The County Clerk Who Cried Persecution

This was one of the most succinct summaries I have read on the topic, from Kim Davis' defenders are missing the point.

Kim Davis isn’t fighting for religious liberty. She’s fighting to get paid for a job she’s not doing.

That is about the size of it. Every job requires you to conform to something, whether that is a dress code or a start time or the salary you receive. It is doubly so with a job working for Caesar. She wants to work at this job but doesn't want to do what the job demands because she personally opposes it. I also would not issue marriage licenses for homosexuals but I don't work for Caesar. I liked this quote in the article from the Cato Institute:

“[Davis] is not in jail for refusing to violate her religion, unless her religion requires her to keep her public job.”

That stings a bit, doesn't it? Being a county clerk doesn't give one standing to defy the law, even when the law is based on a ridiculous legal notion. The author of the article gives a couple of hypothetical situations that culture warriors wouldn't be so quick to defend but thinking through a topic is a lot more work than knee-jerk reactions.

There is real persecution coming to this country but it is not here now and this isn't persecution. There is an old story about a boy who cried wolf. Today we have a lot of Christians and politicians who cry "persecution!" whenever anything doesn't go their way, like Fox News contributor Todd Starnes. We ought not be surprised when real persecution comes and no one cares because they have gotten tired of hearing anything and everything described that way.

You Might Be An Amish Driver...

With apologies to Jeff Foxworthy....

If you have picked up just enough German to tell Amish kids "sit down", "sit still", "sit back", "be quiet", "too loud", "go to sleep" and "almost home", you might be an Amish driver.

If you are able to recognize Amish from out of town just by what they are wearing on their head, you might be an Amish driver.

If the first thing you do at a large gathering is check out the other 15 passenger vans to see if anyone has a nicer van than you and to silently judge those with ugly, older vans, you might be an Amish driver.

If you have ever hurt your neck by turning your head too quickly to see who is in the buggy you just passed, you might be an Amish driver.

If you are stare suspiciously when you see English you don't recognize in predominantly Amish areas, you might be an Amish driver.

If you call other non-Amish "English", you might be an Amish driver.

If know by heart which Amish families are consistently either late getting ready to leave or that are going to call you ten minutes before you are scheduled to pick them up to change the time, you might be an Amish driver.

If you refer to a 12 passenger van as a "little van", you might be an Amish driver.

If someone suggesting that you depart at 2:30 AM and drive for 8 hours while they sleep doesn't seem insane to you, you might be an Amish driver.

If you say "lane" instead of "driveway", "fast" instead of "secure", "dinner bucket" instead of "lunch box", "let a message" instead of "leave a message" you might be an Amish driver.

If you unintentionally use German words in conversation with your spouse even when no Amish are present, you might be an Amish driver.

If 95% of the contacts in your cell phone are Amish and your phone gets used more by Amish than by you, you might be an Amish driver.

If you identify people by who they are married to (i.e. "Joanie Of Chachi") because there are so many other Amish with the same name, you might be an Amish driver.

If you can go from wide awake and driving to seat back and sleeping in 30 seconds, you might be an Amish driver.

If you wave to strangers in a buggy with a single lifted finger (index, not middle) and wave to Amish you know with a slow, full wave, you might be an Amish driver.

If you have a bunch of pictures on your Kindle of Amish kids using the camera on the Kindle instead of playing "Angry Birds", you might be an Amish driver.

If you know that "Angry Birds" is like crack mixed with Ritalin to Amish kids, you might be an Amish driver.

If you have learned through painful experience to "fix your own plate" at a potluck instead of letting the Amish ladies do it while you are waiting, you might be an Amish driver.

If you have also learned that a woman wearing a plain dress and white cap doesn't automatically mean she can cook or bake, you might be an Amish driver.

If you can figure out what someone is saying as long as 50% of the words they use are English, you might be an Amish driver.

If you love what you do for a living, you might be an Amish driver.

