How Our Church Became Reformed (Pt 1)

The Program’s Purpose and Daily Bible Reading

Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist. This program is dedicated to helping you better understand the word of God and the doctrines of grace. The Bible tells us, do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.

Get your Bible and coffee ready and prepare to study along. Here's your host with today's lesson, Pastor Keith Foskey.

Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist. My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist. Today is August 10th, 2020. And if you're following along in our daily Bible reading, then today you should be reading Acts chapter 13.

The Church’s Bible Reading Plan and Invitation to Join

If you'd like a copy of our daily Bible reading list, you can go to our website at our church, Sovereign Grace Family Church, that's sgfcjax .org. Sovereign Grace Family Church, S-G-F-C-J-A-X, for Jacksonville, dot O-R-G.

And you will see there our scripture reading plan for 2020. This takes you through the New Testament. There's still time to hop on and finish out the New Testament with us. We're going through the books of the New Testament in the order that we believe that they were written.

And this will take us all the way to the end of the year, reading one chapter a day, every day, except for the weekends. You have the weekends to do catch up. And of course, to come and enjoy corporate time of study, prayer, and singing at church.

And if you're in Jacksonville, I want to welcome you to come and join us at Sovereign Grace Family Church. If you do not have a church home, we are a Reformed church here on the North side of Jacksonville.

Why This Week Is About the Church’s History

We're part of the Fellowship of Independent Reformed Evangelicals. And that's what we're going to actually talk about this week on Coffee with a Calvinist. I want to give a little bit of a history of our church.

Last week, I took an opportunity to talk about how I became a Calvinist. It was entitled, My Pathway to Calvinism. And if you haven't had an opportunity to hear that, you may want to go back and listen in because that is an opportunity to learn not only how I became a Calvinist, but what were the scriptures that convinced me to become a Calvinist.

I go over some of those important scriptures and I talk about how God used them to change my view on this subject of Calvinism. I was taught in seminary that Calvinism was bad, bad, bad, that it was a thing that would kill churches.

Calvinism kills churches. I heard that a lot. I heard Calvinism destroys the heart of evangelism. And that was what I was actually taught in seminary. And yet, as I began to investigate, and as I said, I don't want to retell the story.

If you can go back and listen to last week, but as I began to investigate, I found out that the doctrines of grace, which are known as the five points of Calvinism, they are thoroughly biblical and founded on biblical truth.

And so I, over a period of time of study, reflection, prayer, investigation, listening to others who teach on the subject and reading books, as well as the scriptures, of course, most importantly, the scriptures, God led me to what I would consider to be a right understanding on the doctrines of grace.

The Church’s Move from Disciples of Christ to a Reformed Identity

But that story coincides with the story of our church. Sovereign Grace Family Church has not always been a reformed church. And so what I want to talk about this week is how God changed this church. And the reason for this is multifold.

One, if you're new to Sovereign Grace Family Church, I want you to get acquainted with our history. I want you to know where we came from. And most of the time, when somebody new comes to the church, I schedule a time to meet with them and I will share with them part of our story.

But sometimes I don't get to share the whole story. And so this, I'm going to do five days on this subject for the next five days, I'm going to be talking about the history of the church and how we became a reformed church.

So that's the first reason. The second reason is, I would say, as equally as important, if not more important, and this is an encouragement to, excuse me, to some of you out there, pastors especially, who may be pastoring churches where you feel like you're all alone because you have come to a biblical understanding of the doctrines of grace but you're in a church where you feel like what you're saying about the gospel has to be censored, has to be fed through a filter because you have people in your church who are opposed to the doctrines of grace.

And I want to kind of address that as well because I've been told, I mean, I've had conversations with several pastors. They would say, you know, I cannot use the name Calvin. I cannot mention the Reformation.

I can't mention the doctrine of predestination or election because my church simply would not stand for it. There are people in my church who would get upset by it. And I understand how they feel and it breaks my heart that we have men of God who are hurting basically by their church not being able to preach the truth because there are people in the church who won't stand to hear the truth.

And so I want to hopefully this will be an encouragement to see what God has done in our church. And not that he's necessarily going to take the same route for you and your church, but maybe I know that this story has encouraged many people, many other pastors as I tell them how God worked in our church to see how God is able to take a group of people who are not reformed and have a revival.

Really, this is the story of revival because that's what this is about. This is the revival of a church. Our church was not always Sovereign Grace Family Church, as I mentioned before. Our church was Forest Christian Church and it was part of the Disciples of Christ movement.

