Are We Up to the Job of Evangelism? — Alistair Begg

The ground rules are fairly straightforward. Obviously, you can ask any question that you choose, and we can answer any question that we want. And if they happen to intersect, then, you know, that would be fine.

Otherwise, we'll go. I think we pause just for a moment and ask God's blessing on this time, too. God and Father, thank you so much for a nice lunch. Thank you for the safety and security of this place, even though the weather is as inclement as it is outside.

Thank you for the sense of partnership and joy and encouragement that we sense in the company of each other, our fellow foot soldiers, as it were, in the army of Jesus, seeking to, as enlisted men, give ourselves wholeheartedly to the task entrusted to us.

We pray that as we have the opportunity to think along the lines of these questions now, that you will grant both clarity and a rightful sense of brevity, and that it may be a meaningful time. We pray in Jesus' name.

Amen. I'll just take these questions as they come. Obviously, I'll look at them. Some of them I'll shuffle, but please don't take it personally if your question doesn't come up. This has your name on it, Vaughn.

I don't know why, but we can start with you. If the Gospel is to be proclaimed by simple but gifted men, as you advanced, why does the Evangelical Church insist on requiring so much education to qualify one as a pastor?

Training Pastors to Handle the Whole Counsel of God

On the one hand, the Gospel is very, very simple. So, I was converted when I was 18, and I first explained the Gospel within days of hearing the Gospel. And I didn't need to go away for years and years of education to do that.

So you don't have to be a brilliantly trained person to be an evangelist. The Gospel is very, very simple, but it's also extremely complex. This whole book is about the Gospel. And we need leaders who understand the whole Council of God, and who are not week by week just explaining A, B, C, D.

A very, very simple Gospel, that one. And to enable the whole Church to engage with our pluralistic society and speak the simple Gospel in a way that makes sense, you need really well-educated pastors.

Now, the danger is, what we do, I think, is sometimes take people from a particular culture, perhaps especially, I'm just thinking of the British context, from maybe a working-class culture, and we recognise gifts in them, and we take them away and educate them for a very long time in a completely different culture.

And then we're surprised that they actually can't go back into that culture. Now, that is an issue. And I think, for me, the issue is not that we shouldn't educate them, but on occasion we need to think of flexible ways of educating people, so that we can minister the Gospel to the whole spectrum of society, and not just have educated pastors for educated people.

But we're also thinking, how can we reach those who are from different educational backgrounds? But we need training and reflecting the whole Council of God. Do you want to take a stab at that as well?

Only that, as Vaughan pointed out, act to teach implies a certain level of facility in the material that is taught, as well as an ability to teach anything. So, pastors, teachers, need to know the truth of God, the deep truth of God, and able to handle the Word of God carefully.

Because of our cultural distance from the first century, it is essential that modern people study a lot to understand the Bible in its own context. So, it's not as if it's rocket science. People often say to me, you know, why do you have to know Greek and Hebrew and all that?

And I just say, it's not nerdy, it's not academic. All you're doing is you're trying to know Greek, as well as a 16-year-old sitting in Corinth listening to Paul's letter read out. You're just trying to get to that ability.

And most of us who have studied Greek only ever get to about a 16-year-old ancient Greek's ability. I just got to 14. But it requires effort to get to that basic level.

For what it's worth, I think perhaps in the question there is the whole notion of the way in which pastors are discovered and called. And from my limited experience here, I wonder whether the questioner doesn't have in mind the way the average church writes, for example, to someone like myself, saying, we have an opportunity for a new pastor and we wonder if you have any recommendations and let me tell you what we're looking for.

And then in the way they lay out the requirements, they at least create the possibility for missing possible candidates because it's driven perhaps a little too much by educational expectations rather than by a sense of the call of God, not absent from education, but just starts at the wrong point, if you know.

And my observation, again, of time here in America, I don't know whether others would concur with this, but I think that once a fellow has done, for example, an engineering degree or a good degree in accountancy and obviously has a facility, an intellectual grasp of things, the ability to reason and to work things through, his time may be far better spent with a more limited form of theological study than in going through the routine of the average Master of Divinity program as I observe them here in the States.

And I think that's why, for example, I'm very keen on the work of the Proclamation Trust. Not in place of doing the academics, but in recognizing that a lot of people who've gone through the hoops and had their tickets stamped are actually not any closer to understanding how to deal with a passage of the Bible and how to teach it.

