From the end of 2008 to 2013 I was the lead teaching pastor of a large non-denominational church in the northeast. During my time there I was told by various elders to lead the church in a more “broadly evangelical” direction. By others I was encouraged to lead the church to become more narrowly Reformed. I was told that our theological “tent” was too big and that it was too small. In those few years I understood the wisdom of the words of Dirty Harry, “A man has to know his limitations.” There are a few things I can do. There are other things I could probably learn to do. But one thing I will never know how to do is lead a church in two opposing directions simultaneously.

In my God in the Whirlwind, I have developed what is the answer to our ailment. The indulgent God has done nothing good for the Church. It is time to return to the biblical God. But this is meaningless unless we start where Scripture starts. That is, we must start with the God who is objective to us.

He stands outside of us, outside of our circumstances, outside of our subjectivity, and summons us to come outside of ourselves, to know him. We do not enter into ourselves to find him as if, all along, he had been hiding there among our intuitions. Rather, he breaks in on us. He enters our world, our private world, and when he enters it he does so on his terms and not on our own. This in no way denies our need for the Spirit’s illumination of Scripture and our own regeneration. It is simply affirming that our crippling self-preoccupation, our deeply privatized view of reality, must be set aside if we are to come before our triune God as he has revealed himself to be. This is what Christian faith is really about.

It has often been maintained that the sixteenth-century Reformers had a poorly developed missiology, that missions was an area to which they gave little thought. It is considered axiomatic that the Reformers had no concern for overseas missions to non-Christians and that they evidence no recognition at all of the missionary dimension of the church.

In 1996, leaders from Reformed and Evangelical churches in America gathered in Cambridge, Massachusetts to issue a call to reformation. They published The Cambridge Declaration, expressing concern that “churches today are increasingly dominated by the spirit of this age than by the Spirit of Christ,” and called the church “to repent of this sin and to recover the historic Christian faith.” Almost twenty years later, this clarion call to reformation seems to have died out.