A fully operational Amish Assault Vehicle

The Death Of The Blue Coat

Today marks the 486th anniversary of the death of Georg Blaurock or Georg Cajacob, also known as the blue coat, one of the earliest Anabaptist leaders. He was the first of the three men in Zurich to be baptized as an adult at the hands of Conrad Grebel and in turn he baptized Gebel and Felix Manz. After several close escapes and being preceded in death by Manz and Grebel, Blaurock was executed by being cruelly burned alive by the Roman Catholic authorities on September 6, 1529.

So what, that was like 500 years ago! Can't we let the past be the past and focus on the future. Well, no we can't. I realized recently that in just over 2 years, on October 31st, 2017, we will recognize the 500th anniversay of the more or less "official" start of the Protestant Reformation. This event turned the world upside down and set the conditions for the world we live in today, from the nations of Europe to the World Wars to the very existence as it does of America. A lot of people will be talking about Luther and the Reformers, some in praise and others in condemnation but the struggle between the Reformers and Rome was not the only thing going on at this time.

For me, we can never pretend that what happened didn't happen. To do justice to our history we cannot try to cover or remove the warts because they are what made us who we are. We must remember why Blaurock and others were killed, who killed them and what they were teaching that was so dangerous to the religious powers. If we forget that in the vain hope of some notion of ecumenism, we do a disservice to their life and their death and make them both in vain. I am not looking for recriminations or demanding an apology from modern Roman Catholic and Protestant leaders for their treatment of the Anabaptists but I am asking that we don't forget what made them such a peaceful yet existential threat in the first place.

So today as you go about your day, take a minute to remember the Blue Coat!

Book Review: The Anabaptists and Contemporary Baptists

Featuring an eclectic mix of contributors from Rick Warren and Emir Caner to Malcolm Yarnell and Albert Mohler, The Anabaptists and Contemporary Baptists: Restoring New Testament Christianity, is a collection of essays giving us a solid look at important lessons for contemporary Baptists and others from the Anabaptists.

This is not a "Trail of blood" style book that attempts to create a Baptist version of papal apostolic succession. It is more of a historic look back at a group with a lot of similarities to Baptists. The book argues, successfully in most ways, that Baptists today can learn from the Anabaptists and explains how they can speak to our contemporary setting, something I have advocated for over the course of the last few years amid seismic shifts in our religious culture and the church itself. These essays are, as noted by the title, written in honor of Paige Patterson and come from megachurch pastors as well as seminary teachers and students. I was surprised to find that I really enjoyed Rick Warren's chapter, I am not a big fan of his but taken on the merits of the chapter it was excellent although some of it was hokey as can be ("I want to build the bridge of love between my heart and theirs so that Jesus can walk across." (Kindle Locations 2113-2114) Save it for Hallmark!)

The chapters range from highly accessible to very academic. One of the greatest strength of this book is also often its greatest weakness. Some of the later chapters contain great information but are pretty deep, scholarly articles that I felt like I was wading through and they may not be as accessible to the average reader as some of the earlier, more popular level chapters. I admit to skimming a bit in these chapters, the academic minutiae was a bit much for me and I would imagine that is true for a lot of even above-average Baptists who are familiar with church history. 

This is book is especially well suited for those with minimal background in Anabaptism. Especially useful are the chapters dealing with Balthasar Hubmaier, a powerful theologian who gives us a glimpse into the thinking of the Anabaptists and, if I can be permitted an editorial comment, shows that the contemporary neo-Anabaptist movement has very little in common with the Anabaptists. We also see some of the more questionable theological notions of Anabaptists, something I give them a lot of latitude for since they were a little too busy being hunted, tortured and murdered to sit down and work out the niceties of theological positions. For the historic Anabaptists, their most powerful theological statements are read in the blood, not in their books.

