Alright, it's 1033, and for the sake of time, I know we'll have people, probably some stragglers rolling in here, but let me go ahead and pray and we can get started. Heavenly Father, Lord, we pray for this time, just that it would be edifying as we think about a controversy in the 20th century and how that gives light to our present situation, help us have strong convictions, convictions to stand in the moment of trial and temptation. Lord, we pray for faithfulness in the coming days. I pray, Lord, just that you would encourage all of us through looking at the lives of some of the great leaders of the past. In Christ's name, amen. Well, I don't know, just by a show of hands, who here has read Ian Murray's book Evangelicalism Divided? A few of y'all have read that, so obviously stole the title of this lecture from Murray's book. My name is Grant Castleberry, and right now I'm a pastor in Raleigh, North Carolina, and I'm writing a dissertation on Martin Lloyd-Jones. So a lot of this material has just come from the dissertation. I'm specifically doing a dissertation on church history and Martin Lloyd-Jones' study in church history and use of church history. So this is a little bit tangential, but it's been really helpful for me to go back and just kind of look at the controversy that happened regarding the ecumenical movement. I'm going to get to that in a second, but let me begin. with a theology of separation, because that's going to come into play when we look at the actual controversy. But a theology of separation, really important to understand, that the Bible teaches a theology of separation, and this is an important thing to note, that it's only between you and somebody who claims to be a believer. It's not a theology of separation from the world. In fact, Paul clarifies that. It's not from somebody who is claiming to be an unbeliever. It's a theology of separation from people who claim the name of Christ, but who depart on two grounds. And I can't help this fact that this light is just like. I'm sure it's as annoying to you as it is to me. But turn to 1 Corinthians chapter 5, and I just want to show you this just very briefly. But Paul says, just for clarification, I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people." Now notice the distinction. Not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world or the greedy and swindlers or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. So he's saying, I'm not calling you to a life of hermitage, like the Amish, where you're separating from everybody. That's not what we're talking about. But he does say, Verse 11, but now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed. So we are to separate from somebody who is in unrepentant sin. Very clear. The second reason for separation is false teaching. For this, turn over to the right to the book of Galatians. Galatians 1.9, Paul says, as we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed. Let him be anathema, is what he says. So if somebody is claiming to be a brother and they are compromising The central doctrine, he says, of the gospel, let that person be accursed. Clearly, we are to separate from that person, just as we were looking at from Titus 1-9, rebuke those who contradict sound doctrine. In Revelation, John writes, come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins, lest you share in her plagues. Church history, you remember J. Gresham Mason came out of the Presbyterian Church, came out of Princeton Seminary, founded Westminster Seminary. Thomas Chalmers Scotland leaves everything, leaves the Church of Scotland, the buildings, they all come out. They all leave because the church had compromised the central teaching, the doctrine. So that's a theology of separation. Now I want to begin by looking at three key players that were involved in this controversy that we're going to look at. I'm just going to introduce them to you. Many of them are probably well known to you, so I'm probably not going to be telling you much that is new. But the first is Martin Lloyd-Jones. His dates are 1899 to 1981. Martin Lloyd-Jones was Welsh. He was born in Cardiff. He was raised in a town called Yungitho. And he was very influenced by the Welsh Calvinistic Methodists, so revivalists. And Lloyd-Jones, fascinating person. I'm going to be doing a whole lecture on Lloyd-Jones tomorrow. if you're interested in really diving deep in who Lloyd-Jones was and his influence. But really, Lloyd-Jones is important because he was instrumental in bringing back expository preaching in the 20th century. In fact, let me give you a quote from Hughes Oliphant Old. This is the guy who wrote the whole history of preaching, seven volumes. And Old says, the greatest impact of Lloyd-Jones on the English-speaking pulpit of today is the recovery of true expository preaching. John Brencher said, this is why he was so effective, the authority in which he preached made you feel that to disagree with him was intellectual suicide. I love that. And he meant that as a criticism. But I take that as a compliment, that to disagree with what he was saying was intellectual suicide. He, just interesting, he didn't go through the normal seminary. He began his life as a doctor, as a physician, and just very brilliant, became the assistant to the King's physician, Sir Thomas Hoarder. became a member of the Royal College of Medicine, age 26. But in the midst of that, he's converted when he's 25. He feels called to preach when he's 26. He leaves all of the life of London behind, goes and pastors