A New Book by John Armstrong

A new book by John H. Armstrong, Your Church is Too Small, has just been released by Zondervan. John is a first-rate Christian scholar, a provocative and prolific writer, and a dynamic speaker.  He teaches apologetics at Wheaton Graduate School, but he spends the bulk of his time writing, speaking and personally ministering to pastors and Christian leaders whom he has identified as sharing his vision for reformation and revival .He is the founder and president of ACT3, a ministry designed to allow him to use his unique spritual gifts in the service of Christ.

Before going on, I need to clarify what the title of John’s book means. It does not refer to the size of a church as measured by the number of congregants. It refers to one’s conception of what the Church — the Body of Christ — actually is. This book is a call for Christians to give up their sectarian tendencies, to stop looking with suspicion on believers from churches other than their own, to stop saying that “those guys cannot possibly be real Christians because they don’t believe XXX or do YYY,” and to practice Christlike charity in light of Jesus’ prayer for the unity of believers in John 17:20-21:

My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.

I will not try to review John’s book here. It would be difficult for me to do so honestly, because over the last year John has become a personal friend of mine. In my biased opinion, Your Church is Too Small is well written, honest insightful, engaging, challenging, etc.  But even if it were not, I would still urge you to read it because I believe the message of this book is vitally important to the spiritual health of all Christians and Christian churches today. I have read a lot of books over the past year — some great, some pretty good, and some mediocre. In the evangelical world, there seems to be an endless supply of gifted, charismatic leaders/speakers/authors promoting ideas that promise to be the next great trend  that will revitalize churches and ministries. Most of these ideas fizzle out in a very short time.

But John’s book is different. His central thesis is an idea that is truly big, a teaching so important it was expressed in the most ancient creeds:  the doctrine of “one holy, catholic, apostolic church.” For the last millennium and especially the last century, this doctrine has been wantonly neglected, violated and even opposed by vast portions of the Christian world. The opposite of this teaching, sectarianism, has been encoded into the DNA of countless believers, congregations and denominations, to the detriment of the gospel and Christian witness. In a future article, I will try to explain why I believe this message is so vital. For now, I would like to explain a few things about who John is and how he came to write this book.

I have been following John’s writings for several years now, especially his daily blog. There is a handful of Christian blogs that I read regularly.  For example, I follow Scot McKnight’s Jesus Creed, which has interesting articles and plenty of lively discussion. By comparison, John’s blog seems to have an audience that is smaller, quieter, and more diverse.  His articles have encouraged, informed and challenged me at a very deep level. John also writes a weekly article that is longer, more scholarly, and geared toward people who serve in church leadership.

Perhaps the main reason why I am attracted to John’s material is that, although he has strong opinions on all sorts of theological and political issues,  he is also one of the most openminded persons I have ever met. He never stops learning, growing and challenging himself, and his personal spiritual journey is laid bare in his writings. And his spiritual journey is a fascinating one.

John was raised as a conservative Southern Baptist but gradually migrated toward Reformed theology and is now an ordained minister in the Reformed Church. When he transferred to Wheaton College in 1969, he was amazed and shocked by the malaise and spiritual deadness he found on that campus, particularly among the student body. He enlisted several friends to pray for spiritual revival, and the then-president of Wheaton, the late Dr. Hudson Armerding, joined their 24-7 prayer chain. On a snowy Thursday night in February, 1970, God began to answer their prayers. During a sparsely attended evening service at Edman Chapel, the Holy Spirit visited those who were there. Students from all over campus and people from suburban Chicago began to pour into the chapel, confessing their sin and crying out to God in prayer throughout the night. This visitation by the Holy Spirit, which many have characterized as a mini-revival, had a lasting impact on the Wheaton campus and bore lifelong spiritual fruit in the lives of those involved. Dr. Amerding later called the 1970 Wheaton revival the highlight of his presidency and credited John as the student who was instrumental in bringing it about.

