The Baby & the Bathwater

  "Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater" is a common saying that expresses one's concern that those who are questioning or re-adjusting their beliefs may go too far and jettison essential core truths and put their salvation in jeopardy.  It can be rather scary, both to the questioner and especially to his on-looking fellow believers.
  So how does one make sure that, if he does leave the spiritual house, at least he doesn't leave the neighborhood?  If he departs from some of the theological distinctives of his denomination, what constitutes crossing the line into heresy?  Who decides things like this?  Should we rely on our spiritual leaders, or can we decide for ourselves based on our own reading and understanding of the Bible?
  After reading Rob Bell's latest book, Love Wins, I found myself agreeing with him on certain points and not on others.  Some of his thoughts are outside the conventions of mainstream evangelical Christianity in America.  So who decides if he's a heretic?  I went back and reviewed the Apostles' Creed to see about the essentials.  Hmm, no problem there; looks like Bell is still in the theological neighborhood if the Apostles' Creed describes the neighborhood.  

  1. "Sticking to the Bible" isn't always a reliable method of establishing one's beliefs.  There are a thousand denominations out there, and they are all based on solid interpretation of the Word-- albeit, many different interpretations.  

  2. Trusting the Holy Spirit won't work; there are innumerable instances of people hearing exactly opposite revelations from the Holy Spirit, resulting in many a divergent pathway.

  3. How about safety in numbers?  I mean, if we stay within the mainstream of belief are we safe?  Martin Luther didn't think so.  There are beliefs that evolve and devolve, some espoused by individual scholars, some by denominational conferences, and others that just sort of happen to become popular without a champion and who knows how, rather like urban legends that become widely accepted but are not backed by a stitch of truth.  And some are really a stretch.

  As an example, a couple of years ago a friend of mine expressed grave concern that a fellow who was questioning authority within his church was in danger of judgement because he had removed himself from his "spiritual covering".  Even though the doctrine of "covering" was virtually unknown fifty years ago and has only come into widespread acceptance recently, partly through the efforts of ultra-conservative speaker Bill Gothard in the 1980's (the same guy who announced that rock music is of the devil).
  Even more widely accepted is the idea that when human beings die and go to heaven they turn into angels with wings who float on clouds and play harps.  Really.

  Anyway, though I think doctrines are generally arrived at (1.) in community by groups of like-minded people who base their conclusions on their dead-level-best understanding of (2.) the scriptures while seeking revelation from God through (3.) the Holy Spirit, it seems that individual believers often make their judgements on who's a heretic by one simple method:
  Anybody who doesn't believe what I believe is a heretic.

You Go, Girl!

  Wow!  I could hardly believe my eyes when I read Michelle (Eagle) Artley's article in the latest issue of the Missionary Church's official publication, The Missionary Church Today.  Her feature, "Calling All Women", encourages women to pursue leadership roles within the church as "catalytic" leaders, catalytic referring to an entrepreneurial trait of those who "start something".  She gives a brief history of the role of women within the church, pointing out that a century ago there were many "ministering sisters" in the denomination, in fact, more than 500 licensed between 1880 and 1960, while today there are only six.  Since 1960, there seems to have been a 50-year descent into conservative legalism regarding the role of women in leadership, which flies in the face of the "respect for women" that Jesus and Paul demonstrated.  Artley points out that "we tend to gravitate toward Paul's instructions to women in dysfunctional churches, such as Corinth or Ephesus, but he regularly spoke of women leading in the church. ... Throughout the Bible women filled such leadership roles as prophet, pastor-teacher, apostle, deacon, judge, and co-laborer."
  Artley challenges the mostly male leadership of the Missionary Church, "men of God, when the Lord saw that is was not good for man to be alone, he did not create a few more men and call it a day.  He created woman to complement man and partner with him."
  There are others who are challenging the current policy of the Missionary Church to limit women, which states that they "cannot be lead pastors or denominational or district executives except in situations of need and for the duration of the need."  Three years ago my brother (a minister in the denomination), and I put our heads together to see what could be done to remove all restrictions on women within the Missionary Church.  A recommendation resulted, originating from his board of elders at New Hope Missionary Church in Lapeer, Michigan, and that recommendation has been slowly crawling its way through the various committees, and is due to be addressed at this year's general conference.  Perhaps the male chauvinism of the denomination will be mitigated soon.
  Michelle Artley speaks for me when she says that "Women are vital to the wholeness of church leadership.  May God soon be able to look on the whole of the Missionary Church and see that it is good."
  In an earlier post I mentioned that one of the problems of trying to be literalists is that we automatically make ourselves hypocrites, because there is absolutely nobody on the planet who can treat all of the scriptures literally.  As an example, I mentioned that Jesus had told his disciples to "sell your possessions and give the money to the poor" (Luke 12:33) but that nobody was taking that literally.  This thing of limiting women in the church is a result of building a doctrine on a literal interpretation of Paul's instructions to troubled  New Testament churches, but again, it makes us hypocrites, because even in the same passages that seem to limit women, there are references to slavery, which we dismiss as not applicable today, since slavery is not permitted in our culture today.
  We could treat the passages on women in the same way as we treat the passages on slavery if we wanted to, but the conversation, when it is addressed at all, is largely conducted by pools of male church leaders, so how likely is that to happen easily and quickly?
  May God help the Missionary Church to shed its hypocrisy and finally treat women with the equality and respect that the Lord intended!
  