a church in Wells for 13 years, then comes to London, becomes the co-pastor with G. Campbell Morgan. Y'all have heard of G. Campbell Morgan, his expository thoughts on the Gospels. And he co-pastors with Campbell Morgan until 1943. and then becomes the solo lead pastor, 1943, right in the middle of the Blitz in World War II, and pastors Westminster Chapel until 1968. He retires in 1968, 1969. If you've read his book, Preaching and Preachers, he gave those lectures at Westminster Seminary in 1969, and then he dies in 1981. So that's Martin Lloyd-Jones. If you're interested in reading more from Lloyd-Jones, I would recommend his book, The Sermon on the Mount. Another little book called Faith on Trial. It's very accessible on Psalm 73. And then every pastor should go get his volumes on Romans and Ephesians. Just absolutely marvelous material. Get those volumes. I promise you, you'll be immensely helped. So that's Lloyd-Jones. Second, J.I. Packer. J.I. Packer, his dates were 1926 to 2020. And J.I. Packer is probably the most influential conservative, and I would say reformed, theologian of the 20th century. His book, Knowing God, sold over a million copies. So you have people like Late Great Planet Earth, Hal Lindsey, their books, Knowing God was an international bestseller. Packer also wrote just wonderful books, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God, Keep in Step with the Spirit, which was a critique of the charismatic movement Packer just massively influential in 20th century evangelicalism. If you want to understand Packer, and this is as I've been going back and reading books on Packer, reading Packer, here's been the most helpful thing for me to understand about J.I. Packer is J.I. Packer first and foremost was an Anglican. His parents were blue-collar, his dad worked at a train station, but they went to a local Anglican church that didn't even have the gospel. But that was really fundamental to his identity, formative, that he was an Anglican first and foremost. And if you'll ever notice pictures of Packer, he's got kind of an indention on his head. You're like, huh, maybe, it just looks a little odd. Well, when he was seven, he was playing tag in the schoolyard, and he ran into the road and he got hit by a bread truck. And so they had to put a metal plate in his head. And providentially, God used that because he couldn't go play. He couldn't play sports. He couldn't ride a bike. He couldn't do anything. So age 12 or 13, his parents get him a typewriter. A typewriter. And that becomes like his most prized possession. And he's a brilliant person that is writing articles and things when he's, you know, a teenager. So God in his providence works that out. He goes to Oxford and he studies the Puritans. He does a doctorate on Richard Baxter, does a 499-page defill on Baxter, on Baxter's theology of redemption. And people say, if you go to Oxford, you can go check out that that dissertation and the names of the people who have checked out that dissertation are basically a who's who of evangelicalism of people that have been interested in following that. So that just gives you an insight into Packer, but he's fundamentally, this is what you have to understand. We know him because he has influenced broader evangelicalism so much through his writings, through his teaching, through his preaching. But he was most concerned about reforming the Church of England back to the 39 Articles. That's Packer. Billy Graham. Billy Graham, his dates are 1918 to 2018, lived almost 100 years. He is the most well-known evangelist in the 20th century. and is remembered as the key leader of the neo-evangelical movement of the latter half of the 20th century. And we're going to talk a little bit momentarily about the break between evangelicalism, neo-evangelicalism, and fundamentalism. But let me just give you some insight into Graham's influence. He held throughout the course of his life 417 Crusades. Remember, those were anywhere from one week to sometimes, the New York Crusade was 16 weeks. So these were long, week-long iterations. And he held those 417 Crusades in 185 countries. His crusades were attended or watched by over 210 million people. Historian Mark Noll said, of all the media stars and would-be leaders of the modern evangelical movement to emerge since World War II, no one has come close to the visibility, influence, and sheer presence of William Franklin Graham. George Marsden said, an evangelical is someone who likes Billy Graham. Have you all heard that? Yeah, I think he's a good guy. You must be an evangelical. Grant Wacker, who was a historian at Duke, I don't even think that Wacker was necessarily sympathetic to Graham. I think Wacker's a modernist, but he titled his biography of Billy Graham, America's Pastor. America's Pastor. Because he was not only influential with so many Americans, but also influential with so many presidents. You'd always see, you know, Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush and Billy Graham right there with him. You've seen those pictures. So, incredibly influential. Billy Graham founded, as you know, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Samaritan's Purse. Samaritan's Purse is doing good work, certainly in my home state, North Carolina. The Periodical Christianity Today, CT. Fuller Theological Seminary was a school that Graham helped start in Pasadena, California. Billy Graham was interested in a broad evangelicalism. So his vision was pushing out from fundamentalism, which was pulling back from what he