Schism Is As Schism Does

I have been watching the Episcopal Church by peeking through my fingers at the slow moving train-wreck for a number of years. By no small effort the EC-USA has been the tip of the spear when it comes to jettisoning orthodoxy for "progressive" political correctness and that has led to the demographic implosion that the Episcopal Church and other "progressive" denominations have experienced. Like a snake swallowing its own tail the progressives keep telling themselves that they need to just take one more step away from orthodoxy to bring people back but all they accomplish is ecclesiastical suicide.

Today the latest bit of bad news came down from the Anglican Communion,  the worldwide circle of churches which included the Episcopal Church. In a nutshell the Anglican Communion, which is far more vibrant and orthodox in countries outside of the U.S. and the U.K., announced a suspension of the Episcopal Church from the Communion for a period of three years. The exact wording is below:

7. It is our unanimous desire to walk together. However given the seriousness of these matters we formally acknowledge this distance by requiring that for a period of three years The Episcopal Church no longer represent us on ecumenical and interfaith bodies, should not be appointed or elected to an internal standing committee and that while participating in the internal bodies of the Anglican Communion, they will not take part in decision making on any issues pertaining to doctrine or polity.

That is a pretty stinging rebuke from the worldwide Anglican body but the critical point cam earlier in the statement"

2. Recent developments in The Episcopal Church with respect to a change in their Canon on marriage represent a fundamental departure from the faith and teaching held by the majority of our Provinces on the doctrine of marriage. Possible developments in other Provinces could further exacerbate this situation.

What needs to be crystal clear is that "conservatives" who walked away from the Episcopalian church are not the ones who are causing schism. Rather the Episcopal Church by embracing a deviant understanding of marriage, gender and human sexuality has willingly placed itself outside of the boundaries of what can legitimately be called the church. They have departed from the church, not the Anglican Church in North America or other groups and churches that have left the Episcopal church. When someone or an organization deviate from the boundaries of the Kingdom, the only proper response is to separate from them. Despite the faux unity some propose, sometimes separation is the only proper response to those who embrace sin. Those who have left have departed not from the unity of the church but have returned to the unity of the church.

The Episcopal church has responded to the statement as one would expect including the obligatory obscene eisegesis of that most oft misapplied verse, Galatians 3:28:

Before the Jan. 14 vote, Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Michael B. Curry told the primates gathering Jan. 11-15 in Canterbury, England, that the statement calling for the sanction would be painful for many in the Episcopal Church to receive.

“Many of us have committed ourselves and our church to being ‘a house of prayer for all people,’ as the Bible says, when all are truly welcome,” Curry said in remarks he later made available to Episcopal News Service.

“Our commitment to be an inclusive church is not based on a social theory or capitulation to the ways of the culture, but on our belief that the outstretched arms of Jesus on the cross are a sign of the very love of God reaching out to us all.  While I understand that many disagree with us, our decision regarding marriage is based on the belief that the words of the Apostle Paul to the Galatians are true for the church today: All who have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, for all are one in Christ.”

“For so many who are committed to following Jesus in the way of love and being a church that lives that love, this decision will bring real pain,” he said. “For fellow disciples of Jesus in our church who are gay or lesbian, this will bring more pain. For many who have felt and been rejected by the church because of who they are, for many who have felt and been rejected by families and communities, our church opening itself in love was a sign of hope. And this will add pain on top of pain.”

The comment section is very instructive, including the frequent threat to withhold funds from the Anglican Communion.

The Bible is crystal clear. The same Paul that Mr. Curry so grossly misquotes is also the apostle who had the most to say about marriage, sexuality and how to deal with sin in the church. It is the undeniable witness of Scripture that one cannot simultaneously embrace and celebrate wanton sin and call oneself a disciple of Jesus.

So what? If you are reading this you likely are not Episcopalian or Anglican so why should you care? You should care because this disaster is a warning for the rest of the church, a warning that compromise with sin invariably destroys the church. The rest of the church should be constantly vigilant because what we see on display here can happen to any of us if we let loose our grip on the Bible as applicable and authoritative and clear on this and many other topics. I take no pleasure in the death throes of Episcopalianism but some of the most tragic events are the most instructive.

