Home > Work > Turning Around the Mainline: How Renewal Movements Are Changing the Church
1 " Modern ecumenism rightly began in mission, but then lapsed into a merger mentality, then defensive bureaucracy, and finally into unrepresentative forms of extreme politicization. "
― Thomas C. Oden , Turning Around the Mainline: How Renewal Movements Are Changing the Church
2 " Cultural relativism has used this deceit to gain power. The absolute relativists want to assert their sincere desire for dialogue UNTIL they become a majority. Then they often want to settle issues by either exclusion or coercion. They first argue for democratic fairness, but when they acquire their majority, they are tempted to turn immediately to a triumphalism that assumes that liberal justice has triumphed. From then on, dialogue about truth is forbidden, and about absolute truth is absolutely forbidden. "
3 " Countering this view, confessing Christians seek to maintain the unity of the church through discipline, not through division. The confessing movement is strongly committed to staying WITHIN. It is better for churches to learn to respect their own legislative processes and discipline themselves accordingly than to face the even greater problems of separation, division of property, and the anguish of divorce.Confessing Christians seek to reform their churches, not leave them. Those who split off leave the patient in the hands of the euthanasia advocates, the Kevorkians of dying modernity. The Holy Spirit will not bless willful unnecessary divisiveness.If classic Christians self-righteously leave, they abandon the legacy, the patrimony, the bequests, the institutions, and the resources that have been many generations in the making with much tears and sweat.Walking away turns out to have weightier moral impediments than hanging in. IT SEEMS UNTHINKABLE TO ABANDON, WITHOUT FURTHER PRAYERS FOR SPECIAL GRACE, THOSE HISTORIC COMMUNIONS BY WHICH SO MANY HAVE BEEN BAPTIZED. The faithful have committed themselves for generations to the support of these communions which their classic doctrines and evangelical revivals have engendered. To allow these resources to be permanently taken over by those inimical to the faith cannot be an act of responsibility......To flee the church is not to discipline it. No one corrects a family by leaving it. Separation does not foster discipline. Discipline is fostered by patient trust, corrective love, and willingness to live with incremental change if that is what the Spirit is allowing. Discipline seeks to mend the broken church by a change of heart. "