thought the culture and the academy, was a broad evangelicalism that had room for essentially everybody at the table. And for an evangelicalism that was emergent and recognized by the American public and by the American media and those types of things. So that's Billy Graham. Now, I want to describe a movement that happened largely with liberals, but also with Roman Catholics in the 20th century. It's hard for us to understand this movement. There's still some vestiges of it today, but it's called the ecumenical movement. the ecumenical movement. And I said this movement was started by liberals. When you lose the truth and you basically just make your church parrot the culture, what ends up happening is people start leaving the church. You see this all over the place with the mainline denominations. When you just drive through downtown in any city on a Sunday and look at the old, now liberal churches, they're dying. They're all dying. Statistically, they're all dying. And this is not a new trend. This was happening in the 20th century. And so the idea came about early 1900s. This idea started in the 1910s, 1915s, right when people were compromising on basic fundamental truths, what we call the fundamentals. They said, you know what? The reason why people aren't coming is because we're not united. If Christians across the world were united in a show of force, then the world would see that there's something special about Christianity, that we have this unity that transcends cultures. and languages and all sorts of barriers, then people would be attracted to the church. It was really a church growth idea, is really what the ecumenical movement was. In 1948, they started an organization called the World Council of Churches. And the World Council of Churches was made up of what they called National Council of Churches. So every country had… America had our own National Council of Churches. And so did countries in Africa and Europe. And these countries made up this whole World Council of Churches. And evangelicals rightly criticized the World Council of Churches on three things primarily. First, they did not affirm biblical inerrancy. Second, they tolerated doctrinal heresy. And here's what they said, as long as a person claimed to be a Christian and had a Christian baptism in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that it was incumbent upon us to acknowledge that that person, that church, that denomination is Christian. So as long as they claim to be Christian and have Christian baptism, regardless of what they believe, And third, the World Council of Churches was open to bringing all the churches together across the globe, including the Roman Catholic Church. So there was a real denial of the need for the Protestant Reformation. Now, the Church of England became a member of the World Council of Churches. It's very important. The Church of England, the Anglican Church, became a member of the World Council of Churches. So if you are an evangelical, like John Stott, like J.I. Packer, within the Church of England, now you are a member of the World Council of Churches. And this movement really put a lot of pressure on people. This was the hit thing. This was the Trinity thing to conform and say, yes, we need to all be a part of this movement. There was real pressure. A Dutch theologian, I want you to get a sense of this pressure to come together. His name is Klaas Roonja. He described it this way. He says, it is sweeping across the world through all churches. And whether we are members of the World Council of Churches or not, we all feel the pressure of the ecumenical tornado. It is a tremendous pressure, he said. And then a Presbyterian pastor here in America named Russell Jaberg, he was a minister in the Presbyterian Church USA, said this. To raise questions about union is to ask for a sentence of exile from one's fellowship. It is to give evidence that one is not aware of the fresh wind blowing through our theological quarters. It is to be out of step with the great forward march of Christendom. To be lukewarm here is to be a Samuel who has not heard the voice, a Saul who has not seen the light, a Moses who has not turned aside. So this is what the ecumenical movement was. It was the advance of visible unity at the complete expense of truth. It was the advance of a visible unity at the expense of truth. It was an endeavor to Christianize the world without a clear definition of Christianity. Let me give you another quote. This is from Martin Lloyd-Jones. This is how he described it. This is a great fact which we have got to face. Denominational leaders are prepared, they say, to give and take. They are prepared to reconsider, to make new arrangements and accommodations with others. They feel that the divisions of Christendom are a scandal, that a divided church is an offense to God, and that it is the divisions of the church that account for her weakness and her ineffectiveness. Therefore, they say, we must become one and promote the idea of one great world church. That is the major fact confronting us. Now, here's the thing. Liberal leaders, Anglo-Catholic leaders were smart in how they approached evangelicals. Because evangelicals within denominations were often pushed to the side. They weren't given a place at the table. They were looked down upon. Anybody experienced that before? And they said, we're going to give you a place at the table. We're going to now let you headline the conferences. We're going to let you come speak. We're going to let you author books with