Evangelizing the Televangelized

Consider this. These Australians are mocking what they think is Christianity.



Can we all agree that what Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn and their like give us is not any form of Christianity? Yet unlike your local pastor and mine, these clowns are on television for everyone to see. Sadly, they are perhaps the only people claiming to speak for Christ who penetrate the secular worlds of people like these Australian television entertainers.

There is nothing that anyone can do to eliminate the supply of this nonsense. The right of free speech extends also to snake oil merchandising. But surely we can work on the demand side. Who are these people who are watching, and attending, and (most importantly) funding this stuff? Where are the missionaries to the televangelist audiences?

But I'll end on a light note. If you watch carefully at the end of the video, you can see one of the Aussie "faith healers" flip an old man in a wheelchair. (Let me add that ordinarily that would not be funny.) The tall guy at the very end turns and whacks someone. I didn't catch it until the third viewing.

Billy Graham's Long Shadow

When a friend recently told me that Woody Allen once interviewed Billy Graham, I thought he was joking. It seemed comparable to Groucho Marx interviewing Cornelius Van Til.

But here it is on YouTube. Billy actually does a great job turning Woody's irreverent jabs into gospel opportunities, and often topping the great comedian with fast and funny come-backs.





I do not know exactly when this interview took place, but my guess is the mid to late 1960s.

For the fun and sheer wonder of it, here is Billy Graham in 1949..



...and 1957...



...and 1971...



After sitting under the sound, Reformed, Evangelical ministry of Dr. Glyn Own at Knox Presbyterian Church in Toronto for 16 months, I came to saving knowledge of God after Billy Graham preached a New years Eve service at the IVCF 1984 Urbana Mission Conference.

We had been blessed for several days with the expository teaching of Rev. Eric Alexander from Glasgow. Through that I came to under stand the connection between the cross and my sin, between Christ's death and my life. That is the heart of the gospel.

Billy Graham closed our several days together--19,000 young people gathered at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champagne--with a New Year's Eve worship service. During that time, he told us to bow our heads and close out eyes. He asked us, If God were to call you to the mission field, would you go?" Anyone who would was to stand up. My friends, one on each side of me, stood up. They were missionary kids themselves. I did not stand because I had no desire to go off to the far reaches of the world, even despite what I had learned that week about the centrality of missionary work in the life of the church.

After the service, we went directly to out buses to take us wherever on the continent we were going. In the darkness of that bus on my way back to Toronto, I thought about what I had done--or rather not done--that night. By the grace of God I confronted myself, asking, "David! The Lord has given his Son to die for the payment of your sins, and if he tells you to go to Nepal or Brazil you're going to refuse him? You're going to withhold from the One who did not withhold his only Son, his beloved Son for you?" It made no sense at all. So I committed my self to serve him in any way he would direct me to serve him. I count my conversion from that point. I had received Christ as both Lord and Savior (his inseparable offices).

There are things with which I have disagreed in Billy Graham's ministry. The altar call is one of them. But that night--December 31, 1984--God used Billy Graham to bring me into his kingdom, perfecting the labors of others before him. I thank the Lord for Billy Graham.

Thoughts on Paedo-Communion

Calvin serving the Lord's Supper in Geneva

In his communion address this morning, my pastor compared the Lord's Supper to a family meal. As no passage came immediately to mind in support of this image, his remark distracted me as I pondered in what sense this might be true. Yes, the redeemed in Christ are adopted into the family of God. We are born again as brothers and sisters in Christ. And the Lord's Supper is certainly just that: a supper, and thus a meal.

But I quickly thought of what any paedo-communionists in the congregation would do with his image. "Yes," the would say. "Our children are not little pagans. They are part of the covenant family, as their baptism testifies. [True.] So why are they barred from the family meal?" This imaginary objection was troubling to me. So as I am entirely certain that serving communion to unconverted, unregenerate covenant children (paedo-communion) is an erroneous application of covenant theology, I was ready to jettison the family meal image as unhelpful, and confront the pastor at the door.

Then it occurred to me that the problem lay in a misunderstanding of the nature of the Christian spiritual family in contradistinction to the merely natural family. In the natural family, you come to life, then you live life, and then you die. In the spiritual family that is ours in Christ, however, you start out dead, then you come to life, and then you live life forevermore. Paedo-communionists miss this difference, and that is the root of their well-intentioned confusion. I would no sooner administer the communion elements to my infant children than I would to my deceased saintly grandfather (if I had one). Both of them are in my family. Both of them are included in the New Covenant. But both of them are dead, so to administer the bread and the wine to either one of them would be inappropriate at this time.