Book Review: "The Soul-Winning Church"

“The Soul Winning Church: Six Keys to Fostering a Genuine Evangelistic Community” by J.A. Medders and Doug Logan Jr. The Good Book Company, 2024.

I am probably the thousandth person by now to make a post like this about the “Soul-Winning Church,” but I have to say it. This book was fantastic. It was to my heart what kerosene is to a fire. Fuel!

I have lived and pastored for a long time now with an always increasing frustration and confusion as to why our churches aren’t making more disciples. Why are the baptismal waters so still? Why is so much church growth dependent on other church’s decline? What are we doing wrong or missing all together? What needs to change? I have walked around with these questions swirling around in my head, but not ever really being able to put them into words, let alone find their corresponding answers. And then this book showed up in the mail.

In only 164 pages (making it super accessible and easy to hand out to almost anyone) Medders and Logan do a massive job, and they do it well. They give hope to pastors like me that our little churches can be soul-winning churches; that evangelism can be ingrained in the culture of our churches and not just be another category of ministry, and that we can love the people that come from other places, without settling for transfer growth as the ultimate means of growth.

Medders and Logan identify in the book six key areas of focus for becoming a church that reaches the lost. Each key is just as convicting, convincing and compelling as the next, well at the same time being so obviously biblical. I am not lying when I tell you that I only made it through chapter one before stopping to spend the next week reflecting on the first key and laying out plans for walking through the chapter with my elders at our next meeting (which is exactly what we did).

I think if you’re a pastor you need to read this. I think if your plumber you need to read this. I think that this book needs to be read by home groups, men’s groups, women’s groups, youth groups, and by everyone else in the church that’s not in a group. At the end of the day, I don’t think that I am the only one feeling this perplexing frustration about the lack of souls being won. Something is missing, and Medders and Logan identify that missing piece. They remind readers how central soul-winning is to the mission of the church, and then they go to work on equipping the church for that mission.

We have got to be churches that are consumed with winning souls, because Christ is consumed with winning souls! And if there is a book that can play even the smallest part in further fueling that passion and preparing Christians to walk it out, then in my mind, that is a must read.

As Spurgeon writes (and as Medders and Logan quote him saying), “Soul-winning is the chief business of the Christian minister; indeed, it should be the main pursuit of every believer. We should each say with Simon peter, “I go afishing,” and with Paul our aim should be, “That I might by all means save some.”[1]

Grab it, read it, and lets go!

[1] C.H. Spurgeon, The Soul Winner: How to Lead Sinners to the Savio (Fleming H. Revell. 1895), p 9.

J.I. Packer, a Skateboard and the Bible

When I was four my parents took me into my first skateboard shop and bought me my first skateboard. I guess it was a big moment in my little life, because everything about it has always stayed with me. I can still picture the layout of the room. I can still see the worker reaching up with some kind of long metal instrument to bring the board down off the wall. I can still remember the board itself, black and neon green with the words Hot Stick written across the bottom in a kind of Friday the 13th styled lettering. And most importantly I can still feel that feeling of pure excitement as I got on the board for the first time and headed down the hill with my parents jogging to keep pace beside me.

Ever since that early memory, I have always had in me this gnawing and drawing desire to find more and more adventure. I don’t know if my parents buying me a skateboard at four years old was the catalyst for it or if they were just responding to what they could already see growing in me; but either way, the yearning for and pursuit of excitement has never waned. I think it is for this reason that school always proved difficult for me. It just felt boring. Reading books and learning equations felt dull and tedious. I wanted to be outside on a skateboard, or up the mountain on skis, or on the water behind the boat. I wanted to be thrilled.

Now I tell you all that not for no reason, but because it has a lot to do with how and why I started really following Jesus and then how and why I became obsessed with studying God’s Word.

Half-hearted at best

I became a Christian like lots of little kids do who have parents and/or grandparents that love Jesus. Being maybe six or seven years old (a few years after the skateboard purchase), I sat on the side of the spare bed in my grandpa’s house and prayed along with him, asking Jesus to forgive my sins. For many years after that, based on that moment and prayer, I called myself a Christian. Whether I truly was or not I don’t know, but what I do know is that I definitely was not thrilled about any part of the Christian life. At best I gave it all a half-hearted effort. It was again the same situation as school, it just felt boring.

