Tony Miano Repents (?) of Anger

Tony Miano says he is walking in repentance of unrighteous and consistent anger. Let's just say it comes as no surprise that he has had anger problems for years. I am glad he acknowledges it as sin, but as far as whether the repentance is real and/or anywhere near complete, color me hopeful but unpersuaded. One need only check the archives of this very blog to see his devolution over the course of time, from one perspective.

For his sake, I definitely hope it's true. One reason I'm not optimistic it actually is true is the way he characterises what happened when he moved to Iowa.

"a man who was once a close friend began a relentless and vicious attack against me and Pastor Mike Reid."

Here is the "attack" Miano references. He still apparently doesn't understand that calls to repentance are not attacks. That makes me think that his repentance is either fake or incomplete. He hasn't begun to apologise to any abolitionists, so I'm very skeptical. 

Given what is known about this Mike Reid fellow, I certainly hope that Miano's new soft and loving side isn't due to any weird stuff on Reid's part or any funny business going on with any of Miano's female family members. I wish I were joking.

Tony Miano Sinning Against Abolitionists Yet Again

The hate is strong with this one...



A commenter on the video says:

Watching this video with a purely analytical eye, here's what I see. A man is reading the Bible out loud, apparently to himself. A person walks up and says, "That's for you," interrupting him to the same degree as a Denny's waitress, a church usher, or a StarBucks barista delivering a latte (and who hasn't read their Bible in a coffee shop?). The man is neither annoyed nor offended by this and is about to return to reading the Word, when a second man also interrupts the reading to inform the first man that he has been given an unwelcome tract. Instead of proceeding with the reading (you know, out if respect for God's word) the first man then himself interrupts the word of God, having apparently decided that it would be in the interest of the greater good to pause and use the moment as a platform to make accusatory statements about the philosophy represented by the person who initially said, "This is for you."

Very true.

Joel McDurmon spits truth, implicitly endorses Church Repent

"Even here, however, we are going to face opposition and pushback—largely from fellow evangelicals. I can think of only one remedy for this problem, and it has to start in the pulpits. Absent this initiative, it falls to parachurch ministries and individual Christians to state the truth. This is where we’re at." (Source)

So... when abolitionists said these kinds of things (three years ago), many in the Reformed crowd asked us who our elders were, which elders sent us out so as to say things like this, and whence our authority came to say things like this. Men like Marcus Pittman, Jon Speed, Shane Dodson, and Tony Miano publicly and hypocritically excoriated abolitionists for being consistent with the doctrines that we hold (and, actually, the doctrines that they themselves hold), called us "rebels", "nomads", a cult, and ecclesiastical anarchists. They said that since we are not part of the local churches in question, we had no business calling those churches to repent.

Now that one of their favorite polemicists is saying it, will they ask him the same questions and "cut ties" with him, dissociating from The American Vision?

Time will tell. But it would appear that time is running out for these guys' point of view. More and more people are seeing that their ecclesiolatry just won't cut it when virtually nobody is actually living for Jesus.

The negligible danger of making evangelism one's mistress

UPDATE: Tony Miano is on a downward slide into a very dangerous spiritual position and is leading his family down that path as well. As I said in my review of his book, "I sometimes honestly fear for him at the time when (not if) the elder(s) of his church fail him."
Well, now I fear for him even more. See here and then more importantly here. Lord have mercy. He who has presumed to lecture so many, block them on social media, and sow division between them and other believers on the basis of ecclesiology, "pastoral authority", "the authority of the local church", and whether one has been "sent" to do evangelism has shown himself to be an immature nomad, tossed about by winds and waves of doctrine.
Psalm 9:15 - The nations have sunk down in the pit which they have made; In the net which they hid, their own foot has been caught.
Proverbs 29:6 - By transgression an evil man is ensnared, But the righteous sings and rejoices.

And yet...
Proverbs 24:17-18 - Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles; or the LORD will see it and be displeased, and turn His anger away from him.

Pray for the man. Pray he will repent of all his bombastic rhetoric and realise the massive piles of hypocrisy in which he has engaged the last few years.
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Certain street preachers of some popularity take every opportunity they can, it seems, to warn their readers/listeners against making evangelism and open-air preaching a "mistress" (here for example) and thus neglecting family, marriage, and the more "mundane" (as it were) aspects of church membership.
Yes, that happens, here and there. Yes, nobody should neglect their family or other responsibilities while they do other good things. Yes, it is a warning well taken. Yes, it should be stated here and there.
But is that a relevant warning to the vast, vast majority of professing Christians in America? Are we in the middle of a huge movement of men spending forty hours per week at work and then another forty out on the street or at the abortion mill preaching and evangelising while their families languish at home? No.
So, forget a "huge movement" - are we witnessing even a significant minority of the professing Christians of America doing so or anything close to it? No.
As conceded above, of course to do such a thing would be bad and sinful. But there's something else that is bad and sinful, which *is* in fact a vice shared by the vast, vast majority of professing Christians in America - a profound and vast complacency vis-à-vis the fact that people, BY THE THOUSANDS, are dying and going to Hell and murdering their babies, every single day, and that same vast, vast majority is doing nothing about it while they pursue their leisure, vacations, book studies, sports and fantasy sports, and potlucks.
These men are like doctors who during your annual checkup make a big deal out of your chronically stuffy nose while not even mentioning the fact that your aorta is 99% blocked and that your blood pressure and cholesterol are way too high. Upon coming to one's senses and a full realisation of the actual situation and its dangers, one would abandon that physician and warn others about his neglect and/or incompetence.

