Matt Chandler, President of the Acts 29 Church Planting Network, has recently been in the UK speaking on church planting. We had the privilege of having Matt speak at Oak Hill last year, and this more recent visit gave me reason to dig up his talk.

Matt’s obviously a visionary leader and a compelling speaker, but what evidently drives both those things is that he’s someone who just wants to make much of Jesus Christ. And that’s infectious.

He was speaking on the Explicit Gospel, the subject of one of his more recent books, urging us to put up front and central the gospel of grace in all we do: from the ministry of our churches to the ministry of our families. One of the things that hit home was his phrase “the Bible’s already outed me”; if we believe the gospel, why do we keep trying to present a better version of ourselves. God in his word has already told everyone what we’re really like, and yet he’s also dressed us in Christ’s perfect righteousness through faith.

I’ve embedded the videos from Matt’s talks below. Others have shared their take-aways on Matt’s 2013 visit here. The talks from Acts 29 Western Europe’s Explicit 2013 church-planting conference, where Matt & others spoke, are available here, whilst a report from the 2014 conference in London is here.

Matt Chandler on the Explicit Gospel at Oak Hill:

Matt Chandler Q&A at Oak Hill:

When was the last time you cried? Ok, so admittedly beginning like this does sound a bit like one of those ‘touchy feely’ weekend supplement celebrity interviews.

In fact, perhaps for you it’s all too easy to answer the question. Life is hard right now. At the other extreme maybe you’re struggling to think of an incident even in the last year that moved you to tears.

I want to hazard a guess that if we asked the apostle Paul the same question, he’d struggle to answer – not because he never wept, but rather because crying was so inseparable from his day to day ministry.

Now I imagine that Paul the Weeper is probably not how we often think of the guy who wrote that beastly theological tome to the church in Rome. Compassion and tears? If anything, isn’t that Jesus’ department? As Pub Quizzes are forever reminding us, the shortest verse in the Bible is: “Jesus wept”? And we’re used to that – after all, it’s such a Jesus-kinda-thing to do.

But Paul on the other hand? We’re talking about the Apostle-with-Attitude himself; supposedly woman-hating, doctrine-making, emotion-forsaking. Hard as nails and as cold as ice; the original Gospel Machine. He probably wouldn’t even weep watching the Lion King, right?

And then Acts chapter 20 lands in your lap, and it’s like: Boom.  We were looking at it in a class the other day and I was struck afresh. This is what Paul says to the Ephesian elders at Miletus:

“You know how I lived the whole time I was with you, from the first day I came into the province of Asia. 19 I served the Lord with great humility and with tears and in the midst of severe testing by the plots of my Jewish opponents. 20 You know that I have not hesitated to preach anything that would be helpful to you but have taught you publicly and from house to house. 21 I have declared to both Jews and Greeks that they must turn to God in repentance and have faith in our Lord Jesus.

… 28 Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood. 29 I know that after I leave, savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock. 30 Even from your own number men will arise and distort the truth in order to draw away disciples after them. 31 So be on your guard! Remember that for three years I never stopped warning each of you night and day with tears.

… 36 When Paul had finished speaking, he knelt down with all of them and prayed. 37 They all wept as they embraced him and kissed him.

In terms of understanding Paul’s ministry life on the ground, this gives us a fairly clear flavour. And that flavour is tinged with the saltiness of tears. Paul ministers through tears. No doubt tears of pain and tears of heartache and tears of love. 

Now, we may want to speedily add in our cultural caveats here. We may protest that being British puts us in a different camp from these weepy Mediterranean types. We may particularly argue that if we’re a bloke then society expects/shapes/needs us to ‘stand strong’ and just ‘man up’. Anyway, wasn’t Paul an apostle? Doesn’t that make him unique? Superspiritual?

Well, maybe, to some extent. But isn’t there something about Paul here that illustrates for us what it means to take the gospel seriously? The precious truths of salvation and sin and grace and repentance should be connecting with our emotions. Why? Because they’re also connected to real people whom we care about. Evidently people mattered to Paul. And that meant he cried with them and he cried over them and he cried for them. 