And so either before they go or when they finish, they're looking for an opportunity to have that modeled for them in a way that will make them effective at the very aptitude for teaching that their task demands.

And implicit in that is the notion that it's only God, ultimately, who sets people apart to gospel ministry. It's only God who makes these individuals. Seminaries don't do them and theological institutions don't do them.

So we're not relying on that. John Dixon, you said last night, Monday, that A. You were an energetic proclaimer of Christ in your teens, B. You were demotivated by systematic training in evangelism, and C.

You were re-energizing by destructuring your approach. My question is twofold. A, B, C, D.

Ah, I think we'll forget that one. I'm tired. I'll chuck that one, don't you think? No, it's good. It's a good question. I haven't heard the question yet. It sounded like the sort of thing I might say.

I don't think you were as clear as that.

I'm sure, I'm sure. Was your early enthusiastic evangelism partly, at least, from your natural outgoing personality, and two, for those who are more reticent or less bold, could some type of equipping for conversational evangelism be helpful to spur them on?

Conversational Evangelism and the Limits of Gospel Techniques

Yes and yes. Okay. Right.

Okay. I tried to qualify what I said a couple of times, that I'm not criticizing courses in particular, that particular course or any course. Many have been helped, and I do think a reticent person who doesn't really know what to say can be helped by a course, as long as the emphasis in the course is on conversational rather than monologic, to invent a word, monologic explanations of the Gospel.

But I'm all for it. Go for it. And mix it up. Don't just focus on one, because you don't want believers thinking that there's only one presentation of the Gospel. I mean, there is. It's in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

But, you know, leaving that aside, there's not one modern presentation of the Gospel.

Christological Monotheism as the Foundation of Evangelism

Okay. This is another one that really starts with you, although it would be nice for Vaughan maybe to go first. Why have the basic biblical doctrines of Christological monotheism been obscured by the other motivations to preach the Gospel?

What has caused the Church to forget about this foundational motivation and resort to other less significant motivations? This is obviously tied to John. I can't answer that question.

Vaughan was asleep during that. I know, I was listening very carefully. I wonder whether part of it is it's not shocking to us. We're just so used to the fact that there is one God. Because we've come from a Christian culture, it's been proclaimed over many generations.

It's only just beginning to be shocking, I think, to the younger generation. That has really been schooled from about 35 under. They've been schooled in Britain in pluralism. And the assumption is that if there's a God, then they probably don't believe in many gods.

They think there's one God in lots of different forms or expressed in different forms. And so it is shocking now to say there is one God. But for those 35 plus, it's kind of in the bloodstream. It's not surprising.

But it is radical when you put that against our culture. And I wonder whether we need to get out more. Because if we got out more and engaged with non-believers, it is deeply shocking. And then we see the implications of this unbelievable.

No, it's not unbelievable, it's wonderful. But this wonderful truth, there is one God. And you put that against the way people think, suddenly that drives you to evangelism.

I wonder if the question is also trying to get at why historically in the church, why sociologically in the church, has this, what I've described as the primary rationale for evangelism, been in the background, and these other ones about Jesus means so much to me, so I share him, people are going to hell, so I try and rescue them, come into the fore.

I don't know the answer historically, sociologically. But I wonder, or perhaps I should put it this way, in my own case, whether this is true nationally, internationally, I don't know, but in my own case, it was the demise of my Arminian days, as I described them last night, and the rise of my sense of the full sovereignty of God that gave me eyes to see that in scripture, the thing that pushes you toward evangelism is not fundamentally any human need, it is God's unique worthiness that promotes evangelism.

Perhaps there's a cultural parallel to my personal experience in that those who have been known for evangelism and active in evangelism have not been from the Reformed camp. I keep hearing about people from Reformed evangelical churches who aren't involved in evangelism, because God's elected them, so don't worry about it.

That's a caricature, I guess, but I wonder if that's part of it, that I could just be making that up.

Alastair, am I just making that up? No, I don't think so. I think there is a kind of warped understanding of things that makes people feel that if they're too overt in their approach and in the wideness of the offer of the gospel, that maybe some of the non-elect will be converted.

We would really hate for that to happen. But staying on that high level, two questions here about evangelism, traditional evangelism in the church. Is there a place in local church evangelism for evangelistic meetings?

Evangelistic Meetings and the Public Invitation

If so, how should such meetings be presented? How should the church look for response to the gospel? And sort of along with that, what are your thoughts about extending public invitations from the traditional walk the aisle, come forward to contemporary inquiry rooms, signing a card, etc.?