The "Herald" Society

I keep hearing people use the word "herald". And they apply it to someone who goes to a building every single Sunday and lectures the same people over and over again about things that in many ways they should already know and be learning themselves (and teaching others [Heb 5:12]).

That's not what a herald is, folks. A herald goes forth from the King, bearing the King's message, and he gives it to ALL the King's subjects. He doesn't put out a sign, "Come hear the King's message. Once a week, for 30 minutes. Only inside this building. You know, if you want to," and then wait for the King's rebellious subjects to come to him.

There's a name for someone who lectures to a small subset of the King's subjects over and over again at a set time and place, but it's not a "herald".

I must admit that it is hard to see friends and acquaintances post and repost notifications about "Herald" Society get-togethers as if these were beneficial to the kingdom of God. I truly believe that there is a lot more bad than good about such things. Most of the reason why I think this centers around the hypocrisy that is more than evident in so many of the dealings of these men.

Take the "H"S meeting currently underway in Milton, FL as an example. As part of the buildup leading to this event, Tony Miano among others have put out some material encouraging people to attend. As this remains a topic of interest to me, I have followed some of that material, partly to see whether the "H"S has learned from previous errors which I have personally documented. To be more specific, the errors center around such things as

• forming a parachurch ministry, all the while decrying parachurch ministries.
• using the word "Herald" in the title of the society, all the while intentionally not doing the things that heralds do.
• using the word "Herald" in the title of the society and saying stuff like "No king but Christ", all the while putting obstacles in the way of those who desire to obey the Great Commission (like women for example) and doing all they can to force potential actual heralds to get permission from someone who acts like a king in demanding that people submit to his own rule before the herald obeys the actual King.
• teaching the sufficiency of Scripture, all the while imposing extrabiblical traditions on others, such as "the call to preach", requiring that men "be called" before they are permitted to engage in open-air preaching (OAP). 
• trumpeting the importance of the local church, all the while actually negating its importance (see more on that below).
• calling people to waste time and money that could have been put to use in their own localities, and in exchange giving them something (a series of lectures) that could easily have been communicated by an iTunes podcast.
• teaching Calvinist (and frequently cessationist) doctrine, all the while pushing a view of sanctification that I can only describe as charismatic Wesleyan, in that the "call to preach" maps quite well onto the "second blessing" that in other circles might be thought of as the "baptism of the Holy Spirit".

All of this is hypocrisy, but let's focus on that last item for a moment. The funny thing about it is that in charismatic theology, this "second blessing", this "baptism in the Holy Spirit", is usually pretty objectively verifiable - does the allegedly secondly-blessed person speak in tongues? If yes, they figure that the person has been baptised in the Holy Spirit.
And even leaving aside the fact that such a thing as the "call to preach" is not Scriptural, like at all, how do you figure out whether someone has received that particular second blessing? I keep asking the question. The most common answer would seem to be something like "the elders of your church tell you".

Which leads me to a video hyping the "H"S that Tony Miano put out, in which he reiterates some of the things he and Jeff Rose discussed in a recent podcast and in which he expresses more of this typical "H"S hypocrisy. Note that:

