Dr. Boot On Christian Culture

Well, thank you again, everyone, for being here. We do appreciate you taking this time out, as Randy has said. This is an informal soft launch, if you will. It's an introduction to the work of the Institute and an introduction to our new center.

I know that quite a few of you here are leaders, church leaders, ministry leaders, organizational leaders, and we're very thankful for your presence here today. We just want to let you know a little bit about our hopes and our plans, give you a glimpse of the study center.

So before I make just a few remarks this morning, I do want to say a few thank yous that are necessary, even for putting together a soft launch like this. As you can imagine, on a property of this size involves quite a lot of people, and I won't be able to thank them all individually, but I do want to say a thank you to the board, to the EACC board, each and every one of you for all of the staff team and all the volunteers who labored very hard to make this possible.

You're going to be eating and drinking over in that direction shortly, and so everyone from the caterers to the gardeners to the musicians, we want to thank you. We appreciate you very much. Now, I was told that Sam, yes, let's give him a little round of applause.

Yeah, thank you. I was told that, and I think he probably will be here, but perhaps a bit later, Sam Osterhoff will be here. Is he here? He is here. Fantastic. Sam, can you just stand up and give us a wave?

Sam is here. We appreciate that very much, and I'm probably not allowed to say this as the head of a charity, but vote for Sam when the elections come around, please. That would be wonderful. We have also some very good American friends up from Phoenix, Apollo Gear Ministries.

They've actually been doing some, this is Marcus here doing some filming, and he's got three colleagues with him, Jeff Durbin and others. We're very thankful to them too for their partnership and coming up here for this weekend.

And I want to make a special acknowledgement of, even though he will probably squash me for saying this a bit later on, I want to acknowledge a very dear friend and reformational visionary and sponsor of the Ezra Institute.

His name is John Holtink. Where is he? John, you better be in this room right now. Yes, he's there. We want to thank John because none of this would have been possible without John. Let's just thank John.

The Lordship of Christ Over All of Life

So Randy gave you a very quick flyover view of the Institute as a think tank, an evangelical think tank, which was founded after I'd spent a number of years traveling globally and doing research in the area of cultural philosophy and cultural theology.

And in many respects, the church and the school that Randy mentioned were an outgrowth. They were an expression, really, of the desire that we had to see cultural reformation and renewal taking place in all aspects of life under the Lordship of Christ.

And if there were to be one passage of scripture that has been defining for me over the years, it would be Colossians chapter one, which in Paul's incredible description there of the Lordship of Jesus reveals his kingship, his authority over every aspect of life and thought, that no area of life is outside of the rule and reign of Christ Jesus.

And so for us at EICC, it's the fundamental conviction, really, that culture, properly understood, is the public manifestation of the worship of a people. I know that some of you are familiar with the Institute.

Some of you may even have read my little book, Gospel Culture. But in there, I talk about the fact that culture, properly understood, is the public manifestation of the worship of a people. It's religion externalized, as Henry Van Til said.

It's the concrete outworking of what any society believes is the ultimate origin, meaning, and purpose of life. And those of you, many of you I know will be familiar with Paul's letter to the Romans in that first chapter, in the final analysis, what Paul tells us there is that there are only two types of worship ultimately.

There's the worship of the creator and there's the worship of creation. Two types of worship in the final analysis. And those two types of worship produce different forms of cultural expression. And he talks about how that works itself out in the area of human family, human sexuality and so forth.

So when people turn to Christ, to Christ the Lord in repentance and faith, they are made new creatures. And their hearts are redirected towards true worship. I mean, that's what happens when you become a Christian, isn't it?

You're redirected towards true worship. And that radical redirection of necessity means the recreation of true culture, which the Bible calls the kingdom of God. Because if culture is the public expression of the worship of a people, and the gospel restores us to true worship, then it restores us to true culture.

The Bible calls that the kingdom of God. So every return to Christ the living word is at the same time a healing of culture, for it is the restoration of human beings to their proper calling. So that's fundamental to what we believe as an institute.

And the challenge and the joy actually of being a Christian is that all of us are inescapably a part of that gospel culture. Even though we're up against some fairly stiff spiritual opposition these days, we have the privilege of being called to be God's co-workers in the reconciliation of all things to God.

And if when you were driving in you managed to see the EICC sign out there, if you weren't distracted by my dad in his straw hat guiding you into the car park, you'll notice that the little verse under there says, for from him and through him and to him are all things.

That's Romans 11, 36. So that's the calling that we have to be co-workers with him, and it's in the light of that sort of theological foundation, that theological basis, that the institute really observed that the opposition and objection against the Christian faith in our generation, in our time, was increasingly being framed in cultural, civilizational and political terms.

