What to Discern from the Church Fracture Where David Platt Pastors - Part 1

What to discern from the church fracture where David Platt pastors? That is a topic we'll discuss today right here on the Christian Real View Radio Program, where the mission is to sharpen the biblical worldview of Christians and to share the good news of Jesus Christ.

I'm David Wheaton, the host. The Christian Real View is a non-profit ministry. Thank you to our listeners for your encouragement and also your support, and also to our national sponsors, Samaritan Ministries, who provide a biblical solution to healthcare. You can find out more at thechristianrealview.org. The Christian Real View is a non-profit ministry. Thank you to our listeners, Samaritan Ministries, who provide a biblical solution to healthcare.

You can find out more at thechristianrealview.org. The Christian Real View is a non-profit ministry. Thank you to our listeners, Samaritan Ministries, who provide a biblical solution to healthcare.

Thank you to our listeners, Samaritan Ministries, who provide a biblical solution to healthcare. We hope you join us this weekend on the Christian Real View as we talk about this church fracture and what we can learn from it so that we can have unity in our own churches. These divisive situations in churches are hard because members of churches invest so much of their life into their church. I mean, after all, their faith in Christ is the most important aspect of their life, and that centers around the church. They invest time and money and prayer into their church. Major moments of their lives take place in their church, whether it's worship services, their marriages, funerals, baby dedications, annual holidays. Church is also their social group.

So when these kinds of fractures happen, it really becomes a highly distressing situation. So it's a big issue when things go sideways at a church. So how to stay unified and not shipwreck or fracture a church, we're going to discuss today. Now, before we get into the specifics of the issue at McLean Bible Church, and we're just looking at that as an example of what can take place when certain decisions are made that cause this lack of trust and lack of unity in a church, let's talk about what it takes to cultivate unity in the church. I just wrote down four things that I think will keep a church unified if they are adhered to very closely. Number one, a church must be clear and committed on biblical doctrines. That must be a major focus in the church.

If you're kind of fast and loose with those things, you're not committed on those things. If you don't spend a lot of your time thinking about what we believe and have that unity throughout all your leadership everywhere in the church, there are going to be cracks in your armor, so to speak, that are going to be exploited. Number two, second key to cultivating unity in the church is choosing or having qualified pastors and elders, according to Scripture, who are discerning of false teaching and teachers. We see this all the time in the New Testament that Paul was constantly warning, whether Timothy or Titus or others, other churches he was writing to about being careful, because false teaching and teachers inevitably come in to churches.

It's just the way Satan and his minions operate in this world. They're always trying to compromise churches. So you need qualified pastors who meet the qualifications of pastors and elders, as laid out in Scripture. But they also are discerning of the fact that they're going to be attacked, and there's going to be false teaching, maybe even by well-intentioned people that are going to try to make inroads into the church. The third key to cultivate unity in the church is to focus on the fundamentals. And this was something that we talked about with Matt Fletcher last week, that in Acts 2, we see this fundamentals of what the early church focused on. They taught the apostles doctrine, they taught the Word, they focused on fellowship of believers. That's the purpose of the church.

It's for believers, not for non-believers. And they had communion, they remembered Christ's sacrifice, and it was for prayer, to pray together to God, to communicate with Him. We'll read some of the verses, the passages of Scripture, that relate to these four points.

The fourth point in cultivating unity in a church, or having a unified church, is to exercise church discipline and restoration. That's from Matthew 18. Because if you don't do that, if you let members of a church sin and sort of, quote-unquote, get away with it, if they're allowed to continue in sin and just go on, it infects and influences the whole congregation.

After all, the church should be a group of sanctified, or being sanctified, believers, not ones where a sin is being overlooked and swept under the rug. Now, the verses that correspond with those four points I just listed out, the first one's from 1 Timothy 4.6. And this is the apostle Paul writing to his understudy, a pastor, a younger man in the faith, Timothy, who pastored at several different, or at least a couple different, places where Paul went on his missionary journeys. And he writes to Timothy, in 1 Timothy 4, he says, In pointing out these things to the brethren, so you're the pastor, point them out to those in the church, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, constantly nourished on the words of the faith – now listen to these words he uses – and of the sound doctrine which you have been following, but have nothing to do with worldly fables or false doctrines, fit only for old women, Paul writes. On the other hand, discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness. You need to live an exemplary life, Timothy.

