Where Do You Draw Lines for Ministry Partnerships?

00:00:00.000 | Well, every Christian is faced with hard decisions about who we will and who we will not spiritually

00:00:10.500 | associate.

00:00:11.500 | Today, we take up the topic and talk about John Piper's affiliations, who he hangs out

00:00:16.600 | with, and why, what conferences he speaks at and why.

00:00:19.240 | Pastor John, I know from our private conversations on the leadership team here at Desiring God

00:00:23.040 | that you have given a lot of thought to this topic of who you partner with.

00:00:27.520 | You let us read a personal document you wrote that lays out your own thinking here, and

00:00:31.880 | I was wondering if you could walk us through that thinking on the podcast today.

00:00:37.260 | Over the decades of ministry, how did you decide about how broad your associations would

00:00:41.880 | be?

00:00:42.880 | I know there are listeners who wrestle with this issue, even if your position as a Christian

00:00:47.400 | leader is uniquely different.

00:00:49.440 | If you could, for listeners of the podcast, explain your convictions here.

00:00:54.720 | What might be most helpful is for me to describe how I have made certain decisions about the

00:01:01.480 | degree of unity I expect in the various settings that I'm part of and why I've made those decisions.

00:01:10.280 | I should say at the outset that most of these decisions that I'm going to talk about for

00:01:16.360 | the next few minutes are not explicitly demanded in the Bible.

00:01:22.560 | I believe they're informed by the Bible.

00:01:24.600 | I've tried to do it that way, but they're not the kind of decisions that cause me to

00:01:29.880 | say not everyone should do it this way.

00:01:33.440 | I'll mention six kinds of associations over the years with other believers that I faced

00:01:42.960 | as expectations for leadership came my way, kinds of togetherness where I had to make

00:01:48.960 | decisions who I'd hang out with and who I wouldn't.

00:01:52.720 | As I mentioned, think of them as concentric circles moving outward with the first most

00:02:01.880 | inner circle being the one where I expect the most agreement and the sixth and farthest

00:02:08.440 | out circle where I expect the least agreement in those I'm together with.

00:02:14.680 | Here's the first one.

00:02:16.400 | My elders and staff of the church where I was the lead pastor for 33 years.

00:02:24.840 | As much as it lies in my ability and my power, I'm going to work in that setting for deep

00:02:33.680 | and detailed theological unity as well as ethical unity on biblical convictions on major

00:02:41.800 | issues as well as ministry philosophy issues like a strong commitment to world missions,

00:02:48.520 | youth ministry that's not biblically empty fun and games, worship services that are serious

00:02:54.480 | joy and not living room casual slapstick howdy partner kinds of gatherings.

00:03:01.680 | The reason for the tightness at the staff and eldership level is that we together are

00:03:11.200 | charged to teach this body of believers what is biblically true in doctrine, what's biblically

00:03:19.000 | right in behavior, and we need to pull together as an eldership.

00:03:25.880 | The less important doctrine is to a pastor, the less he'll care about this kind of unity.

00:03:32.720 | I'm sometimes appalled at how some pastors say they can have a staff that are all over

00:03:39.920 | the map theologically.

00:03:42.360 | I think that's possible because his preaching remains distant from the specifics of the

00:03:52.000 | text and distant from doctrine.

00:03:55.040 | I think this breeds weak churches that become mirrors of the culture sooner or later.

00:04:03.240 | Another reason this kind of philosophical unity and ethos unity is needed among the

00:04:10.380 | elders and on the pastoral staff is that we have to make choices that are not specifically

00:04:17.940 | prescribed in the Bible.

00:04:19.320 | You have to.

00:04:20.320 | Will women do the pastoral prayer?

00:04:22.980 | Will worship leaders wear torn jeans?

00:04:26.220 | Will we encourage coffee in worship?

00:04:29.060 | Will the youth bob for apples in a toilet bowl filled with mellow yellow?

00:04:35.000 | And a hundred other choices that are not laid down explicitly in the Bible.

00:04:39.840 | And without a significant ethos and philosophical unity, the conflicts on the staff can become

00:04:47.600 | unlivable.

00:04:50.600 | It almost goes without saying here, but not quite, so I'll say it, that with all this

00:04:55.940 | theological and ethical and philosophical sameness, unity, I really do want personality

00:05:05.920 | diversity and ethnic diversity on the staff and the elders.

00:05:12.280 | That's because my own limitations in personality have to be compensated for in others so that

00:05:20.840 | the people are helped by having people of different personalities on the council.

00:05:28.160 | Secondly, church planting network that I support and I'm part of, so this is the next concentric

00:05:35.880 | circle outward.

00:05:38.420 | We have one life to live, and we have to make choices about what we think will make the

00:05:44.360 | greatest impact for the glory of Christ and the good of the nations.