When I started out, as Randy said, when I was 16 years old was when I first spoke publicly about the meaning of the gospel. It probably wasn't a very good message, but I do remember it very clearly to this day.

Many of the questions were about, you know, Jesus and the possibility of miracles and the possibility of the resurrection and can you give me seven good reasons for believing Jesus was raised from the dead, and these kinds of questions.

But over the last 15 years especially, you will have noticed the objections to the Christian faith have turned in much more cultural, civilizational and political terms. And that has required the development of a distinctly scriptural response, because those kinds of questions and the kind of thinking that's impacting our culture has impacted the church.

And we believe that the root of that, the root of that crisis that we are facing today, is the widespread loss of a comprehensive gospel, a distinctly Christian world and life view, a distinctly scriptural world and life view, and ultimately our failure to recognize the religious root of all human life and thought, in our education, in our law, in our politics, in medicine, in art and science and so forth.

So that we see many Christians seeking to carry on the Christian life today in many respects, in the areas outside of the life of the church, in a supposedly neutral way. And our contention is that all of life is religion, none of it is neutral.

So that requires the constructive recovery of something, of a full-orbed gospel of redemption and a scriptural apologetic that is capable of confronting the kind of systematic unbelief we see in our culture today with systematic belief, consistent systematic belief in every sphere of life.

So this gospel-centered cultural reformation beginning with God's people is, in our view, a very urgent necessity. It doesn't take a cultural prophet anymore, or a profound social critic, to see that we are living in a culture saturated now by humanistic and increasingly pagan religious assumptions.

And these presuppositions that are all around us are now redefining, if you will, the norms of various aspects, various spheres of life and, of course, our cultural institutions. And this is unleashing real problems, in fact real evils, on our society and is resulting in an increased opposition to the freedom, hope and truth that is there for us in the gospel.

And the tragedy that many of you will have experienced is that many parts of the church today have not escaped the influence of these humanistic and pagan forms of thought in our radically secularized society.

And in fact at times we've even been complicit by our silence or our surrender to the debasing, really, of our cultural life, to the bringing about of unrighteous laws and corrupted education and sinful political practices and evil social structures and debased arts and really a moribund cultural direction today that we've allowed to persist.

And there is around us, especially in my generation and younger, there is a real urge to synthesize Christianity with other worldviews. And I think Randy is just trying to retrieve a child that's maybe wandering around over here and we hope will not do any skydiving practice.

She's just here. I think he's gonna grab her. There's a tendency for us to want to synthesize Christianity with the other worldviews round about us. And what that has led to is an ecclesiasticizing, for want of a better word, it means really a privatizing, a truncation of the gospel so that we've really said, well the gospel is for Christians, it's for the church, the word of God is for the church.

But all these other areas of life, they can go on their own way. And therefore we've synthesized Christianity with these other worldviews and the witness of the church to the world-renewing reign of Christ and his kingdom has been eclipsed as we've surrendered one area of life after another to anti-Christianity.

And actually the result, as you all know, has been the radical dechristianization of our culture today and the decline actually of our civilization. And many non-Christian critics, many non-Christian thinkers have acknowledged that we've reached a point of existential confusion, of spiritual rootlessness, of socio-political desperation where we are replaying the same sort of utopian delusions of the past or we're falling off into a kind of political pragmatism.

So when you think about this little institute here and the small work of the EICC, it'd be very easy to think to ourselves, well the task is so vast, it's totally daunting, to many people it's completely hopeless.

They just say, well you know the world's going to hell in a handbasket, we just have to wait for Jesus to come back and so on. And they feel hopeless. But as Randy said, beginning with very small things, a website nine years ago, a journal jubilee, a speaking ministry, the EICC has tried to respond positively to this crisis as a moment of opportunity.

It is a moment of crisis but every moment of crisis is actually a moment of opportunity. And this is a tremendous hour of opportunity for the gospel. You know that generation that they call the Z generation, who are in university right now, most of them have never heard the gospel.

They don't even know what it is. We've got really a completely unreached generation. And at the same time, many of us are familiar with the fact that the studies show, the sociological studies show, that Christian families are losing somewhere in the region, in North America on average, 75 to 80 percent of our children to the church before the age of 23.

So there is a moment of opportunity. And so making quiet but steady progress with growing inroads across the English-speaking world, in Canada, in the UK, in the US, in Australia, with an international team, a growing team of fellows, we were enabled last year to take a very big leap forward when the resources were provided for this study center, this Center for Reformational Culture, which is now the base for our research, our writing, our strategic development of new teaching, training, and short-term study programs in Christian worldview, in cultural theology, cultural apologetics, and Christian philosophy, which we are rolling out and launching steadily over the next few years.