Below are a couple of choice quotes:

The modern generation is largely rootless. They are fatherless and rootless, and so they get blown around like tumbleweeds. When I talk about Radical Reformers, I am talking about people who say, “We have to go back to the root.” The Magisterial Reformation did not go far enough. You must go back to the New Testament, to the apostolic church. The Anabaptists and other Radical Reformers were “radical” in the truest sense, not as being extreme but in the sense of returning to their roots. (Rick Warren)

The Anabaptists and Contemporary Baptists: Restoring New Testament Christianity (Kindle Locations 1993-1996). B&H Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Emphasis Mine

From 1520 to 1560 approximately three thousand legally sanctioned executions for heresy occurred. The Anabaptist movement accounted for almost two-thirds of those executed. (Thomas White)

The Anabaptists and Contemporary Baptists: Restoring New Testament Christianity (Kindle Locations 1788-1789)

That was staggering to read. Almost 2/3 of the executions were of Anabaptists. I knew the percentage would be significant but not that high.

In his discussion of the “church,” Hubmaier noted the importance of “love” in the practice of church discipline or fraternal admonition. He had Leonhart ask, “What authority do those in the church have over one another?” Hans replied, “The power of fraternal admonition.” Leonhart then inquired, “What is fraternal admonition?” Hans answered, “One who sees his brother sin goes to him in love [zu ˚ im geet auß liebe] and admonishes him fraternally and quietly [strafft in bru ˚ derlich in der still] to abandon such sin. If he desists, he has won his soul.” Hubmaier emphasized “fraternal admonition [bru ˚ > derlich straff]” or “brotherly love,” which instilled mutual accountability within the congregation. His Anabaptist ecclesiology was set apart from the priestly admonition in the Catholic Church, which lacked mutual accountability between clergy and laity.

The Anabaptists and Contemporary Baptists: Restoring New Testament Christianity (Kindle Locations 2770-2777), Emphasis Mine.

Living at a time of many changes and much duress in the ecclesiological sphere for someone of his convictions, Hubmaier saw moral laxity as the “besetting weakness of Protestantism.”(Simon Goncharenko)

The Anabaptists and Contemporary Baptists: Restoring New Testament Christianity (Kindle Locations 3557-3558)

Luther becomes a reformer because he cannot attain assurance of salvation in the system of the Roman Catholic Church; Oecolampad becomes a reformer because he cannot find the new creature in Christ sufficiently realized in the Roman Catholic Church. Luther deals with justification; Oecolampad, following 1 Thessalonians 4: 3, says voluntas Dei est sanctificatio nostra. For Luther, the focus is on faith; for Oecolampad, on that which flows from faith— Piety, holiness, love— as well with the individual as with the overall entity of the corpus Christi mysticum. Luther emphasizes a Christianity more affected by Paul; Oecolampad one more affected by John.

The Anabaptists and Contemporary Baptists: Restoring New Testament Christianity (Kindle Locations 4818-4822)  

That is pretty representative of what you should expect. For anyone who is a Baptist, Anabaptist or just a student of church history, The Anabaptists and Contemporary Baptists is a great resource to build those bridges we need to learn from the past and hopefully avoid repeating some failures.

Wait. What?

I get kind of random Twitter followers now and then and I like to share when I do. This one might take the cake:

I really hope that is a satire account but if not please let me know if you are aware of anyone on social media who is less "dope" and "urban" than me. I am pretty sure you don't know anyone. I wonder what inspired them to follow me other than some automated program.

As they say on the mean streets of rural Indiana: "Yo, dawg, thou hast a dope buggy and a phat horse. Please note a word unto thine mother."

A Powerful Examination Of One Of The Most Often Misused Verses In The Bible

Dwight Gingrich did a masterful job in his essay, Giving Account for Our Use of Hebrews 13:17, which I finally got around to reading. It is not a stretch to say that that is one of the most mishandled and prone to abuse Scriptures in the New Testament, often by the very people who are trusted to know better. I am not going to excerpt it at all or offer comment other than saying that you really, really should read and ponder what he is saying.