John remained in Wheaton, Illinois and pastored a small church there for nearly two decades, but left his pastorate in 1992 to spearhead an organization called Reformation and Revival Ministries. That ministry, which was devoted to equipping church leaders to foster spiritual revival, grew repidly, and soon John was besieged with invitations to speak and write. He worked closely with R.C. Sproul and the late Dr. James Boice to found the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals (ACE) in 1994, and could be described as a rising star in Reformed Christianity.

It was about that time, however, that God began to call John to a different path. In his own words, from Your Church is Too Small, this is what happened:

It was an ordinary Sunday morning worship service. We were reciting the words of the Apostles’ Creed, words I had said hundreds of times before. I knew the words. I believed them. But I had never been particularly moved by them. They were just words recited in a service.

But on this Sunday things unfolded very differently. As I said the words “I believe in the holy catholic church” from the Apostles’ Creed, something stopped me. At that moment, the Holy Spirit spoke to my heart: “Do you really believe these words? If you believe them, then why don’t you act like it?” The conviction was powerful and true. I was so shaken that I had to sit down. I wept. Questions flooded my mind. I knew God had spoken. But I had no idea how it was about to change my life.

John began to doubt that the ACE could effectively bring about the kind of national spiritual renewal that he longed and prayed for because that organization, by its unwavering commitment to Calvinist theology, had excluded the vast majority of Christians in the United States. He began to openly speak to ACE leaders about catholicity and suggested that the organization reach out to Methodists, other Wesleyan churches, Pentecostals and mainline Protestatant denominations. That suggestion was not well received. John resigned from his leadership position in ACE and began to take his own ministry in a new direction. He started to develop deep friendships with Christians from a wide variety of Protestant circles and even from Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions. 

After a few years, Reformation and Revival Ministries was given a new name: ACT3, which stands for Advancing the Christian Tradition in the Third Millennium.  Through ACT3, John has been promoting his vision for missional ecumenism. Unlike the flawed and ineffective ecumenical movements of the mid-20th century, which jettisoned truth and attempted to reduce Christian doctrine to the lowest common denominator, John sought to live and promote relational unity among believers across denominational boundaries.  Instead of glossing over or minimizing doctrinal differences, John engages leaders to openly discuss these differences in non-adversarial ways, so that they can relate to one another from a standpoint of understanding rather than ignorance and caricature. This approach can be seen in two recent books that John has edited, Understanding Four Views on the Lord’s Supper and Understanding Four Views on Baptism. John does not counsel Christians from any tradition to sacrifice any of their deeply held beliefs, distinct theologies or styles of ministry, nor does he envision everybody coming together to form one universal mega-church. He does look forward to a day when believers from different traditions will recognize that diversity in the Body of Christ is the scriptural and historical norm and that membership in the Body is not determined by doctrinal purity but by relationship to the living Christ. And he encourages Christians to put aside fear and suspicion and work together wherever they can to serve the greater cause of God’s kingdom.

When John took his ministry in this new direction, he paid a heavy personal price. Most of his closest friends stood by him, but many donors and supporters of his ministry dropped by the wayside and revenues decreased by more than 50%. He has received a great deal of criticism by Christians who perceive him as having compromised truth. While John is a strong defender of orthodoxy, upholds the tenets of Reformed theology and maintains his good standing as a minister of the Reformed Church, he opposes sectarian tendencies in his own denomination and wherever else he finds them. Some of his fiercest opposition comes from evangelical Protestants who maintain strong anti-Catholic positions and characterize the Roman Catholic Church as preaching a false gospel. This is a price he is willing to pay. Other Christian leaders who have taken similar stands have also paid a price. For example, after Chuck Colson joined Bill Bright and other leaders to signed the Evangelicals and Catholics Together document in the mid-1990’s, revenues to Prison Fellowship dropped by about $2.5 million per year. But it opened new doors for Mr. Colson to minister in Latin America and he has no regrets.