• attendees will listen to lectures for 20 hours, in 3 days. That's almost 7 hours of lecture per day, all in the name of "equipping". (As if anyone can remember a significant % of that amount of lecturing.)
• we should not expect a "caste system". And yet:
  --speakers speak from an elevated stage, from a thing called a "pulpit".
  --the centerpiece of the event is listening to these exalted figures.
  --the main attraction is the names they were able to attract to speak - James White, Earl Blackburn, etc.
  --there will be those who are "called to OAP" and those who aren't.
  --anyone can listen to lectures but only the "called" few get to put it into practice in the primary way that Jesus, the prophets, and the apostles did.
• Miano says that "speakers will speak of their love for the church, love for the bride of Christ, and love for reaching the lost with the Gospel". And I guess they'll demonstrate that by not modeling how the bride of Christ ought to be living, by implying very strongly that the mission of the church is to sit down, shaddup, and listen to Great Men talk, and by not even trying to reach the lost with the Gospel, because...
• there won't be any organised outreach to the lost during the entire duration of the "H"S meeting.
  Miano says, "don't expect a pep rally for OAP. Don't expect a lot of time on the streets. We want to focus on teaching, prayer, worship, the edification of pastors and their churches, and encouraging the bride of Christ to lift up the Gospel."
  So they're going to do that by not spending time on the streets, and by not proclaiming the Gospel, and by staying behind the walls of a church building, in a different city, just like most everyone does when they're at their own church. By not heralding.
  And then when, at the 6-minute mark of the video, Miano exhorts his listeners that "it is time for Christians to get out of the Christian bubble", the irony is intolerable.
• the excuse given for not modeling or training in OAP is because "that's the responsibility of the local church."
  --But teaching theology isn't?
  --People can't sit in pews at their own churches?
  --Wouldn't it be better to spend the time that attendees spent traveling and pew-sitting at the "H"S in deepening relationships at the attendees' own local churches?
  Wouldn't it also be better to put the traveling and lodging money the attendees used for the "H"S event to use at their own local church? Isn't the "H"S actually working opposite to its stated desires?
  --It's not the responsibility of each local church to teach about the Bible and talk about love for the church, bride of Christ, and reaching the lost with the Gospel?
  --It never occurs to the "H"S organisers that most pastors wouldn't have any idea how to train anyone in evangelism, let alone OAP?
  --Or that saying "only called people should OAP" gives a convenient out to anyone who has ulterior motives in not challenging fear or incurring the anger, slander, and scorn of worldly people?

All these things considered, it is entirely unclear why anyone thinks that putting together a "H"S event is a good idea. It is even less clear why anyone would want to attend, apart from the proffered opportunity to, I'm sorry to say it like this but I believe it is largely true, listen to heroes, Great Men, talk from an elevated position so they can consume more information. Because many think to at least some extent that their closeness to God is necessarily directly proportional to how much theology they know.


It seems like a far better name for the Herald Society would be the Pew-Sitter Society. They model during their meetings what they actually want Christians to be when they go back to their own communities and churches - pew-sitters until someone in a more elevated ecclesiastical position gives them permission to go love their neighbor and obey the King.

In which my tweet about the Herald Society is vindicated

On my "to listen to occasionally" list of podcasts is Tony Miano's "Cross Encounters". I can't remember which episode it was, but some time before the November 2014 Herald Society conference, he spent some time hyping the conference and encouraging listeners to attend. My interest was piqued when he specifically stated that this year's HS conference would not feature very much street evangelism or open air preaching (OAP), but would rather focus on sermons wherein the conference attendees would sit and listen to someone talk from the stage.

This struck me as a bizarre waste of time and energy - could not sermons like these be recorded beforehand, or preached lectured at one's own church or something in some sort of collaborative effort, and later made available for download to whoever wanted them? The whole point of calling your conference the Herald Society would seem to be to get heralds together. You get however many dozens of people interested in OAP, doesn't it make a ton of sense to actually go out and herald the Gospel all over the place?

If an OAPreacher is a candle illuminating darkness within our culture, what happens when you get 50 of those candles together in one place? That much more brightness and illumination, right? So when we read things like Matthew 5...

14“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden; 15nor does anyone light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. 16“Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.

...wouldn't it be a good idea to go ahead and shine that bright light to those who are in darkness? How is it a good idea to take that light, all those OAPreachers, and hide them behind the walls of a building, using all their time to preach around 20 (probably pretty lengthy) sermons in 2 1/2 days?

Refreshing

It's not often that the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy (Luke 12:1), is so obviously displayed as it was here recently.
Thankfully, abolitionists' attendance of Bellevue Baptist Church on Sunday caused something of a stir, which is one of the things we were hoping for. That the hearts of Pharisees revealed themselves afterward is a bonus.
Consider:

@Fred_Butler @fbc_jd If they're protesting a church that preaches the authentic gospel, then they are wrong to protest.
— Tony Miano (@TonyMiano) November 2, 2014

@Fred_Butler @fbc_jd 150 years ago, it was John Brown. 30 years ago it was Operation Rescue. Today, it's AHA. Same song, different band.
— Tony Miano (@TonyMiano) November 5, 2014

@ABereanOne @fbc_jd @TonyMiano Crickets are a good thing. There's nothing to reconcile, b/c there was no unity to begin with.
— Fred Butler (@Fred_Butler) November 6, 2014

Even through the cold, cruel screen through which you view these words, you can feel the flow of love and warmth, the Christian charity.