our presses. As long as you don't have to agree with other people. but as long as you acknowledge that these other people are Christians as well. That's the only catch. You just have to acknowledge that these are brothers. You might disagree with them on key issues, but we're going to give you that place at the table. So more and more what begin to happen, you ask, why was this such an immense pressure? Well, evangelicals begin to cross that line. and say, well, I still hold to my doctrine. I still hold to the very things that I believed four or five years ago. Now I'm just partnering with these individuals, these denominations. And the evangelical alliance in England, which the evangelicals were a part of from the Church of England, but also from other denominations, begin to make those steps forward. So there's this immense pressure, let's partner together, then we will be effective, and by the way, we're offering you nice things. Just come to the table. So, I now wanna look at how those leaders. Billy Graham, Martin Lloyd-Jones, and J.I. Packer responded to the ecumenical movement. They had to respond. This was a global phenomenon. So how did they respond? Let me begin with Billy Graham. Billy Graham, 1949, he had been an evangelist with Youth for Christ traveling across America before this. 1949, he has his big crusade out in Los Angeles. That is when he comes out. That's when he's People began to notice Graham. He was put in the papers. And early on, he had relationships with fundamentalist leaders like Bob Jones Sr., John R. Rice, Carl McIntyre, others. He ran in fundamentalist circles. This went on for about five years. In 1954, something interesting happened. In 1954, he held his London Crusade in Haringey Arena. So he crosses the pond, he goes to London, and the liberals in the Church of England, the Anglo-Catholics, they do not endorse the Crusade. But he goes to London. He begins the crusade. Evangelicals are supporting it. And people are coming. People are interested. And the Anglo-Catholics and the liberals are watching this, and they said, There's some success here. Maybe we can draft off of it. And so rather than playing distant and coy from Graham, they cozy up to Graham. And they say, can we be a part of this crusade? And these are known Catholics, known modernists. So by the end of the London Crusade in March of 54, it was estimated that 80% of London churches were cooperating with the Crusade. Liberal Methodist minister, very famous, Leslie Weatherhead, and the Archbishop of the Church of England, Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury even supported the Crusade, Archbishop Fisher, gave the closing prayer of the 1954 London Crusade. Now, this is significant because it made Graham think that he could partner with known liberals and Catholics and be successful without compromising his message. That's what he thought. So he comes back home in 1954, North Carolina. And he'd been previously asked to do crusades in New York City, but he did not feel like the support was right. And he'd been growing apart from these fundamentalist leaders. And so in 1955, he crosses a Rubicon, really. He receives an invitation from the Protestant Council of Churches of New York City. Remember I was talking about the National Council of Churches that are all part of the World Council of Churches? Well, the Protestant Council of Churches of New York City was all part of that overarching ecumenical institutional bulwark. And in 1955, he accepts an invitation to be sponsored by them in New York for a crusade. And this is kind of under the radar. you know, it's not really, he accepts the invitation. The crusade doesn't happen until 1957. And in 1957, that's when really all the bridges are burned between him and his fundamentalist background. He does the crusade in New York, 16 weeks thousands upon thousands of people in Madison Square Garden. And he has known liberals, Roman Catholics on the platform. And here's what began to happen. The people who came forward at the Graham Crusades were called what? Y'all remember? inquirers. They were called inquirers. And they would come forward and they would meet and pray with a person down front. And then afterwards, the follow-up would be to direct those people into the churches that sponsored the crusade. So those very people who came forward were then pushed into some evangelical, some Catholic, some liberal churches. And I went and read Graham's biography, just as I am, and he explains that. He just said, well, I just figured people, true evangelical believers would figure it out in the end. really wasn't a churchman. He didn't think in terms of the church. But that was the result. And that played out, really, for the rest of Graham's ministry, this partnership with anyone who claimed to be a Christian, regardless of their doctrine. Let me give you a direct quote from Billy Graham. The ecumenical movement has broadened my viewpoint, and I recognize now that God has his people in all churches." So that became his mindset and his philosophy. In 1963, Billy Graham traveled back to London. He wanted to meet with Martin Lloyd-Jones, now pastoring at Westminster Chapel. And he asked Martin Lloyd-Jones to chair the World Congress on Evangelism, which was eventually held in Berlin in 1966. And Martin Lloyd-Jones said he would. He said, I will make you a bargain. I will chair that World Congress on Evangelism under two criteria. Actually, three. He said, first, get the liberals and the Catholics off your platform. No liberals and