My Ancient Emergent Theory

  History repeats itself.  Argyle sweaters look stylish again to young people whose grandparents wore them sixty years ago.  Bellbottoms will certainly experience a second coming-- or is it a third coming?  What goes around comes around again in the next generation.  New church leaders make the same mistakes as their predecessors.  Because of basic human inclinations-- sometimes running along family lines-- we are destined to repeat many of the mistakes of our forefathers.  Our nesting instincts will undermine our missionary instincts, keeping us at home when Jesus said "Go".  Our desire for comfort and security will foil our humanitarian intentions.  And so there will always be a struggle within the Body of Christ, a disparity-- like the Apostle Paul talked about-- between our good intentions and our actual behaviors.

  Yet some of us are more inclined to behave in certain ways than others.  Some are adventurers because we come from a long line of adventurers.  Some are more likely to be stuck in the mud of familiar old traditions, while others seem to have a sort of holy dissatisfaction with the status quo and a knack for shattering the normal-- and breaking other things as well.

  So, I say that what is happening in the church in the Western world is about personality types.  Not only that, I say it has always been about personality types, that every spiritual revolution has fallen out along certain behavioral lines that correspond with types of people.  I'll call them activists and passiv-ists.

  Or you could say they are consumers and producers, or givers and takers, or any number of other labels, but what I am theorizing is that the emergent religious landscape in America is actually a battlefield that is overrun on the one hand with believers who are comfortable with church the way it has been for most of their lifetime, and on the other hand, those who are disillusioned, dissatisfied, and even up-in-arms, over the endemic complacency of their counterparts.

  And, as I was making the point at first, it has always been this way, even as far back as the Exodus.  When God sent Moses to rescue the Israelites out of Egypt, many of them didn't want to be rescued; they were comfortable where they were, and later, when their comforts disappeared, they made it known to Moses in no uncertain terms.  

  Forty years ago, the Jesus People emerged to challenge the accepted norms of religion in America, some of them even forming communes like Koinonia Farms, in an effort to break the traditional mold.  It was a quest for greater authenticity, for true and practical spirituality rather than religion, an attempt at having a relationship with God, not just a form of godliness.

  And so it is now. Only this time it is speeding up, it is gaining critical mass like no other movement since the Protestant Reformation.  It is rocking the religious boat so violently that some are predicting the swamping of the boat, calling America a post-Christian culture and reporting the end of evangelicalism.  

  And the passiv-ists don't like it, so they oppose it and they demonize it.  "Heretics!" they yell, "These house churches are full of false doctrine!"  while they separate themselves more thoroughly from a needy world while going through their order of worship every Sunday morning.

  Okay, maybe I'm being a little rough here.  Maybe even a bit hypocritical, because, even though I see myself as an activist, one who disparages the irrelevance and the arrogance of the typical church in America, there are days when I get weary of the struggle, days when I want to be comfortable and secure as well, so on those days I'm a passiv-ist like my friends.  I also think that age and environment and a whole lot of other influences can affect this thing, and I think it is possible to move from one personality type to the other-- and back again, depending on lots of variables.  I have become less passive (and less patient) as I have matured.  It's a journey, folks.

  Anyway, I don't think that there is much that is new about what is currently emerging in the church to address the changes in the emerging culture.  I think that God will always make sure that there are activists in any place and time, like the Old Testament prophets, who will challenge the complacency and the hypocrisy of the church of the day, and the farther it gets off track, the louder they will cry (and the more unpopular they will become).

  Solomon speaks for me when he says, "What has been done will be done again, there is nothing new under the sun." (Eccles. 1:9)

  By the way, in this post I have ignored certain factors that may be fueling the current revolution and creating the illusion that it is something unlike anything that has happened before, such as epic shifts in the culture, etc.
  Hmm.  Wait a minute.  Maybe it's not about personality types after all, maybe it's about different spiritual gifts.  You know, those with the prophetic gifts are always clashing with those who have the administrative gifts, calling them stick-in-the-muds, and such, because they resist change and all.  Shoot, I'll have to work on that; I guess I'm not quite ready yet to write my book and make a million bucks on this emerging church phenomenon.

  

  

Beyond Radical- a brief book review

  "THERE IS NO SCRIPTURAL GROUND FOR ANYTHING WE PROTESTANTS PRACTICE."

This is how Gene Edwards begins his book, Beyond Radical (1999), after first stating the mission of the book: "THIS IS A CALL TO BREAK WITH THE PRESENT PRACTICE OF CHRISTIANITY IN A WAY MORE RADICAL THAN WAS KNOWN DURING THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION" (Yes, it really is printed in all caps;  I think he's trying to get someone's attention!)  He then lists more than twenty practices that we do that are not scriptural, stating that "We distort history when we try to teach that these practices are all New Testament, existed in the first century, and are 'right out of the Word of God!'"  Here's a partial list:

THE CHURCH BUILDING

PASTORS

THE ORDER OF WORSHIP

THE SERMON

THE PULPIT

THE PEW

THE CHOIR

CHAPTER AND VERSE

SUNDAY SCHOOL

THE SEMINARY

THE BIBLE SCHOOL

INTERDENOMINATIONAL AND PARA-CHURCH ORGANIZATIONS

ALL PROTESTANTS GOING TO CHURCH ON SUNDAY MORNING

THE ALTAR CALL

  Edwards' book pre-dates the similar but more comprehensive and well-known volume by Frank Viola and George Barna, Pagan Christianity.   Edwards is more famous for his other works, A Tale of Three Kings, and The Divine Romance, among others.  He and Viola have been part of the house church movement for several decades.  By the way, the modern house church movement dates back to the early 1800's, and only lately has experienced an acceleration in growth, I believe, in response to the fast-growing exodus of about one million believers in North America who are leaving the institutional church every year, and also in response to emerging changes in Western culture.  One of those major changes is the growing quest for authenticity.  The list above should explain the need for that.