Harrison Perkins on How God Meets His People in His Ordinary Means of Grace 

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Interview with Harrison Perkins

Why does understanding the ordinary means of grace matter, and what motivated you to write about them? 

The means of grace are God’s promised ways of working to bless his people spiritually. Too many Christians chase fabricated experience as the way to develop the Christian life. It usually leads to burnout and frustration. I want God’s people to know rest and strength. 

How have you seen the ordinary means of grace shape people and grow a healthy church?  

People have come to love the church more.  

They see that the church is not one cog in a bigger goal toward a better society. Rather, the church is where we encounter God and his grace to know him for blessing.  

I have seen that a lack of understanding in ministry leads pastors to try to be very creative. But if we invent the way that people experience God, our experience becomes the barometer of God’s work. We need to realize that we are not the baseline. God as he is revealed in his Word is. So, the truth of God’s Word should shape our experience rather than our experiences affecting what we think must be true. The means of grace keep us grounded and aligned with what God has revealed and focused on chasing God in his promised ways to bless us. 

Who should read a book on the means of grace, and what will they take away? 

This book is for everyone! I hope it helps Christians love the church more and to appreciate why Reformed churches are committed to certain—in some ways unique—ways of worship. 

You argue that Christians who seek God through extraordinary experiences or dramatic encounters are actually at a disadvantage compared to those who simply attend church and receive the Word and sacraments. Is that argument a harder sell in our age and culture than it might have been in the past? How do you counter that? 

The argument can be harder because people love big, grand experiences and have been conditioned to want those experiential activities from their church.  

The culture shock of those coming from wider evangelicalism into Reformed worship is real. The mindset seems always to push toward “go big!” and a consumer mentality. But we have to remember that the church’s gathered worship benefits us even though we are not the primary audience. God is the primary audience for worship, since we assemble to honor him.  

We need a reality check that our thought, “I didn’t enjoy worship today,” should be met with the response, “That’s ok, we weren’t worshipping you.”  

When we grasp that truth, we learn to shape our expectations around what honors God, and we know what honors him not by feeling and experience but by his Word. Then, we start to see why we benefit from shaping the whole of our worship around the means that he has promised to use to meet us.  

We experience him in those means. 

Just for fun, tell us something about you that only your friends or family would know. 

I hate spiders but love peanut butter. 

Harrison Perkins explores these themes more fully in his book Meeting God in His Means of Grace: How Word, Sacrament, and Prayer Help Us Encounter Christ. In it, Perkins explores how the ordinary matters of Christian life—reading the Word, participating in the sacraments, and prayer—uniquely draw us into communion with Christ. 

Harrison Perkins is pastor of Oakland Hills Community Church (OPC), a senior research fellow at the Craig Center for the Study of the Westminster Standards, online faculty in church history at Westminster Theological Seminary, visiting faculty at Birmingham Theological Seminary, and a visiting lecturer in systematic theology at Edinburgh Theological Seminary. He lives in the Detroit metro area with his wife and son.