no Catholics. Second, you drop the invitation system. So no more just as I am and coming forward. And then third, that you're only sponsored by evangelicals. He said that they talked, Lloyd-Jones and Graham talked for three hours, but Billy Graham could not accept those conditions. So that leads me to Lloyd-Jones' response, and this is really what I want to focus on primarily. So while Graham leveraged the ecumenical movement to advance his position, Lloyd-Jones stood against it. And Lloyd-Jones was really looked at the pastor of pastors within England. And there was a group of pastors, several hundred, that would meet that he would lead called the Westminster Fellowship. And they would meet once a month, those who could, in London. But they would also have an annual three-, four-day conference. And Billy Graham took one of those conferences as an opportunity in 1962 to talk about real Christian unity, real doctrinal Christian unity. You can go read that today. I'm trying to remember what it's called. Anyway, just look up Martin Lloyd-Jones on unity, and it's a short book, and he walks the pastors through Ephesians 4 and John 17. This is how Lloyd-Jones described true biblical unity. He said, true unity is created by the Holy Spirit in the shared experience of the application of the truth of God's Word to the soul. True unity is created by the Holy Spirit in the shared experience of the application of the truth of God's Word to the soul. He criticized the ecumenical movement's understanding of unity this way. This is very insightful. I found this very helpful for my own personal ministry. First, the ecumenical movement had put the cart before the horse. and that it hoped to emphasize unity and then come to an agreement on doctrine. And Lloyd-Jones, if you read Lloyd-Jones on any of this stuff, he would almost always go to Acts 2.42, where Luke records that they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, and that's first, to prayer, to fellowship. And Lloyd-Jones would say, Luke actually has a purpose in putting them in that order. that it's the doctrine that serves as the basis for the fellowship that comes later. You don't put the fellowship before the doctrine. The fellowship is the result of the doctrine. Second, he says unity in Scripture is spiritual, not physical. It is something that the Holy Spirit does, not what man does. The Spirit unites believers into the mystical body of Christ. Therefore, third, by deduction, unity is recognized then, not created. Unity is recognized, not created. You don't create unity with someone else. In fact, Paul says in Ephesians 4, be eager to maintain the unity. We're called to maintain and preserve unity. We're never called in the New Testament to create unity. We are simply called to recognize those to whom we are unified. Let me give you a direct quote. Unity is Not the result of anything that we do. Union is the result of the work of the Holy Spirit himself. We can never create union. We are not even called to create union. It is not our task. The only unity we recognize is the unity that is created by the Holy Spirit. Fourth, Lloyd-Jones said, actually this whole idea of being one big church in order to be more spiritually effective, is completely contrary to what you see in church history. He says, rather than using large groups without a unified doctrine or ethos, God throughout history has used the unified remnant. not the large groups. God has always used the remnant, the smaller group that is cohesively defined doctrinally. Fifth, biblical unity cannot be arrived at by a least common doctrinal denominator. True unity must have the life of doctrine which the Holy Spirit exercises. The Holy Spirit uses the truth then to create unity. So that's his doctrine of unity. And one of the things that he would say quite often is during this time he looked back to Luther and the Reformation. And he said, you know, what enabled Luther to do what he did? And what opened up the door for Luther and his thinking in understanding justification by faith alone and those types of things was a very simple question, and that is this, what is a Christian? That is a very simple question, but it is an important question that you have to answer. What is a Christian? And that's the question that nobody in the ecumenical movement was really answering. or even asking for that matter. Anybody is a Christian who claims the name of Christ and has been baptized? And Martyn Lloyd-Jones says, not so fast. What made the Reformation special is that Luther asked a very basic question. What is an evangelical Christian? What is it? And then, second question that naturally follows, what's the church? What is a church? Very basic questions. And so Lloyd-Jones said, okay, we need to go back to the basics and help people. We're supposed to have unity that the Holy Spirit creates with true Christians. What is an evangelical Christian? There's a little book he wrote called What is an Evangelical? Has anybody read that? Okay. So, he basically goes and answers that question. Let me just give you, just very quickly, the 13 marks, he says, of what an evangelical is. In his mind, this is someone who is a legitimate born-again believer. He uses those terms, evangelical, born-again believer, almost synonymously. But first, the evangelical is totally subservient to Scripture. The sole authority in his life is the Bible. Second, the evangelical views himself primarily as an evangelical Christian. In other words, their foremost identity is not that I'm a Methodist, it's not that I'm a Baptist, it's not that I'm an Anglican. My foremost identity is that I'm a born-again evangelical Christian. Third, the evangelical possesses spiritual discernment. The evangelical is a man who is always watching. 