I'll start with you, Yvonne. I was brought up in the David Watson era. I remember going to guest services where Archbishop Kogan gave the address, and it was a very standard pattern. The past years I've been in the States, sorry to make this a second question, but there is a broad, just so you know, if you haven't come across it, the idea that the local church is really no place for evangelism at all, that you only come in here to be edified, and you scatter to evangelize.

And so evangelistic preaching has often been devalued and lost. And then this question asks, you know, he in fact uses the word revivals, which has a connotation, all of it, so on. Do you make sense of all of that?

I think there's a lot there. In general terms I do, and I'm going to come back to these kind of themes in my next two talks. But in general terms, I think we should be preaching the gospel whenever the people of God meet, because the gospel is what builds up believers and what converts non-believers.

So I think it's a bit of a false distinction. We'd always preach the gospel. This whole book is the gospel of God. But the question is whether it's right I'm taking ever to have that as the primary focus of a particular meeting or sermon in church.

And that is my background. So 20 years ago when I was first converted, I think in British evangelicalism, most of our evangelism was focused on the guest service. And in some churches it would be morning for the believers, evening would be the guest meeting.

Some churches would do that week by week, others, my own church included, occasionally. I still think there's a place for that. In Britain it's less and less of a place because by and large the unconverted are not coming to church.

If you've got a church-going culture, which much of America still has, certainly far more than Britain does, then week on week you're going to assume that there'll be quite a significant number who've never really responded to the gospel but are in church.

We still get that at Christmas. So we make up a huge amount of Christmas. That's when non-churchgoers will come. But increasingly we've seen that actually we've got to get out and our main evangelism needs to be outside of the church.

And it's interesting, isn't it? Jesus says, go and make disciples. And we've changed the go into a come and we keep on saying, come to church. That might work in a church-going culture. It isn't working.

In Britain, those who come to church who are not Christians would be older folk for whom it's just part and parcel of what they do and yet might not be converted. And by and large, Asians. So Asian students come.

We find every week at St Deb's there are Chinese students who come. They arrive in Britain and there's this spiritual vacuum they've got. They want to find out more about Christ. And if we want to reach the Asians, church is a key place to do it.

And we must be given an opportunity to respond. For the Brits, we've got to get out there and do other things and I'll be talking about that later. That's sort of one aspect of the question. John will answer all the others.

John doesn't even remember the others.

Outreach Cycles: Preaching the Gospel for Believers and Unbelievers

I agree with what Vaughan said and the Australian scene is pretty similar. Just to give a practical example, in my own church, our evangelistic, our public evangelism usually goes like this. A couple of times a year, I will preach at all the services on a Sunday, the four services on a Sunday, for a month.

And in that month, I'm doing talks with a focused gospel presentation and addressing, in a particular way, the questions that my people's unbelieving friends are asking. But I'm very conscious that it's not pitched at them in a really sort of awkward way and that it is edifying to believers.

Very obviously so. We call these outreach cycles. Twice a year, we'll do these three or four weeks of bring your friends. We find that people really do bring their friends. If they forget the first week and they come, they go, oh, that would have been perfect for Aunty Jo.

Next week, Aunty Jo's there. And Aunty Jo, hearing that, goes, actually, that was quite intelligent. I might come next week. And we find that by the time you get to week four in these series, our congregation has nearly doubled.

The punchline of all the services in the outreach cycle is, why don't you investigate this? This is so important. Why don't you come to one of our homes and just study with us the life of Jesus through one of the gospels, one of the biographies of his life.

And at the end of these three or four week outreach cycles, we will generally have 20, 30, sometimes 40 unbelievers signed up to read Luke's gospel with us in the home of someone, over beautiful food and drink and great conversation.

And we've trained up a whole bunch of people to lead people through Luke's gospel in order to do that. How that answers the question, I'm simply saying, I'm not a great believer in the one-off outreach service or in the seeker service, but using the actual service in that focused way I still think has importance, even in a culture like Australia where church attendance is about 4%.

Preaching with Different Hearers in Mind

Just listening to you both, I'm reminded of Tim Keller answering this question or a similar question. And in typical Callerian form, he let us all know that he had five groups of people in his mind as he preached.

And he was able to articulate each group and explain how he read certain literature in relationship to group 1, group 2, group 3 and group 4. And that as he preached, whatever he was preaching, he was thinking purposefully at certain points along the way about bringing in group 3 or whoever represented group 3.

