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Nearly 700 people gathered in Indianapolis on October 26 for a historic gathering of renewal-minded men and women from 12 different mainline denominations. The Confessing The Faith Conference was sponsored by the Association of Church Renewal and served as a rallying point for evangelicals and traditionalists from historic denominations such as the United Methodist Church, Presbyterian Church (USA), Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, United Church of Christ, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Episcopal Church, American Baptist Churches USA, and the United Church of Canada.

The following stories are condensed versions of longer articles written by our colleague in renewal Craig M. Kibler of The Presbyterian Layman. They highlight some of the themes touched on at the conference.

Calling for a new ecumenism
World-renowned theologian Thomas C. Oden is calling on confessing Christians throughout the mainline Protestant denominations to embrace a new ecumenism rooted in classic orthodox Christianity. Oden is the Henry Anson Buttz professor of Theology and Ethics at the Theological School and the Graduate School at Drew University and he issued the call in a paper to the Confessing The Faith Conference.

Saying that the old ecumenism has deeply fostered the disunity of the church, he said the social witness of the modern ecumenists –those who have forgotten the ancient ecumenical consensus – has been the most divisive element in modern Christianity. “They have been most divisive just at those points at which they have offended against ancient ecumenical boundaries: in permissive sexuality, relativism, political adventurism and permissivism,” he writes.

The paper by Oden, who was hospitalized and unable to attend the event, was read by Dr. James V. Heidinger, the president and publisher of Good News and chairman of the Association for Church Renewal.

He called for the “vital recovery of ancient ecumenical teaching” and an effort to bring classic Christian teaching back into church leadership, calling it the new ecumenism. Oden contrasted that with the “deterioration and eminent collapse of the bureaucratic and ideological wanderings of the modern ecumenical movement.”

Oden distinguishes between the new ecumenism and modern or old ecumenism:

• Old ecumenism began in mission,

then lapsed into bureaucracy and politicization. The new ecumenism is returning to the wellsprings of unity in apostolic truth and ancient ecumenism as a basis for rebuilding.

• Old ecumenism has been preoccupied with negotiating structures of organic unity. The new ecumenism is seeking to restore and embody classic Christian truth within and despite old divisions.

• The old still seeks a unity in shifting political alliances, while the new celebrates unity that it already experiences in Jesus Christ.

• The old is politics-driven, the new Spirit-led.

“Our church leadership has been distracted by false gospels,” Oden said. “Our finances have been misspent. Our mission efforts have at times become reduced to social service projects lacking clear proclamation of the One on behalf of whom we offer compassion. Our continuity with the historic consensus of faith is imperiled. Our theological institutions have been plagued with false teachings from speculative Scripture studies to permissiveness to neo-pagan witchcraft to channeling to voodoo and to sexual relativism.”

The call to orthodoxy, of openly confessing classic Christian teaching in “good conscience without evasion or dilution,” he said, already is resulting in a rebirth throughout the mainline denominations.

 

The responsibility of Church reform  
 “Too many Christians have the wrong assumption about church renewal and reform,” observes Diane Knippers, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C. “They confuse the goal or the ideal with the normal. They think that the normal or typical state of Christ’s church is what it ought to be—unified, holy, courageous, peaceful, charitable, teaching truth at all levels. In case you haven’t noticed, the church isn’t typically like that.

“In fact,” she said, “the Biblical and historical evidence is that it has never been that way. … [Church reform] is the normal responsibility of those who love God. It is integral to God’s redemptive project. We don’t reform the church so that we can get on with the other tasks – mission, evangelism, discipleship, seeking justice and righteousness. No, church reform is part of the task of the church.”

Knippers, saying that reformation is one of the ongoing tasks of the church, listed what she called “emerging characteristics of contemporary reformation:”

1. Mature and diverse, 2. Ecumenical, 3. Profoundly theological, 4. Addresses moral issues,
5. Global, and 6. Gene rational.

 “Let’s be very clear about what we really desire, hope for, contend for and pray for. Let’s be really clear about what we need. Reformation is more than minor changes in church canon or adopting Biblically-based petitions or even electing church leaders. Our plight is too serious for that. We need revival. We yearn for another Great Awakening. The Holy Spirit doesn’t bring Great Awakenings to denominations. He brings them to cities, to regions and, please God, to our nations.”

