The Blog of Toby J Sumpter
The Reformation would not have happened if ordinary people had not convinced themselves that they were actors in a cosmic drama plotted by God: that in the Bible he had left them a record of his plans and directions as to how to carry them out. Their revolution was not simply a search for personal salvation.
-Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation, 550.
Dear Trinity Saints & Friends,
About month or so ago Peter Leithart told me about a plan that he and a few other men had begun talking and praying about, and tonight Peter announced that plan to the heads of households of Trinity Reformed Church. The plan is called Trinity Institute, a pastoral/theological study center to be founded in Birmingham, Alabama with Peter as the director of the program. You can read more about the plan in Peter’s own words here. This plan includes the Leitharts moving to Birmingham sometime during the summer of 2013.
If that were not enough, Joshua Appel, our newly appointed Pastor of Parish Life and Christian Education – in addition to giving us helpful overviews of the Sunday School program for the year as well as our Parish Group big picture plan – made mention that he has agreed to go through a pastoral candidating process with our sister congregation, Trinity Church, in Wenatchee, Washington. This does not mean that either Joshua is committed to moving to Wenatchee or that Trinity Church will definitely extend that invitation, but both parties have agreed to discuss that possibility. He hopes a decision, one way or the other, may be reached around the beginning of the year.
There are obvious ways in which both of these announcements evoke piles of mixed emotions. It’s exciting to see the opportunities that God seems to be laying before these men, and it’s challenging and difficult to hear, Peter Leithart’s news especially, as the founding pastor of Trinity.
But after the initial shock wore off a bit and I growled and shook my fist at Peter a few times for good measure (Joshua too, just in case), I stood back and looked at the last couple of years and nearly laughed in amazement, as I saw how clearly God has been leading us up to this moment, blessing us, organizing us, equipping us for the next stage in TRC’s story.
I’m thinking of several things: First, about two years ago, the leadership faced some of the most challenging pastoral counseling situations we have ever faced. It was a veritable storm of marriage implosions and hard heartedness and immorality and rebellion that ultimately resulted in a heads of household meeting where we made around 5-6 announcements regarding different situations where we were calling people to repentance, rebuking men in deep sin, announcing church discipline, etc. But looking back, that was God blessing us with the grace to be faithful to His word, faithfully love and protect the flock of God, and graciously calling erring brothers and sisters to repentance.
Sometime during that busy spell, I remember talking to Joshua Appel about what was going on, and we both marveled at what God had given us and wondered what He was up to. In that moment, one of us (I can’t remember who) said, “I wonder if God is getting ready to give us a building.” We’ve been ‘the church that meets in the hotel conference room’ for 9 years, and we’ve prayed for a building of our own since the beginning, and that idea seemed to make sense at the moment. But we had no prospects for any building at that time. But that conversation started an avalanche of praying and meeting and discussing how we could more faithfully organize our ministries, our leadership, and focus our priorities as a church. This led to the beginning of Parish Groups last year, a kickstart of Sunday School, an expanded diaconate (from 3 to 7 deacons, with 2 more in training), and refocusing of pastoral duties for the pastoral staff.
What’s more exciting is the fact that this isn’t just a lot of shuffling papers and administrative flow charts, we’ve seen real ministry taking place. God has been blessing families both inside and outside the church in some pretty startling ways. I have seen people come to the Lord and people come back to the Lord who had turned away from Him. I have seen marriages healed that looked like they were beyond fixing. I’ve seen huge sins confessed and forgiven and the way that the grace of Jesus transforms men and women and children in real life. I’ve seen the love of Jesus in action in our church through ministries of mercy to outcasts and lonely, hospitality to neighbors and strangers, and I’ve seen bills paid, children sponsored to attend Christian schools, and most recently, I’ve been supremely grateful to watch Trinity stand up and surround the Grieser family in love and prayers and support when their son, Jonah, was diagnosed with Leukemia.
And then if all that wasn’t good enough, this summer God gave us a building. The story is wild and crazy. I’ve said several times that the entire saga was like a really bad dating relationship, on again/off again, and by the end, I was just laughing at God’s sense of humor. In the end, it turned out that God was determined to give us the building at a cost far below reasonable for the simple reason that He can.
All that to say, when I look at the big picture, I see God having poured enormous blessings on our church, but not just any blessings. I see God having set us up for some of the most significant ministry and outreach and growth we have ever seen. I believe that God has organized our forces, galvanized our energies, lined us up on a field of battle and intends to use Trinity in bigger ways than ever before. And the building is a huge part of that. And after seeing the initial sketches of the site plan for the new building tonight (see Roy Atwood if you missed it), I am more convinced than ever. God has planted us here in a permanent way, in a public way and has prepared us for the next stage. In other words, I believe that we are on the verge of Trinity’s biggest work yet. And all because God has led us here, God is blessing us immensely and equipping us for more important tasks ahead.
