Last week I attended The Gospel Coalition Conference in Orlando, FL. I was manning the ChinaSource booth so wasn’t able to attend many of the sessions and workshops or hear too many of the speakers. One speaker I did get to hear, though, was Mark Dever, pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. and president of 9Marks Ministries. The title of his message was “The Day of the Lord.”
During his message he talked about an article he had read in the 1980’s written by a rabbi titled “The Bible Belt: America’s Safety Belt.”
Later in the evening I attended an informal session with a group of Chinese urban house church pastors who were attending the conference. This session was a chance for them to talk about an indigenous church-planting movement that that they are a part of.
One of the pastors, in talking about the importance of church planting, referenced Dever’s talk from earlier in the day. “Church planting, he said, is the safety belt of China.”
