Christianity Today interviewed Tullian Tchividjian last week about an attempt to remove him as pastor. In March, Tullian became the second pastor in the history of Coral Ridge, succeeding the late D. James Kennedy who pastored there for 47 years. Tullian was approved as pastor with a 91% vote in March. On September 20, 69% voted against the motion to remove him. People are wondering how things could change so much in only a few months.

There has been lots written about the situation at Coral Ridge. I don’t really want to say a lot about that specific situation, except to say how much I’ve appreciated Tullian’s preaching and writing. I’m praying for that church as they move into the future. It’s a significant work, and they need our prayers. (Jim Belcher has a post at Out of Ur today on this topic.) Although I’m not close enough to be able to judge what happened, it seems inevitable that a transition like this would be a bumpy one even under the best possible circumstances.

The situation has caused me to reflect again on what it’s like to succeed a defining pastorate. I’ve done this at Richview myself, as my predecessor – a good man and a good pastor – significantly shaped the church over a 23 year period. The transition to a new pastor was incredibly difficult for the church simply because the previous pastor had been so significant to the life of the church. Add to that the inevitable mistakes that I as a new pastor made and you have a very tough transition.

Although I received a fairly strong vote to come as pastor, I’m sure that I wouldn’t have received more than 69% support in the early years if things had been put to a vote. In fact, the transition probably took eight years – twice what I would have guessed. It simply takes time.

Spurgeon pastored The Metropolitan Tabernacle for 38 years. After his death, the congregation experienced months of turmoil and almost split. When Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones resigned from Westminster Chapel, the church struggled for some time. The same for other churches – People’s Church in Toronto, and First Baptist Dallas after W.A. Criswell.

Two reflections:

Pastors need to prepare congregations for when they will be gone. We need to avoid becoming pastor-centered churches. The more the ministry is built around the pastor, the more the church will flounder when the pastor is gone. Just last week I heard Tim Keller preach a message that gently encouraged the church to look beyond his own leadership in the future. Even when a pastor does this, by the way, the transition will still likely be hard.

This isn’t easy, but perhaps the most important work a pastor can do the longer he stays is to ensure the congregation isn’t dependent on him.

We need to pray for churches in transition. I believe in church planting, but I also believe in transitioning churches. But we shouldn’t underestimate the difficulties. If you know of a church that is in transition, pray for that church. They need the prayers. With the right kind of leadership, a lot of patience, and God’s help, they’ll make it through.

From Tullian Tchividjian’s excellent book Unfashionable:

I have good news for all of us who are becoming weary of this pressure from church leaders to fit in with the world: we don’t have to. The relevance of the church doesn’t depend on its ability to identify the latest cultural trends and imitate them, whatever they might be. “The ultimate factor in the church’s engagement with society,” [Os] Guinness says, “is the church’s engagement with God,” not the church’s engagement with the latest intellectual or corporate fashion. Contrary to what we’ve been hearing, our greatest need as twenty-first-century churches is not that we’re culturally out of touch; it’s that we’re theologically out of tune.

Yesterday’s post on the church brings up a good question: how do we critique the church? It certainly needs correction at times.

This is made even harder because many of us have been hurt by the church. The criticism understandably comes with a lot of emotion at times.

Tullian Tchividjian, pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, has a good post on God-centered anger vs. self-centered anger. “Our world needs more God-centered anger,” he writes. So do our churches.

I find this story of his challenging:

I remember being at a conference years ago when, during the panel discussion between the various speakers, one of the speakers (an editor of a conservative political-theological magazine) was expressing his frustration with many of the political “left-wingers” in an unnecessarily sarcastic and condescending way. When he was finished, John Piper (one of the other speakers sitting on the panel) spoke up and said to the man with the utmost seriousness and precision, “For a long time I have appreciated your ministry. You are an astute observer of our culture. I read your magazine every month. It’s always insightful. But there’s one thing missing from your ministry.” The other speaker looked at Dr. Piper and asked what it was. Piper looked at the man dead in the eyes and in front of 5,000 people said, “Tears!”