1 Corinthians 16 says, Watch ye stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong, let all your things be done with charity. The evangelical Christian is watchful over their own soul and the fellowship that they share with believers. Fourth, the evangelical distrust reason and particularly reason in the form of philosophy. Lloyd-Jones understood philosophy to be a source of another authority outside the Word of God. And what he's really getting at here, not that obviously there's a stream of Christian philosophy which he would acknowledge, but he was leery of a pointing to academia as an authority that would be held over scripture, especially with things like critical scholarship and science. Science says this. He was leery of people who would just quote some PhD authority as someone who had more authority than Scripture itself. So that's fourth. The evangelical distrusts reason, in particular reason in the form of philosophy. Fifth, the evangelical uses reason in service to Scripture. So it's not that we throw logic and reason and deduction out the window, but it's held underneath Scripture, not above it. Sixth, the evangelical only accepts two sacraments. baptism in the Lord's Supper. Seven, the evangelical does not wholesale except tradition, and is critical of the church's history. Now, Lloyd-Jones was massively influenced in church history, loved church history, used church history. You read him, and in terms of his illustrations, The only thing he uses more is Scripture. It's Scripture and church history. So we certainly are to learn from church history, and he would acknowledge that. But he's saying history must be judged by Scripture. Tradition must be judged by Scripture, not the other way around. Eight. The evangelical is a person of conviction and truth. We should have the truth. We should hold the truth. We should walk in the truth. We should speak the truth. The evangelical is not content to see the truth compromised. 9. Evangelicals simplify worship. And he was not a fan of all the vestments and the processions and all the formalism within the Church of England. I think that's primarily what he's saying there. Ten, the evangelical emphasizes the necessity of the new birth. It is the new life in Christ that is needed and emphasized for the Christian life. And therefore, there is within true Christianity an emphasis upon sanctification. 11. The evangelical desires revival. The evangelical longs to see a great work of God on a grand scale. 12. The evangelical is always interested in biblical preaching. They love to hear the Word of God taught. Lloyd-Jones goes as far to say that when people cease to be interested in preaching, they cease to be evangelical. 13th, and finally, the evangelical is someone who is consumed with evangelism and proclaiming the message of the gospel. So they're interested in seeing lost people come to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Now something interesting happened 58 years ago yesterday, October 16th. 1966, there was a meeting of the Evangelical Alliance. Remember, the Evangelical Alliance was made up of evangelicals in the Church of England and in other denominations in Great Britain. And this meeting was to address issues related to the ecumenical movement. And somehow, the leaders of this meeting of the Evangelical Alliance decided to ask Martin Lloyd-Jones to speak the very first night. And this meeting was held in Westminster Hall, which is, if you've been to London, you remember Big Ben and Parliament and the London Bridge, all of that. Westminster Hall is right down there. And it's packed with Evangelicals. And that night, October 66, October 16, 1966, Lloyd-Jones stood up and called everybody to come out of their denominations. He called for separation, a biblical separation. He says, it's time to come out, to leave. They called them mixed denominations. Leave your mixed denominations. He said, the Anglican church is speeding towards Catholicism. There's so much compromise. It is time now to come out. Now, Lloyd-Jones was not an organizer. He was not a real planner. You know, he was a thought leader. You know, you're around those, some people are very brilliant in terms of planning and organization. That was not Martin Lloyd-Jones. And so he really didn't have a plan for what he was calling people to. You know, that was the big criticism after the fact is like, okay, come out, leave, leave your denominations, leave the Church of England. You know, to what? What are we coming to? And later on, there was another group that was called the British Evangelical Council, which was much more conservative. It had already been started. The year before, 40 people had attended its meeting. That kind of became what Lloyd-Jones attached onto. But in 1966, he didn't have a plan. But his call was to come out. And I just want to read you. part of his call. In the moment, people described it as such a clarion call that they felt like all the evangelical Anglicans were going to leave, leave their parishes. It was such this spirit-filled moment. And this is what he said. He says, my friends, we are not only the guardians and custodians of the faith of the Bible, we are the modern representatives and successors of the glorious men who fought the same fight, the good fight of faith in centuries