Forget all the times we have repeatedly rejected the word "protest" with respect to the Church Repent project. Forget the fact that all we did was attend the service quietly and then afterwards offer pamphlets to people, then when security stepped in and, in a break from their normal pattern, pushed everyone out of the auditorium and called the cops to make us leave even though a simple request would have sufficed, we merely sang "Amazing Grace" and then left. Forget that if we had been there to protest, there would have been zero doubt that we were there to protest! Forget the fact that abolitionists specifically and explicitly reject violence, whereas John Brown didn't. And forget the fact that OR wasn't violent either, and yet Butler's and Miano's pastor looked the other way while a member of his church sent sheriff's deputies to beat the tar out of and break bones of OR volunteers.

Fred Butler did us all the favor of stripping the niceties from this debate. Tony Miano and his acolytes love to talk about "unity in the Gospel", and Butler and others will say the same when they don't dislike you enough. They'll even reach across denominational lines and make sure everyone knows that Presbyterians, Lutherans, Arminians, and such are their brothers in Christ, because we all hold to the same Gospel. But poke at one of their sacred cows - the institutional church structure - and suddenly the false veneer vanishes.

Apparently to them, location matters. You can criticise Bellevue Baptist pastor Steve Gaines all you want for his arch-anti-Calvinism and his crazy support for altar calls and sinner's prayers, as long as you do it from afar. Dare to defile the sacred ground of the church building and suggest that maybe there are false converts inside its walls and that maybe something ought to be done about that, and these Gatekeepers of Evangelical Purity will make sure your backside is smarting.

The Gospel we preach is not fundamentally different. Miano professes faith in the Gospel, and I believe the Gospel. I think there's more unity in the Gospel than these men do. Butler thinks there was no unity to begin with.

But many Pharisees can profess the Gospel quite well. That's part of their charm. It's by their fruits you will know them. Though it may hurt a bit to see people we may admire reveal the sin in their hearts, let it be a helpful reminder that we are not to put our trust in men.

Some Bad Advice From Tony Miano

UPDATE: Tony Miano is on a downward slide into a very dangerous spiritual position and is leading his family down that path as well. As I said in my review of his book, "I sometimes honestly fear for him at the time when (not if) the elder(s) of his church fail him."
Well, now I fear for him even more. See here and then more importantly here. Lord have mercy. He who has presumed to lecture so many, block them on social media, and sow division between them and other believers on the basis of ecclesiology, "pastoral authority", "the authority of the local church", and whether one has been "sent" to do evangelism has shown himself to be an immature nomad, tossed about by winds and waves of doctrine.
Psalm 9:15 - The nations have sunk down in the pit which they have made; In the net which they hid, their own foot has been caught.
Proverbs 29:6 - By transgression an evil man is ensnared, But the righteous sings and rejoices.

And yet...
Proverbs 24:17-18 - Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles; or the LORD will see it and be displeased, and turn His anger away from him.

Pray for the man. Pray he will repent of all his bombastic rhetoric and realise the massive piles of hypocrisy in which he has engaged the last few years.

============================================

Tony Miano, well-known street preacher, had this to say on Facebook recently:

Can't find a solid church that supports open-air preaching?
Then go to a solid church that doesn't support open-air preaching, and submit to the authority of the pastors/elders of the church. It is more important that you are a serving member of a local church than it is for you to open-air preach.
Christian Brother: God has certainly called you to be a hand, or foot, or arm, or leg in His Body. But He may NOT have called you to open-air preach. The fact that you want to open-air preach doesn't mean God has called you to open-air preach. You may not be finding a church that supports open-air preaching because that may not be the role the Lord has for you in His body.
So, get plugged into a local church; live in submission to the elders and in love with the rest of the congregation. Be willing to work the nursery, or scrub a toilet, or teach a Sunday school class (if you're qualified). Be willing to serve for no other reason than it is a fulfillment of the two greatest commandments--to love God and to love people.
The Lord may yet call you to open-air preach (if you are a man), and you will know that because your pastors/elders will affirm your call to preach the gospel in the open-air. And they will likely affirm that call once they see you are willing to submit to authority, serve the Body, can rightly handle the Scriptures, and once they see that the gospel of Jesus Christ is more important to you than hearing your own voice preaching it.
Give it some thought.

I gave it some thought, and I'd like to share a few.

Notice that Miano didn't frame the issue in terms of whether the church thinks the individual reader ought to open-air preach (OAP). It is plausible a church might not want a particular individual to OAP. For example, if the aspiring preacher is not very good at explaining the Gospel, or he hasn't mastered his temper yet and easily gets mad and challenges people to fistfights. But Miano is talking about OAP in general.

On the other hand, Miano seems to be referring to a situation where an aspiring OA preacher is not a member of a church because he can't find one that supports OAP. It is a pitifully sad commentary on the state of Reformedigelical churches in the West that this is a plausible scenario. I would at least agree with Miano on this - if you're not a member of a church, there had better be a really really good reason. Ie, you live in a location where despite faithful searching you have not been able to connect with anybody who actually loves Jesus.