You need to fulfill these qualifications of an elder. Moving now to verse 11 of 1 Timothy 4, he tells Timothy, Prescribe and teach these things. Focus on your doctrine. Let no one look down on your youthfulness, but rather in speech, conduct, love, faith, and purity, show yourself an example of those who believe. Verse 13, Until I come, give attention to the public reading of Scripture. Read God's word. That's the perfect part of your worship. To give attention to exhortation and teaching. Do not neglect the spiritual gift within you which was bestowed on you through prophetic utterance, with the laying on of hands by the presbytery. Verse 15, Take pains with these things.

Be absorbed in them. In other words, focus on sound doctrine, the reading of Scripture. Focus on the fundamentals so that your progress will be evident to all. Verse 16, Pay close attention to yourself and to your teaching. Persevere in these things, for as you do this, you will ensure salvation, both for yourself and for those who hear you. That really dealt with the first point of being clear and committed on sound biblical doctrines, key to having a unified church. Now let's go over to 1 Timothy 3, one chapter earlier, where Paul gives Timothy the qualifications for pastors and elders in a church.

I mean, these men, and yes, they're supposed to be men, have to have a lifestyle and a character that's beyond reproach. So he writes in 1 Timothy 3, starting in verse 1, it is a trustworthy statement, if any man aspires to the office of overseer or elder. Now there has to be an aspirational, he has to want to do it, he shouldn't be just compelled to do it, he needs to aspire to it, he needs to have the desire inside of himself. It is a fine work he desires to do. An overseer or elder then, and here's the list of what the qualifications must be, he must be above reproach in his life.

He must be the husband of one wife. There's the specification that it should be a man, not a woman. This elder must be temperate, prudent, respectable, hospitable, and here's a key one, able to teach. In other words, he has to be able to teach the Word of God. He must be able to teach, he must be a good teacher of the Word.

That's going to be one of his responsibilities. Verse 3, not addicted to wine, of course not, or pugnacious, which means kind of a person of conflict, but gentle, peaceable, free from the love of money. There should be none of that in an elder or pastor. Verse 4, he must be one who manages his own household well, keeping his children under control with all dignity. Verse 5, but if a man does not know how to manage his own household, how will he take care of the Church of God?

In other words, it's not just kind of his spiritual life in a vacuum, it must be lived out in his home. He must have a good marriage, and he must have his children being raised in the discipline and instruction of the Lord, and his children aren't out of control. Verse 6, he must not be a new convert to the faith, so that he will not become conceited and fall into the condemnation incurred by the devil. He must have a good reputation with those outside the church, so that he will not fall into reproach and the snare of the devil. Now granted, these are very strict and sobering qualifications for someone who is going to lead the church, be a pastor or elder, but that's exactly what God wants it to be, because this is the body of Christ, this is the most important institution that God established in the entire world, it's the one that God promises to bless, the church, and so those that lead it must have those things. So going back to our point, our second point of unified church must have qualified pastor elders who have a discerning spirit being able to protect the flock from false teaching and teachers. Next point was focusing on the fundamentals, and this is from that passage in Acts 2 where the early church, they were continually devoting themselves to the apostles' teaching, theirs to the word of God, preaching, and to fellowship with fellow believers, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Now, there can be more to a church, of course, than that, but there shouldn't be any less than that. Those are the four fundamentals upon which a church should be built. So adding anything to that, though, should be done with careful, careful discernment because whatever you add to that will actually impact the church. So if you add lots of programs or ministries and if you add multiple services, two kinds of services, you start doing videos and you have a certain kind of music environment, that is all going to affect the character of that church. I'm not saying all of that's wrong, but you need to be really careful that none of those things you're adding are taking away from those four fundamentals of teaching God's word, fellowship, remembering Christ's death, and prayer. We don't want to be distracting from those things.