Seriously, if you are not reading Dwight's lamentably too infrequent blog posts, you are bad at the internet and you should feel bad about yourself.

Kentucky, Gay "Marriage" and the Schleitheim Confession

Around the web yesterday was a news story out one of the states we formerly lived in, the great although muggy state of hot Kentucky. A County Clerk, Kim Davis, is refusing to issue marriage licenses to homosexuals in spite of a Supreme Court decision making up a "right" for homosexuals to marry out of thin air with a heaping helping of judicial acrobatics and a subsequent appeal by Ms. Davis. According to Ms. Davis her decision is based on her religious convictions.

In one sense she is correct. There is no way to reconcile the Bible and homosexual "marriage". No matter how committed the relationship, you cannot draw an equivalence between two men sodomizing one another regardless of how long it has been going on or how much they love one another and a marriage between a man and woman. That characterization may seem jarring to our tender ears by putting the defiling act of homosexuality in the place of priority but what defines homosexuality is the act, an act that has been considered disordered and unnatural for thousands of years, and not without reason.

On the other hand, the church long ago abdicated our responsibility and permitted us to be unequally yoked with Caesar in the matter of marriage. Greedily seeking after tax and pension benefits we took from Caesar and now he is taking back, leaving us in this ridiculous state. Ms. Davis is an employee of Caesar no matter her faith. When you work for Caesar and swear an oath of office (another Biblical violation), you have to do Caesar's bidding.

So what does that have to do with the Schleitheim Confession? As a reminder, the 6th article of the Anabaptist confession deals with the sword and as part of that deals with the office of the magistrate:

Thirdly, it will be asked concerning the sword, Shall one be a magistrate if one should be chosen as such? The answer is as follows: They wished to make Christ king, but He fled and did not view it as the arrangement of His Father. Thus shall we do as He did, and follow Him, and so shall we not walk in darkness. For He Himself says, He who wishes to come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me. Also, He Himself forbids the (employment of) the force of the sword saying, The worldly princes lord it over them, etc., but not so shall it be with you. Further, Paul says, Whom God did foreknow He also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of His Son, etc. Also Peter says, Christ has suffered (not ruled) and left us an example, that ye should follow His steps.

Finally it will be observed that it is not appropriate for a Christian to serve as a magistrate because of these points: The government magistracy is according to the flesh, but the Christian's is according to the Spirit; their houses and dwelling remain in this world, but the Christian's are in heaven; their citizenship is in this world, but the Christian's citizenship is in heaven; the weapons of their conflict and war are carnal and against the flesh only, but the Christian's weapons are spiritual, against the fortification of the devil. The worldlings are armed with steel and iron, but the Christians are armed with the armor of God, with truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation and the Word of God. In brief, as in the mind of God toward us, so shall the mind of the members of the body of Christ be through Him in all things, that there may be no schism in the body through which it would be destroyed. For every kingdom divided against itself will be destroyed. Now since Christ is as it is written of Him, His members must also be the same, that His body may remain complete and united to its own advancement and upbuilding.

Being a magistrate carries with it a responsibility and tacit understanding of being willing to do Caesar's bidding and carrying out Caesar's laws. If a Christian serves as an agent of Caesar while trying to follow Christ at the same time, inevitably something will have to give and more often than not it is following Christ. I affirm that you cannot be following Christ while killing your enemy as soldier of Caesar to give just one example, although it is the most obvious one. Another one would be an officer of the court that is charged with evicting a family from their home for non-payment. The law is clear, you don't pay what you owe and out you go. That is the law and whether it is just or not it is the law. How then can a Christian act as Caesar's agent in throwing the family out of their home?

That is why Anabaptists have traditionally stayed clear of being magistrates or even voting in elections. When you do either you become an agent of the state or a supporter of an agent of the state and they are bound to run into stuff that is contrary to the teachings of the faith. Ms. Davis is right to not issue a license for something that God has decreed to people who live counter to what God has declared. She also ought to resign if there is no other option. Christians should not willingly put ourselves in a place where we have to choose loyalties between the God of Creation and the god of this world, between Christ and Caesar.