On the other other hand (which I guess gets us back to the original hand), one might decide that until the Lord provides something better, he should probably just join the best church he can find and try to influence it toward following the Scripture. This may in some cases result in conflict between the person wanting to be faithful to Jesus and the leadership and/or the rest of the congregation who are all too happy doing their own thing, following their own autonomous desires and preferences, and ignoring major portions of the Scripture in so doing. What then?

Before we get into that, I'd like to ask this: What makes Miano so sure that a church that doesn't support open-air preaching is indeed solid? Evangelism and the Great Commission are kind of a big deal when it comes to properly obeying Jesus and fulfilling the two greatest commandments, and if a church is not interested in obeying Jesus, that's not a solid church. It doesn't matter what they confess, what they say with their lips. The Scripture is full of rebukes of false professors who say one thing and do another. Like the Pharisees. Like the Jerusalemites who said "the temple of YHWH! The temple of YHWH! The temple of YHWH!" Like the false prophets who said "peace, peace" when there was no peace.

Perhaps the church thinks open-air preaching is mean and nasty in and of itself. I would suggest in that case the OA preacher invite people from the church to come out with him, to show them how it's done and to demonstrate that, while of course someone can be mean and nasty in virtually any situation, OAP can be done in a way that is loving, kind, and understanding.

What if no one from the church is willing to go watch, and yet they continue to insist that OAP, a ministry that Jesus and Paul and Peter did a whole lot, is not good? Well, then, those people need to be called to repentance. Or I suppose you could leave and be a "nomad", but then that would leave the people in the church in unchallenged deception, which is not good for the church he leaves behind. It is actually the opposite of love for those people.

On the other hand, what if a few people go out with the OA preacher and everything goes well, and yet they continue to oppose OAP in and of itself? Would not the conversation then have to shift to their biblical reasons to justify their opposition? It may be that the leadership of the church would in that case lord it over the OA preacher, citing some imaginary "authority" to tell him that OAP is not OK, with no other reason than that they say so. Such person(s) would be deep in sin and rebellion against the role they're supposed to be playing in their local church. The OA preacher, being a part of that local church himself, would be obligated (not permitted, by the way, obligated) to get one or two other witnesses and rebuke that person, initiating church discipline for unrepentantly sinning against the OA preacher and against the rest of the congregation for refusing to teach the whole counsel of God.

1 Timothy 5:19-21 - Do not receive an accusation against an elder except on the basis of two or three witnesses. Those who continue in sin, rebuke in the presence of all, so that the rest also will be fearful of sinning. I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus and of His chosen angels, to maintain these principles without bias, doing nothing in a spirit of partiality.

Miano later says this:

The Lord may yet call you to open-air preach (if you are a man), and you will know that because your pastors/elders will affirm your call to preach the gospel in the open-air.

There's a reason why he didn't include any Bible citations along with this statement. Nothing in God's Word would lead us to believe this is true. It also exhibits a puzzling naïveté. Does Miano really think that the most common reason why a pastor might oppose OAP would be that the OA preacher in question has a history of "rebelling" against the pastor's "authority"? What does "pastoral authority" even mean, in a situation where the pastor is not following the Word of God?

Let's continue with another statement from Miano:

Christian Brother: God has certainly called you to be a hand, or foot, or arm, or leg in His Body. But He may NOT have called you to open-air preach. The fact that you want to open-air preach doesn't mean God has called you to open-air preach. You may not be finding a church that supports open-air preaching because that may not be the role the Lord has for you in His body.

Miano is equivocating on the uses of the word "calling" in this paragraph. The first occurrence is fine - it is indeed true that God has called every individual Christian to be some body part in His Body. Miano seems to be assuming that 1 Corinthians 12's discussion of body parts refers to a given local church, which I would dispute, but let's leave that aside for now. How do we know that God has called us to be a body part in the Body of Christ? The Scripture says so.

So how does Miano propose that an individual can know that he is "called" to do OAP? I have asked this question many times and never received an answer. It is a major weakness in his book "Should She Preach?", which I documented in my review thereof. Which Scripture passage leads us to expect that God would continually send individual people specific callings to specific tasks or ministries, going forward throughout the ages during which the church would subsist? I have argued that no such Scripture exists. This is where the equivocation comes in - the first time Miano says "calling", he is correctly referring to biblical command. The second and third times, he is trading on a mistaken tradition of man that is sadly common in Reformedigelicalism.

Miano is doubtless aware of the Modern-Day Downgrade at work in the Reformedigelical churches of the West. Part of the Downgrade is the trend toward that which is easy and adds to the comfort level of the partakers. As an experienced street preacher myself, I know well that OAP incurs a very high level of discomfort, and Miano of course knows this too. Since it is uncomfortable, people don't want to do it, and this leads to their making excuses, twisting the Scripture so they can justify their apathy toward the lost. This is a far more plausible explanation for why someone might not be able to find a church that supports OAP.