We talked about this last week. Finally, the last thing is exercising church discipline with the purpose of restoration that comes from Matthew 18. It says, If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private.

If he listens to you, you have won your brother. There's step one. Step two, if he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses, every fact may be confirmed. Step three, verse 17, if he refuses to listen to them, now a plurality of people tell it to the church. Step four, and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. In other words, he needs to be disfellowshipped from the body in order to bring him to a point of repentance. Unrepentant sin, whatever it is, should not and cannot be tolerated by the church of Christ.

But the point is not to get to step four. The purpose is not just to punish the unrepentant sinner. The purpose is to restore that person.

So that's why there's this process of doing it so hopefully that person will be restored before it comes to having to be expelled from the local body. The Christian Worldview with David Wheaton returns in just a moment. We want to teach people where their food comes from.

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Now, back to today's program with host David Wheaton. So with that as some context, here's why churches fracture. You have elders and pastors who are only mildly concerned with sound doctrine, but they're majorly concerned with how the church appears. They want to attract people from the outside world. They want to appear culturally instead.

They don't want to look like they're haters. The leaders of a church may not have very good discernment about what's going on, not only in the world, but actually more importantly what's going on in the professing Christian world. They may understand the trends and the false teaching that's always rampant in all ages in the Christian world.

They never discipline members of their church. There could be an unbiblical divorce going on in that church, and that won't be addressed by church leadership or maybe an adulterous relationship or any of the things you see like Paul addressed in his letter to the Corinthians. Or they're constantly trying to tweak things in a church as if it's like a business where you kind of tweak your marketing strategies to try to see what might increase sales and might get the momentum going.

And then when they tweak things, they might do it discreetly, so hoping people don't notice in the church, or on the other hand, they might do it very brusquely and just have a very heavy-handed approach to making changes in the church. And therefore, when you have that dynamic, well, you have people who are probably more discerning in the church, who have been there for a long time, they see what's taking place, and then you get these divisions and fractures like what is taking place at McLean Bible Church in Virginia right now. Now, speaking of McLean Bible Church by the acronym MBC, I looked on Wikipedia, it was founded in 1961 by five families in Northern Virginia.

Its first service was held on Easter Sunday at an elementary school. Senior pastor Lon Solomon, who became the pastor in 1980, he has a very interesting biography, he was born and raised in a Jewish home in Virginia, but he became a born-again Christian in the spring of 1971. And as I mentioned, he became senior pastor of the church in 1980. And he served for 30, I believe it was 37 years as pastor of this church, going from a very small church to a very highly influential church in the Washington, D.C. metro just outside that particular metro area. In 2017, according to the article, David Platt was confirmed as the pastor-teacher of the church, later lead pastor, replacing Lon Solomon. Now, it's hard to know exactly how many people go to the church.

I've seen some articles online saying there was as many as 16,000 coming at one point, not sure if that's true, but in a recent article, because this story was even featured in mainstream media, it was in the Seattle Times, we have that linked on our website, they say the church has about 2,500 members and meets over four locations. So who is David Platt, their new lead pastor of the church? I went to Wikipedia as well, and Wikipedia is not necessarily a trustworthy source, but just for kind of basic facts, David Platt is. He's married and the father of four. He graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in journalism, and he obtained his MDiv, his ThM, and his PhD from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, which is one of the six seminaries of the Southern Baptist Convention. He was a senior pastor at a church in Birmingham, Alabama from 2006 to 2014. Apparently, according to Wikipedia, the youngest megachurch pastor in the U.S. at that time. Years later, in 2014, he became the president of the Southern Baptist Convention's International Mission Board.

