Twin Lakes Conference

I had a long and deep sleep last night and then headed to the dining hall for breakfast with a Reformed Virginian and an American Swede. After munching down some crispy bacon (seems to be how they eat it in Mississippi) and french toast, we gathered again for the conference’s final worship service, this one led by Ken Pierce and with Derek Thomas preaching “The Benediction” from 2 Corinthians 13:14.

It was Martin Luther who reintroduced the benediction as a liturgical act of bringing a worship service to a close and since the Reformation this verse (2 Corinthians 13:14) has had pride of place in many services. But we may have lost a sense of the usefulness of a benediction. It is more than just a farewell or a prayer, but is meant to be a blessing (which means you should be looking up, not looking down with your eyes closed). This particular benediction functions covenantally, indicating the twin themes of blessing and cursing, the way of the Lord and the way of the world. At the end of the service it is appropriate to declare to the people which is the way to true joy and happiness. When using this benediction, every service ends with God, His Word and His covenant. It reminds us of the faithfulness, character and immutability of God. It also serves as a prooftext reminding us of the Trinity, of what He is in His being and essence. It is a constant reminder to us of the essential truth of this doctrine and reminds us how important it is that the rest of the service is also trinitarian.

Thomas then expounded on each of the benediction’s three points, the grace of the Lod Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Sadly, my notes on this sermon left a little bit to be desired (actually, they left a lot to be desired) so decided it would be best to just leave things like this, as only a brief summary. The sermon was meant to uplift pastors who are so often burdened by their work, and who are tired and sometimes worn out or beaten down. This benediction serves as a reminder to them of these three wonderful principles that should minister to the hearts of those who minister to others.

And this was a recurring theme at this conference, that ministers so often face extraordinary difficulties and that they come under attack from within the church and without as they attempt to bring the Word to God’s people. I could quickly see that this conference, this fellowship, serves as an opportunity for pastors to escape, for just a few days. It is an opportunity for them to hear some teaching and to offer worship to the Lord. But most of all it is an opportunity for them to fellowship with other ministers, to relax and to unwind, whether than involves quiet Bible study under a tree, endlessly casting a line into the lake and hoping that there is a fish in their worth catching, or using a handgun to obliterate the threat posed by marauding haybales conveniently covered in concentric circles.

I’m not really sure how one becomes a member of this fellowship, but I do know that many ministers would benefit from it. The grounds of this conference are unique and uniquely beautiful. It is an amazing place to be and wherever I go I hear people saying how much they love this time and how much they love to meet here with their brothers in the Lord and brothers in the ministry. The flavor is southern and southern Presbyterian in particular. But even as a Canadian and a Baptist I felt welcome and felt at home. It has been a grand week.

This afternoon we enjoyed a panel discussion in which Ligon Duncan spoke with several African American pastors. He asked about how they were saved, how they came to embrace the doctrines of grace, and how they feel the church can best address issues of race. He also spoke briefly on the phone with Mark Dever (asking Mark about his upcoming writing projects) and then with D.A. Carson (whom he also asked about his upcoming writing project). In the afternoon we had a few hours of free time which I used to make a long and circuitous tour of this incredible facility. I even found myself at a shooting range with a bunch of pastors blasting away at some targets with at .45 (two to the chest, one to the head seemed to be the order of the day). We walked for at least an hour and still had to stop short of seeing everything.

After dinner we reconvened for another worship service, this one led by Jay Harvey and with a sermon by Thabiti Anyabwile.

Thabiti spoke from Ephesians 2:11-22 on the topic of “The End of Alienation, Hostility, and Homelessness.” He began by discussing how important and confusing this issue is, and how racial identity continues to be a major struggle for individuals and for our culture even in the twenty-first century. Many unbelievers are attempting to sort out the issues, but even the best and brightest minds continually contradict each other. The vision held out to us by God through His apostle in Ephesians 2 is glorious and provides the biblical solutions.

The three problems connected with race and identity that are addressed and answered in this passage are Alienation, Hostility and Homelessness.