So, get plugged into a local church; live in submission to the elders and in love with the rest of the congregation. Be willing to work the nursery, or scrub a toilet, or teach a Sunday school class (if you're qualified). Be willing to serve for no other reason than it is a fulfillment of the two greatest commandments--to love God and to love people.

Of course, Christians should be members of a local church; I don't dispute that. I would take issue with verbiage like "live in submission to the elders", however. If the elders tell you not to do a biblical thing, or to do an unbiblical thing, it is no virtue to obey. It is actually sin to obey these lesser voices in that case. Sin because you ought to be doing the right thing, and also sin because you are acting in a cowardly way, following the "overlord"'s orders rather than standing against evil and exposing it (Jeremiah 7, Ephesians 5:11) out of love for the deceived elder(s) as well as love for the congregation.

You can't actually love your congregation if you are sinning by knowingly withholding from them that which they need, that of which you know you ought to help them take hold.

James 4:17 - Therefore, to one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin.

Taken in the context of the situation he is laying out, Miano is actually indirectly recommending a sinful course of action.

Also, because of the discomfort involved in OAP, there are precious few people willing to do it. Yet I challenge you to show me another ministry in which the Gospel can be spread so widely to so many people in such an efficient manner as OAP. I'm not criticising other methods of evangelism. I'm saying that OAP has its place, and Jesus chose it for a reason.

Mark 1:14-15 - Now after John had been taken into custody, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”
Matthew 4:23 - Jesus was going throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness among the people.
Matthew 9:35 - Jesus was going through all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness.
Luke 20:1 - On one of the days while He was teaching the people in the temple and preaching the gospel, the chief priests and the scribes with the elders confronted Him...

If your church meets in a separate building, far be it from me to suggest you not scrub a toilet. If y'all meet in a house, scrub the toilet there. Go for it! Doing that sort of thing and OAP are hardly mutually exclusive. I mean, unless your nursery duties are late on Friday night or something, which is often a really good time of week to do OAP.

The problem here is not whether an OA preacher in a church should say, "OAP is all I do within my local church." That would be foolish and wrong. But Miano is not only acting like it is better to do something that most anyone can and is probably willing to do (since scrubbing toilets is, let's face it, not too hard) than to do something that is hard but that results in tons of people hearing the Gospel proclaimed with boldness and power, for no other reason than that the OA preacher's church is in sin and thinks that OAP is bad.

It would be far better to say this: Be willing to OAP for no other reason than it is a fulfillment of the two greatest commandments--to love God and to love people. And it is love not only to the lost who hear it, but also to the church members who probably have an unbiblical worldview undergirding their unbiblical objection to OAP; the OA preacher has the chance to set them free from these wrong views. This is pleasing to God.

Two more notes:

The Lord may yet call you to open-air preach (if you are a man)

Please, again, see my review of Miano's book on the issue of whether only men are biblically warranted to OAP.

once they see that the gospel of Jesus Christ is more important to you than hearing your own voice preaching it.

True, the OA preacher must guard against pride in his heart. But when fewer than thousands of Christians are doing OAP in one's area and there is opportunity, it should be done in a biblical manner, no matter whether the elders of your church are sinfully suppressing it.

Speaking for myself, it matters not whether it's my voice. I want many voices proclaiming the Good News of the risen Savior. And if there are none, I want at least one. If that's me, so be it.

Philippians 1:15-18 - Some, to be sure, are preaching Christ even from envy and strife, but some also from good will; the latter do it out of love, knowing that I am appointed for the defense of the gospel; the former proclaim Christ out of selfish ambition rather than from pure motives, thinking to cause me distress in my imprisonment. What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed; and in this I rejoice.

The Nomad

Follow me on the timing of this.

September 11, 2011, Tony Miano joins Faith Community Church.
(source) (screenshot)

~August 2012, Miano "began a process with my elders, the goal of which was to have my elders commission me, through the laying on of hands, to serve Faith Community Church as an evangelist, in keeping with the role of an evangelist as delineated in Ephesians 4:11-14".

~March 2013 - Jon Speed and the Babies Are Murdered Here / Gospel Spam / Street Preacher Guild group publicly dissociate from Abolish Human Abortion because of www.churchrepent.com.
Miano stands with them.

September 2, 2013 - Miano makes the following announcement on his Facebook page.














In other words, Tony Miano announces his intention to engage in a Church Repent activity toward Bethel Church in Redding, CA. Before his church elders have laid hands on and commissioned him to be an evangelist representing their church.
(source) (screenshot)


December 2013 - the elders of Faith Community Church "found aspects of my evangelistic gifting and ministry (namely, open-air preaching) philosophically incompatible with the evangelistic direction the elders have set forth for the Faith Community Church family. That being the case, the elders determined they could not lay hands on me and commission me to serve Faith Community Church as an evangelist."