past. Surely as evangelicals we ought to feel this appeal. We are standing in the position of the Protestant Reformers. Are we accepting this modern idea that the Reformation was the greatest tragedy that ever happened? If you want to say that it was a tragedy, here was the tragedy. that the Roman church had become so rotten that it was necessary for the reformers to do what they did. It was not the departure of the reformers that was the tragedy. It was the state of the Roman church that was the tragedy. We are the modern representatives of these men and of the Puritans and the Covenanters, the early Methodists and others. Can you not see this opportunity to come out? of the denominations and join together. It was such a powerful call, such an effective call, that John Stott, y'all know John Stott, The Cross of Christ and other books, was sitting on the platform and when Lloyd-Jones sat down, Stott said later, I was afraid everybody was going to leave the denominations right then and there. And he stands up, Stott does, and he gives a rebuke to Lloyd-Jones. And he says, don't anyone make any hasty decisions. Don't make a hasty decision. Don't leave your pastor. Don't leave your denomination. He says, I believe scripture is against what he just said, and history stands against it. And so right then and there, October 18th, 1966, you had this divide within British evangelicalism. And you had people who came out of the denominations. and you had people that stayed in the denominations. And that leads me to the third person, J.I. Packer. J.I. Packer was a friend of Lloyd-Jones. In 1950, Lloyd-Jones and J.I. Packer had started the Puritan Conference, which is, you can largely attribute the reform resurgence in America all the way back to 1950 and the Puritan Conference with J.I. Packer and Martin Lloyd-Jones. Jay Packer massively effective amongst evangelicals, as we've talked about. Lloyd-Jones personally, privately, told J.I. Packer, he said, look, they're never going to accept you within Anglicanism. One, because they looked at Packer like a theological Frankenstein. You kind of had the, you know, the dent in the head and all that. But they looked at, British people are not, they're kind of off theological. They're not very precise. And Packer was very precise. They looked at Packer as this oddity. And then he's blue collar, which means that he's lower middle class. He's not accepted amongst the elites within the church of England. And Lloyd-Jones says, look, you're a doctrinal guy. You do not need to try to rise through the Church of England. They're never going to accept you. You're never going to be able to reform the Church of England back to the 39 Articles. It's not going to happen. But that's exactly what Packer did. Packer stayed in. Packer stayed in. What he did in the Church of England is he made a compromise. He said, I will partner with the Anglo-Catholics in order to fight the liberals within the Church of England. So I'll partner with the Anglo-Catholics in order to kind of ward off ecumenism to a degree, but I'm going to partner with the Catholics while doing it. And he wrote a book in 1970 called Growing in the Union with several other Roman Catholic authors. And that really was the point in which Lloyd-Jones said, look, we can no longer even do this Puritan conference together because now you are working with known Catholics. Not that they were no longer friends, not that Lloyd-Jones shunned him, but he just said publicly, we cannot partner in ministry together anymore because you are affirming a gospel by your partnership that we both believe is false. So that was in 1970. Anybody follow evangelicals and Catholics together in the 1990s? That was really just symptomatic of what Packer had already been doing in the late 1960s and 1970s and 80s, is partnering with Catholics for conservative causes. in order to fight the liberals. You know, you partner with Chuck Colson and others. And Lloyd-Jones' point to Packer is, by doing that, you are fundamentally denying the very gospel that we stand for and hold to. So now, finally, we have just five minutes Let me give some critique and reflection. And I'll begin with Billy Graham. First, as I alluded to at the very beginning, partnering with liberals and Catholics in the crusade and putting those individuals on the platform gave confusion to what Graham's message actually was. Billy Graham's famous comment is, I will go anywhere and preach the gospel to anyone as long as they don't ask me to change my message. But by having known Catholics and liberals on the platform, just like with J.I. Packer, you're confusing the message to people. You're affirming by what you do something that is completely different from what you are saying. That's one. Two, Graham said, I'll go anywhere as long as they don't ask me to change my message. Did Graham's message change? Did this years of partnering with liberals and Catholics change the message? Let me just give you, did anybody see that 1997 interview with Robert Shuler on the Hour of Power? Any of you all thinking of that? Graham said, I think there's the body of Christ which comes from all the Christian groups around the world or outside the Christian groups. I think that everybody that loves Christ or knows Christ, whether they're conscious of it or not, they're members of the body of Christ. I could keep going. So clearly, over time, sadly, it affected his message. And it also affected his work in broader evangelicalism. Look at broader evangelicalism today in the institutions