I mentioned that earlier. That's a major position he held there. Then in February 2017, he began serving as the interim teaching pastor at McLean Bible Church in Virginia. Now, David Platt is the author of many books, including the New York Times bestseller, Radical, Taking Your Faith Back from the American Dream. I think it's important to understand what that book is about. I personally haven't read the book, so I went online to a review to one of the, I think, very highly respected reviewers, which is Tim Chalise. He's got a very popular website, chalise.com. He's from Canada. I believe he's either a pastor or an elder in his own church, but he writes very regularly online.

It's a very popular website. He wrote a review on Radical, David Platt's book, back in 2011. So this is 10 years old now, this review. But I think it gives a good summary of what this book is about because it really was a highly influential book. And he said this, whatever David Platt is selling, Chalise writes, people are buying it. At last count, 750,000 copies of Radical were in print, and it had been on the New York Times list of bestsellers for 52 weeks. Now, 750,000 copies, and that may not be the final number, maybe much more than that by now, but that is an incredibly huge number.

That's what Chalise says. He says that is no small achievement. So he's written that book.

I'm not sure how his other books have done, but that book did incredibly well. He says, by the time you finish Radical, you'll be charged up. You'll be ready to sell your home, to give up your car, to move across the world, to ditch the American dream in favor of moving across the world to do mission work. But here's the thing, Chalise writes, you'd better do it quickly because a couple of weeks later, you'll probably be back to normal, back to ordinary. Platt will get you all fired up, he writes. That's a good thing.

At least it can be. But in the midst of all the excitement, I worry about excitement fatigue. After all, Radical is far from the only book of this kind, the kind of book that seeks to shake up the Western church to get the church to do something more, something, well, radical. Read the book Do Hard Things or Crazy Love by Francis Chan and Radical by David Platt and all the rest and you'll get worked up every time.

But the reality is that for the vast majority of us, our lives will not look much different two weeks or two months or two years later. It's not that the books are bad, it's not that the books are bad as much as they give us little to work with as we move from fantasy of being radical to reality, from the abstract, moving across the world, to personal. In the middle of reading a book, it is easy enough to say, I'm going to give it all away. But then you realize that your wife hasn't read the book and isn't quite as eager. And then you realize that you have children and hauling them halfway around the world would have a profound effect upon them. And then you realize that it's been six months and you still haven't done anything. In fact, the excitement has passed away and you realize that life isn't so bad.

There may be some lingering guilt that you haven't moved across the world, but you've realized that it isn't just so easy to extract yourself from all of this. I am concerned, Challies writes, that it is difficult to read this book radical and believe its message and not feel that normal life is dishonoring to God. Do you get that line? In other words, if you're kind of a normal person who has a normal life and you're kind of living in America in a house and get a job and raising kids and just doing the normal thing, that somehow your life is somehow dishonoring to God. Maybe we need to learn to be faithful in our own neighborhoods before believing we'll be faithful in other things. That's from Tim Challies' review of David Platt's book Radical. Now, there's more to the review than that.

I just read a few paragraphs from it. And I'll just say to that that very few Christians are called to, quote, sell it all and live in a hut on the other side of the world. I mean, after all, if you think back to the early church, the Christians that Paul traveled to and ministered to, they just lived in towns and homes and they raised their families, they had jobs, they paid their bills, they weren't living this, quote, radical life as the apostle Paul was. Some of them were poor, some of them had some money, some of them were wealthy.

God uses all types of people for his purposes. So it's altruistic to say, just give up the American dream, your, quote, unquote, your regular life in America. I mean, someone has to earn money and someone has to pay the bills, especially for those who are living radical lives as missionaries on the other side of the world, then who's going to pay for the churches?

I mean, churches don't produce a good or a service to sell where they can operate as a business would. Someone has to work and live these, quote, non-radical lives, this American dream life, to pay for all this other missionary church work going on in the midst of it all. So David Platt is a very popular, very influential, in demand, and as you're going to hear in a little bit, he's a passionate, compelling communicator. And I want to say again, I'm not on the inside of this issue of what's going on at the church he pastors at McLean Bible Church. I've heard and I've read both sides of the issue, but I'm not doing the program today to take sides, but rather to discern and learn from both sides and how Platt's decisions have led to this once stable church, McLean Bible Church, leading to this fractured moment and how this can be helpful for us to understand for our own churches as well. So this past week, I just happened across this sermon that David Platt had given at his church on Independence Day, July 4th.