Now when I look at all that, I certainly would not have written into that story any major character changes. But God writes His story better than we do, and He knows best. Of course there’s a huge part of me that would love to continue to stand up with Peter week after week leading worship, sharing counseling and preaching duties, etc., but when I stand back and look at God’s enormous blessing on our congregation, I am absolutely certain that this too is part of God’s blessing. God is blessing us even in this transition. And so we should pray and work to see Peter’s transition as part of the way we get to share this blessing with more of God’s people around the world. This new exciting calling is part of the way God intends to bless us at Trinity and bless others through us, extending to the Trinity Institute and beyond.
The wonderful thing is that Jesus is our Head Pastor, our Chief Shepherd and Overseer. He looks after all His saints, all His sheep, and He leads and directs and blesses. He knows where we need to be, and He puts us there for our good and for the advancement of His Kingdom. He can be trusted. He is a faithful leader.
I am so thankful for Peter and Noel, and for the supreme privilege and gift it has been and continues to be to serve with Him. And I ask you to join with me in praying God’s blessing on this new venture, this new work: for its organization, for its funding, for its curriculum and instructors, for the Leitharts’ transition, their family and all the details that go into a move like this.
I am also enormously thankful for Joshua and Sara, and the gifts and enthusiasm they bring to Trinity. I will continue to bribe and threaten in all the ways I can imagine (Sara, did you see those building plans and all that choir space?), but I have such great love and respect for them, that I am certain however the Spirit leads them will be for their blessing and the blessing of God’s people whether here or in Wenatchee.
What does all this mean? It means God is blessing us. It means that God is hearing our prayers to be used, to become ministers of His grace and justice. And thankfully we have a solid nine months or so to work on details, continue planning for the future, move into our new building and then get ready for whatever God has up His sleeve next. But I’m pretty sure it has something to do with taking over Moscow (and the world) for Jesus.
Much love and blessings,
Pastor Toby
So a few days a go I posted a quote from private correspondance by Rich Bledsoe concerning the connection between liturgical worship and homosexuals. His thoughts came in response to some recent posts like this and this.
For what it’s worth, the broader context of his comments actually included the point that the Orthodox Church is finally coming out into the open, coming out of the various cultural ghettos she has tended to hide away in for centuries. And part of coming out into the mainstream of western culture means dealing with all the same sins that all the rest of us have been dealing with already. Part of the “pristine” reputation of EO is bound up in the fact that lots of their churches spoke Russian and Ethiopian and worked (in some measure) to stay separated from mainstream American culture. The point wasn’t to point at EO and laugh, the point was in part to say, “hey, look who decided to show up to the party.” Now you get to fight along side the rest of us Bible believing Christians. So in one sense, you could take the whole comment as a compliment.
But the point I zeroed in on was relative to liturgy, glory, and homosexuality. Now here’s the argument, and I really would like to hear honest feedback. I thought the argument made good sense.
We know from Scripture that the woman is the glory of man. She is his crown. In fact, in the Hebrew this is underlined. The man is called “dirt” because he was taken out of the ground, and then God rips a rib out of his side and “builds” the woman. Literally, God builds a “fire” (Ishshah), and then (and only then) the man is called a “fire” (Ish). In other words, man becomes glorious when he has a woman at his side. He becomes a fire, when the fire-babe becomes his crown. The woman is the glory of the man. We might wonder what it is about a woman that is glorious: Paul points to her hair (1 Cor. 11), Solomon says it’s her wisdom (Proverbs), and elsewhere we gather that she is created to be beautiful physically and make and do beautiful things (like magically making babies inside of her). Continue Reading…
One of the things that all liturgical churches have to come to grips with is that we have been so de-glorified for so long, that the very glory of the liturgy attracts a faux following, a fake following. To be blunt, a homosexual following. If the woman is the glory of the man, the homosexual is the faux glory of the man. He is false, fake, faux glory. He is a fake woman, so he is fake glory. But, like it or not, homosexuals are going to be attracted to all that glory in Eastern Orthodoxy. “Smells, bells,” and long beautiful gowns with candles, incense, and chanting, is going to attract a lot of faux glory seekers.
It is no mistake that Oscar Wilde was not a Presbyterian or Congregationalist. Smells and bells are where it’s at.
