Church

Who's to blame? Passive pastors

Wayne — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:25:38 -0400

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Obedience Yields Safety

Wayne — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:11:44 -0400

If parents raised their own children, per Biblical commands, instead of entrusting them to schools and churches, people like this wouldn't be a problem.

That churches are structured like institutions, rather than remaining Biblically organized, certainly makes it easier for both parents and molesters to get what they want. Parents are all too willing to surrender their duty, to train their own children, to those whom they worship (pastors, teachers). Churches attract molesters and deviants, because they're desperate for volunteers, and children and youth ministries are shunned by most. It's a formula for phenomenal success...at the expense of the children! If you want to protect your children from abuse, do not entrust their keeping to schools and churches.

Youth groups are probably among the most dangerous places for kids today. Besides youth group leaders who are molesters, they are breeding grounds for worldly pitfalls. Only a couple notches better than schools, youth groups still tend to segregate by age (unlike the real world), typically have too few adult leaders proportionate to the number of kids, and practice crowd control more than spiritual training. In my experience, youth groups practice coed lock-ins (sleepovers) without gender segregation, teach kids how to put condoms on bananas, teach them that sex is for those in love rather than marriage, and worse. Kids in youth groups tend to feed off one another, exaggerating any tendencies toward worldliness. Real holiness (being set apart for God) is all but unknown in most youth groups. These are dangerous places to entrust your children—if you value their eternal fate.

Obey the Lord by raising your own children, and a host of dangers can be avoided. Refrain from implicitly trusting churches simply because they claim to be Godly, but audit and question everything. Better yet, do your own job as parents, and molesters and damnation won't be problems for your kids.

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Churches are not the Body of Christ

Wayne — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:20:52 -0400

The Body of Christ is the church. The true church is the set of all believers. This Biblical church is certainly not the corporate entities modern church-goers tend to think of when the term is used. As a lot, incorporated churches are too similar to for-profit businesses (or worse, governments).

Incorporated churches (hereafter, inc-church) are territorial, protective of their petty empires, and far more often than not, avoid cooperation with or endorsing of other ministries. If a believer has a ministry of his own, separate from the corporate control of an inc-church, he's often not considered an active member of that inc-church. If another ministry—one easily determined to be kosher, so to speak—desires to partner with an inc-church, the knee-jerk reaction is most often, "No." If you're lucky, your ministry will be investigated for months on end (obviously Godly discernment is not at work here) and worked into the church calendar 18 months from now. There's very much a not-invented-here syndrome at most inc-churches.

I imagine the threat of competition, for those beloved "tithes", is too much burden on some churches. Measuring an inc-church's success via budget, membership, or programs shows "outside" ministries to be a threat. Inc-churches' leaders often fear that outsiders may be more spiritually mature, reveal doctrinal heresies, or otherwise threaten their power and authority in their home regimes. Then there's the omnipresent fear among many clergy that they may lose their parishioners' worship. Their borders remain largely closed to ministries beyond their control in an effort to protect their tenuous holds on their ignorant congregations. Assuming a business model, instead of a Biblical model, many inc-churches fail to let perceived competition drive them to spiritual growth, instead choosing pre-Reformation tactics of stunted spirituality, Biblical ignorance, and turf wars.

Inc-churches' territorial fears place them outside the Body of Christ, sometimes taking with them large portions of their membership. Inc-churches tend to adopt a business-like guardedness over their resources, departing from the Biblical model of the Body of Christ. Fortunately, a time is coming that will purge the church, the Body, of inc-churches and their tyranny.

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Matthew 19:14

Dave — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 18:03:17 -0400

My family attends a Messianic synagogue. We worship ישוע (Jesus), but in a very Jewish way. In fact, the worship time is one of the things we like best about our synagogue. We have Davidic dancers, people waving flags, and a very enthusiastic congregation with a tangible spirit of worship.

Today during worship, my wife and I were treated to a wonderful experience. For the first time in his life, our son, now three years old, participated in the worship activities. It began when he noticed that during the chorus of the song that was playing, the Davidic dancers would do a little hop when a particular lyric was sung. Our son started to hop along with the dancers, and he indicated to us that we should hop along with him. Only too happy to comply, my son and I hopped our way through the rest of the song. Too much fun! The song that followed was one of our favorites, so much so that we have played it many times on YouTube. I picked him up, and we both sang and raised hands to the Lord!

Now, I am not fooling myself about the spiritual significance of what happened. This does not mean that my son is saved. It can't even really be said that he was truly worshiping the Lord. He doesn't yet have the conceptual machinery to do either effectively. It was exciting partly because it was just so darned adorable (really, it was ), but mostly for another reason. We keep our son with us during the worship service, rather than dropping him off in the kids' room, because we want him to see us, and others, worship. We want to model that for him. The fact that he has begun to imitate us means that maybe we're doing a good job.

Anyway, praise to God, and give us more, more!

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The Lord is a man of war

Wayne — Mon, 18 May 2009 14:42:37 -0400

Exodus 15:3 popped out at me today.

יהוה (the LORD) is a man of war; יהוה (the LORD) is His name.

The Lord is not a pacifist, and neither are His followers commanded to be so. Christians are not to be doormats, not for illegal invaders, Muslim killers, or lawless rulers. Those wussy, socialist (thieving) weenies who wrongly espouse the moniker "Christian" do not represent Biblically Christian values. God may be love, and He surely prefers this, but He's just as much "a man of war."

Denial of God's revealed character, or a portion thereof, is a sinful attempt to fashion an idol made after man's heart. Today's church, having abandoned or perverted the Word of God, needs to repent of this sin and let God be who He is.

