Sinclair Ferguson quote: Aug. 26, 2005

Here's a quote from Sinclair Ferguson that got me out of my chair today. You'll have to forward through to about 1:02:10.

I think it's written all over the church today that we are far more interested in ourselves as individuals than we are in the life of the community. And if I were to spell out why I think that's true, I would lose friends. .. (laughter) everywhere. My own position is I don't think a New Testament believer would begin to understand why we do church the way we do church, instead of the way they did church. So there are serious questions here as to the extent that we are self-fascinated evangelicals rather than God-centered and community fellowship oriented.



Has it never struck you that the New Testament almost no where tells you how to do evangelism? Why? Because it understood that 'being the church' was to do evangelism. And our problem in our community, if I can explode for a moment, is that we do evangelism because we are not convinced at all (and often rightly we're not convinced) that our Christian community is really radically supernaturally different from the rest of our world.

You probably know why I'm keen to keep up on the NPP.

Even though I've never met him, I owe quite a personal debt to Dr. Ferguson. It was my junior year of high school when my father took me to a Ligonier conference in Philadelphia on the theme of the atonement. The speakers were Sproul, James Montgomery Boice, and Sinclair Ferguson. I'll never forget feeling for the first time WORSHIP and WONDER as these men discussed THEOLOGY. In a very real sense, it formed a call to ministry for my life.