Book Review: Separated Unto God

As I mentioned yesterday, I read a lot while on vacation. One book I finished up was pretty meh but the second was mostly irritating and disquieting, not because it was wrong but because it struck a little too close to home. Below is my review.

The main failing of much of Christendom today, however, is not the development of a neolegalism, but of unvarnished worldliness. 

- J.C. Wenger, Separated Unto God, p 144

Nestled in a lengthy book, the above quote from John C. Wenger in 1951, makes a point that was true in the middle of the 20th century and is even more true today. In spite of frequent dire warnings of the "legalism" boogeyman, the greater danger in the church is and has always been a compromised posture toward the world, an attitude that sees progressive surrender to stay one step ahead of the world's displeasure as the safest path. For the vast majority of the church the time to make a stand has passed but in some places there still is a healthy appreciation for the need for the church to be a separate and distinct people who do not look, think or act like the world.

J.C. Wenger's comprehensive look at separation, Separated Unto God, is perhaps the gold standard on the topic from an Anabaptist perspective. Granted that many contemporary "Anabaptists" would be shocked and horrified at what he describes, I nevertheless find far more of value in what Wenger wrote six decades ago than I do in most of what passes for Anabaptist literature today. While some of what he wrote seems archaic and even quaint in our "enlightened" culture, even in the church, I found virtually every page to be convicting. I also found it unsettling because too often I recognized where I was likewise engaged in cultural compromise, often without giving it much thought.

For virtually every subject from how we dress to involvement in war, Wenger goes to the Bible and makes a compelling case for simple non-conformity. It is a refreshing change in an era of compromise at breakneck speed from most corners of the church apart from those that are still trying to tilt at the windmills of the culture wars. It is important to note that Wenger approaches this entire topic as a positive separation toward God rather than away from the world. The difference might seem quibbling but it is an important difference to understand.

Wenger also touches on one of the (or perhaps the) major weaknesses of the separated, conservative Anabaptist tribe, namely their tendency to bunker up, rely on tradition and eschew the evangelistic zeal of their Anabaptist forefather. Speaking of the Pennsylvania Mennonites, Wenger quotes the following:

Their Christianity was not that of "radical" Christians; it had settled down to a comfortable, conventional, denominational type. There was no thought of evangelistic work, no need of any kind of mission work, or occasion to alter any of the set patterns of worship. The faith and practice of the immigrants was good and satisfying, why change?

From Mennonite Life, quoted in Separated Unto God, p. 80

That rings true even today and it is a major issue but compared to having conversations on accepting "gay marriage" it pales in comparison and is an issue that can be fixed.

If there are weak points they come when Wenger turns to certain church traditions like close (although not closed) communion and church membership. In spite of these flaws I found very little to disagree with. The writing style is a bit archaic and dated but that is quite common among books written in the middle of the 20th century. It is not an easy read but it certainly is a worthwhile one, not just for Christians who embrace Biblical separation but for any Christian who looks around at the race to compromise and wonders if that is what God really has in mind for His church.

Amid the confusion of the church culture we live in and a redefinition of "Anabaptism" that looks suspiciously like run of the mill "progressive evangelicalism", Wenger's writings from so many years ago is a refreshing change and even more necessary today than it was in the 1950's. May God's people recover a healthy separation, not so much from the world but unto God along with a vigorous zeal for evangelism. The world desperately needs it.