Each day the simple wisdom of the historic Anabaptists looks smarter and more critical to study and understand.

Conversational Theology

I came across a term in a book I am reading, The Anabaptists and Contemporary Baptists, that reminded me a lot of an old post but one I return to a lot, Toward a community hermeneutic.

This has been a great book and I am almost done so a review is forthcoming but one passage really jumped out at me. This is the passage in question:

In the foreword to his 2007 book The Formation of Christian Doctrine, the contemporary Baptist scholar Malcolm Yarnell— who is also my supervisor and my teacher— meditates on the “necessarily conversational dimension” of theology. “From a believers’ church perspective, this entails conversation and judgment within the local church, conversation and recommendation within one’s own tradition, and conversation and proselytism with those outside.” This approach offers several advantages. First, it avoids an inadequate limitation to mere theological theory: Etymologically, the word “conversation,” derived from the Latin term "conversatio", denotes “living together, having dealings with others; manner of conducting oneself in the world,” as well as the “oral exchange of sentiments, observations, opinions, or ideas.” Hence, conversational theology cannot be done from the writing desk alone. 

The Anabaptists and Contemporary Baptists: Restoring New Testament Christianity (Kindle Locations 5024-5033). B&H Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

I really like that phrase, "conversational theology". All too often theology is done in the dusty offices of seminary professors and professional theologians (no offense to seminary profs with tidy offices). This leads to all sort of debate over minutiae and some squirrely ideas as they seek for something new and novel to talk about among their colleagues. It also removes the bulk of the church from the conversation, meaning that we end up with "trickle down theology" where each local pastor decides which theological ideas he shares and which he does not share. I don't blame them for that, if you talk with me you are not going to hear much positive about King James Onlyism or "Christian feminism" or a non-omniscient God. Nonetheless the church as a whole should be talking about and thinking through theology, not just in theory but also how it applies in practice, in the real lives of real Christians facing an increasingly hostile world.

So remember, if you are talking about the things of God with the brethren, you are engaged in conversational theology. You might not think you are a theologian but if you are a Christian you by definition are. The only question is whether you will be a good, informed theologian or a poor, ill-informed one!

Words As Peals Of Thunder

I has become quite en vogue among certain segments of the religious social media world to trash the Apostle Paul for his various inconvenient and politically incorrect statements on pretty much everything except "love", a word easily misused and reinterpreted to meet the standards of the world.

That is not how the early church viewed Paul. They had, as did many other generations of Christians, a much higher view of Paul. Rightly so. Jerome is quoted in The Principal Works of St. Jerome as writing the following regarding the words of Paul:

I will only mention the Apostle Paul, whose words seem to me, as often as I hear them, to be not words, but peals of thunder.

Peals of thunder. Peals is not a word we use these days but we probably should. What a different view of Paul we see from the early church and the great theologians throughout history, especially in the Reformation. In fact I ran across this quote again recently when reading  the intro to Timothy George's masterful work, Theology of the Reformers, now in a revised edition. George writes:

The Reformation was not merely a tempest in a teacup. Jerome once said that when he read the letters of the apostle Paul, he could hear thunder. That same thunder reverberates through the writings of the reformers as well. Contemporary theologians would do well to listen afresh to the message of these courageous Christians who defied emperors and popes, kings and city councils because their consciences were captive to the Word of God. Their gospel of the free grace of Almighty God, the Lord God Sabaoth, as Luther’s great hymn put it, and their emphasis on the centrality and finality of Jesus Christ stand in marked contrast to the attenuated, transcendence-starved theologies that dominate the current scene. It is not the purpose of this study to canonize the reformers. The sixteenth century was an age of violence and coercion, and the mainline reformers were not completely innocent of bigotry and intolerance. The Anabaptists, who had warts of their own, offered a counterwitness on this score, a witness that still needs to be heard in our own violence-ridden century. Luther’s invective against the Jews, Zwingli’s complicity in the drowning of Anabaptists, and Calvin’s in the burning of Servetus are all the more tragic because one senses that these, of all people, should have known better. However, what is remarkable about the reformers is that despite their foibles and sins and blind spots, they were able to grasp with such perspicuity the paradoxical character of the human condition and the great possibility of human redemption through Jesus Christ. This concern undergirded their approach to the church, worship, ministry, spiritual life, and ethics. In each of these arenas we need desperately to hear what they have to say. 

