Ed Stetzer

Although I have recently shared that I have joined the faculty at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, I am still pleased to be teaching a few places in the next year or so, including Reformed, Biblical, and Southeastern seminaries.

It was recently announced that I will be co-teaching my class at Reformed with Joel Hunter.

Joel is quite a legend and has riled up much of the evangelical world. He was offered the leadership of the Christian Coalition, announced his plan to broaden the agenda of the organization, and then the Coalition and he parted ways while he was still "president elect." The New York Times version is here.

CNN explained:

"I wanted to expand the issues from only moral ones -- such as opposing abortion and redefining marriage -- to include compassion issues such as poverty, justice, and creation care," Hunter said in a statement. "We need to care as much for the vulnerable outside the womb as inside the womb."

He has a book out that gets at some of his political views, A New Kind of Conservative.

However, conservative politics (of the new or old kinds) will not be the focus of our class. We will focus on the gospel, the mission, and the church. Since Joel has been all over the news, many people might not know that he is a pastor in Central Florida with a thriving church called Northland.

And, the book he is requiring for the class is Church Distributed, his manifesto of sorts. You can read the book online here. In it, he explains:

So what is the distributed church, anyway?...

In the present model of the church, the local church tends to be isolated and preoccupied with its own world. It appears to be, and often is, self-centered. Our triune God, by His very nature, models relationship-centeredness. God in Christ came out of His self-sufficiency to identify with those radically different from Himself, and His church is called to be like Him. The church that is distributed values ministry beyond its walls more than ministry inside them because it focuses on those not yet included. It reaches through relationships it has within its congregation to identify with others. Intentional distribution of the church with a goal of ultimate connection through relationship reflects God's image.

Christian, wake up: YOU ARE A MINISTER OF THE CHURCH. You don't need to know more; you don't need to have a church program commission you--although both can be useful. But you need to understand that in this definition of the church that you are a minister of the church and you can further ministry by connecting with other believers who are different from yourself.

It should be a great class. You can download the syllabus here.