The answer to our alienation is nearness to God. Verses one through ten of this chapter see Paul addressing individuals but in verses 11-22 he zooms out and looks at the people of God. He addresses these Gentiles with whom there is sharp ethnic division from the Jews. Because they were not Jewish they had been foreigners to the covenant and were without hope and without God. This is how people show up at our churches, in a desperate, desolate condition. They are estranged from God, from His people and from any kind of hope. Through Christ they are now brought near to Christ and are Christians. They are a new spiritual ethnic group. This changes everything! Alienation ends when we find nearness to God.

The answer to our hostility is reconciliation and peace through Jesus Christ. Jesus Himself is our peace. Peace is a person and He is the only peace available to Jew or Gentile. To achieve this peace, Jesus made groups that were once hostile to be unified, He destroyed the wall or barrier of hostility, He abolished the law and its regulations, and He came and preached this message of peace (which is a way of summarizing His earthly ministry). Jesus’ purpose in creating this peace was to create one new man, a man characterized by reconciliation with God and with fellow Christians. We see the power of what Christ achieves in the cross when He offers Himself in our place. We see the end of alienation and the end of hostility. He does not make it possible or make it available in the future, but something He does and accomplishes. Why stress this? Because in most Christian churches we live beneath our inheritance on this issue. The power for reconciliation is found in the power of the cross. The danger for us is that we can live in a way that we show the world, which is so confused by racial reconciliation, that we haven’t figured it out either. When we do this we lie about Jesus and what He has accomplished for us.

The answer to our homelessness is a new, permanent dwelling with God. Because of our hostility we are a people that are not at home with God or with each other. We are a household built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets and with Jesus as the chief cornerstone. He anchors this building, keeping it level and sturdy. All of history is about God building for Himself a holy temple, a dwelling place. It is a new building made of living stones which each of us is (or, as Thabiti said, “we be that!”). We are the temple, the place where God resides.

God ends the alienation, hostility and homelessness. So what? How does this impact a pastor’s ministry? What difference does a passage like this make in living out our faith? There are several applications:

First, Ephesians 2 lets us know that Christianity is more corporate than we may be accustomed to thinking. It is about more than our personal relationship with God. The doctrine of the church may be a secondary doctrine but it is not a primary reality. We cannot afford to have an anemic understanding of how we cultivate togetherness in the church.

Second, this passage promises greater unity than we may imagine or experience. The cross holds out for us more promise, power and deliverance than we may have ever imagined. We need to preach the cross in such a way that it applies to the way people think about identity.

Third, this passage begs us to be an aggressively inclusive people. Christians, of all people, who have been strangers in this world and who have been alien, are to be the people with the widest arms, the people seeking to embrace the most. This may be in evangelism or in hospitality or in any other way either inside or outside the church. Failure to do so is a failure to rightly grasp the gospel with our own lives.

Fourth, we need a new anthropology, a new understanding of man. We need to speak to the likeness of all people, regardless of race, but we need more. Distinctly Christian anthropology has to go on to talk about our new identity of Christ in dialog with notions of culture. We need a Christological anthropology. It also needs to be ecclesiological as well.

To summarize briefly, through the cross of Christ we can hold out to the world what it looks like to no longer be alienated, hostile or homeless.

Tonight’s winning quote came courtesy of Thabiti: “I’m in Mississippi in front of a largely white audience…in the woods!”

I’ll be back tomorrow with one more update and possibly some reflections. And then I’ll be heading home!

The day began with David Robertson speaking to us about Robert Murray McCheyne. Robertson, who currently pastors St. Peter’s Free Church, the very church of McCheyne, wrote a biography (Awakening: The Life & Ministry of Robert Murray McCheyne) of McCheyne in 1994 and shared with us some of the lessons we can learn from the all-too-short life of this great Scottish preacher.

We then turned to the second of this conference’s worship services. After Kevin Smith assisted in reading the Word, praying and leading worship, Brian Habig preached from Genesis 11:1-9.

Depravity is not an abstraction but has particular manifestations.