The disillusioned, the unhappy, the dejected, the whatever. And he thought there will be people there like that. There will be disenfranchised people. And he says that that's the way he approaches it.

So that no matter what he's teaching, no matter where he is in the Bible, he's wanting to recognize the diversity of the group that he's addressing and deal with it in that way. And I think there is a real skill in that.

It's not a skill that many of us possess. But there are good examples of it. I mean, most of these people know Dick Lucas because he was here at our conferences in the past. And we've seen him in this culture.

But no one has ever really seen him at his game unless they've seen him with those businessmen in the city of London. And his ability to reach into that mindset is just so perfectly suited. So I think my only comment on it would be that we can only do what we're constituted to do.

And also, we can only work within the ethos of the congregation that we have. And we have to determine whether we want to encourage our people to be the kind of people who are saying, you know, John Dixon and Vaughan Roberts are really worth listening to.

And therefore, if they are worth listening to because they have a facility with the Bible, then it is definitely worth your effort to work at bringing your work friend or your colleague to this service because you have a confidence that these men will not let you down.

And I think one of the reasons that evangelistic preaching has gone south is because there's so much poor evangelistic preaching. And the congregation said, I couldn't bring anybody there. That's going to be so dreadfully embarrassing.

And then it falls back on us. Come back to the clichés, back to the same old things, back to talking down to the non-Christians, saying unkind things about people, and eventually just driving folks away instead of bringing them in.

Can I just add to that, Alistair, that what you say of Tim Keller I just think perfectly illustrates something I said in my talk that really you don't need techniques. To listen to Tim Keller's advice about the five people he has in his sermon and just go, okay, I'm going to have those five people.

It's not the point. It's not the point Alice is making. It's not the point Tim Keller makes. Tim Keller is a guy who is empathic. He loves these five people. So they're in his mind as he's preparing his sermon.

If you're compassionate toward the world, you're just going to be doing that naturally.

That's good. Someone asked a question here about adaptability. In our efforts to be adaptable and change our line of approach in reaching the lost, how can we avoid the dangers of dumbing down or sugarcoating the gospel?

Adapting the Presentation Without Compromising the Gospel

Wouldn't individuals like Rick Warren and Bill Hybels and others in the seeker-sensitive movement say that this is just what they're doing?

Yeah, why not? You spoke about adaptability though, brother.

Well, yeah, but that doesn't mean I know anything about it.

I think it's a question of starting point and presentation. So when Paul talks about adaptability, he's talking about presentation partly. He's prepared to eat with gentiles rather than just keep to kosher law and so on.

So that's about where you are and how you do it as much as it's about what you say. In fact, that's primarily about where you are and how you do it. And I think there's an awful lot we need to be thinking about in terms of adaptability, and I'll be coming on to this later today, that if our only evangelistic strategy is come to us and this is the way we do it, we might reach certain kind of people.

But I wonder whether we're thinking enough about the range of different communities and people groups in our areas and think, well, if I wanted to see if we could have a sort of Keller approach and think of five, not just personality, but five cultural types, how would we reach them and would we do it like this?

Would they come to this area at this time? Would they respond to this kind of style? It's not about content at that stage. There is a content to issue, though, and for me that is starting point. At the beginning as I'm preaching, I want to connect with people.

I believe the Gospel has the answers to all the basic fundamental deep questions of life. So there are all sorts of places I could start. If I'm speaking to an older person in Britain, I can assume that they probably believe in God, they probably believe that Jesus is something to do with God and may even be the Son of God, and they have a sense of morality connected to the Ten Commandments, I guess, and of sin, although they might not use that word.

And so very likely guilt is something that I can tap into, conscious guilt, and a sense they want to be right with God and they've tried throughout their lives. So I might go straight in at that kind of level.

If I'm speaking to the younger generation in Britain, I can assume none of those things, and I'm not going to be starting with guilt and with the basic question, I assume you all want to know God and you feel you've fallen short of His standards, let me tell you how you can, because that, for most of them, is not where they're at.

So I might start somewhere else with just this sense that there must be something more. I've been doing some mission speaking in a university recently and amazingly, because the university authorities banned the student movement from meeting, the Christian movement from meeting, they had to be in a marquee in February, very cold February, out and about.

They couldn't hire any university premises. And the result was that far more people came. You've got national publicity, this thing, because of discrimination against Christians. And we found a lot of Muslims came and a lot of atheists came.