Where the unity rubber meets the road

The chain blog that Alan started on unity has had lots of great conversations. If you haven’t read through it yet, you owe it to yourself to do so (see links at the bottom of the post). The most recent post, No, We can’t just get along, gets to a key issue in any conversations about unity. What are the legitimate reasons for separation because there clearly are some Scriptural reasons where we can and indeed must separate? Alan lists a few out:

1. Unrepentant Sin (Matt 18:15-20; 1 Cor 5:1-5)
2. Disorderliness (2 Thess 3:6)
3. Refusal to Work (2 Thess 3:7-10)
4. False Teaching (2 Thess 3:14-15; 1 Tim 1:20; 2 John 10-11)
5. Divisiveness (Rom 16:17-18; Titus 3:10-11)

Of those, number four is the tough one. I commented on his post with this:

#4 is the real crux of it, isn’t it? What is a “false teaching”? There was a time when I would have inclulded “Arminianism”, dispensationalism and infant baptism in that category. I still diasgree with all three of those but do they rise to the level of false teaching? I certainly wouldn’t let someone baptize my unregenerate child for the sake of unity but I wouldn’t see them baptizing their infant children as reason to break fellowship, even if I think they were wrong to do so. I spent the last couple of years in Michigan in a group that held more or less to a dispensational hermeneutic, which I likewise disagree with but we still had wonderful fellowship with them.

So what then? Certainly any teaching that denies the Gospel by either subtracting from it or adding to it rises to the level of false teaching. What about presuming to speak for God where He has not spoken (false prophecy?) This is a tough one.

What do you think? What are the legitimate reasons to separate from other Christians? Jump over to No, We can’t just get along and weigh in on the conversation…

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Chain blog rules:

1) If you would like to write the next blog post (link) in this chain, leave a comment stating that you would like to do so. If someone else has already requested to write the next link, then please wait for that blog post and leave a comment there requesting to write the following link.

2) Feel free to leave comments here and discuss items in this blog post without taking part in the actual “chain”. Your comments and discussion are very important in this chain blog.

3) When you write a link in this chain, please reply in the comments of the previous post to let everyone know that your link is ready. Also, please try to keep an updated list of links in the chain at the bottom of your post, and please include these rules at the bottom of your post.

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Here are the other posts...

“Links” in this chain blog:

1. “Chain Blog: Dealing with Divisive Issues Introduction” by Alan

2. “Chain Blog: Dealing with divisive issues starts with love” by Arthur

3. “I am divisive” by Jeremy

4. “Chain Blog: Please agree with me” by Jon

5. “Division and our shared humanity” by Andy

6. “Chain Blog: solving the problem” by Bobby

7. “Divisiveness: Acts 2 & Ugly Carpet” by fallenpastor

8. “Stimulating our Collective Memory” by Trista

9. “No, we can’t just get along” by Alan

10. Who will write the next “link” post in the chain?

Separate or distinct?

I was waiting for my kids to get done with VBS last night and while I waited I read a little bit in a book about separation. It was a Mennonite book from the 50’s so it was quite dated but it contained a lot of the usual stuff. It got me thinking about this issue again and I keep coming back to it because it is pretty unsettled in my mind so far.

The problem with separation is that it makes it awfully hard to fulfill our calling. We have been appointed as ambassadors of the King of Kings to make known His holy name by which men may be saved, making disciples of all the nations. An ambassador who never leaves the embassy and never welcomes visitors is going to be a pretty poor representative of his sovereign. So we cannot read the New Testament and see separation as being our calling.

While the above is all true, by and large I don’t see excessive separation as being a problem for most of the church outside of a few small subgroups (and those groups are often as separate from other Christians as they are from the world). Far from it. The church is so similar to the world in terms of values, appearance and behavior as to be virtually indistinguishable from the world. This is a direct result of the combination of state-church coziness stemming from the Reformation and the civic spirituality that dominates the culture of American churches.

In response to the general worldliness of the church, the answer is not extreme separation. That is the easy way out and it is seductive. Running away from sinners is easier and neater than proclaiming the truth in love to them. We can bunker up and keep the world away. That might serve if our first and only goal is to keep ourselves unstained from the world but given our calling of disciple making, it is not feasible.