Why are these people building the tower? - The world’s population is increasing but is not expanding outwards as much as they could or as much as they were commanded to. The earth was still wild and people were staying where it was safe and settled. The people decided to make a name for themselves by making a city and a tower that could sustain them. They were effectively saying, “When someone comes from afar they will see this tower—our tower.” Remember that Moses originally wrote this text for a people who had just been released from Egypt and it would be difficult for them to believe that someone could actually make bricks and create huge buildings on a volunteer basis.

What does God not like it? - He is against this project because something that is natural to Him is that He wants people made in His image to spread out and fill His earth. We speak of the Great Commission but the first commission is to fill and subdue the earth. These people are simply ignoring this and do not want to fill the earth.

What does God do about it? - He does something in the short-run and something in the long-run. In the short-run, He comes down, though we don’t fully know what that means. He Himself goes to Babel and draws this conclusion: if they are already doing this and have one language, there is almost no cap on what they will come up with. So he confuses their language, making it so bewildering and confusing that they cannot finish the project and the city goes unfinished. He scatters them over the face of the earth.

In the long-run He comes as both God and man to earth. He comes as the God-man and does not just appear to walk around, but really lives here and dwells in our midst and He says things like “I have come to seek and to save the lost.” He goes to all kinds of people—the poor, women, the marginalized, etc. And finally, lays down His life for His people and is raised in glory. When He is risen from the dead He gathers his disciples together and, before He ascends, says “you will be my witnesses…to the ends of the earth.” At Pentecost you get the reversal of Babel so that all languages declare the only name worth naming. Luke goes out of his way to let us see something—he lets us see how the gospel message began to be taken to the world as the people were scattered through persecution (Acts 8). God Himself scattered them in this way.

Habig then reminded the people here that one of the founding principles of the PCA was an emphasis on the Great Commission and, while this continues to be emphasized, many PCA churches have neglected the mission field in their very backyards. We are to spread out where God has placed us. The question for pastors is this: Is that the fruit of what you’re teaching and preaching? Does your own behavior exemplify this? Do you put yourself in uncomfortable places where you will be able to meet people who need to meet the Savior (much as Jesus placed Himself in a strange place to meet the woman at the well)? The exhortation is this: place yourself unnaturally to reach people where you would not naturally go.

If you are a pastor or an elder, I think this is a message you will want to hear.

This afternoon Carl Robbins invited different pastors, church planters and heads of ministries to provide brief updates on what has happened in their ministries over the past year. This was really an amazing time as we were able to see the diversity of Reformed ministries. We heard from missionaries raising support to head to other countries to begin churches or whole denominations. We heard from churches that are helping the recovery efforts in Gulfport, Mississippi, we heard from people who translate good books into Spanish and from people who have begun new churches. This was only the first round of these updates and I look forward to hearing more as this event continues. I really got the feeling as I sat here that the value of this event must grow with each year a person attends. A person who has heard updates and prayer requests year-after-year will be able to immediately recognize the answers to prayer and praise God for them. Most conferences have a clear beginning and end. It seems that this fellowship is merely paused at the end of each year and that each time these men gather they just pick up where they left off the year before.

Tonight we had the first of what will be four worship services during the course of the conference. Each is a full service and allows the ministers in attendance to gather ideas about how others conduct their services. Tonight’s service was led by Harry Reeder and the sermon was preached by Douglas Kelly. He preached from Mark 11:24-26 (and do note that verse 26 does not appear in some translations, the ESV included—Kelly preached from the King James) and dealt with the subject of forgiveness. Satan will not be likely to attack a conservative pastor on issues such as “the enlightenment tells us that miracles can’t happen.” Rather, he seeks to have him believe that prayer goes unanswered and seeks to keep him from having a vibrant, powerful prayer life.

The point of this passage is simple. You have to forgive in order to be powerful in prayer. The bad news is that this is one of the hardest commandments in the Scripture to practice. But it’s not really bad news because we have the Holy Spirit to help and guide us.