In between December 2013 and February 2014 - Miano decides to leave that church because they won't officially commission him as an evangelist.


March 2, 2014 - Miano joins Grace Community Church because his other church wouldn't commission him an evangelist like I guess he wanted to be.

March 27, 2014 - Miano publishes his hatchet piece on abolition based partly on the fact that he thinks abolitionists lack local church elder authority to do what we do.
(His article) (Our refutation)

August 2016 - Miano leaves Grace Community Church (John MacArthur's church) to join up with some church in Iowa and "sit under the authority" of a pastor who has adultery and divorce in his past and yet who regularly "shepherds" women and girls one-on-one alone in private. And one of his closest allies, Chuck O'Neal, is sounding the alarm about Miano's discernment, which is either suffering from massive downgrade or has always been this bad. (I favor the latter hypothesis, personally.)
Sometimes... you just can't make this stuff up.



Now, if we were to ask whether Miano's elders at Faith CC thought it was permissible for him to engage in a Church Repent action toward Bethel Church, that would be less than helpful. One of the main thrusts of the criticism of Church Repent from the Babies Are Murdered Here / Gospel Spam / Street Preacher Guild group (of which Miano serves as one of the foremost luminaries and most listened-to voices) has always been that abolitionists have no authority to rebuke or exhort another local church, and that because our elders did not send us out for that specific purpose.


Leaving aside the fact that numerous abolitionists have been explicitly blessed in carrying out Church Repent by their elders, is it possible to escape the conclusion that Miano himself planned to rebuke a church without being sent out by his own elders?
And so he has decided to leave that church and forsake those elders because they wouldn't give him what he wanted - official commission as an evangelist. He could have stayed there and worked through the issues with those elders. He chose to leave and see if someone else would do so.

And what if we were to ask Phil Johnson at Grace Community Church of SoCal whether Miano was submitted to his pastoral/elder/overseer/bishop/episcopal authority when he decided to leave John MacArthur's church in favor of a guy who likes to take women into his confidence in the privacy of his office? It sounds like Miano is rootless and looking for anyone who will take him in and give him the affirmation he apparently desires from a father figure. 

What's the word for that? Ah, yes - nomadic.

Abolitionist ecclesiology

It should be noted that not all abolitionists agree on EVERY SINGLE FINE POINT of ecclesiology.
Kinda like single-pastor Baptists don't agree with plural-elder Baptists don't agree with Presbyterians, etc. Yet somehow the two latter groups work closely, make documentaries, street preach together and all that kind of stuff. Hmmm. Why are Damon Rambo and his friends so quick to dissociate from abolitionists?

Abolitionists do tend closely to one ecclesiological point, however - we reject quasi-papism such as the type that Speed, Pittman, Miano, and Rambo represent. Take that to the bank.

Damon Rambo makes more of a hash of Scripture

---------------------------
UPDATE, 10 March 2017: 
Damon Rambo has made a public statement that looks mostly like repentance, so let's be gracious and give him credit for it. Combined with the fact that he has deleted the posts on his blog to which my own blogposts refer, I am noting the facts here in this update so that all may be informed of the current situation. Note that he has not taken down any comments on other blogs such as Gospel Spam, which probably means he has not done as rigorous and thorough a job of scrubbing his slanderous and wicked comments as I would ask if I had opportunity. Thus, my own posts will remain public and all links will point to Archive.org records of his posts until further notice. 
---------------------------

Damon Rambo, a pastor in Texas whom we've seen before around here, decided to add his ever so helpful thoughts to the comment box of Tony Miano's hit piece at Gospel Spam. It would appear that the "Angry Pastor" not only pastors angry, but blogs angry too.

I am not sure why Tony "exited the conversation" but I can say for myself that the first question out of my mouth would have been "Are you preaching under the accountability of a local church, with established elder(s) and a recognized membership." If he said "no," the conversation would have ended right there. Such people are in grievous sin, and until that sin is repented of, further fellowship, discussion, and hashing out of differences cannot be had. Those who deliberately reject the visible expression of Christ's Bride must be excommunicated from any secondary fellowship, until such time as the Lord brings them to repentance.

To give a little background as to what he means, a few good brothers in the Lord have attempted to kick-start reconciliation talks between the Babies Are Murdered Here / Street Preacher Guild / Gospel Spam / quasi-papist / anti-Church Repent and therefore pro-Church Apathy / Pharisee crowd, among whom Rambo evidently prefers to be numbered, and abolitionists against whom the aforementioned Pharisees have sinned in numerous ways. I was party to one of these attempts; the brother started a group Facebook chat which included three abolitionists and three anti-abolitionist antagonists, and posted therein an impassioned plea for a beginning to reconciliation and cessation of social media hostilities. Marcus Pittman left the chat within thirty seconds of the appearance of the chat. Tony Miano exited a couple of minutes later after stating to the organiser of the chat that he'd talk to him privately.