It was on some website and the article surrounding the video was about that David Platt had called out some people in his church for getting in the way of the nomination or election of three elders that had been put forward. So I decided to hear what he had to say to his church. And after listening to his message before his sermon about calling out these members of the church, it was just really hard to believe that he was actually saying this to people within his church in front of the entire church congregation. So after hearing it, and you're going to hear parts of it in a second here, I decided to go to try to figure out, well, what is the other side, the side he's criticizing and complaining about, what are they saying, what are they upset about, what are their complaints against the direction of the church? And I dug in a little more and found out that there was a group of men in the church who were very unhappy with the direction that David Platt has led the church and had written this 17-page letter to the pastors and elders of McLean Bible Church. And as I read the letter, I just couldn't believe how compelling and how biblical and how discerning some of the things they were writing. Now, I don't know the behind-the-scenes story, but their understanding of what a church should be and what church leadership things they should do and not do and what kinds of teaching should be embraced and what types of teaching should be pushed aside was actually really helpful to me to read this. It gave me greater insight to understand what's taking place within the church.

So we'll get to that letter from these men to the elder board of McLean Bible Church. But let's first get to what David Platt said that July 4th day, just a few weeks ago, to his congregation about what's taking place in his church. Before we dive together into the word today, I need to address a dynamic that is taking place in our church family right now in a way that I don't think I've ever had to do or wanted to do in all my years as a pastor, and I want to be careful with my words.

Just to interject, when I heard that as a setup to what he was about to say, I thought, uh-oh, what's coming? I had no idea what was going on in the church at that point. We had a meeting this last Wednesday night for the purpose of affirming God's call in the lives of potential elders, pastors in our church family. I mentioned last Sunday this is one of the most important things we do as followers of Jesus in the church to recognize and celebrate God's grace and biblically qualified leaders he raises up among us. And Wednesday night was a great night of worship and praise. Three elder nominees shared a bit of their stories to get a glimpse of God's grace in their lives, and if you weren't here, you missed a blessing. It was so encouraging hearing from these brothers together. We got to know them more.

We laughed with them. We were encouraged in our faith by them. All three of them pointed us to Jesus. So you can tell already that Pastor David Platt really wanted those particular three men to be elected to the elder board, and these were guys that he wanted. Yet, when it came time to affirm them, because no one had expressed any biblical concern about them, we were not able to because, and I want you to listen closely to the words I'm about to say, a small group of people inside and outside this church coordinated a divisive effort to use disinformation in order to persuade others to vote these men down as part of a broader effort to take control of this church. Now he might as well have just dropped a bomb in the middle of the sanctuary when he said that.

As a matter of fact, he repeated exactly what he said there a second time. I won't play it again, but this was an incredibly strong accusation against certain people who are likely sitting in that room that day. When a pastor ratchets it to that level, he wants those people, he doesn't care if those people leave the church, he wants them to leave the church because he sees them as being in the way.

There was no sort of reconciliation reaching out, how can we figure this out? They had reached a point where this is it, these people need to be called out, and anyone else who joins them, well, you're the enemy. There was a coordinated effort started by a small group of people and expanding to others to deceive people into thinking that if they voted for these men, then our church would. And so here are some of the lies that people were being told as they entered the building in that lobby that night. And just hear all the buzzwords and scare tactics that were used. NBC would be gone down a road of leaving the gospel behind, leaving the Bible behind, embracing liberal theology and cultural Marxism, like the author of the Communist Manifesto, that we would change our stance on abortion and sexuality, that we would allow critical race theory and Black Lives Matter and defunding the police to drive our agenda as a church.