that Graham started. Look at Fuller Seminary. They're waffling now on the gay issue. They abandoned biblical inerrancy in the 80s. Wayne Grudem told me stories when he was at Fuller Seminary. He transferred out to Westminster. But when he was there, when Wayne Grudem was a seminary student, he was taking notes in his classes of how inerrancy was being compromised at Fuller Seminary. Christianity today, my goodness. It really is pathetic. has no vestige of evangelical Christianity really at this point anymore. And the evangelical movement, by and large, has been co-opted by progressives and charismatics. Look at it. I mean, what is it? What is the evangelical movement today? So that really, sadly, is downstream of the choices that Billy Graham made with the ecumenical movement. I don't want to diminish the fact that I know people that came to Christ through the preaching of Billy Graham. I'm not going to diminish that fact. I'm not going to diminish the good that he, I think Samaritan's Purse, you know, I think Franklin has a more conservative bone in his thinking, you know, and I think Franklin is has made better decisions in many of these areas than his father has. So I don't want to deny the impact of Graham, but at the same time, I think he would have been more effective, more effective actually, in terms of institutionally, in terms of his legacy, if he would never have partnered with Roman Catholics and liberals. Okay. Packer. Packer could have been, if he would have come out in 1966, Packer could have been the theologian for evangelicals going into the 20th century. Instead, Martin Lloyd-Jones told him this, warned him of this. He got embroiled in the denominational fights of Anglicanism, and he should have written a great systematic theology. He should have. We should have a systematic theology by J.I. Packer. We have a little concise theology. We should have had a great theology by J.I. Packer, but he never wrote it because he was so busy with denominational warfare with liberals. So he tried to stay in and reform the Church of England, and guess what happened? In 2008, they kicked him out. Did y'all know this? He moved over to Canada, and on the gay issue, he wouldn't compromise. Finally, it came to a point where he wouldn't budge on the gay issue, and in 2008, they kicked him out of Anglicanism. Lloyd-Jones had told him that 50 years earlier. So, Carl Truman has a great article on this. He said, in many ways, we love, respect, go read everything Packer's written, but in many ways, Packer is a failure because Packer could have taken that opportunity and would have been the heir to Lloyd-Jones and conservative British evangelicalism and would have been the doctrinal leader of evangelicals going into the 21st century. Martin Lloyd-Jones, let me say negatively. He should have had a plan for calling, you know, and standing up and calling people out. He should have had a robust plan in terms of what he was calling people to. He should have tried harder than he did to get Jai Packer on board to come out. I think some have surmised that maybe he was a little intimidated by Packer's brilliance, but he should have gotten J.I. Packer to come out because when Lloyd-Jones died, there really wasn't an heir to take the mantle of leadership in conservative evangelicalism in the U.K. Nobody took up the baton. Jeff Thomas is a good godly man. Maybe you all know of him. I mean, he could be seen as one of the representatives. Ian Murray, who was an assistant to Martin Lloyd-Jones. But none of those men had the stature of a Packer or a Lloyd-Jones. Lloyd-Jones also, I think, made a strategic blunder The big call-out happened in 1966. In 1968, he got intestinal cancer, and he almost immediately resigned his pastorate at Westminster Chapel. But what he needed to do is he needed to stay. And Westminster Chapel would have remained the hub of conservative doctrinal Christianity in England, but he suddenly left right when that movement needed an institution as a flagpole. So he left in 1968 and really the movement was dissipated. But all that being said, and I think you'll see that this is obvious from my whole presentation, I think history has vindicated Martin Lloyd-Jones. After 1966, in the evangelical movement in England, Lloyd-Jones was looked at as somebody who was a pariah out in the wilderness. In fact, Alistair McGrath even described Lloyd-Jones. He said, after 1966, Lloyd-Jones was a man out in the wilderness. Well, guess who else was out in the wilderness? John the Baptist, right? I mean, the wilderness is not the bad place to be when you're a prophet. Rico Tice, does anybody know that name? He was an evangelist. Rico Tice, Anglican evangelist. He was at a basics conference on a panel I saw, and Rico Tice just this year left the Church of England. And he said, you know what? Lloyd-Jones was right. we should have come out in 1966. We should have come out in 1966. So really it's a lesson in standing for your convictions and being willing and able to act upon them in a moment of crisis even when, as Athanasius said, the world is contramundum standing against you. Obviously, we do not want to separate from people who claim the name of Christ belligerently, but at times it is necessary. At times it is necessary. Evangelicalism has swung in distancing itself from fundamentalism, where there really is no theology of separation anymore. I think we need to pay attention to that and think about that. We should not partner with people who fundamentally deny the gospel in our very message.