And we're having some very fruitful discussion with some other institutions who are interested in validating our programs. We may even, we're in the discussions now about working towards, for some people, even a master's degree.

So I want to stress, however, that we're not simply here, this has not simply come about because we want to influence academics and intellectuals. That's been tried before. One of the problems with intellectuals is that they're so desperate to say something original that they very often get off track.

You know, when you write a PhD, you need to be saying something new so that people think, oh, that's worth a doctorate. And sometimes the result, sometimes the result is we start to move off track. So we do need to be speaking to academics and intellectuals, but we also believe the best way we can serve the kingdom is to offer teaching, resources, training, and equipping at different levels to students, young professionals, pastors, Christian leaders, in a variety of vocations, so that the whole organic church in every sphere, like medicine, as well as the Church Institute, law, politics, the arts, business, education, and so forth, are being influenced and shaped by a robustly Christian world and life view, and being equipped to engage the culture.

So what you're not seeing here is just the beginnings of another think tank developing a few academic programs. There's an element of that, but it's only an element of it. Our tagline, Informing Faith and Reforming Culture, which you'll see on our new website, which launched just this past week, involves supporting God's people in deepening their understanding of the gospel's redirecting power, its restorative nature, its comprehensive scope, and its formative character for the community of Christ that's called out to make the good news of the kingdom known.

Now, we recognize and we acknowledge that our efforts are meager in the grand scheme of things. They're meager efforts, we know that, and we don't have any grandiose expectation that it's only through the ICC that the kingdom of God is advancing in Canada or elsewhere.

We're a small part of what God is doing, but our unassailable hope in the midst of all that we're doing is that Christ is causing his kingdom people to be a reservoir of strength, out of which successive generations of church and cultural leaders are going to emerge from these small efforts to formulate and articulate and credibly defend a scriptural world and life view as the sole source of truth and freedom and beauty, shaping the future to the glory of God.

You know, I love what John Calvin said, and those of you who are familiar with the EICC will know that we are informed by the Reformed faith. He said, let us not despair at the slightness of our success, for even though attainment may not correspond to desire, when today outstrips yesterday, the effort is not lost.

When today outstrips yesterday, the effort is not lost. So let me wrap this up by just telling you three things that are going to be happening out of the center here, and then you can get some nibbles, and we're going to be taking you all in three or four groups on a tour of the center.

The first thing is that this place is now the hub of the Ezra Institute's operations. It's our offices, it's a place for our scholarship, for our fellows to come and do work, for our publishing, and for our academies and seminars and conferences going forward.

In addition, we have a second location that's available to us at 21st Street in St. Catharines for more of our publishing, editorial, storage of our library, and so forth for student use. So we have actually a couple of locations here that are available to us as we build relationships with some of the university student groups in the area.

So that's the first thing. The second thing that we're going to do here is that one weekend per month, and if you keep your eye on the website, you will start to see when these things become available.

One weekend a month, we're going to open the center for any Christian vocational professional, student, pastor, or leader to come and stay here for a weekend for a time of reflection, study, prayer, guided reading in the area of biblical worldview, cultural apologetics and theology, and Christian philosophy.

So that will happen here once a month. So we're not opening a sort of free EICC B &B. It's not simply a retreat center. For those who come here, it's intentional. It's intentional time of reflection, of study, of guided reading, of prayer, and so on.

And also throughout the year, we're going to invite upon their request and upon our approval, Christian leaders, pastors, teachers, scholars, to come and make use of the center during the day, to use our library.

It would be about a 10 ,000 to 15 ,000 volume reading library here to do some of their research, thinking, and reflection, to interact with some of our team. And in addition to that, we're going to have four weeks a year, one for each season of the year during the university breaks.

We are going to be reaching out to students, Christian students primarily, you've grown up in Christian homes at least, who are wanting help with their scriptural understanding, but especially those who are struggling with or losing their faith or are increasingly skeptical at university now, having grown up in the church, about Christianity.

And we're going to invite them to come for a week of structured reflection and study and guided reading with lectures from some of our team and some of our international fellows. So we're going to try and address this issue of all of these students losing their faith before the age of 23.

And that'll be in the university breaks for four weeks a year. That's the second thing then. So there's a kind of, for want of a better term, there's a sort of labrie element to what we're doing here.

