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:

If you’ve never come across it before the idea of meeting ‘one to one’ or “to do a one to one” might either sound a little bit odd or  just a bit too intimate. And yet the phrase seems to have recently become popular vocabulary amongst churches and Christian ministry across the UK.

I can think of lots of friends who testify to ‘one to ones’ being precious times of personal growth, both in learning to read the Bible for themselves, and in getting to know Jesus and going deeper into Christian discipleship.

In this helpful video below my friend Amy talks about why meeting up to dig into the Bible with someone ‘one to one’ is a brilliant thing, as well as explaining what it might actually involve.

Dave Harvey can write a good book. And he’s got a new one out. It’s called Am I Called? The Summons to Pastoral Ministry (Crossway, 2012). Have a read of a free pdf of the foreword (from Matt Chandler) and opening chapter here. How about this for an appetite-wetter:

‘You see, God isn’t haphazard in whom he calls or what he calls a man to do. He doesn’t appoint bureaucrats over his church; he appoints men—flesh-and-blood, bone-headed mistake factories like you and me. He takes an ordinary guy, carves out his character, grants some grace, trains him with trials, zaps him with zeal, and corners him in his circumstances. Then you’ve got a pastor. That’s a story worth telling—a story about grace.’

This got me thinking about the language of ‘calling’. I’ve generally tended not to use the language of being ‘called’, apart from referring to the Christian’s calling to salvation. It seems this is really the only ‘call’ that we get clearly defined in the Scriptures that we’re to expect for ourselves: God’s sovereign, effective and gracious call to salvation, a la Jesus in John’s gospel: ‘You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you…’ (15:16), or Paul in Ephesians: ‘that you may know the hope to which he has called you’ (1:18). I wonder if at times all the chat about ‘calling’ and ‘vocation’ can cloud and distract from this wonderful calling that every Christian has and can rest upon. I’ve definitely witnessed up-close others believing the myth that the ‘minister’ or ‘priest’ is more spiritual than anyone else.

Certainly one sometimes hears the language of ‘calling’ being used by someone to give a super-spiritual gloss to what is potentially just a self-determined insistence on something, despite what everyone else is saying, i.e. ‘But seriously I’m called! This is so of God!’ From experience it can also make other people feel useless and less spiritual, leading to ‘how come I don’t feel God is calling me?’ or ‘why is that only vicars and pastors get called? Isn’t God interested in my life?’ I guess this relates to another post I wrote, discussing how we think & talk about how God guides us.