 

Anyway, from the screenshots and the way that the various sides are talking, it should be clear to any objective observer who is open to God-honoring reconciliation and who is not, who wants to engage in serious discussion exposed to the light of truth, and who wants to cut off discussion and debate.

Damon Rambo, according to his own words here, is another Pharisee who would impose an extra-biblical standard upon others. Here, he lets us know in no uncertain terms that he would have excommunicated Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Ulrich Zwingli, as well as any believers who dared to speak the Gospel to someone else before the apostles appointed elders in their local church in Acts 11:19-25, Acts 13:44-52, and Acts 17:32-18:1, to say nothing of Philip the evangelist who was just sort of wandering around when the Holy Spirit directed him to evangelise the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8, to say still less of the eunuch himself when he went back to his homeland and shared the Gospel with people there. If only Rambo had been around back then! The NT church would have been so much better organised and godly.

As a matter of fact, Toby's church is between elders at the moment. Rambo doesn't know the history of the church, doesn't know what they think about elders or whether they want elders. Why? Because he hasn't even cared enough to ask. He prefers to lob his tirades from afar, uncaring of the effect his dismissal has on the reader. This is not conduct conducive to demonstrating the NT qualifications of elder. Would the Apostle Paul be OK with blogging under the title "The Angry Pastor" or "The Angry Apostle"? Why doesn't 2 Timothy 4:1-2 read like the following?

I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom: preach the word; be angry in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great anger and hot-temperedness.

I feel genuinely sorry for the congregation at his church, but then again, his expressions are probably not nearly as evil in person as they are online. It's a learned skill, to be sure. One would think a pastor could manage it. But in my experience, churches usually deserve the kind of pastor they have, which is also a pretty sad thing.

He also speaks out of ignorance when he implies that Toby's church lacks recognised membership. He doesn't know that either. He has no idea what sort of accountability structures are in place there. Notice that to him, "under the accountability of a local church" is code for "elders". When these men say "submitted to the authority of a local church" or something similar, what they have in mind is one or more elders who do what the Lord Jesus and the Apostle Peter said they should not do - lord it over their people.

I find it quite interesting that Rambo, as a Baptist, thinks that dissent from his preferred ecclesiology is "grievous sin", for which one ought to be excommunicated and for which reason one ought not to cooperate on any level of Christian service or ministry. Why doesn't he say the same things about Marcus Pittman, a Presbyterian, again? Where is the consistency?

Who said anything about Toby or any abolitionist "deliberately reject(ing) the visible expression of Christ's Bride"? Does he think that Toby is not a member of his church? What does he know about that church? He doesn't know anything. Apparently, dissent from his preferred ecclesiology is equivalent to deliberate rejection of Christ's Bride. Needless to say, this is an enormous accusation. Can Rambo substantiate it from Scripture? He hasn't yet. Can he show that holding to a differing ecclesiology merits the same treatment as one would show to a material heretic and an unrepentant sexually immoral professing brother? If he can't (and let's be clear - he can't), is Damon Rambo not acting as a Pharisee?

Philippians 1:12-18 -

Now I want you to know, brethren, that my circumstances have turned out for the greater progress of the gospel, so that my imprisonment in the cause of Christ has become well known throughout the whole praetorian guard and to everyone else, and that most of the brethren, trusting in the Lord because of my imprisonment, have far more courage to speak the word of God without fear. Some, to be sure, are preaching Christ even from envy and strife, but some also from good will; the latter do it out of love, knowing that I am appointed for the defense of the gospel; the former proclaim Christ out of selfish ambition rather than from pure motives, thinking to cause me distress in my imprisonment. What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed; and in this I rejoice.

"Should She Preach?" by Tony Miano - A Review

Highly experienced street evangelist Tony Miano has written a book titled Should She Preach? Biblical Evangelism for Women, and generously offered a free electronic copy to any blogger who would read it and offer a review. I contacted him and he graciously sent me a copy.

Before I begin, while there are things about Brother Tony with which I disagree here and there, I have an enormous amount of respect for the man. I do not entirely agree with the major points of his book but I target that disagreement specifically and only to the brother's position. In no way do I intend to impugn his character or his witness in this review. I love and appreciate him for many things, so I pray the reader will take that into account as I move forward.

I do not want to belabor or repeat the points he makes in this book. As I have had to squeeze reading it around many other responsibilities and priorities, I would like to put out what I have been able to glean in this way and leave fuller reviews to others.

Brother Tony's book does not succeed in proving his case for a few reasons.