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10 Big Reasons Not to Send Christian Kids to Public Schools

Katrina — Mon, 11 May 2009 19:46:42 -0400

http://www.crosswalk.com/homeschool/11603305/

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Gasser Lets Loose

Wayne — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 12:37:14 -0500

Ancient Gasser aims to offend:

This new lever of change is what I shall call “Another 11th Commandment.” The commandment is simply stated: Thou shalt not offend.
...
I personally refuse to accept the legitimacy of this 11th commandment. To do otherwise would mean that I must suppress expression of my own beliefs. If you accept this 11th commandment, then you cannot express your own beliefs in any but the most familiar of environments without risking “offending” someone, or, heaven forbid, lots of someones.

Touché. "Thou shalt not offend" is merely another expression of hedonism, the worship of feelings.

AG waxes philosophic about values and beliefs:

Doesn't our behavior and our acceptance of behaviors stem from our values? Don't our values come from our beliefs? Of course they do. They always have. They always will.

But this relationship works both ways. If we change our behavior, then we must change our values and then we must change our beliefs so that our behavior is acceptable within the context of our personal values and beliefs. If we do not change our values and beliefs to embrace behaviors that we find acceptable, then we must be living in a state of hypocritical conflict.

AG proposes: beliefs values behavior. What he really means is: actual beliefs --> actual values --> behavior. Of course, if behavior stem from values and beliefs, then any changes in behavior are actually reflections of changes in values and beliefs. In other words, it's not bidirectional as AG claims. When he speaks of the reverse direction, what he seems to mean is: behavior --> stated values --> stated beliefs. Without changing our stated values and beliefs, we are hypocrites. What AG doesn't acknowledge is the usually huge gulf between stated values and beliefs and actual values and beliefs.

Where this error in logic gets AG into trouble is in understanding the changes in the church.

The Christian church, like the rest of us, cannot accept these [unchristian] behaviors without changing its beliefs. But, how can that be? Are the church's beliefs not founded upon and based upon scripture? Does the church follow societal norms? Isn't the church supposed to be a bedrock of leadership? What made the church change?
...
The churches have bought into this new commandment in a big way. They neither say this nor even believe this, but when you look at their policy of “inclusion,” their acceptance of Thou shalt not offend becomes obvious.

He posits the avoidance of offense (behavior) as the cause of its inclusion policies (values) and thus its "modernized" doctrine (beliefs), building upon his reversal of causation. In fact, he's wrong here. The church changed its beliefs first by abandoning the authoritative Word of God, then by embracing the hedonistic worship of feelings, the behaviors devolved. All the while, the church continued to state its beliefs as Biblical, but they were lying, mostly to themselves (and the undiscerning). Such hypocrisy is actually the norm, not the exception.

The lesson to learn here is not about taking offense, values, or politics. It's about the Word of God. Once you no longer choose to submit to the authority of the Lord and His Word, you implicitly choose to subscribe to "cafeteria theology". That is, you get to pick and choose which portions of Scripture to believe. Once this door is opened, it becomes increasingly easy to justify doctrines that are further and further away from God's values. Passages condemning homosexuality can be reinterpreted for modern times, or so church leaders lie. Jesus' claim that nobody comes to the Father but by the Son can get called into question, leading to universalism (all faiths being supposedly valid). Once these flexibilities are exploited, then absolute truth no longer exists, and relativism ensues. The faith, once so clearly defined by the whole of Scripture, can then be twisted into anything anyone wants it to be.

Ancient Gasser has finally recognized the fruit of the abandonment of God and His Word, while still failing to recognize the root cause. His 11th Commandment is not the cause but just another symptom, the one that finally got his attention drawn to the decline of the modern church. Only a return to submission to God's authoritative Word (all of it) can remedy the church's woes and restore the freedom of expression.

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Welch agrees

Wayne — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 10:29:46 -0500

Dave Welch echos my sentiments. Unless we see the "pulpits aflame with righteousness", we are surely doomed in this nation. As the seminaries have been infiltrated, invaded, and subdued by the enemy, it's unlikely we'll see clergy preaching the Word properly for some time...excepting those who forgo worldly credentials, avoiding the co-opted seminaries, in favor of the Truth! After all, all that we need for training, God has seen fit to write down.

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Apostasy Unashamed

Wayne — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 11:47:24 -0500

I continue to see news of the church's apostasy. It's almost passé, now. Homosexuality is normal, even a gift from God. The Bible needs to be "reinterpreted", updated to today's morals. Jesus is not the only way anymore; all religions are acceptable, alternate ways to salvation (except Biblical Christianity, of course). The faith is a feel-good philosophy one can try before buying. It teaches all kinds of doctrines men like to hear: "Several heresies are commonly taught including tithing, Prosperity Doctrine, subtle forms of antisemitism (often including Replacement Theology or merely apathy toward God's Chosen People), Sunday Sabbath, various levels of rejection of the Tenakh, seeker friendliness, and more and worse." What a wonderful new religion these so-called, ill-named, reformed Christians (sic) have fashioned for themselves.

I'm not surprised by the heresies and apostasies. They're not even anything new, since the early church experienced the same problems. What's surprising to me is how open and mainstream, within Christendom, these are now. Apostasy is not an exception with the church; it is the norm.

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Will pastors emulate Jeremiah in '09?

Wayne — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 09:48:45 -0500

Dave Welch asks, "Will pastors emulate Jeremiah in '09?"

No. The American church is getting more lost, not returning to God's Word.

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