George, Timothy (2013-09-01). Theology of the Reformers (Kindle Locations 178-190). B&H Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Emphasis mine.

To paraphrase Maximus Decimus Meridius: Their words echo through eternity like thunder. I think we could use a little thunder these days. Scratch that, we could use a lot of thunder these days.

We have lost the power of words, of ideas, of truth. Our battle-cry is tolerance, ecumenism, pragmatism. We try to fight the good fight by surrendering before the first shot it fired and shockingly keep losing, although that doesn't seem to bother some people. Anything to keep the peace and ensure that the tithe checks and book royalties keep flowing in. Paul makes for an easy target for the self-appointed editors of the faith because he is so readily slandered by those looking for an easier, less offensive gospel. Just pick and choose some seemingly innocuous passages about love, preferably from Jesus, and call Paul a misogynist or simply suggest that you can't really trust what Paul wrote, thereby setting the stage to discount whatever portions of the Bible the culture finds inconvenient. Pitting Paul against Jesus is a favorite pastime for too many religious folks and a fair number of Christians buy into it in their quest to find cover for their embarrassment of following such a primitive faith.

We could use a lot more thunder these days, a little more spine and a lot less congeniality. No one is going to read Jim Wallis or Joel Osteen or Rachel Held Evans and say wow, their words are like peals of thunder! Somewhere along the line we decided that being nice and inoffensive and politically correct were the hallmarks of a Christian when anything but that is the case. Thanks to our Hallmark culture we have a skewed, sub-Christian view of love and that view makes many of us theological wimps and whiners. I have a lot more to say about the view of the Bible and Paul in particular in the days to come. How we view the Bible in our culture today makes all the difference between a faithful witness and an empty religion. Stay tuned.

Hay And Love

Driving around yesterday where we live almost anywhere you went you could smell freshly mowed and raked hay fields. That is such a wonderful smell. With thousands of Amish in close proximity to our home, everywhere you looked there were farmers, Amish and English alike, cutting, raking and baling hay for the winter. Watching the English with their high tech equipment and then watching the Amish with the plodding but mighty draft horses is such a contrast but when you look at their houses it looks like the Amish are prospering more with less technology. What is especially awesome is when you are out of the car and can not only watch but listen. All you hear are the sounds of the horses doing what they love, leaning into the harness and pulling hay rakes and hay wagons. The soft jingle of their harness out in the open air while they do what man and beast have worked symbiotically together for centuries to accomplish in the never-ending change of the seasons reminds me that bigger and louder is not necessarily better. Farming the way the Amish do seems almost quaint but I don't think many of the Amish envy their English neighbors and the environmentally controlled cabs of their massive tractors with a commensurately massive loan payments.

How different the times and seasons are when you spend a lot of your summer preparing for fall and winter rather than looking ahead to the next vacation or the start of the Christmas shopping season. The rhythms of the seasons in the Midwest are very meaningful for those of us who grew up here and choose to live here and it always brings back memories. For me the smell of freshly mowed hay means more than feed for our livestock this winter, it takes me back to my younger days when I was an insufferable kid dating the woman who would be my wife.

