The Voice Of One Crying Out In Suburbia

Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?
(1 Corinthians 5:6 ESV)

Heresy rarely starts out openly. It almost always is a subtle thing, a whisper here, a sly question there. Just like the serpent in the Garden, lies sneak in where you are most vulnerable. "Did God really say that?" A perfect example of this is found in the story of a local Episcopalian church in Detroit that broke away from the Episcopal Church USA because the false teachings finally became intolerable.

For years, worshippers at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Livonia patiently put up with their diocese as it adopted a series of liberal changes that clashed with biblical tradition. But the breaking point came in 2003, when the Episcopal Church -- with the approval of the local diocese -- consecrated an openly gay bishop in New Hampshire.

And there is the problem. They patiently let things go from bad to worse, and only when the heresy was right in their face with the ordination of an open, unrepentant homosexual did they finally act. They should have stood up a long time ago, and if churches like St. Andrews had done so, maybe they could have turned the tide away from heresy and back to it's Biblical roots.

It is not a Christian virtue to be tolerant of heresy in our midst. As their denomination began to reject the Bible as God's complete and inerrant truth, they started to let standard slide including the ordination of women as pastors and the perverting of the Gospel from a Gospel of salvation to a political action arm for social justice. Step by step, little by little they lost their way until one day they looked around and realized that they no longer represented Christ, but just the opposite. This quote from the pastor really strikes home: "We didn't break away from the church so much as they broke away from what the Bible teaches," said the Rev. C. Allen Kannapell, 39, who heads the breakaway church in Livonia.

Too bad they came to that realization too late, but this should be a warning to others to be every diligent of their doctrine and their practice.