“Churches and their services have travelled a long way from their beginnings in the Bible, and they have picked up major elements from pagan worship that have transformed the life and witness of the body of Christ on earth and indeed seriously compromised the calling of the body of Christ and compromised the way we are meant to go about fulfilling that calling.”
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There is an aphorism that says “Nature abhors a vacuum.” The unpalatable truth is that the vacuum left by the Christian Church’s abandonment of her calling to be salt and light to the nations is being filled increasingly by the values of a worldview that is in many respects similar to that of pagan Rome, and it is this worldview that is shaping our modern world.
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Misuse of words and terms can be a great snare. The Reformers did not reform any Church. If they had done so there would exist today a Reformed Roman Catholic Church. No such Church exists. Rather they left the Roman Church, or were thrown out of it, and they then started again.
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Jesus never told us to plant churches. He said he will build his church. He told us to seek the kingdom of God and his righteousness (i.e. justice, not piety) and the Great Commission he gave us is a command to disciple nations, not plant churches. Churches are a consequence of the Great Commission not its goal.
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The degree to which one accepts the whole idea of sacraments is the degree to which one fails to understand biblical covenantal theology and adopts a magical instead of a covenantal understanding of the Christian faith.
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The spectre of animism, still hangs over the Church’s anthropology, and this is ultimately fatal to the further progress of the Great Commission.
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One thing the Church is good at is lobbing water balloons over the trenches during battle (thinking that somehow we are doing something helpful), all the while the enemy’s .50 cal is mowing us down. Worse yet, many stand back thinking that they shouldn’t even throw a water balloon, let alone engage in any form of battle. Unfortunately, at this point, I’ve already offended someone with the analogy.
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Whether we recognize this truth or not, institutions are always at risk of being disestablished by God. Whenever God brings covenant sanctions in history, it is the institutions that must suffer. That is not to say that individuals do not suffer want; rather, it is to say that institutions that are not obedient to King Jesus will find themselves divorced from God and brought to nothing.
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The chief and greatest error of the Christian Church throughout the two thousand years of her history has been to have had the wrong priority and to have made this erroneous priority the touchstone of orthodoxy. This error has existed in all branches and denominations; it continues to this day and the Church world-wide shows little if any sign that she understands the problem let alone that she is prepared to repent of the idolatry that is at the heart of it. Yet the results of this error have been catastrophic for the mission of the Church.
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In 1992 David Chilton gave this lecture on "Ecclesiastical Megalomania" at the Third International Conference on Christian Reconstruction. Though links are sometimes shared of this lecture, I wanted to highlight it once again. Megalomania, especially of the ecclesiastical variety, is a disease upon the church, and this lecture puts forth some basic principles having to do with authority and submission in the context of the local church.
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The clergy is one of the last remaining mediaeval guilds in Western society, and it is a serious cancer on the body of Christ. It is negative and destructive, and if you doubt this what more proof could you need than the state of the Church today, which in the main is controlled by clergy guilds, which restrict access to ministry to guild members and therefore impede the work of the kingdom, since God does not accept this guild membership game and does not play by its rules, and never has.
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But you may ask, how is it that the values of our godless society dominate Church life if the prevailing spirituality is dualistic, since Gnostic dualism is hardly the religion of modern secularism? Because this dualism removes most of what it means to be Christian from the realm of daily life and relocates it to the spiritual realm. But everyone has to live in the real world, even pietistic dualists. And so, without a Christian perspective to guide their thoughts and lives in the real day to day world, since the faith is not seen as being relevant to it, Christians unwittingly imbibe the values of the world around them as a means of dealing with every day life.
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Ask a Christian what the kingdom of God is. Ten to one you won’t get a proper answer, just a lot of pious waffle about kingdom values and kingdom principles at best, and more than likely a load of super-spiritual nonsense that is no more than thinly disguised dualism.
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In one week the Mid-Atlantic Reformation Society (MARS) will be hosting their annual Future of Christendom Conference. Regrettably, I cannot have anything to do with this conference or their society. Not because of my preferences, personal judgments, or so on, but because of what God’s Word tells us about having nothing to do with evil men, bad company corrupting, and because I’m called to defend the name of Christ and His Church.
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