Presumably he cried with gratitude for the way God had poured out his saving and transforming grace. Presumably he cried with burdened heart for those who would not turn from their sin to Christ. Presumably he cried with joy in parting company with brothers and sisters in Christ who had become so dear to him through Jesus.

And so I find myself asking: ‘when was the last time people’s spiritual growth and health made me cry?’

Obviously, we’re not meant to read this and suddenly start trying to cry more. This isn’t a call to start engaging in a bit of onion-cutting before we preach every sermon or go out to home-group.

But if I’m never moved to tears over people, perhaps this passage gently challenges me to ask ‘why not?’. Do these people matter to me? Whether or not I’m a set-aside-paid gospel minister, am I so detached from the people in my church?

On the other hand, if I do find myself feeling gutted, overwhelmed, or even ecstatic, as I invest in others then encouragingly this passage shows me that I’m not just a ‘big girls blouse’. It’s not weakness to be emotionally bound up in the salvation of others. It’s not shameful to be cut up when someone drifts into hardened unrepentance. You’re not a wuss if you ‘well up’ when you watch someone get baptised.

Yep, Paul wept. Do you?

Tonight marks the first night of a new Christianity Explored course at my church in Cheltenham (although wonderfully there’s also at least two courses currently running in local homes and workplaces led by church members). If you want to find out more about our course, then do get in touch, or just turn up at Costa Coffee, on the corner of the Prom in Cheltenham at 7.45pm tonight (17th April, and any subsequent Tuesday) – anyone’s welcome, and of course it’s free. Alternatively find a course near you here. It got me thinking about why I think Christianity Explored is so great. Here’s 10 reasons…

1. It ‘lets the gospel tell the gospel’ and its all about Jesus. This is the great mantra of C.E., and it’s brilliant! Attractively and unashamedly C.E. is focused on the person of Jesus and knowing Him, and the format focuses on Jesus walking off the pages of Mark’s gospel. Its not about Christianity as a set of rules, or simply an experience, or merely a philosophical position. Chiefly Christianity is about Jesus – a person – and so C.E. seeks to help people realise that, breaking down wrong stereotypes and presenting ‘the good news of Jesus the Christ’, as Mark 1:1 puts it.

2. It is loving and faithful on sin and sin’s consequences, and thus magnifies Jesus’ cross and God’s grace. That is, the material does not shy away from the fact that each of us have rejected God, and so deserve judgment. Big and often uncomfortable truths. And my heart naturally recoils from clarity in this area, but I know they are true (and true about me), and so I know that to be truly loving I need to be clear on these matters. The writers of C.E. know that same temptation and so have produced a course that is sincere, winsome, but also unashamed about sin, and hell. As Rico Tice, who presents and co-writes the material, has said ‘Christianity Explored as an experience often stands or falls on whether an individual has grasped grace. However, to really understand grace we have first to see the horrors of our sin. We must see that sin leads to judgment, where we will experience God’s wrath and ultimately find ourselves in hell, unless we have trusted in the rescue of the Lord Jesus (1 Thessalonians 1.10).’

With everything we run as a church, we need to ask are we being faithful to the biblical gospel, but surely particularly so with our evangelistic events and courses; does this, yes attractively and winsomely, but also faithfully and clearly present what has been entrusted to us? Sin and wrath are the great pressure-points, and even when we use the term ‘sin’, the temptation is to redefine it and disconnect it from an offence against God, so that it just becomes personal problems, or relational conflict. And if the material we’re using does that then as leaders we will be also, and so the people we’re teaching will be unclear too. C.E. helps us steer clear of that error and so, I think, be both more loving friends and also more faithful stewards of the glorious gospel.

3. It teaches people to read the Bible for themselves. In my experience lots of people have the impression the Bible is ‘unreadable’. This isn’t helped by teaching, evangelistic or not, that comes across as if the Bible is some magic book that can’t be read normally and requires heaps of ‘special knowledge’. I love how C.E. takes people through Mark’s gospel, bit-by-bit, and shows people that they too can read the Bible for themselves, and encounter Christ in his word. This is much better than either proof-texting, or a presentation of “the gospel” that doesn’t seem to be based in any biblical truth. Its shows an encouraging level of confidence that God’s word, through the Spirit’s power, really is powerful.