00:05:48.960 | And when I ponder where my church planting energies should go, my answer has been, I

00:05:58.920 | want to plant churches, I want to be a part of that movement, churches that believe our

00:06:06.440 | elder affirmation of faith.

00:06:09.440 | So the Treasure in Christ Together network of churches that has grown up consists of

00:06:16.340 | churches whose elders affirm these truths.

00:06:20.080 | It's a pretty significant affirmation of faith.

00:06:23.720 | It's the same one we use here, desiring God.

00:06:27.720 | On the other hand, the philosophical and the ethos dimensions are not as tight in my association.

00:06:36.400 | I don't have pastoral oversight in those churches, and so I don't exert that kind of influence,

00:06:45.080 | and I'm willing to live with that.

00:06:48.120 | Behind this choice, this measure of unity and diversity at the church planting level,

00:06:55.240 | behind that choice is the conviction, and I could be wrong about this, that over the

00:07:01.160 | long haul of, say, 30, 60, 100 years, the greatest good will come through greater doctrinal

00:07:12.040 | faithfulness than through greater numbers of churches which are doctrinally diffuse.

00:07:19.560 | That's a conviction that I've operated with.

00:07:22.320 | I hope it's true.

00:07:24.160 | Third, conferences that I'm responsible for leading.

00:07:28.920 | Now that would include, for example, the Bethlehem Conference for Pastors that I was basically

00:07:33.340 | responsible for from 1988 to 2013, as long as I was the pastor there at Bethlehem.

00:07:40.600 | And here, my tolerance level of differences was greater than with the elders and the church

00:07:47.680 | planters.

00:07:48.680 | And the reason for this is that the people who came to speak at these conferences with

00:07:54.140 | specific assignments, they came with specific assignments, and they don't have significant

00:07:59.680 | influence in the conference on numerous other issues where there might be some significant

00:08:04.900 | differences between us.

00:08:07.200 | Nevertheless, it makes a difference to me what the speakers believe and how they live

00:08:14.420 | and lead outside the conference.

00:08:18.400 | I would not want to have a speaker who was outspoken and widely influential on issues

00:08:25.420 | that I regarded as harmful or unhelpful to the church.

00:08:31.320 | But I have invited speakers who were less Calvinistic than I but didn't foreground this.

00:08:40.280 | And my rationale for this wider diversity was that the spirit of wider fellowship with

00:08:48.560 | doctrinally serious people with a manifestly high regard for the inerrancy and preciousness

00:08:55.380 | of Scripture would, in the end, in the long run, commend the more rigorously biblical

00:09:04.020 | theological vision that I was trying to spread over those 30 years.

00:09:10.340 | In general, I wanted to promote the truth and the beauty of the doctrines of grace and

00:09:17.420 | the preciousness of serious God-centered worship and the radical commitment to a lifestyle

00:09:24.220 | of global missions.

00:09:25.580 | I looked for people who loved the vision of God that I cherished, even if they did not

00:09:32.420 | fully understand it in some cases or replicate it.

00:09:37.180 | And now only God knows whether the strategy that we chose was the most effective, but

00:09:43.060 | that's how we made our choices.

00:09:45.780 | And I'm sure I made some mistakes in that process, but you do the best you can.

00:09:50.820 | Fourth, fourth concentric circle moving out, speaking at other people's conferences.

00:09:55.940 | How do you make decisions there?

00:09:57.620 | I've experimented on this, being unsure about the implications.

00:10:03.660 | In general, I avoided generic conferences that cared little for doctrine, let alone

00:10:09.940 | Calvinistic doctrine.

00:10:11.840 | I wanted to invest in people and ministries that wanted to advance the importance of biblical

00:10:17.340 | reformed truth, not just vanilla evangelicalism.

00:10:23.060 | A few exceptions I would not repeat would be a leadership conference that I went to

00:10:30.940 | where I was followed.

00:10:33.580 | You won't believe this.

00:10:35.020 | I was followed by an effort to set a new world record on the numbers of people sitting on

00:10:41.500 | whoopee cushions.

00:10:44.420 | And there were a few other fiascos like that, which some of our listeners know about.

00:10:57.060 | I tried to balance and with lots of input from the Desiring God team, like you, Tony,

00:11:04.020 | I tried to get input for the downside, the upside of being part of a conference that

00:11:10.580 | might not foreground all the truth and method I prefer versus the upside of speaking the

00:11:17.060 | truth I love into a new audience who may not even know who John Piper is.

00:11:24.100 | And I think sometimes in weighing the pros and cons there, I think sometimes we got it

00:11:28.580 | right and sometimes we didn't.

00:11:31.180 | But that's how I tried to go about it anyway with concentric circle number four.

