These days feel like a very challenging season to be in
Christian leadership. Besides all of the chaos in the world, we have a mixture
of things that captivate people’s attention and take their eyes away from the
Lord. Inside many denominations, it almost feels like a civil war is under way.
I’ve spent a decade or so in the trenches of my own
denomination’s battle between progressives and conservatives. I am blessed that
I do not have this constant tension in my church. We are of one mind. Our
mission is to adhere to a conservative literal teaching of the Bible, and reach
out to love others and make disciples.
We don’t waste church time & money on “issues” like climate change.
As a pastor, my heart is to reach PEOPLE, before the major
global warming starts.
For most of this year, I have walked off the battlefield,
feeling as if the ongoing dialogue, in my denomination, has become a waste of time. I feel called to
focus all my efforts on the positive things that I am blessed to be immersed in.
I have even borrowed some lines from Scripture and developed
my own slogan: “Let the dead bury the dead. As for me and my house, we will
serve the Lord.” While I still intend to spend the overwhelming majority of my
time on tending to my flock and evangelism, I still sense a need to keep an eye
on what is happening to the church in America.
Struggles with bad teaching and doctrine are certainly
nothing new to the church. It seems like every highly gifted, influential
Christian leader can be identified for what they taught and what they fought.
We can read about the Apostle Paul’s struggles with the Judaizers,
in the book of Galatians. The very early church struggled with the Gnostic heresy.
Athanasius (296-373 AD) spent his life
defending the Trinity and Christ’s equality with God. Augustine (354-430) while authoring many
influential works, also had to combat several serious problems, including
pagans, who blamed Christians for the fall of Rome. Martin Luther took a huge leap of faith, and
began the Reformation, as a reaction to the corrupt Roman Catholic church, of his time.
If you see the writing on the wall that I see, I anticipate
some major changes are coming to the church in America. When the people of God
crash and burn, He has always pulled a remnant of true believers out of the
ashes to continue His work.
So, as we tend to the ministries that God has given us, may
we learn from the past and have the discernment and the boldness to stand firm
for what we believe and articulate with as much grace as possible what is
heretical or bad teaching. This is an in-house matter. Check out 1st
Corinthians chapter 5.
Tolerance is such a buzzword in our era. And by its original
definition, tolerating people who see things differently is not a conflict. However,
there has been a semantic change. The definition of tolerance no longer means
tolerate other’s differences. Tolerance now, means to fully embrace, except and
validate ideas that may be completely different from our faith as it is defined
in the Bible.
We may need to deal with other people, but we are never
called to validate and support sin or just plain wrong thinking. The world is a
mess, because there is so much ambiguity. From my point of view, providing some
clarity for people in these turbulent times has been exactly what they are
looking.