The Restoration Movement and the Disciples of Christ

Now, if you're not familiar with the Disciples of Christ movement, that is part of the Campbellite movement, which was in the 1800s, the Campbells and the Stoneites, the Stones, there was Barton Stone, Alexander Campbell, and Thomas Campbell, and Sir Walter Scott.

They were men who came together and formed what was known as the Restoration Movement. And the term restoration, don't ever confuse that with reformation because it's not, the term restoration was, they believed they were restoring the ancient gospel.

That was a term that they used, restoring the ancient gospel. And the problem was they believed that baptism was what had been lost from the ancient gospel, the necessity of baptism for salvation. So those men started the Restoration Movement.

The Restoration Movement splintered into several groups. So now today what represents the Restoration Movement is the Churches of Christ and the independent Christian churches. So if you're ever in town and you see like Main Street Christian Church or something like that, typically that's part of the independent Christian church.

And then there was the Disciples of Christ. And the Churches of Christ represented more of the conservative side of the Restoration Movement. And you'll know if you've ever been to Church of Christ, a lot of them are, they don't use musical instruments.

That was part of the teaching of the early Restoration leaders was that musical instruments were not to be used in worship. And so therefore, the Churches of Christ have maintained that tradition. And the Disciples of Christ were sort of on the left side of that spectrum, where your Churches of Christ were the right side, the conservatives, the Disciples of Christ, very left of center, very theologically liberal.

And so Forest Christian Church, though it was always socially conservative, theologically was very liberal in its view on many things when it came to theology. And for instance, when I was ordained, I was ordained as part of Forest Christian Church.

And on my ordination certificate, I have the elders of the church sign the certificate. And one of the ones who signed the certificate was a female elder. Now, if you're new to the program or don't know our position, we don't believe that at Sovereign Grace Family Church, we don't believe in female elders.

But in the history of our church, because there was a time when it was more on the liberal side when it came to theology, there was a time when there was the allowance of female elders. And so that just gives you a history of the church.

Forest Christian Church was where I grew up. By the way, I wanna make that note. I grew up here at this church. I've been here since I was eight years old when my stepmother first brought me to this church, and it was Forest Christian Church, and I loved the people.

And I loved being around the people, even though I didn't always love being at church because as a young man, I wasn't saved. I didn't wanna be in church, but I did enjoy being around the people. I was part of the youth.

I was part of Sunday school. Ms. Patsy Hoffman was my Sunday school teacher, and I loved her to death. And she continued as a member of this church until she passed away just recently. So I'm giving you this story as one who has grown up here.

And the church was part of the disciples of Christ until 1999 when the previous pastor led the church out of the denomination. And his reasoning was because the denomination had become so liberal in their view of social issues that he did not believe that they continued to represent the best interests of Forest Christian Church.

So our former pastor did the hard job of encouraging the church to leave the denomination. So in 1999, which is coincidentally the same year I got saved, Forest Christian Church, Disciples of Christ became simply Forest Christian Church.

We were no longer part of the DOC. We were no longer part of the Campbellite movement, officially. So that was the beginning of the change that would happen. That was the beginning of a major change because it wasn't too long after that that I felt God's call to ministry.

Seminary, Ministry Preparation, and the People Who Shaped Him

And the church recognized my call to ministry and they afforded me the opportunity to go to seminary. And I got to choose the seminary that I went to. And as I mentioned last week, I chose Jacksonville Baptist Theological Seminary.

One, because it was local. Two, because it was affordable. And I don't know if I mentioned this last week, but when I met the men there, I believe they really loved God and they loved the word of God.

Now, again, they weren't Calvinists. Some of them were very opposed to Calvinism, but they were godly men. They were men who really spoke into my life and loved me. And they're men who I'll always be encouraged to have known and always have a special place in my heart.

Dr. Jerry Powers would sit and pray with my wife and I that God would give us children because at that point we had been married a few years and we had not been able to have children. Dr. Powers would sit in his office with us and pray for us to have children.

And now we have five children. So we're very thankful for those prayers. And so, like I said, as I tell this story, there were a lot of encouraging folks along the way, and not all of them were Calvinistic.

Not all of them were where I am now, but they were all used of God in my life to bring me and ultimately the church to where it is because what happened, and this is where things begin to converge, my story and the church's story kind of become one story because as I'm in seminary learning about theology and learning about the Bible, I am yearning to preach.