And I preached the gospel. Time and time again, I think every meeting I spoke, I'd meet an atheist afterwards and they'd say something like this, I have no need for God in my intellectual thinking. I've thought it all through and there is absolutely no need for God intellectually for me.

And then I would say, well, why are you here? And they'd say, well, something in me tells me there must be something more than this. And so for someone in their twenties, I might tap into that as a beginning.

But the basic ingredients, the lordship of Christ, the coming judgement, the cross, sin, all those things, are going to be there. It's a question of starting point and packaging. Long answer, simple question.

It's a helpful answer. Thank you. Alistair, you said what he said in your sermon this morning. In the very passage in which Paul is pleading or explaining his policy of adaptability, he uses the word euangelion and euangelizami over and over and over and over again.

And then he concludes by saying, it's all for the gospel. That's it. It's adaptability for the gospel. It's not adaptability so that we get along. It's not adaptability for church growth. It's adaptability for the sake of the gospel.

So the gospel has to remain front and center.

And I think that summarizes it between the two, doesn't it? That we're not adapting to people in order to be well liked by them or to increase the numbers that join us, but that our adaptability is to handle the variety of approaches.

Evangelism Through the Resurrection of Jesus

Somebody asked me how I finished. There's a question in here. I think I put it on the ground, not because I didn't like it, but I thought it was worthy of going on the ground in relationship to some of the other questions.

But I'll come to it now. Someone said, how did I finish the conversation with Carla, the Dutch Reformed lady, when she said, you know, I don't believe that God is out there. I believe he's in here. Well, we talked about that.

And we talked about the resurrection. We talked about the incarnation. We talked about the birth, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus. And we talked about the question, is Jesus the person he claimed to be?

Or is he a madman? Is he a bad man? Or is he the God man? In other words, I did what Schaeffer did. It goes always to the resurrection. Schaeffer's apologetic was always there. Didn't matter where you started with him.

He always wanted to say, well, let's ask the question if Jesus is alive. If he's alive, we have a conversation. If he's dead, the whole thing's a waste of time. And we might as well have another round of pudding or whatever.

So, but here's the fascinating thing. The conversation took place. But, and I don't know if I said this, but this week, my wife and I had an email from Carla and from Fritz inviting us to come and visit them in Austria and saying that they had already plugged into the Truth For Life website and that in driving away from the lunchtime encounter, they were trying to guess what I was, that I would speak that way about Jesus.

And they had truthforlife .org and they looked at that and they said, it's maybe something to do with radio or television. He's probably a technician. And, because I am a very technical person and people pick that up.

And so they were completely flabbergasted, you know, that when they went on the website to discover that my caller was turned on the wrong way. And the other thing is, well, with the three dental students, the three dental students, we got on the chat of, well, here's Milan, look at all these people.

Where are they all going and what are they all doing? Do you have a view of the world that can answer the big questions? Who am I, where did I come from, where am I going and does it matter? That was our conversation.

Well, they said, well, what do you think the reason for life is? I said, well, I believe, you know, the shorter catechism, essentially the purpose is this, that God made us for himself and so on. And the parting shot from one of the girls was, well, listen, are you suggesting to me then that if this is the purpose, as you have outlined it, that my purpose in life, and I have a purpose, I want to be a dentist, I want to be a useful member of society and everything, are you saying that my purpose is irrelevant?

And just that leaning against the wall was a bicycle. Because I didn't want to say, no, it's a yes, it's a no, I didn't know what to say. And I said, well, I said, do you see the bicycle here? She said, yes.

I said, well, that bicycle can be used, you can use that as a clothes horse if you want. You can hang your laundry on it if you choose. It's a valid use of the mechanism, but it's not the reason for its creation.

And if you want to ride out into the countryside and enjoy the beauty of that, then you will use it for the purpose for which it was made. And so I said, God has made you for a unique and special purpose.

And she said, okay. And walked away. But who knows. I didn't throw it on the floor, there's the question. I threw it on the floor now. Preparation and reading. Pastor Begg mentioned in the beginning of the conference the importance of organizing quotes, illustrations, etc. for ready reference.

Organizing Illustrations, Quotes, and Sermon Material

What are some practical ideas, suggestions for organizing and ready referencing this type of material? You both must do a lot of that, don't you? Do you have any good tips? I have a filing cabinet. Wow.

Want me to spell that for you? And about 25 different topics and everything that comes my way. Fortunately, my congregation is always cutting things out of the newspaper, magazines, and putting them in my in tray.