The sermon was framed around four matters raised by this matter of forgiveness for personal and ministerial prayers to be answered:

The importance of forgiveness - We know that forgiveness is important because Jesus says in several different places that we are to do it. In this passage he connects our willingness to forgive with the power and effectiveness of our prayers. There are never grounds for a Christian not to forgive since God has forgiven us the infinite debt we owe to Him. There are two major impediments to an effective ministry in the local church, one being lack of perseverance in prayer and the other being a lack of forgiveness. It is difficult to think that heartfelt prayers for other people within the church can be blocked because you have neglected to extend forgiveness to others. Yet this is what this passage preaches.

What forgiveness is not - We do not pay off God to forgive our sins by forgiving others. To accept the Divine forgiveness through Jesus’ blood and resurrection ushers me into God’s holy presence where I experience great changes of heart and mind and attitude. It means that the Holy Spirit comes to dwell in my deepest personality. To refuse to forgive others means you’ve never really understood the gospel in the first place.

How forgiveness works - Forgiveness day-by-day unblocks the barriers to joyful communication. Being a forgiving person unblocks any barrier between my soul and the Lord’s favor. Forgiveness on a human level unblocks the joy of communication with other brothers and sisters in the Lord, allowing happy, ongoing relationships.

Several objections to forgiveness - While we tend to agree that this is biblical, we often raise objections to actually having to do it. This is easy to understand but very hard to practice. Hence a self-protective device so we don’t have to go through the pain of forgiving is to come up with objections to forgiveness. Here are five objections: First, if we forgive someone who hurt us, we will be taken advantage of and they might do it again. The answer to this is, yes they might but Jesus told us to forgive seventy times seven. We do our part and leave what they do with God. Second, to forgive some unworthy person would lower our moral standards. This can’t be right because God the holy and pure forgives sinners without lowering His standards. Third, it is embarrassing to ask for pardon. Many of us feel that if we apologize the other person will know that we were in the wrong. But, of course, they already know that. Fourth, it is hard to forgive but the answer is to understand what it took for Jesus to forgive us. There was nothing easy about it. Fifth, we worry that the other person has not apologized to us. but we are to be like God in taking the initiative to forgive.

We closed with that great Getty/Townend hymn, “The Power of the Cross.”

Ligon Duncan kicked things off with an explanation of this fellowship (they do not refer to it as a conference), the reason it exists and what they mean by continually referring to “the ordinary means of grace.” The Twin Lakes Fellowship is a ministerial fraternal committed to connecting gospel ministers and elders with one another. Duncan quoted Jonathan Edwards who said that when God prepares His church for a significant blessing, He brings together a brotherhood of ministers. These people will have differences but believe passionately in the things that bind them. The Fellowship represents a wide variety of Christians spanning Presbyterians, Baptists, Christian Missionary Alliance, etc.

Every minister at some point feels alone and this is too hard a work to feel alone. This fellowship promotes a dissipation of that aloneness and promote this fellowship. They can come together to know that they’re not alone and to find people who are close to them both theologically and geographically. It is not just a ministerial fraternal but one that wants to have a positive effect on church health and growth through the ordinary means of grace. They want to promote church planting and kingdom extension.

This phrase, the ordinary means of grace, required lengthy explanation. The ordinary means of grace are a focus on the Word, prayer and sacraments. These are the ordinances given by God through which congregational life is nurtured. A ministry that focuses on the things God says are critical to the health and growth of His people.

He paused here to reflect on results-based ministry and said we cannot shoot for only short-term results but need to work towards the long-term results. He quoted Jim Boice who said Evangelicals over-estimate what they can accomplish in five years but under-estimate what they can accomplish in twenty. Far too many ministers and ministries focus on the short-term at the expense of real growth and change.

Ministers today are facing challenges from the emerging church, the word faith movement, Purpose Driven and other fad-driven programs. These programs claim that, since everything in the world has changed, we need to change. But the fundamental human problem has not changed and thus neither has the biblical solution or the God-given means. Effective Christian ministry has always been marked by a confidence in God’s Word both in message and method. This doesn’t mean that we don’t think hard about cultural context but we must know what God’s answer is.

