Peter Masters has been the Minister of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in central London since 1970. [1] [2] He founded the Evangelical Times, an evangelical newspaper, in 1967. He also directs the School of Theology, an annual conference for pastors and Christian workers at the Metropolitan Tabernacle.
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Masters edits the international magazine Sword & Trowel (started by Charles Spurgeon in 1865).
Masters initiated the London Reformed Baptist Seminary in 1976, and directs the further studies of both pastors and aspiring pastors in the Tabernacle's adjunct seminary. The seminary went online from 2011. [3]
Masters has authored over 30 books, which have been translated into at least 28 other languages.
Masters' sermons have been broadcast in the UK since 2003 on the Sky channel UCB. In 2013 the Tabernacle programme transferred to the Sky channel Revelation TV, and is broadcast every Saturday evening in the UK and also in the USA. These broadcasts include a sermon from Dr Masters and an accompanying apologetic or biographical feature. Current UK channels are Sky Channel 581, Freeview HD Channel 241 and Freesat Channel 692. Programmes are also broadcast on a number of overseas radio stations including in New Zealand and the US.
Masters has lobbied for the necessity of distinctive and frequent evangelistic addresses, and lamented the loss of this amongst evangelical ministers. [4]
By calling other ministers to remember and consider the Downgrade Controversy, Masters has advocated a duty of ministerial separation from churches that do not follow the major principles of historical evangelical doctrine, such as the necessity of regeneration, justification by faith without works, and belief in infallibility of the Bible. [1] [5] In this he has repeated the call of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, in his controversy with John Stott, to separate from non-evangelical churches, and followed in the tradition of E. J. Poole-Connor, the founder of the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches. [2]
Masters has opposed and challenged the teaching of the Charismatic Movement that New Testament sign gifts are still extant, arguing that the Bible contains the promise that it is both sufficient and complete, rendering new revelation both redundant and dangerous. [6] This view has been described as cessationist. He has, upon the same grounds, critiqued claims of the gift of miraculous healing as spurious, lacking credibility and sometimes occultic. [7] [8]
Masters opposes Darwinism, which some evangelicals have seen historically as a form of humanist propaganda, [1] [2] and as a doctrine viewed as at variance with the first books of the Bible. He helped found the Newton Scientific Association, and has supported lectures and talks examining alleged weaknesses of the theory of evolution. [9]
Evangelicalism, also called evangelical Christianity or evangelical Protestantism, is a worldwide interdenominational movement within Protestant Christianity that emphasises the centrality of being "born again", in which an individual experiences personal conversion; the authority of the Bible as God's revelation to humanity; and spreading the Christian message. The word evangelical comes from the Greek (euangelion) word for "good news".
Charles Haddon Spurgeon was an English Particular Baptist preacher.
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The Metropolitan Tabernacle is a large independent Reformed Baptist church in the Elephant and Castle in London. It was the largest non-conformist church of its day in 1861. The Tabernacle Fellowship have been worshipping together since 1650. Its first pastor was William Rider; other notable pastors and preachers include Benjamin Keach, John Gill, John Rippon and C. H. Spurgeon. The Tabernacle still worships and holds to its Biblical foundations and principles under its present pastor, Peter Masters.
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The Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches (FIEC) is a network of 638 independent evangelical churches mainly in the United Kingdom.
Arthur Tappan Pierson was an American Presbyterian pastor, Christian leader, missionary and writer who preached over 13,000 sermons, wrote over fifty books, and gave Bible lectures as part of a transatlantic preaching ministry that made him famous in Scotland, England, and Korea. He was a consulting editor for the original "Scofield Reference Bible" (1909) for his friend, C. I. Scofield and was also a friend of D. L. Moody, George Müller, Adoniram Judson Gordon, and C. H. Spurgeon, whom he succeeded in the pulpit of the Metropolitan Tabernacle, London, from 1891 to 1893. Throughout his career, Pierson filled several pulpit positions around the world as an urban pastor who cared passionately for the poor.
Stephen Tong Tjong Eng is a Chinese Indonesian Reformed pastor, evangelist, teacher and musician. He heads the Reformed Evangelical Church of Indonesia, which houses the megachurch Messiah Cathedral, and is the largest Christian Church building in Southeast Asia. He has preached in countries around the world, and guest lectured at theological seminaries and schools.
A Bible college, sometimes referred to as a Bible institute or theological institute or theological seminary, is an evangelical Christian or Restoration Movement Christian institution of higher education which prepares students for Christian ministry with theological education, Biblical studies and practical ministry training.
Mark E. Dever is a theologian and the senior pastor of the Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., and the president of 9Marks, a Christian ministry he co-founded "in an effort to build biblically faithful churches in America. Dever also taught for the faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge and also served for two years as an associate pastor of Eden Baptist Church in Cambridge."
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New Calvinism, also known as the Young, Restless, and Reformed Movement, is a movement within conservative Evangelicalism that reinterprets 16th century Calvinism under contemporary US values and ideologies.
Protestantism is a branch of Christianity that follows the theological tenets of the Protestant Reformation, a movement that began in the 16th century with the goal of reforming the Catholic Church from perceived errors, abuses, and discrepancies.
Nigel Goring Wright is a British Baptist theologian.
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