Home Outreach Leaders Articles for Outreach & Missions How to Tell the Difference Between a Prophet and a Jerk

How to Tell the Difference Between a Prophet and a Jerk

Dear Mr. Prophetic Voice for the Church,

While I appreciate that you feel the need to make every other post, comment, tweet or FB contribution about how the church in the West, or a certain theological tribe, or even specific high-profile preachers, have strayed from the ideal of nascent, biblical Christianity, might I ask you to reconsider your current “ministry” strategy with a few suggestions:

Dial down your dogmatism.

It’s one thing to go to battle if we’re going to wrestle over the atonement or the uniqueness of Jesus, but often what I read falls into areas that not even the Bible seems dogmatic about.

For example, when someone calls out other models of discipleship, or corporate gathering, or simply “how they do church,” because they’ve found the “biblical way” to do it, I think to myself, “How can that be when we don’t have any one-time-for-all-time way of that in the New Testament?” Could it be that God, in his inestimable wisdom, providentially allowed the writers of the New Testament to NOT give a precise blueprint of exactly how those things should look in the specifics (e.g., Lord’s Supper weekly or not) because, just maybe, it might look different depending on both the cultural and historical setting (to mention only two) in which each local church finds herself?

Again, I can appreciate your theological reasons for your way, but when you end up speaking with your typical dogmatism of what should always be, it makes me think you actually know the Bible less, not more.

Take the issue of how a church should conduct a worship service.

I see guys blow up all kinds of models around them (I find them often to be straw-men arguments), but when D.A. Carson, one of the most highly respected theologians and scholars around, can say, “The New Testament does not provide us with officially sanctioned public ‘services’ so much as with examples of crucial elements. We do well to admit the limitations of our knowledge,” and concludes saying, “There is no single passage in the New Testament that establishes a paradigm for corporate worship,” 1 wisdom would dictate we dial down our dogma-meter.

So chill out a bit.

Stop sounding like your ideas are going to be nailed to the door at Wittenburg when, in reality, they’re simply posted to your blog at WordPress.

Stop using your education in biblical studies to validate your conclusions as some kind of expert.

You and I both know there are a lot of people who went to seminary who have said and written dumb things. Need I say more?

1
2
3
Previous articleChurch Planters: You Need to Know These 6 Truths
Next articleThe 2 Biggest Challenges for New Artists
yanceyarrignton@churchleaders.com'
Yancey Arrington is the Teaching Pastor at Clear Creek Community Church in League City, Texas, a suburb of Houston, where he has served since 1998. He is husband to Jennefer and father to three sons; Thatcher, Haddon and Beckett. He is a graduate of Baylor University (BA Religion), Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (Master of Divinity with Biblical Languages), and Covenant Seminary in St. Louis (Doctor of Ministry). You can find more of Yancey's thoughts and work at his blog, YanceyArrington.com, or follow him on Twitter at @yanceyarrington. Tap: Defeating The Sins That Defeat You is his first book.