Rather I see the proper response as being distinctiveness. The church should be distinct from the world and you can only see a distinction when compared to something else which requires us to be among those we are trying to reach. There is a real difference between being separate from the world, i.e. withdrawal from the world as opposed to being a distinct people, i.e. a people noticeably different from the world around us. It is a hard balance. We are called out of the world in order to go to the world but if we are indistinguishable from the world, why would the world be interested in hearing what we have to say? When the church tries to be like the world to win the world, the world is not impressed and the church ends up losing its saltiness. In the days of the Anabaptists, they suffered extreme persecution and were quite different and distinct from the world but they were also zealous for evangelism.

When the world sees us, we should be distinctive. In other words we should be distinct from the world around us. Not just because we “go to church” or by the manner of our dress. Our lives should be lives that distinguish us from the world. The world accepts going to church. The world accepts vague spirituality and uttering religious platitudes. What the world doesn’t understand and cannot accept are people who embrace being bondservants to a King. It doesn’t understand those who see others as more important than themselves. The world doesn’t understand those who eschew violence, power, dominance and upward mobility and replaces them with lives of sacrifice, joy amidst persecution, the setting aside of rights, a willingness to die to self, humbly turning the other cheek and renouncing our right to retribution. Lives of humble service lived simply are far more counter-cultural and radical than driving a Prius or drinking fair trade coffee and those lives will be distinctive lives that will serve to draw His sheep.

We will not be distinctive in the world by observing culturally acceptable religious rituals. Nor will we be faithful to our calling by hiding away from the world. We must be intentionally distinct from the world.

You can probably tell from these muddled thoughts that I am still a long way away from finding solid ground here. I would welcome some thoughts if you can make any sense at all from what I have written.

Separation and evangelism

How do we balance the two?

Scripture presents us with two seemingly opposing forces: the call for evangelism and the call for separation. It is often captured in the phrase “in the world but not of the world”. That is fine as a slogan, but how does that work itself out in the community of believers? I would argue (and have just recently) that typically it doesn’t. Let’s look at both sides, starting with the separation side. The most overt verse and the one most often quoted is found in James:

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. (James 1: 27)

James later in his epistle rightly pegs the source of contention and strife in the church, i.e. worldliness….

What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. (James 4: 1-4)

James describes worldliness as spiritual adultery, wanting to have Christ as Savior but the world as lord. It is pretty clear from what James writes and likewise it is confirmed by what we see all around us that it is worldly desires that cause the strife and contention in the church. When the church fights about money, when it quibbles about doctrines, when it follows after personalities, all of that stems from worldliness or more specifically an entanglement with and love for the things of the world.

We read something similar from Paul regarding the world, warning us against being “conformed to this world” in Romans 12…

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Rom 12: 1-2)

We often hear about being renewed in mind but we need to recognize that the opposite is also true, we are not to be conformed to this world. Three times in John’s Gospel he quotes Christ as referring to Satan as the ruler of this world (John 12:31. John 14:30 and John 16:11). John also speaks of the world in his first epistle….

Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever. (1 John 2: 15-17)

Jesus is even harsher in His condemnation of the pursuit of the world and His warnings (promises?) of persecution by the world. Read John 14-17. So the world kind of gets a bad rap. Whether it was the Israelites getting entangled with pagan people and their practices in the Old Testament times or the church today adopting the world's standards and methods, being too comfortable or even loving the world is a recipe for disaster.

Conversely, separation as a concept gets the stink-eye in most of the church and not without cause. Separation is most typically linked to extreme fundamentalist movements and degenerates into either extreme isolationism or a focus on external pietism (‘No Pokemon Cards or Harry Potter books!’, as if avoiding those things will make one holy).

So what are we to do?

The solution to worldliness is clearly not being religious. That sort of belief gets a pretty rude treatment by Christ in his condemnation of the empty religious ritualism of the Jews. Unfortunately that is pretty much how most of the Body thinks. If I go to church on Sunday and perhaps Wednesday, don’t watch (many) R-rated movies, don’t drink and don’t let my kids read Harry Potter books or Twilight books or play with Pokémon cards, I am not being worldly. There are not a lot of Christians who openly proclaim their desire to be worldly and most condemn worldliness but you see how they live and wonder what exactly is markedly different from the world.