-Rich Bledsoe
Towards the end of the last millennium, Peter Leithart writes:
One of the lesser-known works of John Calvin is a tract whose short title is “An Inventory of Relics.” It is predominantly a sharp attack on the extremes of medieval Catholic piety-practices that I imagine many Catholics would today dismiss as empty superstitions. Samples of Christ’s hair, teeth, even his foreskin were distributed across Europe, and so much of Jesus’ blood had been preserved as to “be diffused over the whole world.” Calvin complained that “had the most Holy Virgin yielded a more copious supply [of milk] than is given by a cow, or had she continued to nurse during her whole lifetime, she scarcely could have furnished the quantity which is exhibited.” The complaint could have been written by Voltaire.
Calvin’s attack on relic veneration, however, was grounded in an evangelical insight that lies at the heart of the Reformation. “The first abuse,” Calvin wrote, “and, as it were, the beginning of the evil, was that when Christ ought to have been sought in his Word, sacraments, and spiritual influences, the world, after its wont, clung to his garments, vests, and swaddling clothes; and thus overlooking the principal matter, followed only its accessory.” In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin offered a similar critique of the liturgical tradition of the medieval Church. Formally, Calvin’s argument is that many medieval ceremonies were human inventions, unwarranted by Scripture. It would be a mistake, however, to reduce his argument to a trivial quarrel over the warrant for this vestment or that gesture. Calvin’s principal concern was evangelical and pastoral; he wished to direct sinners to that “place” where they could encounter the living God. Ceremonies, he argued, “to be exercises of piety, ought to lead us straight to Christ.” Ceremonies and devotional practices that fail this test are best removed from the Church. Continue Reading…
Another follow up thought on the Douthat post below: This American “openness to heresy” seems to me to be a peculiarly Protestant stance, particularly, a sort of political/social manifestation of Sola Scriptura. Protestantism rejects human authority as supreme (whether in prelacy or tradition), and insists that Jesus is the head of the Church, ruling through His Spirit and Word in this world (though respecting tradition and human authority subordinated to the Word). In other words, despite the schismatic sins and fleshly rivalries wound through it, Protestantism has always, in principle, had this “openness to heresy” at least as much because of its confidence and delight in the freedom of the Spirit. As Douthat notes, it’s the heretics, the heterodox who are always trying to tidy up the faith, trying to make the Spirit tuck His shirt in and wipe the jelly smudges off His cheeks. But there is something of a symbiotic relationship between heresy and orthodoxy, such that heretics press in on the faithful in an ultimately sharpening, glorifying way, causing the Church to burn brighter with the truth, slowly, relentlessly leaving lies and distortions behind. Just as God is able to destroy death by death, just as sin and evil are able to be deftly wielded by the omnipotent competence of the author of this story we are in, so too, lies, misunderstanding, and false teachers are bent to the good purposes of the Spirit. And all this without striking a truce with any evil. Continue Reading…
There was a recent Facebook extravaganza (conversation) regarding prayers to the departed saints which was touched off by my claim that this was little better preparation for heaven than studying the latest Playboy centerfold in preparation for marriage. Towards the end of the comments section, I suggested that there was a bit of gnat straining and camel swallowing going on, and my friend Matt Peterson was somewhat taken aback by that characterization and requested an explanation. So here it is.
While I haven’t had the time to go back through and read all of the comments (I have a wife and four young children), from what I skimmed over, I actually don’t have a huge problem with the points Matt was making. He seems to have been working hard to guard some broader principles regarding our union with Christ, and he wasn’t so concerned about defending the particular practice of prayers to saints. He just wanted to make sure that I (and the cyber world at large) didn’t reject it on the wrong grounds. And fair enough. I have no qualms with careful distinctions; truth matters.
But here’s my concern that I don’t think Matt has caught on to yet. Whether we’re talking about icons or prayers to the saints in the Eastern or Roman churches or walking the aisle, praying a prayer, and signing a card in the Evangelical churches, there are millions of souls in grave danger. They are in grave danger because they think they are saved because of this external conformity to some ritual or practice. But this is not the same thing as being born again, being forgiven, washed clean with the blood of Christ, and being filled with the Holy Spirit. And Reformed people do it with Calvinistic soteriology, infant baptism, Christian education, whatever. Every tradition has their shibboleths. And then on top of that, there is a current outbreak here in the US, where the Roman and Eastern churches are getting inundated with Evangelical burnouts. These are people who don’t understand the gospel, have serious issues in their families, don’t understand submission to authority, and in a grip of an idea, something shiny and ancient looking, are sprinting towards full blown idolatry looking for something to bandage the gaping hole in their souls. Continue Reading…
If you’ve been around this blog or read or listened to much of anything I’ve been interested in over the last few years, you’d know that I’m a fan of robust, historic Christian worship. At Trinity, we follow a very traditional liturgy in our worship, we sing historic hymns and psalms and canticles and chants, and we have a hearty appreciation for the Church calendar, celebrating the major feasts and fasts of the Christian year as our fathers before us.