00:11:35.860 | Here's number five, participating in debates and conversations, public and private.

00:11:42.180 | Now, this would include, say, public debates like the one I had with Greg Boyd on open

00:11:46.460 | theism or the one with Sam Storms and Wilson and Hamilton in eschatology.

00:11:54.860 | It would include private group gatherings behind closed doors or phone calls with groups

00:12:01.100 | to deal with issues.

00:12:02.940 | It would include whom I choose to write against or for.

00:12:07.860 | I wrote a whole book against N.T. Wright's view of justification and another one against

00:12:15.060 | Robert Gundry's view of imputation, though I hold these men in very high regard for much

00:12:21.900 | of their work.

00:12:23.900 | So those aren't always easy calls to make.

00:12:27.560 | The only limit I would put on such togetherness in debate or conversation is that it needs

00:12:35.020 | to hold out real promise for doing good.

00:12:37.720 | If I thought that my presence with a teacher that I thought taught error, even to debate

00:12:45.940 | him would give an unhelpful prominence to his views, which they didn't already have,

00:12:51.860 | I probably would decline just because I didn't want to foreground or lift up the prominence

00:12:57.780 | of his error.

00:12:59.740 | I dislike books, by the way, and discussions that give the impression that theological

00:13:06.360 | views are like grocery shopping and you can just choose among many brands of cereal without

00:13:11.500 | too much harm.

00:13:13.240 | I would not be inclined to be a part of those kinds of discussions or publications.

00:13:18.020 | So here's the last, widest concentric circle.

00:13:23.300 | Events like a pro-life rally where I and others are asked to pray and, say, give a five-minute

00:13:29.100 | meditation.

00:13:30.260 | This is as wide, I think, as I've ever gone.

00:13:32.940 | It excludes multi-faith prayer services where the interfaith focus pretty clearly communicates

00:13:42.460 | that the participants agree that all these paths to God are legitimate—Muslim, Hindu,

00:13:48.700 | Baha'i, Jewish, Christian.

00:13:51.460 | They're all the same.

00:13:52.460 | Let's just all pray to the same God.

00:13:54.260 | I've never been a part of one of those services.

00:13:57.940 | But the pro-life rally does include Roman Catholics who pray and speak alongside me,

00:14:06.100 | and I regard Roman Catholicism as a serious, harmful aberration from the true gospel and

00:14:13.260 | the true church.

00:14:14.620 | And the reason I go is that in my judgment, fallible as it is, few, if any, among these

00:14:23.620 | hundreds of people think that my presence at this pro-life gathering shows that I am

00:14:29.260 | soft on Roman Catholicism.

00:14:31.660 | I could be wrong about that, but that was my rationale.

00:14:36.460 | So wrapping it up, what I think all this comes down to for me is making the judgment call

00:14:44.900 | about whether a strong, explicit, joyful, Bible-saturated, Reformed, complementarian

00:14:54.660 | commitment shaping and guiding my preaching and speaking and publishing and organizational

00:15:02.580 | leadership—whether prioritizing doctrine like that will have the greatest impact for

00:15:10.380 | fruitful evangelism, multiplying of healthy churches, reaching of unreached people groups

00:15:17.020 | globally, the faithfulness of radical prophetic witness to the culture, earnest love and holiness

00:15:26.420 | among God's people, or whether those aims would be better accomplished in the long run

00:15:34.900 | by a more muted doctrinal focus and a bigger tent of partnerships.

00:15:40.860 | That's been the question for me.

00:15:43.060 | And given what I see in the Bible, in the foregrounding of truth in the Bible especially,

00:15:51.340 | and what I see in church history, I don't think doctrinally minimalist movements have

00:15:59.780 | the Christ-exalting, God-centered, staying power or transformative power that spiritually

00:16:07.240 | vital Reformed, complementarian, rigorously biblical movements have.

00:16:14.420 | Thank you, Pastor John.

00:16:16.820 | And when you speak of youth bobbing for apples in a toilet filled with mellow yellow, I mean,

00:16:22.500 | your imagination is either very vibrant or…

00:16:25.900 | That is not imagination.

00:16:26.900 | That's not imagination.

00:16:27.900 | You're speaking from experience.

00:16:28.900 | I am.

00:16:29.900 | All right, don't out anybody.

00:16:30.900 | Let me see if I can transition from that into some sort of a close here.

00:16:37.220 | Thank you for joining us today.

00:16:38.780 | Ask a question of your own, search our growing archive, or subscribe to the podcast, all

00:16:42.540 | at askpastorjohn.com.

00:16:44.940 | I am your host, Tony Reike.

00:16:46.940 | We're back here on Wednesday.

00:16:47.940 | We'll see you then.

00:16:48.660 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Where Do You Draw Lines for Ministry Partnerships?

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