Matt Chandler on Election & predestination

Unconditional — grounded in God's free choice

THE POSITION

In a 2009 interview John Piper asks how his Calvinism, which earlier in the interview he defines as "the five points", did not stop him being hired. He says he simply answered the questions put to him. Asked whether he believed in predestination, he said yes, because Scripture plainly teaches it. Asked whether God desires all to come to repentance, he said yes to that too, and left the two standing together: "we've got to figure something out there." He wants his congregation to take these doctrines as ordinary Christianity, not as a programme announced each Sunday.

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ABOUT THIS FIGURE

Lead pastor of teaching at The Village Church in Flower Mound, Texas, since 2002, and from 2012 president, later chairman, of the Acts 29 church-planting network. He is known for joining Reformed soteriology to openly continuationist practice, a pairing he has described as feeling like a theological orphan. This entry rests on his 2009 interviews and conference messages with Desiring God, a 2011 Tabletalk interview, his 2017 foreword to a book by Sam Storms, a 2024 podcast transcript, press reports of his sermons, The Explicit Gospel (2012, with Jared C. Wilson) as reviewers quote it, and his church's statement of faith, which is used only where a cell says so.