Today we highlight an excerpt from a Q&A session Pastor John recently led with the students at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. Earlier that day he had just delivered the lecture "The New Calvinism and the New Community" on March 12th of this year. Here's a question that came from one student.

Hi Dr. Piperat, I appreciated your thoughts this morning on New Calvinism and I was just wondering if you could speak to how the New Calvinists or how the Reformed can relate to broader evangelicalism. Like I noticed what you had done a couple years ago by inviting Rick Warren to speak at Desiring God.

But I'm also wondering, you know, very practically would you advise that we commend a Christian to go to Rick Warren's church or a church that doesn't embrace the doctrines of grace? Depends on what else is available. Better to go to church, defective church, than no church. Church is a given in the New Testament.

You're not part of a church, you're not part of Jesus. So that's a big deal. And there aren't many perfect churches. Like none. So yeah I'd send people to Rick Warren's church in a minute. Unless there was something more robust, more full. I mean I don't know if you heard my 90 minute conversation with Rick.

It's online. And Rick is a Calvinist. He's a five point Calvinist. His problem is, and I don't care if he hears this, because I told him face to face, his problem is he doesn't foreground it. It is so backgrounded nobody would know it. Doctrine plays such a small role in his preaching.

He would say, "but not in our church." He said, "I would take any random 500 people from Saddleback and put them against any random 500 people at Grace Church under John MacArthur and my people would win theologically." That's what he said. I don't know if that's true. But at least you know he's thinking we do curriculum here and I get people by talking about five ways to be happy and then they go from base one to base two to base three, home run, and then go over to John MacArthur and play ball.

I don't think that's a good way to do church. I think if you background doctrine so consistently that eventually you're going to not do as much good as you could. So I told him at the end of that conversation, "Rick, I'm an older guy. I'm older than you are.

Believe it or not, I'm older than you are. And I'm exhorting you, spend the last 10, 20 years of your ministry going deep and not just going wide and I think you'll have a longer legacy." But your bigger question is how to relate to the wider evangelical church. I would hope that people come to your churches, you become a pastor, they come to your churches and their first thought is not, "They believe in the five points here." That should not be their first thought.

Their first thought would be, "They've got a gigantic Jesus here, gloriously able to meet my needs, forgive my sins, save my soul, and meet every practical need in my life. This is a great place to worship King Jesus. What's behind this? Well, it happens to be Reformed theology." You don't keep it secret, but there's a way.

When you read the New Testament, your first impression is not, "Ah, five points everywhere." Once you see them, you spot them. But it's not written that way and our preaching shouldn't sound that way. It shouldn't sound doctrinaire and packaged and tulipy. It should sound, I mean the smell of the tulips should be there.

They don't smell good though, do they? Roses would be better. So yes, we should have huge overlapping commitments with the broad, generic evangelical community and should not be trying to draw a little line, "Oh, I'm not one of those kind of people." I just think we will have a better impact for the things we love about God, the true things about God, if we're not constantly fingering all the badnesses that are in the broader evangelical world, but instead of being robustly strong in the goodnesses of Reformed thinking.

That was Pastor John at a recent open forum with the students of Westminster Theological Seminary. And that hour and a half interview between John Piper and Rick Warren recorded on May 1st, 2011 can be watched at DesiringGod.org. The best way to find it is to go to our website, DesiringGod.org and search for the blog post, which is titled, "John Piper Interviews Rick Warren on Doctrine." And the video is embedded in that blog post.

So what have been the most difficult and crippling challenges John Piper has faced in the ministry? We'll talk about that tomorrow. Until then, I'm your host Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening. 1 DesiringGod.org Page 1 of 2 1. DesiringGod.org Page 2 of 3 1. DesiringGod.org Page 3 of 4 1.

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