I could go on and on with ideas that are unquestionably untrue. So these are serious allegations that David Platt is making against members of his church, basically calling them liars. The Christian Worldview with David Wheaton returns in just a moment. David Wheaton here, volunteer host of the Christian Worldview radio program. Listeners are often surprised to learn that we as a ministry pay for airtime on the radio station, website, or app on which you hear the program. The primary way this expense is recouped is through listeners like you donating to the ministry or becoming a monthly partner.

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Short takes are also available and be sure to share with others. Now, back to today's program with host David Wheaton. But I have noticed one thing, and I'm not ascribing this to David Platt, that now that critical race theory has become exposed, I think you're seeing it, there's a pushback against it by parents and school boards and you see it in conservative news outlets. People understand what critical race theory is now. You're seeing those who are trying to defend it saying it's like a boogeyman, it's a fear tactic, we're not critical race theorists, or they'll say this is the actual history of America.

It's not critical, it's not a theory, this is actually the way America really was, that we're just systemically unjust from the beginning, white people are racist even if they don't know it, and the country and the church needs to be completely reformed in the pursuit of social justice. David Platt continues. And just to clearly communicate again, the seriousness behind this, behind all of this disinformation and deception, is a small group of people who have stated that their purpose is to take control of this church.

I never was able to find that stated purpose anywhere in my research, but perhaps it's out there. And as he repeated that, I thought to myself, I wonder if David Platt has ever considered that he's only been at this church for, I think, just under four years now, and these people who are pushing back against him have likely been members for years and years and years. So you wonder if David Platt has ever had the thought that all this controversy and conflict that has come up has something to do with his leadership and his decision-making as the newer pastor of McLean Bible Church. You'll notice this other word, disinformation, is used a couple times. This is becoming a very popular word to use as well, especially from the Biden administration. They're out to end what they call disinformation.

Facebook uses it a lot. It's as if there's a truth committee that needs to be out there to make sure that everything's truthful according to them. I'm not saying David Platt's doing that, but that word itself is becoming a buzzword that we shouldn't allow anything that certain people, the experts, whoever, the arbiters of truth are the ones that have to keep people to save us from things that they think are false. So next, David Platt pivots to a revote they're going to have two weeks later, which was just this past weekend, where these same elders are going to be voted on, and David Platt is appealing for more people from the church to be involved in the vote, because the first time around, only 25% of the congregation voted, and so it allowed this, as he said, this very small group of people to influence the voting. Now he makes this appeal for everyone in the church to get involved and to vote the way he wants them to vote. I cannot emphasize enough how important this is. Adjust your schedule, your vacation plans, your whatever, in order to be here that Sunday morning, July 18th. This is extremely important for our church. I want you to hear from me that I, we, genuinely love and care for you. We have an opportunity to say together as a church, what happened Wednesday night is not who we are as the Church of Jesus Christ.

And it wasn't just that night. It's part of a bigger picture that's been going on for a long time. We have received constant emails that we've tried to address on individual levels from members sharing things that are deeply concerning, including pages I read last night, and I'm hesitant to share examples because of how hurtful they are. Just to give you a glimpse, I saw one email from one of the main leaders in this group using race to say that MBC is no longer a McLean Bible Church, that it's now a melanin Bible Church. That is not acceptable for the body of Jesus Christ.

That language has no place whatsoever here. And I only share it, I hesitate to share it because I know it's so ugly and painful even here, but I want to point out the approach that's being used by people giving leadership to this group in these meetings. And we need to say loud and clear, that definitively does not represent who we are as a church. Now again, I cannot verify whether or who said it's the melanin Bible Church, but this is what he said, he made a big point about it. He continues, in this next section, I think gives a hint at the issue that is dividing and breaking up this church. We will not apologize for our increasing diversity or our commitment to humbly address racial issues from God's Word as we unite together on a glorious mission to proclaim this good word and our great God in a city where 5 million plus men, women, boys and girls are on a road that leads to an eternal hell and need the good news of God's love for them. Now whether you agree with or believe what he's saying, you have to say that this is one compelling speaker and this is no doubt why he has become such a popular evangelical leader in this country because he compellingly makes his points and gets people really whipped up and on his side. We are at a pivotal moment in our church, opening back up after a global pandemic, ready to enter into a new chapter of our church, standing on the shoulders of brothers and sisters who've gone before us faithfully, ready to run after the city with the gospel, caring for orphans and widows and the poor and those in need to reach the next generation with the gospel. I was in exhilarating meetings all day Friday talking about how to reach the next generation with the gospel. I thought, God, help us to give our time and energy to this.

