Matt Chandler on Original sin & the human will
Will in bondage; needs sovereign grace to be freed
THE POSITION
Leans toward bondage on his own self-description rather than on a passage read. In a 2009 interview he defines Calvinism as "the five points", and in his 2017 foreword he says he embraces "a reformed view of soteriology". The Village Church's statement says that apart from God's intervention humanity "cannot choose of his own accord to worship God." A 2012 Crosswalk feature quotes him saying the Holy Spirit does the work of transformation "through regeneration". No passage read argues the will's inability directly, so the tier is established, not researched.
WHY THERE IS NO QUOTATIONEight cells carry a quotation, and the reason the other eleven do not is access, not copyright. His preaching is on video, but YouTube captions could not be reached from the session that did this pass. The Village Church's own sermon transcripts are PDFs that the fetch tool is barred from reading. His books were not read in any copy, so the two cells that quote The Explicit Gospel read it through reviewers who quote it with page numbers. Four cells rest on The Village Church's statement of faith and say so; they are `established`, because a church's statement is not his own words. A pass over the sermon transcripts would likely fill most of the remaining cells.
20 OTHERS HOLD THIS
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.
Cite this page
"Matt Chandler on Original sin & the human will", Examined Doctrine, July 2026 edition, https://examineddoctrine.com/position/chandler/original-sin (archived at https://examineddoctrine.com/editions/2026-07/position/chandler/original-sin).