There are only three views of gospel ministry:

• Effective engagement requires us to update the message.
• Effective ministry requires us to update our methods.
• Effective ministry begins with a pre-commitment to God’s methods and message as set forth in His Word.

The first approach is that of theological liberalism and says that the gospel won’t work until the message is changed. The second approach is that of modern evangelicalism and especially the seeker-friendly approach, as they say that the gospel won’t work until the method is changed—the message is fine, but the methods need to be tweaked. However, the medium is the message. The method and the message cannot simply be neatly separated. The third approach is that of those who are committed to the ordinary means of grace. Those committed to an approach that believes that the gospel works and that God has given both the message and the method. This is a ministry based on doing the things God says are central to the spiritual health and growth of His people. It is radically committed to a biblical direction of the priorities of ministry. There is a desire among young Reformed evangelicals to see change in the church but “what kind of change?” is the question of the hour. Some people say we need to reject how church and ministry have been done because they don’t work, but they look only to recent church history and blame Protestant confessional theology on the mistakes of the past forty years. This is bad diagnosis and the solutions are worse than the problem. The other direction of change is to go back to the way the Bible says we are to do things. This means challenging some of the sacred cows of church tradition and the culture around us.

However important it is to understand our times and our context (and they are very important!) the ordinary means approach to ministry is first and foremost concerned with biblical fidelity because we believe that faithfulness is relevance. As David Wells says, those whom the world thinks are most irrelevant are in fact those who are most relevant to this world.

People committed to the ordinary means of grace know that God instructs ministers and churches to: Give attention to the public reading of the Word; Preach the Word; Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them…; Celebrate the Lord’s Supper; Pray. These are the ways that God’s people grow. These are the tools of God’s grace and nothing else in the church’s program should detract from these means of grace. This means that ministry is not rocket science. Gospel faithfulness does not require a PhD in Sociology. Ministry is determined more by reading the Word of God than by reading culture. The ordinary means of grace minister wants to think hard about culture, but when it comes to determining method and priorities he moves from text to ministry, not from culture to ministry.

Duncan then asked What do we want to see coming out of the Twin Lakes Fellowship? He mentioned briefly that a few days ago he was with John Piper who has told Reformed leaders that they need to take responsibility to shepherd the young Reformed awakening and to give it godly, biblical counsel. Duncan then said that this Fellowship longs to see a renewal of the old evangelical alliances around the gospel and a strong coalition of [And here he began to channel John Piper in a paragraph that would have broken the - key on my keyboard had I been able to keep up with it and transcribe it] pastors working together for the gospel. And these men will shepherd churches banding together for the gospel and holding tightly to biblical theology.

And that is an overview of the Twin Lakes Fellowship. After a brief pause he called Philip Ryken to discuss two projects Ryken is leading, a literary study Bible that will be published by Crossway and the Reformed Expository Commentary series.

I’m sitting in a lodge of sorts, way down south in Mississippi. Jackson, Mississippi, to be exact. I shamefully admit that I had to look up both Jackson and Mississippi on a map yesterday before I set out just to figure out where I was going to be spending my week. I am here for the Twin Lakes Conference, a small but impactful conference sponsored primarily by First Presbyterian Church of Jackson (a.k.a. Ligon Duncan’s church). Attendance is expected to be around 250 men, the vast majority of whom seem to be Presbyterian pastors. Rumor has it I am the only Canadian in attendance. Among the speakers will be Ligon Duncan (obviously) and Thabiti Anyabwile.

The conference is held on the grounds of Twin Lakes Camp and Conference Center which is owned and operated by First Presbyterian Church. While I haven’t had time (or daylight) to check it out more thoroughly, it seems to be just an amazing facility and is by far the nicest church camp I’ve seen. Best of all, they have wireless internet here. That’s my kind of camp!

The conference kicks off this afternoon with Ligon Duncan speaking and I’ll be bringing updates as the day goes on. It seems to be a conference that is as much about the fellowship as the teaching, so I anticipate that this conference will be unique when compared to the many others I have visited and still will visit this year. It’s sure to be an interesting one.