It’s four years since this reviewer attended the Evangelical Ministry Assembly run annually by the Proclamation Trust, in London.
Since my last visit the assembly has become much bigger – 1500 compared to 900. The venue has changed from St Helen’s Bishopsgate to the Barbican. And the range of attenders wider than ever. The conference was spread over three consecutive days in June. Each day had four sessions of talks and seminars, including expositions by Reuben Hunter, Andrew Reid and Vaughan Roberts.
Identity crisis
The theme of the conference was ‘Identity Crisis – preaching to a confused world’.
Perhaps pivotal to the concept was a throwaway remark by Tim Keller, who said: ‘I don’t have a PhD and maybe experts would want to qualify the statement, but – where Western thinking went wrong historically was anthropology … people did not deny God or the atonement, but began to think that human beings could live and know and save themselves without God.’ Quite a thought.
Two different anthropologies
The Monday afternoon seminar from Dr James Wyatt was a highlight. He is Professor of Ethics at UCL and spoke movingly about human life. He spoke about babies from conception onwards and also about end of life issues. On the hospital unit where he works, technology has enabled them to save the lives of tiny tiny babies. On the floor upstairs medical professionals end the lives of babies considerably older. This, he said, was the product of two different anthropologies. Do we detect a theme coming through here?
Tim Keller gave a typically Calvinic and cool session on apologetics which engages with the current cultural narrative i.e. the things people have in their heads as fixed ideas in the presence of which Bible truth seems to be irrelevant and invalid. His thesis was that we have to deal with this before biblical truth can get through to the hearer, the alternative is MEGO – ‘my eyes glaze over’. He proposed a critique of this narrative, with implication that we have to be shrewd and creative about which biblical arguments we deploy in which situations.
Morning sessions
The morning expositions in John 8 by Christopher Ash were pretty chewy. He really did try to get into the text and that was a helpful thing to see in relation to the person of Jesus. Bruce Ware of Southern Baptist Seminary, Louisville, was given the difficult task of covering a huge amount of material under the snappy title of ‘Practical preaching: a theology of humanity for the preacher from creation, through fall, redemption and new creation’. He coped very well.
Overall, what’s to be said? It is a now very big three-day conference – so be prepared to sit in a huge crowd and relate either to friends you spot in the crowd or to random people sitting next to you. It’s definitely evangelical, Reformed and biblical – excellent to hear undiluted gospel doctrine spoken out clearly. It’s contemporary – no ‘thees and thous’ in the prayers, new excellently-sung songs, and older songs sung with a contemporary feel. And it’s blessed – this is not an assembly for merely bemoaning the decline in society and the weakness of the churches (although there are no illusions about that), but rather for getting on with the gospel and seeing God at work. We thank God.
