)
• The steady growth of seminaries (e.g., Westminster Theological Seminary, Westminster Seminary California, Covenant Theological Seminary, Reformed Theological Seminary, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, etc.)
• The rise of organizations devoted to developing and networking around a God-centered, gospel-driven vision. Dever mentions MacArthur, Sproul, and Piper--associated with Grace to You, Ligonier, and Desiring God. To that list could be added the Gospel Coalition, Redeemer City to City, Together for the Gospel, Acts29, 9Marks, Sovereign Grace Ministries, etc.

There is one factor that neither Dever nor Taylor has listed and one I consider absolutely critical to the growth of the movement: the Internet.

The Internet has allowed people to find community based on common interest—a new kind of community that transcends any geographic boundary. It used to be that people of common interest could only find others who shared their interests within a limited geographic area. The Internet has forever changed this and this is true in any field, whether it pertains to vocation, hobby, sports, religion or anything else. As web sites began to spring up, and then individual blogs and then group blogs and then YouTube channels and Facebook pages and Twitter feeds, people began to discover that there were others like them, people who believed roughly the same things or who had roughly the same interests. Where there may have been only a small number of enthusiasts in a single town or city, the Internet brought together enthusiasts from hundreds and thousands of cities and towns. These people could now congregate online with those who shared their interests.

The New Calvinism is no exception. While the theological seeds had been planted in previous years and decades, the movement was awaiting a catalyst that would allow the isolated individuals to coalesce into a movement. The catalyst in this case was the Internet and social media.