Grace upon Grace upon Grace upon Grace...

50 years ago, Grace Community Church opened it's doors for the first time. There were 27 people there, and they originally met in a home. Evenatually they bought some farmland (which is now downtown...lol) and built a church on the land. In 1969 a 29 year old seminary graduate applied for the pastoral position, but he had some interesting conditions:

1. He wanted 30 hours a week for study (because he was unwaveringly convicted to exposit the bible to the congregation)
2. no talk about salary (he figured if God wanted him there, God would provide)

The congregation agreed (especially to the first, which by today's standards sounds really strange) and John F. MacArthur Jr. preached his first sermon. Apparently he used to talk a mile a minute, but 37 years later some of the founding members agree that he's gotten better.

Now that little church of 27 is somewhere around 8,000-8,500 and their worldwide influence is simply staggering...but I'm not going to shoot off all the numbers about tens of millions of teaching tapes, or books, or dozens of schools they're started. Tonight what really impressed me was going out for burgers with some of the college kids from the Bible Study I'm co-leading (as of this week...yippee!) and sitting back and listening the inevitable talk about "relationships" turn into a 4-woman lecture (to 4 men) about "practical techniques to get things off the ground" (i.e. - how to tell "if she likes you" and where to go from there...).

Now for those Moose Javians, Toontowners, C-Towners, PGers and Edmontonians who've ever been on my receiving end of the lessons of beauty, romance, flirting, propriety and the biblical nature of relationships, you all know that I have a few ideas about all that stuff (someone in Victoria just laughed). Some of you have got the "relational continuim" talk. Some of you have had the "Trinity and submission" talk and some of you have had the "God's shopping list" talk.

I didn't give any of those talks tonight. The girls all beat me to it. I was not too shocked, but definitely delighted at how the fruits of one man's 37 year ministry of simply teaching the Bible, week in and week out, has actually made a bunch of college girls wise. They got it. Not only that, but they talked appropriately to the guys; not as stupid men but as brothers in the Lord who need help understanding some very difficult subject matter. There was joking, but basically no condescension. There was bluntness, but not impropriety. There was conversation without flirting. I wouldn't say that ministry here is hard, it is actually harder; just not in the way that I'm used to. Instead of spending a majority of my time giving the right answers I've got to concentrate on setting the right example. A majority of kids at Grace Community Church already know the right answers; they are looking for confirmation from leadership more than anything. (Do they really believe that and does it really work?)

I remember sitting in a restaurant, several months before I left Canada, and having the same talk with several women who were, on average, probably 7 years older than the girls I was listening to tonight (and no...none of them read this blog, in case you think it's you). The women at the restaurant were the "godly" women of their churches, and they basically didn't see how the scripture taught much on relationships, short of 2 Corinthians 6:14-16 (i.e. "date a Christian guy and don't forget to pray!"). Absolutely no understanding of the relationship between sufficiency and efficaciousness of scripture and relationships. No understanding of God's trinitarian example of love and submission. No understanding of the straightforward biblical didactic passages on qualities that God esteems in a godly women (though most of them had read Proverbs 31, they all thought it basically mean "Be a Chrisitian Martha Stewart"). Lots of disjointed and jumbled bible trivia, but no coherent biblical worldview.

I was contemplating how different two groups of women, both from "Christian" circles, see what is arguably the most common conversation topic among 20-somethings. One sees the Bible giving some "good ideas" about relationships, here and there, where as another sees the Bible as giving "clear teaching" all throughout the Bible that can be understood and synthesized into a whole. What was the main difference? A man who understood, in 1969, that 2 Timothy 4:2-5 was a command, not a suggestion...and 2 Timothy 4:2-5 makes a serious difference to the lives of college-aged women.

And God is gracious. He grants wisdom and maturity to those who feed upon his word.

πασα γραφη θεοπνευστος και ωφελιμος προς διδασκαλιαν προς ελεγμον προς επανορθωσιν προς παιδειαν την εν δικαιοσυνη
ινα αρτιος η ο του θεου ανθρωπος προς παν εργον αγαθον εξηρτισμενος

Never let up. Until Next Time,

The Armchair Theologian