Part of the process of courting my wife included helping with the hay when her dad cut it back when his health was better. That was not much fun because the bales were bound with wire making it possible to make them much heavier than hay bales bound with twine. Some of the bales weighed more than half of what I did back then. Plus I didn't really know what I was doing which made me feel awkward, something I hate. To top it off my wife's brother would toss bales like he was playing corn-hole, which is made easier by him being a giant who was immensely strong. I was pretty strong for a 125 pound kid but each bale was a major effort. Lifting weights in the gym is not quite the same as using your whole body to manhandle a bale of hay.

When I was living in those days of sweating, sore backs and arms that looked like a herd of cats had used them for a scratching post it wasn't much fun but looking back it was all well worth the effort and irritation. I am not sure her dad ever thought I would amount to much but I have to believe it earned me some grudging respect to go toe to toe with the hay bales.

Those days seem so long ago but I still remember the smell of hay and it reminds me of my wife. She would be out there with the men, working every bit as hard but smiling all the while. Hard work never bothered her and I tell skeptical Amish guys all the time that back in the day she could work every bit as hard as an Amish woman or even an Amish man. Stacking hay bales in the barn seems an odd thing to remind me of her but I recall those days and the smell of hay reminds me of how blessed I am to have a faithful wife of more than twenty years and eight children that we love. Our oldest son is out of the house every morning before 7 AM to go work on Amish farm and I see in him so much of what I respect about my wife. My other sons will head out later to care for our pigs, horses and cattle. My daughters are bright and beautiful and the two older girls spent part of their summer in Nicaragua and Nepal serving Christ.

My ungrateful and vain younger self would be shocked and disappointed at how we choose to live but I look around at my family and especially my wife when I see hay being made and wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

The Cage Stage: Not just for Calvinists Anymore!

There is a well known phenomenon that occurs when a generic evangelical discovers Reformed Theology/Calvinism. It even has a name: the cage stage. I will turn to R.C. Sproul, Jr. to explain in more detail. From the article Cage-Stage Calvinism: What Is It and What Causes It? :

“Cage-stage” describes an all too common phenomenon wherein a believer comes to embrace the doctrines of grace, and for a time becomes an obnoxious lout in defending the doctrines to all comers, whether they are interested or not. It suggests that such a newbie should spend some time in a cage until they calm down. If you are a Calvinist, you likely have been through this stage. If you are not, you surely have encountered those who were infected.

Yep. I remember that stage. Like Sproul, Jr. says, what causes it is a lack of belief in Calvinism. Read the whole article if you are interested.

I can go back to my earlier posts when I was even less wise than I am now, which is hard to believe, and a newer Christian and you can see the cage stage pretty dramatically on display. I even used to spend a lot of time arguing with other Calvinists about what constituted legitimate Calvinism!  Get a couple of younger Christians who hold to the Five Points and they will find something to argue about. As I grew older, I grew (mostly) out of that stage. That doesn't mean I hold less firmly to the five points or Reformed theology proper, if anything I hold to it even more firmly. It just means that I don't wander the back alleys of the internet looking for a fight. Again, as stated above, the cage stage is not a flaw in Calvinism, just a somewhat understandable overreaction when someone is introduced to an alternative to the easy-believisim, semi-Pelagian hokum that passes for theology in most of evangelicalism.

As I travel this life I have noticed that while the cage-stage Calvinist is still a thing, although the fervor seems to have cooled a bit as I have mentioned previously, it is not unique to Calvinism. While most people who embrace Calvinism sincerely find the tenets in Scripture, it also seems to attract people who are exceptionally bookish and prone to arguing over minutiae. I have also noticed a disturbing trend in my own past writing and in the writing of a lot of others who are part of the "house church" or "organic church" or "simple church" movement. Perhaps being in a sub-movement in and of itself is a problem but there are a lot of advocates for a simpler, participatory church that are fixated on that over anything else. Again my past writing demonstrates some of this and a lot of people out there still do. That doesn't mean that striving for a simpler, more participatory model of ecclesiology is wrong, no more so than being a Calvinist is. It does mean that while this group is full of lots of great people that I call friends, it is also home to some serious egos, a disturbing amount of bad theology and some flat out false teachers who seem to get a pass on damnable heresy because they say the right things about ecclesiology.