Skipping ahead a bunch of years and over a bunch of situations and circumstances, I ended up reaching the ripe old age of twenty-four years and I found myself back in school and sitting in a Bible College classroom. If you’re thinking that something must have drastically changed in terms of that need for excitement for me to have ended up in a college classroom, well you are wrong. Nothing changed. On a kind of whim, I followed some friends to Bible College just for something to do because I wasn’t doing anything else, and in every class I attended I wondered why I was there and how fast I could unenroll, get my surfboard and get to the ocean.

That Class on John

But then one day, against all odds, all of a sudden something did change. In fact, everything changed. I enrolled in a class simply called The Gospel of John. As I am sure you can guess by the course title, the class was aimed at one thing and one thing only: studying the Gospel of John. It was the first time I had taken a strictly Bible class, and it proved to be the most important class I would ever take. Just like remembering that skate shop when I was four, I remember everything about that class on John. I remember where I sat in the square seating arrangement. I remember where other people sat in the square, and what books we were assigned to read. And most importantly I remember the feelings that I felt from the first moments of the first class and on: pure, unadulterated thrill.

Having had spent my life up to that point incessantly pursuing the feeling of thrill, I knew exactly what it felt like so I knew precisely when I had found it. And while I never in a million years expected to find it in the confines of a second level classroom on the campus of a small Bible College, that is absolutely and completely what I found.

Just to be clear, the professor didn’t do anything out of the ordinary. He didn’t show up on a skateboard or drop down out of a hole in the ceiling. He just showed up, prayed and began teaching us about John’s gospel. He spoke about contexts and backgrounds; He unpacked terms and metaphors. He explained the double entendres and John’s literary techniques. And through all of it, He made the story of Jesus come alive; He made God’s Word and the Gospel story it tells come alive. For the first time in my life I realized some seemingly simple or obvious things, like that there was history behind the stories in the Bible, and history that I could learn about. That there was actual meaning in the texts that really could be uncovered beyond just what I thought or felt they meant. All of this was a new revelation to me, and the result was a realness to who God was and what He had done. And there arose in me a newfound obsession with studying the Scriptures, and seeking to know the God of whom they spoke.

I began everyday sitting down with the Bible, opening piles of commentaries and books and just reading and studying and meditating on it all, believing for the first time that I really could come to know Him through His Word. And as I would sit their sifting through the pages of the Bible, God seemed nearer than He ever had before, His gospel became more and more powerful and heavy on my soul, and I found that I could only explain what I felt in one way: as I drew closer and closer to Him through His Word I over and over discovered the same thrill, only magnified, that I had felt and chased for years on skateboards, on surfboards, on skis and behind boats.

Today

Fast-forward, I am now thirty-nine years old. I still skateboard every morning before work. I am still on the ski hill in the winters and still in the ocean whenever I find myself near one. And yet now I know that those things could all go away, and I would be fine, because the feelings they produce are no longer what I am after. Not because I got old and boring (though that is possible), but because I found the superior adventure and excitement. On that day in Bible College and through the classes that followed, I found an infinitely more satisfying, unfading, ever-increasing thrill of which I have never stopped pursuing, and it is this: knowing God.

Shocking new to some, I am still in school, still in Bible classes, and everyday the most exciting thing I do is to study God’s Word, aiming and desiring to come to know Him more and more fully. And it is without question the most exciting pursuit I have ever and will ever experience on this side of the new heavens and new earth.

You know I used to quote famous skateboarders to sum up my life. Now I quote men like J.I. Packer, because now I understand what they meant, and I feel what many of them so perfectly identified: “Knowing God is a relationship calculated to thrill a man's heart.[1]”

[1] J.I. Packer, Knowing God (InterVarsity: Chicago, 1973), 36.

