George Herbert was an early 17th century Anglican priest and English poet. Charles Spurgeon, the great Baptist preacher, once said, “I love George Herbert with my very soul.” C.S. Lewis, in his atheist days, found George Herbert unnerving. He wrote about him, “Here was a man who seemed to me to excel all the authors I had read in conveying the very quality of life as we live it…but the wretched fellow…insisted on mediating it through what I would have called ‘Christian mythology.’”

Archibald Alexander, the first faculty member at Princeton Theological Seminary, was given the title “Professor of Didactic and Polemic Theology.” That seems a bit startling to us, because the term “polemical” in our day has an almost purely negative connotation. However, in the original plan of Princeton seminary, Polemical theology was seen as a discipline separate from the positive exposition of systematic theology.

Dr Lloyd-Jones taught that we should evangelize with the gospel even as we teach and edify believers. Why? We must not preach as if everyone is a Christian, and we shouldn't think that believers no longer need the gospel, but only more "advanced" instruction. He believed that church members needed to be exposed to the Gospel not only because some of them needed to realize they had never repented, but also because "all the people who attend a church need to be brought under the power of the Gospel." (p.153)

First, Dr Lloyd-Jones insisted that we use the gospel as we edify Christians. In Preaching and Preachers, Lloyd-Jones warns preachers not to "assume that all…who are members of the church, are…Christians. This, to me, is the most fatal blunder of all." (p.146) He goes on to say that many people have accepted Christianity intellectually but have never come under the power of the Word and the gospel and therefore have "not truly repented." (p.150)

The growth of a big passive ‘middle’ happens to all churches as they grow larger. This growth in passivity weakens what I will call the “lay ministry dynamic.” That dynamic happens when a significant percentage of Christians engage in lay ministry “behaviors” because they are trained and coached—informally and personally—by the pastors and staff of the church. These lay ministry behaviors result in many new people, including many people without faith, being brought by Christian friends into the services and life of the church community.