In a Chaotic Time, The Strength of MacArthur Inspired Us to be Unshaken
To me, John MacArthur was everything I didn’t want to be. To be frank, I found him unbearable.
I was a young church planter. I wanted to reach the city and break bread with sinners. The goal was to be able to articulate the gospel in understandable terms to a secular audience without offending them. But this didn’t stay at the level of ideas. It was a lifestyle. While no God-fearing minister would have admitted it, the goal was to fit in and be “cool.” What you wore (down to specific brands) was a means to communicate “I belong here, I’m one of you.” To plant a church or minister in a secular context and preach in a suit was seen as ludicrous. No hipster wants to listen to a guy in a suit.
MacArthur wasn’t “cool.” He wore suits and didn’t seem nice. His whole persona seemed alienating. He told Beth Moore to “go home.” It seemed as if he was trying to offend people. He appeared like one of the harbingers of the bygone culture war era. And as everyone was taught, “culture war”-ing is very uncool.
One of my friends’ fathers sent me MacArthur’s book as we began our church plant. He cared for me and wanted to help me be a better minister. I remember hating it at the time. It was my first direct exposure to his work, and I was unimpressed.
Back then, being “in the city, for the city” was all the rage. Church planters were encouraged to move to the city, typically blue bastions, and plant a flag for Jesus. To help these young church planters, various models of ministry were developed in order to better contextualize the gospel. But they were not pitched as options. They were taught to be gospel truth. And in doing so, they became allergic to confrontation. A generation of “nice guy” pastors was cultivated by seminaries and other para-church ministries. These were guys who wouldn’t call a sodomite a sodomite but would definitely point out how bad other Christians are.
The ideal church planter was someone who was conversant with the latest secular literature, but oftentimes this just meant sitting in a coffee shop doing “sermon prep” with a copy of Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly or Tim Keller’s Reason for God stacked on the table, hoping to serve as a conversation starter (a gospel conversation no less!).
The aspiration was to be welcomed into the city and be a blessing to the city. After all, we were taught, would anyone care if your church disappeared tomorrow? We were totally unprepared for the hostility Paul faced in Ephesus. The goal was to gain an audience by toning down any possibility of offense, while maximizing “gospel opportunities” with “people of peace.”
But that all changed for me in 2020. The model of ministry I had adopted proved both unable and unwilling to meet the moment. The three horsemen of COVID, BLM, and transgenderism tested all of us. But in particular, ministers who uncritically adopted models of ministry with an intention to be conversant with the lost and show how the gospel was relevant to urbanites were uniquely challenged. Nothing in their missional playbook afforded them permission to push back against these forces. They had no answer for how to deal with these matters because they were told that was “culture war” stuff and that in order to win the lost, they could not engage in culture war stuff unless it was with a sympathetic ear.
I saw pastors promoting “pronoun hospitality” and telling their churches to lead the way in providing care for transgenders. I witnessed ministers who bent over backwards to comply with regulations, bragging about how they loved their neighbor by getting the shot and wearing a mask. And I saw them fall all over themselves to prove they were not racist.
With the full bloom of the cultural revolution, the “winsome witness” and “faithful presence” approaches were exposed as worthless. The missional/incarnational framework may not be inherently compromised. Many of us adopted it with the sincere conviction that it was the best way to reach the lost. Yet over time, it cultivated a fear of offense and a tacit rule: don’t poke the cultural bear. In practice, it often traded clarity for nuance and conviction for credibility.
And there stood Pastor MacArthur unflinching in the face of madness. A lone voice, it seemed. Unbothered by the critics. Courageous in the arena. While other ministers and ministries critiqued him for remaining open, he didn’t seem to care. He just openly defied the government. Notwithstanding any eschatological emphases which could have ameliorated his godly instincts, he stood tall and pushed back. Other churches shut down their worship and even marched with BLM, but not Pastor MacArthur. Here was a man confident in the Lord, who loved his neighbor enough to stand for the truth, willing to defend his God-given freedoms, fought for by his forefathers from the Bible.
I was somewhat shocked. This was the man I had so readily dismissed in my youth as out of touch and stodgy. The man preaching in a suit, not skinny jeans. The man boldly preaching without trying to gain an audience with the world. A man who seemed the antithesis to what I had been taught ministry should look like.
And so I repented. I repented of my arrogance and of my own compromised approach. I repented of the theology of niceness masquerading as wisdom, or that having a faithful presence meant that I should turn down the volume on God’s Word.
May we all be uncool and not nice when the cultural arsonists rear their ugly heads. In a world at war with God, let us be called fools for Christ. Let us offend those who offend God so that they may come to salvation.
The church doesn’t need more cool pastors. It needs men who are willing to be hated for the truth. We need men like Pastor John MacArthur. Pastors who are willing to offend. The battles Pastor MacArthur faced were unique to his time and his generation. What is coming will require a new approach, but I hope for all of our sakes it looks old.
We don’t need novel strategies when it comes to ministry. We just need to get back to the basics. We need to get back to the Bible. Defending truth in the public square is loving your neighbor. Warning against lies that destroy souls is gospel work. The idea that cultural confrontation and gospel proclamation are mutually exclusive is itself a modern invention.
Pastors should model the courage of Pastor MacArthur today. We need men who are trained in how to resist the mob and stand for the truth. We need ministers who champion God’s Word and reject any attempt to tone down our message.
This isn’t about recovering a golden age but building for the next one. This isn’t reactionary nostalgia. It’s about facing this age faithfully. We need to assess the field of battle with a sober mind and aim to finish the race well.
This age won’t be won with relevance. It will be won with righteousness. We will not tame the barbarians at the gate with cleverness. The moment demands courage, and thank God for the model of courage that we had in Pastor MacArthur.
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