Do we not see the trends? God, wake us up. I wanted so badly to pray over those three brothers with their wives here Wednesday night, all of whom are eminently qualified, but we had to pause in light of what happened. This is clearly a man who senses that this is a pivotal moment in his church and maybe for himself as a pastor.

You can see as I listen to this why I had to think, wow, what is going on here? And I really wanted to look into what the other side was saying as to how it got to this moment where, again, he's speaking to the congregation of his church, I believe, at all four locations. In the end, this is not ultimately about a small group of people versus church leadership. This is about the members of McLean Bible Church deciding how we're going to move forward together as a church family in a way that is different from this world. God is bringing us together to say in a fresh way, Spirit of God, do among us what only you can do. Bring unity out of disunity. Bring harmony out of discord. Melt hearts, form minds, exalt truth over lies, bring error into light. God, do what only you can do.

We need you. Okay, you can watch the entire message that he gave before his message on July 4th. We have it linked at our website, thechristianworldview.org.

I was just thinking as I was listening to it, what are you thinking about it? I'm sure there are some people who listen to him and think, oh man, this guy, wow, he's on the right side of history. This is the guy. He's passionate and clear and biblical.

What's the matter with these people who are pushing back against them? This guy has God on his side. I'm sure there are some others of you who think this guy is really laying it on. He's covering for something he's trying to do. He is a hidden reef. Watch out for him. Look at the things he's trying to institute here.

He's using code language and he seems very phony. I'm sure there are some of you who think that as well. Whatever you think, it certainly was quite a way to start a worship service at his church and just shows you the degree to where this situation has come at McLean Bible Church.

So you've heard David Platt's perspective on what's taking place, that there are a small group of people who are infecting more people and these people are racist, melanin Bible Church, and they're trying to take over the church and keep the church from fulfilling its mission to preach the gospel to the people of Washington, D.C. in that area. But as in anything, there's always another side of the story and only God knows the truth. So I started to look at the other side of the story and as I began to read around, I realized that there's been a lot reported in this. And by the way, this is very public information. I'm not reporting something to you that's confidential or I'm betraying someone's trust.

I read these articles and got these videos just online like anyone else can. And so I began to look at what the side that he was talking about was saying and I came across, as I mentioned earlier, this 17-page letter that these men had written to the pastors and elders of McLean Bible Church with their concerns about what had been taking place in the church since David Platt became the pastor. I'm just going to give a slight preview of it now because we're not going to have time to read the letter this week.

We'll get into it next week. You can read it in the meantime if you'd like. It's very worth reading. It's very compelling reading and it teaches us things about cultivating church unity, roads not to go down. The letter was posted on a website called Capstone Report.

I'm not that familiar with that website but I'm sure you can find it elsewhere as well. We have it linked at our website, thechristianrealview.org. I'm just going to make an assumption that the men who wrote this letter to the pastors and elders of the church are part of the group that David Platt was talking about in his recent sermon. And you can be the judge where the tone of the letter and what the content of the letter is shows that these are people who are kind of quasi-racist and intent on taking over the church. The article before the letter starts up by saying, Division at McLean Bible Church over Pastoral Accountability began long before recent business meeting fireworks.

For at least a year, church leaders and even some elders urged David Platt to stop what they considered, what I consider as his reckless activities. This letter, which I will read next week, to the elders of McLean Bible Church was sent in February of 2021 and outlined in 17 pages many of the concerns about the leftward drift of MBC and its issues involving elders, oversight, transparency, issues with staff oversight and its move toward promotion of critical race theory and other divisive ideologies. The letter starts out by saying, as you know, several months ago, we provided the Elder Board with a paper discussing our grave concerns regarding the gospel, the church, justice and racism, acronym GCJR.