To compound matters, we have 1 Corinthians 5: 9-13 which speaks of the importance of discipline within the church (something that is only really feasible with a regenerate church). So we are not only to avoid entanglement with the world, we are also to enforce pretty serious discipline upon the unrepentant sinner among the Body, “purging” them from among ourselves. All in all, a pretty strong mandate to be separate from the world and from unrepentant sin within the Body.

On the other hand we have a pretty important call to proclaim Christ to the world.

And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matt 28: 18-20)

That doesn’t have much ambiguity unless you think it applies only to the disciples which I think is an untenable argument given the rest of the New Testament. Nor is it something that is reserved to just a few people (see Acts 8: 1-4). How we accomplish that is another matter. We often get the example of Paul in 1 Corinthians 9, the “all things to all people” passage:

To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings. (1 Cor 9: 22-23)

That is often (mis)interpreted as being a call to fit in with the world so that we can win the world to Christ. That idea seems to be at odds with what Paul says elsewhere about not being conformed to this world, what James says about being unsoiled by the world and the general principle throughout Scripture of God’s people being segregated from the unbelieving world. It seems to me that the church is called to be a witness to the world, not a sub-category of the world like a Rotary club or a political party.

So how do we sort this out? I think it becomes easy to stray too far one way or the other. I am not talking about people who are in cults in Idaho or those who think that Christian liberty is a license to act like a fool, waving the flag of freedom while pushing boundaries just because they can. “Yeah, I had a beer with dinner and got a tattoo. Whatcha gonna do about it Pharisee!” I am talking about rational people who read the Scriptures and come to a conviction one way or the other that slips into excess. It is a well meaning excess perhaps but excess all the same.

On the one hand (the more common end) there is the worldly church. You see this all the time in churches with marketing strategies and corporate structures. In a lot of churches, the world’s way of doing things is the preferred method. I am not just talking about “seeker sensitive” churches. The majority report in evangelicalism is the flimsiest excuse for community, a minimalist faith that only requires the most cursory adherence (typically in the form of regular attendance and “tithing”). You can be an evangelical believer in the most conservative church and still live in a manner little different from the rest of the world 98% of the week. The vast majority of Christians (my family especially) are pretty worldly by almost any measure in how we live and how we interact with the world. I don’t know of many Christians who are “unspotted” from the world in any real sense and in general I would argue that when we mix the world in with the community of believers, the community suffers far more than the world benefits.

On the other extreme there are the purists. Some of these take the form of the traditional extreme separatists like the Amish. The Amish and other related groups are separate to the point of being insular. Others come in the form of the hard line fundamentalist movement or (at the risk of getting myself in trouble) there are those who are evangelists for their own distinctives. Isolationist tendencies are understandable. It is easiest to avoid worldliness by avoiding any contact with the world at all. If you don’t have a TV or computer (probably both good ideas), you are in far less danger of being inundated with messages of immorality, licentiousness, covetousness or any of the other myriad sins that flood the airwaves and the internet. Being completely removed from the world is the easiest. However in doing so, it becomes awfully hard to proclaim the Gospel and also it is pretty hard to be unified with the greater Body of Christ in any sort of meaningful way. Plus you can get rid of your TV and computer, eschews worldliness, have your wife cover your head and make your daughters wear dresses and still have heart issues.

So somewhere in the middle is probably the right answer. Like so many areas of doctrine, we need to tread a narrow path that is easy to fall off, either to the right or the left. We cannot ignore the perishing world to focus only on ourselves and our families or even our community. We also cannot become entangled with the world lest we find ourselves becoming “worldly”. I would say that for the majority of the church, the issue is more one of worldliness than it is isolationism.