Now that's what Francis Schaeffer was about. Thirdly then, as well as hosting certain roundtables and symposia here, we are going to be offering short-term trading academies and seminar programs, details of which are on the website.

These will include things like, which we run already, we've been running this for a while now, a high school age worldview program, the Worldview Leadership League. That's a week for 14 to 18 year olds.

We're going to be offering a university preparation week called How Then Shall We Answer for your young people, your grandchildren, your children who are about to go into university, and they need to be prepared for what they're going to encounter there.

And we're going to run our Christian Legal Institute here, which is a collaboration between us and the Christian Legal Fellowship, which reaches law students who are going into the legal profession. That happens for a week.

We run that already elsewhere. That will start to happen here. And then in particular, we are going to be offering, our main offering is called the H. Evan Runner International Academy for Cultural Leadership.

It's a bit of a mouthful. It'll be abbreviated to the Runner Academy, but that's the main offering that's going to happen here. It's going to be our most comprehensive, intensive program. And for successful applicants, it's a heavily subsidized two-week residential program.

It'll be accredited. It will be one of, for some people who opt into this, it's going to be a building block towards a master's degree. And that is to train and equip the next generation of cultural leaders to understand their lives and cultural moment through the lens of God's Word revelation.

So they're going to be analyzing while they're here and uncovering the state of the West, and get the critical tools in philosophy, worldview, and apologetics, cultural theology, to retrieve some of those lost tools and riches of biblical wisdom.

And the kind of faculty that we have here are very well-qualified men and women from around the world who have a reputation, not just for leadership and academic excellence, but for godliness and insight and experience in the area of cultural engagement and cultural transformation.

They're pastors, they're philosophers, they're theologians, physicians, educators, arts and media professionals, lawyers, frontline ministry leaders will all be taking part as faculty in that program.

And it's an international program in that we have collaborating organizations who are promoting this in different parts of the English-speaking world, not just Canada, but the USA, the UK, Australia, and beyond.

So we're expecting that probably half of our students will be international students, although we are right here in Canada. We want to make the focus Canada, but we recognize that there are going to be international students who are coming to us.

So in conclusion, let me just say what you can do to be involved. First of all, you can spread the word. That is, you can tell people about the EICC. If I do say so myself, I think the EICC is one of Canadian Christianity's best-kept secrets.

We don't mind that, because we're very happy to be quietly influential in the background, but we think we are one of the best-kept secrets here in Canada. And so tell people about the institute that we exist, direct them to our website, let them know that there's these opportunities coming.

Secondly, you can partner with us. If you're a ministry leader or a church leader, you can partner with us by coming alongside us in prayer. You can support us. You can help sponsor events. We'd be happy to discuss collaborative ideas with you if you've got those.

Thirdly, you can volunteer. Maybe you've got a little bit of time to spare. Perhaps you're a budding gardener. You like to help look after a big house like this one. Maybe you could be a student mentor at some of our academies and some of our programs.

We'd love to talk to you about that if you think you could volunteer in some way. Fourthly, you can pray for us. And we need prayer. We really do need concerted, faithful prayer from people who are going to be committed to that task for us, especially as we face particular challenges at the beginning.

One of those challenges is going to be that we're in discussions right now with the NEC, that's the Niagara Escarpment Commission, and the region, because we want to do certain things here. This land is really prime agricultural residential and we're talking to them because we want to make certain adjustments to this existing facility and accomplish things here that may require some kind of amendment.

So we need you to pray about that, that God will smooth the way for all the way through that process of discussion so that we can do what we need to do here. So you can pray for us. We need prayer for provision as well, which brings me to my fifth and final point, like a good preacher, leave the giving to the end.

This is a beautiful property. I'm sure you've seen that as you've driven in here. It's a unique property. This is a beautiful place. And you'll see the house, you'll see the possibilities here. And with this beautiful property comes an opportunity cost.

And those costs are significant. We're in need of new individuals, families, churches to include us in their giving plans, because we need to add staff, we've got growing overheads, and especially our programs, especially for students, are going to be heavily subsidized.

That means the requirement of donors so that we can train young people for cultural transformation and reformation. So we're a registered charitable corporation, so please consider, if you don't already, coming alongside us.

So thank you again for being here. Please stand with us as we seek to move this ministry forward. Let me close with the words of Evan Runner as he talked about the challenge of being a Christian in our time.

He said this, to be Christian is to live whole human lives in this creation of God's by the light of God's word and with the aid of his spirit. The most fundamental and urgent battle of our time is a struggle for the religious direction of human society in its totality.

The battle of our time is to determine which spirit is to possess our hearts and give direction to our civilization. The challenge is no smaller.

Than that.