Outside of Which No Ordinary Possibility of Salvation

Maybe it’s me, but I don’t understand the point of an organization that is not a church whose purpose is to gather pastors, who are in churches that already promote the gospel, for an undertaking called Gospel Coalition. What were the members of GC doing before when they were merely pastors preaching week-in and week-out, sometimes in independent congregations, sometimes in denominations? Were they Gospel Cobelligerents? Or by not being co-aligned were they not as much for the gospel as when belonging to GC? Is the import of GC that it is a cooperative endeavor or that it is promoting the gospel? But are people who don’t join GC guilty of being uncooperative or of not being sufficiently committed to the gospel?  Maybe both?

These were questions that came to mind when reading D. A. Carson’s attempt to clarify GC for the editors of Christianity Today. For instance, when Carson explained, “In some ways we’re almost a coalition of coalitions. Tim represents a whole network. John Piper represents a whole network. And because we share a common vision of what the gospel is and common aims and so on, it’s not, in some sense, just individual churches. It’s all the networks that are linked with that,” I wondered if the real entree into GC was being a fan of Carson, Keller, or Piper. In which case, should it be called, “Coalition of Readers of Evangelical Popular Authors”?

Then when asked if GC purposefully shared the characteristics of a denomination, Carson responded:

It does, but it purposely disallows others. Sociologically, there is a lot less loyalty to denominations today than 20 years ago. In one sense we’re growing because of that. We are meeting a sense of dislocation. On the other hand, in a denomination there will also be, for example, means of ordering who is ordained and who is not. There are going to be agreed standards on who becomes a member or not. Whereas we’re a center-bounded set. We’re not a boundary-bounded set.

Tim Keller is a deeply committed PCA man. He’s a paedobaptist. My ordination is Baptist. And we’re not going to agree on everything. We’re happy to talk about anything, but we’re not going to make one standard or the other the touchstone for the organization.

That left me wondering if GC is really “Baptists and Presbyterian Coaligned for Parts But Not All of the Great Commission.” That’s a mouthful — BPCPBNAGC —  but the leaders of GC may be up to it since in addition to their day jobs as Baptists and Presbyterians they are leading a super-coalition.

One does wonder if church matters to coalition.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 4:17 am and is filed under Christian politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.