Our little country church commissioned our first foreign missionary in thirty-some years on Sunday, sending a member of our congregation, a young lady affiliated with Campus Crusade for Christ, to Asia for a year. (We aren’t her only financial support.)

Thanks for the post. Appreciated.

Hank

Now, in fairness, the site does provide a search feature, and when I search for “beliefs” it gives me several theology-related links. That should count for something.

On the other hand, when I click those links, I get this message:
“Invalid parameter range – contains potentially unsafe characters”

(By the way, as an ex-Catholic I’ll be the first to acknowledge that the Presbyterian Church doesn’t have a monopoly on unsafe characters.)

Okay, in all seriousness, the Church (not PC, not Baptist, but Christ’s Church writ large) does seem to lack boldness.

Hank

When I think of Jesus saying, in Mat. 19:8, that Moses permitted divorce because “your hearts were hard,” it makes me wonder: how much different were we, back when life was hard and death was common (as, admittedly, it still is in some places)? Presumably the Romans didn’t feel the same about their 18 month old children as we do about ours. How is that possible? I don’t know. I’ve been assured that people everywhere “love their children just the same as you do, and want the same things for them.” Maybe that’s true, but it doesn’t seem likely.

I couldn’t agree more that it is not the church that suffers from faith’s expulsion from the public square. Our relentlessly anti-Christian, anti-value popular culture hurts most those who are outside the church.

Hank

But.

I see more lively churches that seem to be accomplishing a lot more, with a lot less denominational infrastructure (like six categories of membership and the attendant year-end bookkeeping). I guess the question is, are you willing to risk the bad in order to stay more focused on the good? And in a country without an established church, when you can start a new church as soon as they kick you out of your old congregation, does it make sense to be so focused on these worst-case scenarios?

That doesn’t sound good, but it does sound familiar. A few of us pre-septuagenarians were talking the other day about where our local church will be in 20 years. Our excuse is that the population out here in the country is aging and shrinking: we’re in our own little demographic death spiral.

I’m reminded of what the LORD told Samuel in 1 Sam. 16:7 “Do not look at his appearance…God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.”

We should be far more concerned about what’s on your inside than what you’re wearing on the outside. Do you love the Lord? Are you committed to the Word? Are you preaching only Christ, and Him crucified?

These are all far more important issues than wearing a robe. If this is a “big issue” for a church, then it should be approached by the pastor with great tenderness and humility, but for the sake of the gospel and practical reasons, it may just be time to leave the robe off.

Yes, and he was not alone in the OT to call for compassion and justice. The message of practical love Christ preached was already old and, for me, finding that thread in the OT brings that text to life.

– Hank