That’s the type of anger and critique that the church really needs.

Tim Challies reviewed Tullian Tchividjian’s new book Unfashionable yesterday. Tim expressed some concerns about transformationalism, “the view that God seeks to redeem and renew not just people but nations and cultures.” You see this expressed when Tullian writes passages like this:

God promises nothing short of total cosmic renewal. Our confident anticipation of that renewal — our living hope of it — triggers and sustains our excitement and motivation for making a difference by living unfashionable lives. It links us with something so grand and glorious that it easily exposes the flimsy lie behind mere fashionability.

Again: “Churches are designed by God to be instruments of renewal in the world, renewing not only individual lives but also cultural forms and structures, helping to make straight all that is crooked in our world.” Tim counters: “I do not see Paul’s concern with culture except as a means to reach souls…I will simply say that I do not see that the Bible teaches such an emphasis.”

Tim’s disagreement led to some good discussion in the comments.

Tim is right on a couple of issues. First, there is a genuine discontinuity between this age and the next. We should not expect cosmic renewal quite yet. Second, Paul does not spend much time telling us to transform culture.

BUT there is more to be said. There is both continuity and discontinuity between this world and the next; Tim acknowledges this. The trick is to hold these in tension. Jesus’ resurrection took place in this age and in this world; and the kingdom is already present here and now, but not in its fullness.

Doesn’t 2 Peter 3:10 say this world going to be destroyed? Doug Moo (PDF) argues that Scripture teaches the world’s transformation, not replacement. Moo strikes the right balance in what he concludes this about the environment, with some application to the larger issue of cultural renewal: “While rarely rising to the level of an explicit emphasis, and never the chief concern in and of itself, the world of nature is an integral component of God’s new creation work.”

Tim Keller writes that this is an often neglected part of our teaching:

I must admit that so many of us who revel in the classic gospel of “grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone” largely ignore the eschatological implications of the gospel…

If this final renewal of the material world was part of Paul’s good news, we should not be surprised to see that Jesus healed and fed while preaching the gospel as signs and foretastes of this coming kingdom (Mt. 9:35).

When we realize that Jesus is going to someday destroy hunger, disease, poverty, injustice, and death itself, it makes Christianity what C. S. Lewis called a “fighting religion” when we are confronted with a city slum or a cancer ward. This full version of the gospel reminds us that God created both the material and the spiritual, and is going to redeem both the material and the spiritual.

There are many more themes one could develop here: the creation mandate; Scriptural teaching on culture; the implications of Jesus teaching us to pray “your kingdom come; your will be done on earth as it is in heaven”; the culture-transforming implications of New Testament commands; the implications of the present reign of Christ in the world; explicit commands to care for non-spiritual needs; a Christian view of vocation and government; Pauline teaching on taking every thought captive, God reconciling all things in Christ, and so on.

We can overstate this case – but I’m afraid that we can also understate it as well. Transformationalism (or whatever you want to call it) is not non-biblical, as Challies suggests; it’s deeply biblical, and we need to explore it and live its implications, neither understating or overstating its importance.

I love this quote from Neil Plantinga:

At their best, Reformed Christians take a very big view of redemption because they take a very big view of fallenness. If all has been created good and all has been corrupted, then all must be redeemed. God isn’t content to save souls; God wants to save bodies too. God isn’t content to save human beings in their individual activities; God wants to save social systems and economic structures too…

Everything corrupt needs to be redeemed, and that includes the whole natural world, which both sings and groans…The whole world belongs to God, the whole world has fallen, the whole world needs to be redeemed – every last person, place, organization, and program; all “rocks and trees and skies and seas”; in fact, “every square inch,” as Abraham Kuyper said. The whole creation is “a theater for the mighty works of God,” first in creation and then in re-creation.