Expository Preaching and the Church Prepared for Change

Preaching is in my DNA. It's what God has called me to do. It's what God has gifted me to do. And I wanted to preach. So I went to the pastor at the time and I said, can I start a Sunday night service so that I can begin to preach on a weekly basis?

Because at that time we didn't have a Sunday night service. So he gave me the opportunity to preach a Sunday night service. And this, I would have said that maybe around 2004 was when that happened. I began to preach once a week on Sunday night and I was already teaching Sunday school and I was already giving a Wednesday night youth lesson, which was a short sort of sermonette for youth.

But that was how I started to begin really my church life and ministry here was through preaching on Sunday nights. And the people who came were listening to me and I was teaching in Sunday school. And in 2005, the pastor and I decided that because he was getting ready to retire, that he was going to allow me to begin preaching on Sunday morning, as well as Sunday evening.

So my full-time preaching schedule began in 2005, January 2005, I began the full-time preaching ministry. I was preaching Sunday morning, Sunday night, and I was still teaching the youth on Wednesday night.

And I believe I was still teaching Sunday school at that time. And I was preaching and God was using what I was learning at the seminary to help me because I was getting, even though it wasn't necessarily Calvinistic, I was getting fed the word of God.

I was going to seminary two or three nights a week. You know, I was doing, I was working during the day. I was studying. I didn't sleep a lot in this particular time in my life, but in 2006, our pastor retired and I became the full-time senior pastor of Forest Christian Church at the time.

Reformed Theology Takes Root in the Pulpit

And it was about the same time as I was becoming confirmed as a Calvinist. I mean, like I said, my journey to Calvinism began much earlier than that, a couple of years actually, but it had taken time to take root and to really begin to come out in my preaching.

So by the time January of 2006 rolls about, I am now convinced in Reformed theology. I still wasn't calling myself a Calvinist because at that time, the term Calvinism was so weighted with baggage and so many people had an issue with the term.

I still wasn't using it. So if you're a pastor and you don't like to use the word Calvinism, I understand. I have been where you are. And again, the term Calvinist was, I preferred, and even today would still in one sense, prefer Reformed when I'm talking about the church because there was more than just Calvin that influenced the theology.

It was Luther, it was Zwingli, it was all of the Reformers and their predecessors and their descendants. They were used of God to bring about the Reformation and to simply identify just one of them above the rest, Calvin, is a little unfair because I would say I've been influenced by Martin Luther so much and I consider Luther such a hero of mine, even though I would not consider myself a Lutheran.

But I probably have as many differences with Calvin as I do with Luther on certain subjects. So it's interesting how it all worked out. But anyway, getting back to the point, that was the start, was I was now the pastor of Forest Christian Church, a church that had a background of theology that was sort of mixed between conservative and liberal as to how they understood the Bible.

But it was a people who loved God and wanted to know his word. And that's why they hired me. That's why they called me, because they knew I wanted to preach the word of God. They'd heard me preach for the year before on Sunday morning.

They'd heard me preach for the two years before on Sunday evening. The people knew what they were getting. They were getting a man who loved the word of God. And so the church was poised for change. And the change was about to come because as the word of God was going to be preached week in and week out, expository preaching, I was preaching through Luke on Sunday morning.

I was preaching through Romans in Sunday school. I was preaching verse by verse through the word. As the word of God began to be preached to the people of God, change was about to come. But change never comes without some kind of pushback.

Resistance, Conflict, and the 2008 Turning Point

And that's what we're gonna talk about tomorrow. We're gonna talk about those who were not happy about the change. And we're not gonna mention any names or anything, not here to make anyone look bad, but we're gonna talk about the fact that there were some who did not want the church to change.

And ultimately it led to a head in 2008 when we finally decided that not only was I a reformed pastor but we were a reformed church. And so if you would, please join us tomorrow as the story continues of how Sovereign Grace became Sovereign Grace Family Church.

And I hope today has been an encouragement to you. And again, thank you for listening to Coffee with a Calvinist. My name is Keith Vosky and I've been your Calvinist.

Thank you for joining in for today's episode of Coffee with a Calvinist. Keep in mind, we have a new lesson available every weekday morning at 6 .30 AM on YouTube and Facebook. If you enjoyed this lesson, please take a moment to respond by hitting the like button, leaving a comment and subscribing to the channel.

On behalf of Pastor Vosky, thank you for listening. May God bless you.