I guess my point here is that it might be a good idea for more mature and wiser heads to help talk down some newly awakened folks who feel betrayed by the institutional system (probably with cause). Perhaps a little time in the cage to work out what this all means and ask some critical questions like "What do I do if I can't find exactly what I am looking for?" and "What are the boundaries of acceptable theology?". Like newly minted Calvinists, new house church types need some time for reflection before canonizing the works of Frank Viola and singing the praises of other house church advocates, many of whom are involved in a disturbing number of ego and power driven squabbles. Take what you have learned brothers and sisters and let it percolate for a while before you decide to conquer the world under the banner of 1 Corinthians 14:26 and assume everyone you meet is dying to hear why the way they do church is wrong.

Southern Baptist Convention To Cut Hundreds Of Missionaries

Christianity Today reports that the International Mission Board, the foreign mission arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, is cutting hundreds of staff including missionaries: Southern Baptists Will Cut 600 to 800 Missionaries and Staff. David Platt, president of the IMB, announced that the IMB has overspent by almost a quarter billion dollars and it sounds like the prior leadership was not exactly fiscally responsible. Is this a sign of things to come? It sounds like it could be...

Scott Moreau, editor of Evangelical Missions Quarterly, said the IMB staff cuts could be a sign of things to come. Since the 1700s, he said, evangelicals have used the “William Carey” model of missions funding.

In that model, churches and individual Christians donate to a mission society, which then sends out missionaries.

It’s a model that could falter in the future, Moreau said. “This might be a step toward the demise of the centrally funded mission agency.”

To me it is inconceivable that the current model of missions will survive the near future. We should be thinking very seriously about how to fund mission work and we should have started to do so a long time ago. Being a missionary supported by the IMB must be nicer than having a dozen local churches you have to ask for money from but I think both of those models are in trouble, We should have been moving to a model of using mission funds to equip local Christians in foreign mission fields. rather than parachuting white American missionaries into foreign countries to save the heathen. We have plenty of white heathens right here in America and you can find a bunch of them pretty easily because they are in a pew on Sunday mornings. By equipping and even supporting for a time Christians in their own native lands we change the 'Murica To The Rescue! paradigm and hopefully have a more genuine and less threatening Gospel witness. Plus I think it would be far more cost-effective. For a fraction of the cost of supporting U.S. missionaries in the lifestyle they are accustomed to, we can send equippers to help Christians already on the ground obtain the tools they need to be witnesses, which is far more Biblical anyway (see Ephesians 4:11-16).

Of course it wouldn't be like me to not point out the institutional elephant in the room. The SBC's IMB has been selling off mission property and not replacing retiring missionaries because they lack the funds to stay within budget. That means people in foreign lands are not hearing the Gospel and are dying condemned in their sins. Meanwhile as I have posted previously, the Southern Baptist Convention, as the largest Christian denomination in America, has tens of billions in real estate that sits mostly empty most of the week (see my post, Speaking of haranguing the institutional church  to see where I come up with that claim.). How can we sleep at night as the church knowing that our priorities are that screwed up? Let me say that again: people are dying and going to hell without Jesus and the richest and most powerful Christians in the world can't be bothered to spend less on ourselves so we can send the Gospel to them. You can bet we have the money to support sending Marines and drone strikes to those countries but not Bibles and missionaries. If God were not infinitely patient and sovereign  I fear that every lot in America containing a "church" building would be a smoldering ruin. I am not at all joking about that.

We are at the point where we have to decide which is more important for us, having a cozy and convenient place to get our religion on or taking the Gospel to every corner of the earth. We don't have enough money to do both now and that is only going to get worse in the future. I am quite confident that the Bible already answers that question for us in favor of the latter. The only remaining question is whether the church of Jesus Christ will be a faith Bride and carry out the Great Commission He entrusted to us.