Football fans talk of “60 years of hurt” harking back to when England won the World Cup. UK Evangelicals also reflect back to 1966, specifically to October 18th when Martyn Llloyd Jones addressed the National Evangelical Assembly. His address on Evangelical Unity ironically led to greater division, on a personal level between Lloyd Jones and John Stott who chaired the assembly and broke with convention by giv9ing an impassioned rebuttal rather than merely summing up. Ona wider level, it reflected greater tensions between hose who chose to heed Lloyd Jones appeal to come out of the denominations, often at great cost, manses were forfeit, church buildings lost and those who chose to remain in denominations, particularly Anglican Evangelicals who met together at Keele the following year to affirm their commitment to the Church of England.
Whilst the transcript of the talk has been available, most of us, to now have interacted with the event through reports and excerpts rather than access to the full talk. This year, the MLJ Trust managed to recover and share the lost audio of Lloyd Jones’ speech. You can listen to it here. I would like to share a few reflections having had the opportunity to listen myself. It is worth acknowledging at the start that the recording quality makes listening to a challenge I don’t know if further digital clean-up is possible. However, it still helps us to get more of a fee, not just for what Lloyd Jones said but the tone and the atmosphere. It has often been observed that hearing the Dr in person added something that is lost on the written page. Those who heard him at Westminster Chapel have suggested that even recordings don’t fully capture everything but they do get us a little closer to hearing Lloyd Jones in his own voice.
One thing I immediately noticed was that Lloyd Jones’ humour comes across far more in this and that might change our perception of him. Many of us, perhaps because of the dominant photographic images available and because of the way he eschewed jokes and illustrations in his sermons may have been tempted to regard him as dour but, especially the early exchanges indicate a man with warmth and self-depreciating humour.
We have tended even with excerpts and reports available to assume that the explosiveness was in the call to come out from compromised denominations. I suspect that we have perhaps tended to “listen backwards” making our assessment of the argument both from Stott’s response and from the subsequent events at Keele. However, listening to the full talk encourages us to see DMLJ’s emphasise placed on a desire for evangelical unity first and I wonder if it was this challenge that stung the most. There was a wistfulness to the argument as Lloyd Jones expressed his regret that Evangelicals did not give more time to each other and being together.
This remains the question today. Do we prioritise evangelical unity or do other things come first. And that must also raise the question as to whether we can let other secondary issues as well as denominational unity take priority. What I mean is this: The Dr takes time to set out what he considers to be the essentials to evangelicalism. It’s not unity first, it is unity in truth, doctrine does not lose its place and he is concerned for doctrinal precision. However, he clearly did not give every issue similar weight and that can be seen in his own practice. After all, this was the Reformed, conservative who took time to mentor and encourage the then emerging leaders of the Charismatic movement. Now, I don’t think that we should seek to honour Lloyd Jones by accepting his uniting and dividing points as infallible, that would turn him into a kind of Evangelical pope and our unity would be in a person rather than the truth, the last thing that he would have wanted. However, the principles he establishes are vital.
It is perhaps ironic that we have a recovered recording of an evangelical hero critiquing our lack of a doctrine of the church at the same time as The Evangelical Alliance have shared a report suggesting that not all “belief” Evangelicals attend church regularly. Perhaps we still lack a doctrine of the church that we consider part of our essentials?
I hope to return to this specific question in future posts and at greater length in my “A Pastors’ Theology” series. However, I think we can start to sketch out an outline of what an Evangelical Doctrine of the Church should include the following. First, that the Church is the bride of Christ and we cannot claim to love the groom whilst dishonouring his bride. Secondly, if redemption means that we are set free from slavery to sin, it does not mean that we are simply set loose, we are welcomed into a family as adopted children. Thirdly, we are strictly urged not to forsake meeting together with the pattern being local churches gathering weekly in the New Testament. Fourth, the gifts of the Spirit are to be understood in the context of the body. We are members of the body together and receive gifts for the body. This means that Evangelical Ecclesiology is overtly Trinitarian with the Father, Son and Spirit central tom our understanding of The Church. I would argue therefore, that it should be impossible to claim to be an Evangelical and not have a commitment to belonging to and active involvement in a local church.
Whilst the recording presents its challenges, yes you do get a bit more of a feel for the tone as well as the content. There is, I think there is a frailty in his voice, he is the elder statesman approaching the end of his ministry at The Chapel and facing ill health. Still, he is very much recognised as the authoritative preacher that we know from his Romans and Ephesians series. Further, rhetorical shape of the talk is classic Lloyd Jones, he starts gently and steadily, he diagnoses the problem and builds a logical case before the speech takes off at the end. Even with the distance of years and the challenges or recording quality, you can still feel its force.
Listening to the talk confirms to me that this is not merely an exercise in preserving historical heritage. The subject matter remains relevant to today. Now, as it happens, the Ecumenical movement did not end up flattening out denominational structures, one world wide church has not been created. This might temper calls to create structural unity between Evangelicals and I’m not sure that heavy structure would have fitted with Lloyd Jones’ congregationalism anyway. However two big questions remain. The first is do we have a commitment as Evangelicals to The Church and the second is are we committed to unity with each other.