Emil Brunner and the Fear of the Lord

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom” (Ps. 111:10). A familiar verse to those of us who have been in and around the church for some time. In fact, so familiar and seemingly straightforward that we commonly quote it to other Christians, refer to it in conversations, and even send it out as an encouragement or reminder to friends (I am a little surprised that I don’t see it on more t-shirts and coffee-mugs). Still, at least for myself, along with being a familiar verse it has also always been a kind of bewildering verse. Because while the argument is simple enough, that the fear of the Lord precedes wisdom, the question always remains, what is “the fear of the Lord”?

Be honest for a minute, how many arguments have you been in (lets call them robust dialogues) about whether the fear of the Lord is respect or terror; admiration or trepidation? You don’t have to answer that out loud, because I actually can’t see or hear you anyways, but I will assume that at least some who are reading this have had those dialogues. The Lord knows that I have. And to be honest, though I have earnestly argued in those times from one side or the other, for most of my life I have not been exactly sure who is more right. Of course, to the unredeemed the fear of the Lord must be mostly if not entirely terror. How could it be anything else when you are in the cross-hairs of God’s judgment? But is there not that kind of fear also mixed in with the worship and admiration of those who have been rescued out of His judgment?

A Fuller Picture

The fear of the Lord is not the only perplexing phrase found in Scripture. The Bible is full of them. In fact, there are so many words and concepts in the Bible that are difficult to unpack that sometimes I wish God had just included a lexicon in the back. It would have been a huge time saver and cleared up a lot of discussions. But alas, He did not. And so, for our own good (and truly for the delight of our souls) we are left to become students of the Bible; to search the Scriptures in an effort to put together fuller understandings of the biblical language, and also to read and learn from those who have gone before us and done much of that searching and putting together already.

All that to say, one of the most impactful and biblical definition of the fear of the Lord that I have ever come across is from the 20th Century Swiss Theologian, Emil Brunner, in the first volume of his three-volume dogmatics set, The Christian Doctrine of God. In his chapter on the holiness of God, while Brunner is discussing God’s incomparableness and his transcendence over and above his creations, he writes this beautiful and insightful passage,

“Man is not equal to God: he is indeed a creature, not the Creator; he is a dependent, not an independent, personality. Therefore, one cannot stand on a level with God and have fellowship with Him as if He were just one of ourselves. We must bow the knee before him…The creature should bow the knee in reverence before the Holy God. This humble recognition of the infinite distance between God and man is the “fear of the Lord”: that fear of the Lord which is the “beginning of all wisdom” (Prov. 1.7). This is the expression of the feeling that we are wholly dependent upon God, and that He is in no way dependent upon us.”[1]

Isn’t that wonderfully said? When I read that some months ago, I remember feeling like for the first time I had a picture of the fear of the Lord that was beyond the age old of debate of either respect or terror. Brunner makes the picture so much fuller than that, and he does so by putting together a couple of important biblical concepts.

Consider this passage for a moment and at least two of the components that Brunner sees as essential to a biblical fear of the Lord.

STARTING WITH HUMILITY

The first component is humility. Fear of the Lord is made up of the kind of humility that comes from seeing God as completely transcendent and wholly separate from mankind in His holiness: “The King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see” (1 Tim. 6.15-16). It is made of the kind of the kind of humility that comes from seeing the absolute incomparable nature of God, and the creatureliness of man; from seeing God as Creator and people as His created beings: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? (Ps. 8.3-4). It comes from the kind of humility that sees Isaiah, a prophet of the Lord upon encountering the Lord, proclaiming judgment upon himself because of his absolute unworthiness: “Woe is me! yFor I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!” (Is. 6.5).

If the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, then the humble admission and recognition that we are in no way equal to God is the beginning of that fear. Or to say it another way, the first essential part of the fear of the Lord is knowing that He is the Lord and that we are not.