This means that many of our prayers are set and remain the same for many months of the year, many songs and pieces of service music remain unchanged, and we perform the same actions and speak scripted responses to one another Sunday after Sunday. And there are good reasons for this:
First, we believe it shows honor to our fathers and mothers in the faith, praying their prayers and singing their songs, and recognizes substantively that we have come into the middle of a conversation, or better, into the middle of a great dance that began centuries ago. We are part of something much, much bigger than our congregation here in Idaho at the beginning of the third millennium. But secondly, we also believe that it is formative and pedagogical. Similar to some of the aspects of classical education, some of the most important lessons we learn are learned through ingrained habits and ritualized repetition. This is also a standing objection to the frequent assumption in the modern church that only that which is spontaneous is genuine. Or the converse, which is highly skeptical of ritual, repetition, or scripting anything — even though the most non-liturgical churches still develop patterns, habits, and traditions. Finally, like many other treasured traditions (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, etc.), the repetition grows in glory and loveliness over time. It may seem awkward to say, “The Lord be with/And with your spirit” or “The peace of the Lord be with you/and also with you” at first, but over time, as we learn this language of the Church, the language of the Spirit, those words take on the love and joy of “Merry Christmas!” and “Christ is risen/He is risen indeed!” We believe that God meets us in worship by His Spirit and through the forms and words and prayers and rituals, is forming and re-forming us His people into a new humanity. And just as you might say in a generic way, America is a “Christmas and Easter” culture — which actually describes our Christian devotion in all of its shallow, non-committal glory quite well — the ultimate aim is for the whole of our worship and devotion to Jesus to fill our lives throughout our days and years. Continue Reading…
While I’m on the Reformation, I’d just like to make a comment about worship music in general.
Channeling some of what James Jordan has pointed out in the past: you can probably identify some of the most potent practices in the church by following how they get distorted or marginalized in the history of the church, repeatedly pushed aside by the devil so that God’s people are not in full strength.
One example of this is congregational singing. This is one of the hallmarks of the Reformation: the people of God singing the praises of God together loudly.
The captivity of the Roman church had included a perverse professionalism that relegated all the most important stuff to the front of the church where only the special people could handle the “holy stuff.” Thus, the liturgy was done almost entirely by the pastor and a deacon or two or maybe a highly trained choir while the congregation watched and listened. Frequently the clergy were the only ones who actually partook of the sacraments, and if anybody actually understood the Latin Mass, it would have been a few of them. The Roman church had effectively passed a weapons ban on the people of God and locked all the most effective assault weapons of the Spirit in a vault in the front of the church where they were occasionally taken out of the case and lifted up for everyone to look at and pray to.
When the Reformers busted out of the Roman prison, they ransacked the altar area of the church and gave all the weapons that the priests had been hiding up there back to the soldiers of God: normal men, women, and children. They opened the word of God by putting it back into the language of the people, they gave all professing Christians the sacraments (both bread and wine), and they put the war-psalms of David back into the mouths of the army of Jesus, His saints. Continue Reading…
The Reformation was an Exodus: Luther, Bucer, Calvin, Knox and their sidekicks were the Moses and Aaron and Joshua and Caleb of the 16th century, and they led a great mixed multitude out of an Egypt that had arisen in the very Church of God. The Pope had become a tyrannical pharaoh, and his bishops and prelates laid heavy burdens on God’s people. God heard their cries, and raised up judges to free His people. He lifted His mighty hand, and with an outstretched arm, He brought His people out of the Roman house of bondage. Anyone who denies this should be sentenced to a decade in politics where you will simultaneously fit in with your fellow camel-swallowers and get what you deserve.
Since history is God’s story, and God delights to rehearse His main points and themes repeatedly in motifs and types, wisdom is found in reading our stories in light of the stories of Scripture. As soon as the Israelites have gone three days into the desert, sure enough, they’re ready to head back to slavery. Later, at Sinai, some of the gold plundered from the Egyptians is used for casting a golden calf. But even a generation later, you have pharaoh wannabes like the cowardly Achan, coveting the treasures of Jericho in a hole in his tent, like a slick pollyanna megachurch pastor. Continue Reading…
