Monday, February 19, 2007

Pyromaniacs: Sectarianism and Separation

Pyromaniacs: Sectarianism and Separation

Good stuff on Pyromaniacs. As always the comments are more interesting than the post itself. Not that the post itself is boring, quite the contrary, but the comments always bring out a few people who go way far afield into topics that are only marginally related.

Unity is a big issue, one that cults and catholics beat us up on and very few people have much of a response to. My church is one of three Baptist churches on a stretch of US-31 in northern Michigan of about 6-7 miles. That may seem OK but when you realize how few people are along that stretch, it seems odd that we have so many Baptist churches per capita. Ours is a fairly traditional SBC church, one is a fundamental, KJV-only church and one used to be and now is kind of a modernistic Baptist church that de-emphasizes it's baptistic nature. It would be a lot easier and more efficient if we all just met together, but there is too much distance from one end to the other for that to happen. The real problem, in my humble opinion, is that we focus too much on the church building, organizations and denominations, and too little on the church itself. Virtually every church contains some mixture of believers and unbelievers. I think even the most conservative, orthodox reformed baptist, elder led, church discipline, all five points of Calvinism church still has unbelievers in their midst and many far left, women pastor, scripture denier high church, mainline protestant churches still have believers in their midst. The only church composed entirely of born agains believers is the invisible one.

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