That's a class that was instituted at McLean Bible Church by David Platt in leadership. Today, we write again to share our deeper underlying concerns on the following key issues, an elder oversight, lack of transparency, biblical preaching and teaching, staffing and outside influences on the church. We believe that these issues are the root of MBC's current predicament and regrettably believe that they call into question the fidelity of McLean Bible Church to scripture. We are concerned that secular worldly ideologies have improperly influenced the teaching of scripture at MBC, confusing and dividing the church body, ultimately undermining the preaching of the gospel at MBC. However, we believe that God can sovereignly use serious problems to very beneficial ends, as seen in Paul's rebuke of Peter and Peter's repentance. Please understand that this comparison to the Apostle Peter is intended to highlight that even the greatest church leaders are nevertheless fallible. And I take that to mean that you have a very popular evangelical leader, David Platt.

We can't look to him as being infallible that he can and has made mistakes. The letter lists out 20 categories of a church where they believe David Platt and the elders are taking the church the wrong direction. They give bullet points under each one. And I'll just quickly list some philosophy, board composition, nomination process, functionality, church polity, budget, transparency, biblical preaching and teaching, syncretism, homiletics or preaching, law, gospel, distinction, doctrine of the sufficiency of scripture, legalism, hermeneutics, interpretation of scripture, ecclesiology, we discussed that last week, theology proper, shepherding, impact of staff hiring and training in partnership with outside organizations.

So there's all these categories of things they address where they see error, grievous error going on in this church. And they lay out the letter in bullet points. So I'll just read the first one. Won't have time to get into the whole letter as I mentioned.

But the first one has to do with the philosophy. And they say in the letter, bullet point, according to the McLean Bible Church Constitution, the elders are responsible for guarding the reputation and doctrinal integrity of the church. We believe the elders have not properly exercised oversight of church doctrine as MBC has undergone major theological shifts, including embracing a social justice interpretation of scripture and corresponding unbiblical prioritizing of unity at the expense of doctrinal truth, which must exist before love can unite. They reference 1 Peter 1.22. So as I got into this letter, I realized that these men who wrote this letter aren't some wild-eyed, racist, unbiblical church takeover types that David Platt seemed to be referring to, but rather they have taken a very biblical, measured, comprehensive, and even reconciling approach to the troubles that have been taking place at McLean Bible Church. Now again, going back to the very beginning of the program, the point of covering this topic is to learn from this very difficult, fractured situation at this church. The tendency today in evangelicalism is to turn away, to look away when situations are bad.

Remember the fall of Bill Hybels at Willow Creek Church or Ravi Zacharias and so forth. These things tend to be ignored. They're not positive. They're negative. And the church is very willing to quickly look away.

I do not think that is a good idea. And in Scripture, there are all kinds of negative examples in Scripture that we need to learn from. So this situation at McLean Bible Church is one where, don't look away. This is very public. It's in the Washington Post.

It's being covered very broadly. Let's learn what has gone wrong there as best we can, not being on the inside, so that we can be wiser in the leadership and in the various aspects of our own churches. That's why we're doing the program.

We'll do part two next week. Thank you as always for joining us on the Christian Royal View Radio program. You can listen to past programs, order resources for adults and children, sign up for our free weekly email and support the ministry, or perhaps become a monthly partner by going to our website, wlchristianworldview.org. If you have health care needs, get in touch with our national sponsor, Samaritan Ministries.

You can click on their banner on our website as well. Because we live in a fallen world, there is going to be sinful situations that arise, not only in the broader world, but also in the church as well. But we can look to the one who is perfect and realize that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. So until next time, think biblically, live accordingly, pray for McLean Bible Church, that God's best and His will would be done, and stand firm. . Until next time, think biblically and live accordingly.