This whole line of thinking is what has led me to investigate Christian communities. Is an intentional Christian community, living and worshiping and eating together daily, sharing with one another in an Acts 2 and Acts 4 way that also reaches out to the lost through preaching and acts of mercy the way to go? I think it might be a good start if you can avoid the pitfalls like isolationism, prideful separatism and megalomaniac leadership. It only works if you are intentionally reaching the lost. (In fairness to some of the more isolated groups, it is not like most "evangelical" churches do much in the way of evangelism). The community of the church should in and of itself be a witness to the world, something different from and distinct from the world. Our mission as the church is not to win elections or to defend our “rights” or to count pew sitters. It is to proclaim the Christ and to welcome those who have been saved into that distinct and unique fellowship with the church.

I am sure of this. The church is so entangled with the world that it has become in many ways virtually indistinguishable from the world, in the visible gathering of the church and in the lives of individual Christians. There must be a better way.

Dividing lines

April wrote a post and mentioned feeling kind of guilty about looking around at other churches, and it got me thinking about something that I have considered before. In American Christianity, with it’s carefully delineated lines of “where do you go to church?”, it can be seen as a sign of faithlessness and abandonment for someone who worships regularly in one place to worship and fellowship with believers in another body. In an extreme example, I know of one person who was accused of forsaking the assembling together because he was in fellowship with other people for a few weeks instead of the church where he was a “member”. Not that he was hanging around with heretics or pagans, he was with other believers but not the right other believers.

Are we abandoning the church by fellowshipping outside of the church we have been attending? I would argue no. In fact, as I commented at April‘s blog, I think that the real abandonment of the church is the false divisions we have created even among like minded people. How often do similar Baptist churches fellowship together? How about Presbyterian churches? I am not talking about once or twice a year, but on a regular basis. We sequester ourselves based on denominations, “membership” and loyalty to one local body to the exclusion of other believers. I pastored a church for over a year and in that same time Josh Gelatt pastored a church twenty minutes away. I never even knew he was there, much less had fellowship with him. Despite his youth spent in Arkansas, Josh is not some heretic to be shunned. He is a Baptist, about my age, Reformed in theology. I remember crabbing to my wife about how few other Reformed believers were in our area, and here is Josh twenty minutes away pastoring another Baptist church. Of course, they are a GARB Baptist church and we were SBC, so we had no contact. Josh was probably the most like-minded Christian in the area, was very close to us but I never sought him out. Believe me when I say, I could have used that fellowship.

Why do we fear to fellowship together outside the confines of our own local church? Certainly not because there is a Biblical reason. Pastors get together at conferences all time. The conference I am going to next weekend will have pastors and laity from all sorts of church backgrounds. Together for the Gospel is designed specifically to bring together pastors of different denominational backgrounds under the banner of key truths that we do share. But among local bodies, try getting churches to do stuff together. It is hard to do with very similar churches, Baptists with Baptists and Presbyterians with Presbyterians. Try getting a Baptist and a Presbyterian church together and see how that goes (no one invites Lutherans to stuff, they are no fun).

Where we have truly forsaken the assembling of the saints is in letting our doctrinal differences inseparably divide us. I think there is a place for doctrine. I would not fellowship on a regular basis with those who, in my doctrinal framework, apply baptism in error. But why should we completely exclude those with whom we have doctrinal differences? There are so many believers that live right by us that we rarely get to know because they don’t worship in the same circles and that is shameful. Rather than focusing ever inward on those who believe exactly as we do, we should seek out opportunities to fellowship with the body at large. Not to convert them to our way of thinking or to poach believers from their church to ours (the fear of exactly that might be behind some of this), but to be in fellowship. Instead we bunch ourselves together, raise walls and lock the doors. I am as guilty of this as anyone. I wouldn’t even consider regular fellowship in a paedobaptist church but I also don’t spend much time in our new home with people who are not like minded. I am going to make a concerted effort to get to know other believers in the area. Maybe on Sunday nights, since we don’t have church services currently in the evening. That might be a great opportunity to get out of our comfort zone and meet other believers. Not to shop for a "new church" but just to spend time with other believers.

I think it is terrible that we are content to wait until eternity to worship with and be in fellowship with so many other Christians.