For What it’s Worth…

If you’re interested in church planting, you’re quite possibly aware that the Church Planting Center at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York has launched a blog.

The RCPC Blog, currently labelled as “beta,” is home to reflections from Tim Keller, Scott Sauls and others from the Redeemer staff team as well as members of their church planting network.

In one of Keller’s first blog posts, maybe even his first, he brings John Frame’s tri-perspectivalism to bear as a tool for analysing the phenomenon that is Willow Creek Church.  (Incidentally, I have Frame’s The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, sitting on my desk which I’ve started reading about 5 times and never managed to quite get through it!)  It’s an interesting read, although I think that viewing tri-perspectivalism as the silver bullet with which to harmonise the various threads of broad evangelicalism  is probably misguided.  That said, I don’t think Keller is saying it is the silver bullet, but others around the blogosphere seem to.

There are some books that just keep popping up around the place.  Soul-Winning Made Easy by C S Lovett, published in 1959, is one of them.  Every few months I see another reference to it, someone selling it (eBay has multiple copies currently listed), or someone describing it in words like these “This book represents everything that  was wrong with much of the evangelism training of years gone by”!

Tim Challies, over at Challies Dot Com, has posted some amusing illustrations, two of which are linked at right.

Here’s a section from page 78.

You have just said to your prospect . . . “Jesus is waiting to come into your heart. Will you open the door? Will you let Him come in?” He makes no reply. Great forces are at work inside him. His soul is a battlefield. The Holy Spirit and Satan want his decision. You wish you could jump into his heart and help him, but you can’t. So you do the one thing you can do . . . press him to make a decision . . . one way or the other.