By Mark W. Christy, PhD
Furtick, Stephen. (Un)Qualified: How God Uses Broken People to Do Big Things. Multnomah: 2016.
In a Q&A Session at the 2012 Shepherd’s Conference, John Macarthur was asked about his view of Stephen Furtick, the pastor of Elevation Church in Charlotte, NC. In response, Macarthur offered a one-word response, “unqualified”.[i] Given that this conference was focused on the pastoral ministry, it should be clear that Macarthur is offering his assessment of Furtick’s qualifications for ministry. In response to this portrayal, Furtick decided to pen this book.
Despite his intention to essentially undermine Macarthur’s criticism, he fails to address the critique head-on by simply demonstrating how his character and teaching practices line up with the biblical model for pastors and teachers. Instead, he labels Macarthur’s one-word assessment as judgmentalism and questions where he gets his “information,” “standards,” and “authority” (8). While anyone who is aware of Macarthur’s ministry would likely consider his source to be the Bible, Furtick certainly has every right to defend his person and work with the Scriptures. Given the lack of personal relationship between these two pastors and the nature of the conference where this comment was made, it would seem that Furtick should have attempted to defend his hermeneutics and sermon delivery.
While he does discuss his ministry briefly in regard to Macarthur’s criticism, he informs the reader that God reminded him that he is unqualified in and of himself and refers to 2 Corinthians 3:5-6. From this, he boldly asserts his self-proclaimed divine commissioning and points to his ministerial success as the validation: “God has blessed my efforts far beyond what I could ever deserve” (13). His defense of his qualifications, however, could be made by any false teacher who has found success because anyone can claim God’s call. Furthermore, many false teachers over the course of Church history have had success in their efforts just as Matthew declares, “Many false prophets will arise and will mislead many” (24.:11).
Unfortunately, Furtick chooses to assess his qualifications as a Christian who is, like all Christians, less than perfect. By doing so, he completely misses Macarthur’s point. Instead, he offers the standard fare that can be found in much of his other published discourse: confusing psychobabble, truth that has been conflated with self-help jargon, imprecise wording, and propositional truth claims that ultimately become watered-down and made increasingly difficult to ascertain by narratives (personal and biblical) and other anecdotes.
In his own words, this book is “about understanding who we really are now in order to be who we are capable of becoming. It’s about ruthlessly peeling back the prejudices and assumptions we’ve made about ourselves. It’s about letting God be our source of sufficiency” (4). From these words, it can be seen that the focus of his book is on the readers’ selves and how the readers can help themselves.[ii] Somehow, in the middle of the self-help attempts, God will become the “source of sufficiency” since all Christians are “unqualified” (4). As one combs the pages to search Furtick’s pastoral wisdom, a responsible reader might have trouble knowing whether or not his advice is meant for them since Furtick himself suggests that his readers may have conflicting religious identities including “Catholic,” “atheist,” “agnostic,” and “Christian” identities (46).
Given Furtick’s revealed goal of aiding his reader in self-examination, a hopeful reader would likely expect a pastor’s discussion of sin to be the foremost topic given that it is for that that Christ died and for that that He sent out His disciples to spread His Gospel and establish churches who would call pastors like Furtick. Such a reader would come away extremely disappointed because Furtick prefers to use the word “sin” very sparingly and turns to other words that may be more palatable to a wider audience such as mistakes weaknesses. Even when he does briefly mention sin, his comments (due to his bias against the term “sin”) easily dissolves into the broader discussion on weaknesses and leaves the reader unable to discern much of the time whether or not he is discussing sin specifically.
Within his frequent self-help and self-empowerment verbiage, his tendency to state his thoughts in a way that exhibits theological imprecision and at worst heresy becomes a major issue for the discerning Christian who endeavors to read his comments. For example, he says that despite the reader’s brokenness, God “still believes in [them]” (40). Such a statement seems to offer a view of man that is at best semi-pelagian. At another point, he acknowledges Christ’s righteousness as “[o]ur only hope”, but then states something that suggests some vestige of hope within us that exists apart from Him: “We tend to believe that the only reason God doesn’t lose his temper and flick us off the planet is that when he looks at us, [H]e looks at us, [H]e sees us through [H]is Jesus lens” (54-55).
This apparent though subtle elevation of the creature can also be seen in Furtick’s understanding Jesus’s words to Peter in Matthew 16:18: “I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it” (NASB1995). Following the Roman Catholic interpretation (despite being a Southern Baptist), Furtick believes that Peter himself is the rock (70). For him, this new moniker “suggested that Peter, even with his all-too-obvious imperfections, would be foundational to the movement Jesus was establishing” (70). To put Furtick’s view another way, Peter, as a fallen man, a sinner cloaked in fallen flesh, and a person who has yet to indwelled by God’s Spirit, was to be “foundational” in the Gospel work. Given the timing of Christ’s words and Peter’s lack of Spirit-indwelling, it would be more appropriate to view Peter’s declaration of Christ’s true identity to be the meaning behind “rock”: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (Matt 16:16 NASB1995). Beyond this, the centrality of Christ’s Person to the Gospel is made abundantly clear throughout the whole of Scripture.
Several pages later, Furtick delivers a somewhat clear message on God’s holiness and His hatred of sin (75). After taking this biblically correct stance, he follows it up with a portrayal of Jesus as one who “defends us” and “protects us” in His reaction to our sin in his discussion of Jesus’s reaction to the woman caught in adultery in John 8 (75). One must ask how God the Father who is one with God the Son can take such divergent views of a sinner. Once again, this demonstrates Furtick’s lack of precision with theology and even his ineptness of employing Scripture to pronounce biblical truth. As one reads further, one will find Furtick basically arguing that even God the Father does not hate our sins: “The biggest problem comes when we think that God is mad at us for our mistakes? That [H]e’s disappointed because we dared to display frailty. That [H]e’s disgusted with our sins. Or that our weaknesses prove [H]is displeasure with us” (110-11).
With an overly positive though admittedly conflicted view of the state of humanity before God, Furtick informs the reader that “[t]rue freedom in Christ comes when we realize that without [H]im we are spiritual bankrupt, but in [H]im we have all things” (187). To those evenly remotely aware of the basic gospel tenets, the cause for concern should be readily apparent. The believer’s freedom in Christ is made sure at the point of salvation when the convert repents and believes in Christ through a submission of will. It does not occur, as Furtick suggests, at a point of realization of any or even all of the gospel truths. This freedom is maintained temporally as one continues to submit to the Lord by walking in obedience and repenting as required to do so. To put this another way, freedom in Christ is a matter of the heart and not the head being changed by the Lord and made righteous by His grace.
[i]John Macarthur, Interview at 2012 Shepherd’s Conference, Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SariJgUEP1w&list=PLcpTMSL-FR-dYwsar3umadxI83J8lS93P&index=23. To locate it quickly, one can fast-forward to the time of 45:47 on the video.
[ii]Furtick adds more discussion of what his book is about and continues to make it obvious that self-help is a major theme of this book (31-33).