Dr Paul Allen

It didn’t take long, but we can now say that Aaron Renn and James Wood have been vindicated. Their recent analyses of our cultural moment and strategies for Christian cultural engagement have been proven right by recent events in Australia. I refer, here, to Andrew Thorburn and his rapid departure from a high-profile role at one of Australia’s most prestigious professional sporting clubs. This incident is a harbinger of the times and illustrates the wisdom of Wood’s and Renn’s claims about the church’s relationship to the culture.  Renn argues that we are in a “Negative World,” a cultural climate where Christianity is on-the-nose and increasingly marginal.  Conservative Christianity has a particularly bad brand in a world where traditional social mores are passé. Wood, by interacting with the example of Presbyterian minister Tim Keller, asserted that the age of “winsome” evangelical cultural engagement is over.  Whether or not Wood has properly framed Keller’s ministry st...

In his recent essay, Tim Keller has entered his bit into a persistent dialogue regarding how Christians should speak in public. The players in this dialogue, including James Wood, Aaron Renn, and Simon Kennedy, are working to determine how Christians should speak outside the church. At odds is not sermonic form or structure, but what it should sound like when Christians are called to “give an answer” (1 Peter 3:5). Keep in mind that the content of the answer is, for the most part, not up for debate. “We preach Christ crucified” (1 Cor 1:23), they all say. But the authors of this piece are not so sure. Keller has settled on account of “persuasion” as the form Christian speech should take in the negative world. Though we are no more satisfied with Wood’s account of a more confrontational approach, Keller’s account of persuasion falls flat in the negative world. Indeed at the heart of persuasion, what should be called apologetics, is a functional agreement between the speaker and the audi...

Watching David Koch skewer evangelical pastor Guy Mason on Australia’s morning show Sunrise was an excruciating experience.[1] Andrew Thorburn had been dismissed for his association with the City on a Hill church just a couple of days after being appointed chief executive of a professional Australian football club.  The reason given was that the church held to traditional Christian positions on abortion and homosexuality. These beliefs were now declared beyond the pale for someone prominent in Australian public life. Thorburn would not discuss his beliefs with the media, so Sunrise invited the pastor of Thorburn’s church, Guy Mason, to be interviewed instead. I could not be more sympathetic to Mason because I have been through many media interviews and you always, always come home thinking of things you should have said. It is easy for the rest of us to watch the recording and imagine from the tranquillity of our easy chairs better responses to the interviewer. I am more interested...