FROM HUMILITY TO REVERENCE

The second component is reverence. Now a person might say that reverence is humility, but I would argue that they are not quite the same. People standing in the presence of God might be humbled; they might finally recognize their level of importance in comparison to Him; they may even bow their knees to Him as Paul says will be the case (Rom. 14.11). But in that moment, those knee bowers may still fail to stand in awe of Him and show Him the kind of deep honour and respect that is caught up in the term reverence. Without a doubt, reverence and humility are deeply connected. Reverence requires humility and it comes out of humility. Still, it is not the case that wherever you find humility before God, that reverence can just be assumed. And so, Brunner identifies reverence as another essential piece, “The creature should bow the knee in reverence before the Holy God.”[2]

The fear of Lord is not only recognizing the infinite chasm between us and God, it is following that recognition to a place of worship. It is recognizing not only His otherliness but also His worthiness. It is prostrating our lives before Him because we have seen not only his separateness but also His goodness. It is saying with Psalmist, “Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!” (Ps. 95.6)

HUMBLE REVERENCE

All that to say, if Brunner is right (and I believe He is), for the believer the fear of the Lord is not simply respect, and it is not just plain fear. It is more then both of those. It is recognizing how transcendent and wholly other God is, not sharing His glory with any, and so recognizing how worthy He is of all of our praise. It is in Brunner’s own words, humble reverence. Or in the words of the elders in the throne scene of Revelation 4, “Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created” (Rev. 4.11).

To finish where we began, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom” (Ps. 111:10).

[1] Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of God (Westminster Press: Philadelphia, 1946), 162-163.

[2] Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of God, 163.

He Is Not Suprised By Your Brokenness

Have you ever thought that you were too muddy to come to Jesus? Like He was going to be caught off guard and ultimately offended by the messiness and griminess of your life; by all those past mistakes as well as all the habits that your still roommates with today?

I will just assume your answer is a yes, just like it was at some point for most of us (all of us) who have ever come to Jesus. That begs the next question, are we so naive to think that Jesus knew/knows everything about us, except how rotten we were/are? The Bible says wild things like this: that God knows the number of hairs on our head; that He has searched us and known us, down to the thoughts in our mind; that He knew before the foundation of the world that we would be made holy in His sight and that we would do good works that He had prepared for us to do. And yet, you think He didn’t see or realize that we all were or still are some broken down raggedy old train wrecks?

Remember what Jesus told Peter? It was a harsh reality for Peter, but it should be like music to the ears of the souls of those who realize they are just like Peter. Matthew 26.34, “Jesus said to him, ‘Truly, I tell you, this very night, before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times.’” Jesus knew! He knew exactly what Peter, His own disciple, was going to do. He knew it and He still loved Him. He knew it and He still went to the cross for Him. He knew it, and He still showed up after He had stepped out of that tomb, to restore Peter to Himself.

Don’t be so foolish to think that Jesus is in the dark as to the darkness in your life. He is all knowing, which means He knows the good and the bad. He knows exactly where we have been, what we have done, and even what we are still going to do. He knows the ugliness and He knew it before He went to the cross, and He still went for us. He knows it and He still loves us.

If our sin has ever been a stumbling block for us in coming to Jesus let it be so no more.

Remember Peter.

And then remember Jesus, “But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5.8)

No Intermediaries

How amazing is it that Christians have direct access to Jesus? You know it didn’t have to be that way. When Jesus was on the earth he had his twelve disciples. Within that group of twelve disciples he had his inner circle of three. Then within that inner circle of three, at least according to John’s gospel, he had that one disciple, “the one whom Jesus loved” (John 20.2). Given these close and intimate relationships it would have made sense for Jesus, at least while he was on earth, to have routed access to him through the one, three or all twelve of his disciples. And then it could have continued that way when he ascended, whether through Saints in heaven, angels, etc. In other words there easily could have been a hierarchy where the disciples, or Abraham, or angels ended up acting like his assistants, and the intermediaries between other Christians and himself. That would not have seemed that crazy. Really, it wouldn’t have been so different then the setup in the Old Testament between Israel, the priests and God.

But he didn’t do that. He didn’t set up the disciples or anyone else as intermediaries. He didn’t appoint more priests. Instead, he said things like, “Let the little children come to me,” (Mt 19.14) and “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Mt 11.28). Instead of making any hierarchy or system of intermediaries he made himself directly available to anyone that would come to him.

Again, how amazing that even right now I can come to Jesus and speak to him without anyone standing in between? And how crazy that I/we don't take advantage of that relationship more often; that we aren't on our knees before him more than we are?