Fortunately, I have a PA as well who trolls all sorts of media to find me things relevant. Whether that's helpful or not, I have no idea, but that's what I do.

Not much to add except that I actually write on a computer phone, and you probably do it in a computer way, but rather than putting it in the filing cabinet, I find things just get lost there. If I see anything that I think that could be usable, I immediately think, now if I was looking for something under this, if I was to put this under any heading, what would it be?

And if I've got a heading there already, I actually just keep it in the file and I will write about three times a year. I'll spend a bit of time just writing that in. I use pen and ink, and that just reminds me it's there and that I'm much more likely to use it.

So I tend not to think, oh, I need something on meaninglessness, which is one of my sections, or hedonism, and then all sorts of Christian doctrines as well, and then look. More likely, as I'm preparing, I say, oh, there was that story, or there was that quote, and then I think, now where would I have that?

And I know immediately where to find it under the appropriate heading. That's good.

That's largely my approach has been a combination of that too. And you can never start soon enough, and more simply, I don't think, than simply take an alphabetized expandable file, if nothing else. And the first quote that you find from the New York Times on humanism, you tear it out, and if humanism is it, then you put it in under H.

And my approach to it over the years has been that I have taken and filed all of the sermonic material from Genesis to Revelation, and where there is a clear and obvious subject, then I tie the sermon material to this master file, so that if you go in under Grace, you'll find that there are quotes there that if they are short enough, they're actually written in.

If they're longer, you've got the page reference and the place in the Bible. If it's a piece out of a magazine, it will have been photocopied and added, and so it just builds up a big compendium. And added to that, and I'm not as committed to this as I've been, and I go in spurts with it, a bit like exercise, but when I read a book, and I was saying to Yvonne, we were talking about an author called P .D. James, who's a crime novelist, an English lady, and I was so fascinated by her books, and I wanted to read something of her autobiography, found this autobiography to be totally fascinating, so I completely indexed the whole book.

So the book has words written all the way through the book, and I will now give that book to my secretary, and I'll ask my secretary to go through the book and add all of those observations about death, about a humanistic funeral, about taking walks, about beauty, about all kinds of things that all come out of the material.

And if you do that with your books, and you index your books, then you've at least got a chance of finding stuff. If you don't do it, you'll spend hours of your life saying, I know I read that somewhere, and you're going around like a crazy person looking for this stuff.

So whatever your system is, and obviously I'm a pen and pencil fellow still myself, my younger colleagues have got this all flying around the world with the internet and stuff, and I really admire them, but it takes me twice as long to fool around with that stuff.

There are demons in my laptop. I don't have a really theology of demonic activity, except as it relates to computer technology.

Can I just add that if you ask your congregation to help you, you'll find you have a lot of stuff. Ask them to find stuff that they've come across that relates to various themes. It'll do two things. It'll give you a stack of material.

It'll also help you understand what your congregation is troubled by out there in the world.

That's right. Someone asked the question, where can I order or purchase Matthias Media material in the US? There's a young man here. Where are you, Matthias man? Stand up just for a moment. This young gentleman here is now in the United States to launch the Matthias Media USA mechanism, and they should go on what website?

Matthiasmedia .com and everything will flow from there. Terrific stuff. If you have not gone on this website, it really is very, very, very good material.

Absolutely. Biblically solid, trying to reach the world. I have a vested interest that they published the first few of my books, but they really are great people.

Bringing the Gospel to Inner-City Communities

There's a question here about inner city work. Why do we in America not see the inner cities of America as a mission field in the same way as we do in other countries? I suppose I should have to answer that question.

I think increasingly we do. I mean, there have been some classic illustrations of that. Jim Boyce at 10th Press stayed in the inner city, and Phil Riken is there with the express purpose of reaching Philadelphia downtown with the peculiar problems and opportunities that are there.

Tim Keller is a classic illustration in Manhattan, albeit of a different mechanism, but still the same thing. There are people in Atlanta who are doing the same thing. Many of our African American pastors are heavily committed to inner city and urban work, and there are some classic illustrations of that as well.

Certain cities lend themselves to it more than others, and also we have to be true to the calling that we've received. I'm a city boy. I was brought up in Glasgow. I was brought up in a large city, and I love cities.

I haven't actually been called to the city. I mean, this isn't exactly the city out here. I'm jealous of those who have opportunities that are within the span of a university context or being able to reach out to people in a way that makes perfect sense.