Responding to radical feminism
 Radical female theologians are seeking to reimagine Christianity “without the true Bread of Life,” says Dr. Donna F.G. Hailson, director of the doctor of ministry program in the Renewal of the Church for Mission and an assistant professor of evangelism and renewal at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wynnewood, Pa., and co-author of The Goddess Revival.

Radical spiritual feminist practices “diverge from Bible-honoring worship, ritual and prayer,” said Hailson. Those practices comprise a belief system that has been created from bits and pieces – mixing elements of Wiccan ceremonies, Eastern healing rituals, erotic litanies, drums and chants invoking ancestors, and even some old camp-meeting hymns.

There was a firestorm of protest from the mainline denominations over the first ReImagining God conference in 1993 by those offended by the conference’s “milk and honey communion service,” the denial of the atonement, the worship of the goddess Sophia, denominational funding and incidents of lesbian activism.

Such radical feminist initiatives have not gone away. The tenth anniversary ReImagining God conference is scheduled June 19-21, 2003, in St. Paul, Minnesota.

“How tragic,” Hailson believes, “that so many are failing to see that the only all-satisfying answer to the deepest of human hungers is not feeding on oneself but, rather, turning to the one true Bread of Life. How tragic that so many miss the reality of liberation available only through the real (not symbolic) Jesus Christ. How tragically misguided is the effort to engineer a new order of humankind minus the Living Redeemer. Only in Him and through Him can there be a New Creation. How tragic that worship, in the wake of all of this, has become the idolatry of self-absorption and navel-gazing when it is meant to be, as C. Welton Gaddy has explained, ‘a gift between lovers who keep on giving to each other.’”

Such an emphasis on the self, a focus on personal experience and cultural distinctiveness “over against the revelation of Scripture,” Hailson believes, leads to a “denial of absolute and universal truth, and it allows pluralism and relativism to prevail.”

This belief system, she said, reveals a “profound yearning for the deep song of Christianity” among people who have decided to be “in the church but not of it.”

 

Reclaiming the gift of marriage
It is easy to forget that marriage is a creation of God for the glory of God, believes the Rev. Thann Young, and now is the time to reclaim that gift.

The goal of marriage should be more than “simply friendship or companionship. It should be oneness. As we consider the institution of marriage as a divine creation of God, we are reminded that divine means holy, godly and

godlike.…We need to understand that marriage was given to the church and that it is a rite, a ritual, an institution of the church. God gave marriage to the household of faith. It is a divine gift.”

Young, the founder and pastor of Agape AME Church in Olney, Maryland, serves on the board of directors of the Alliance for Marriage, which is a non-profit, faith-based, ecumenical and interfaith organization based in Washington, D.C.

“God’s creative work was not complete until he made Eve,” Young said, referring to Genesis 2:18-24, the story of Adam and Eve. He could have made Eve out of dust as He made Adam and the creatures of the Earth, “but for some divine reason, God decided to make Eve from Adam’s very own flesh and bones. In doing so, he illustrated to us that, symbolically, Adam and Eve became one flesh. This is a miraculous and spiritual union of heart, souls and lives.”

“If we are to play a vital and relevant role in changing the tide of divorce, separation and the social breakdown of the family,” Young said, “we must be committed to teaching marriage from a Biblical perspective, steeped in reality, undergirded by the Holy Spirit.”

He said if committed Christians are to reverse the current trends concerning the state of marriage in this country, then they must realize that the answer doesn’t lie in government proposals or in reports by psychologists or sociologists, but in Jesus Christ.

“We must never lose sight of the fact that the institution of marriage belongs to the church. We own it. It was given to us by the Lord. And if we own that institution, we must learn to handle it with care. We must nurture it as a precious gift from God,” Young said, adding: “God has not called us to change the institution of marriage. We have been called to uphold it and embrace it, respect it and be committed to it.”

 

Looking at the family, seeing God
 “When we understand something of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, we find that the basis for the family rests, not in the creation, not in us, but in the very nature of the Absolute itself, in the very being of God Himself,” says Dr Dennis F. Kinlaw, founder of the Francis Asbury Society and former president of Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky. “The reality that we call ‘fatherhood’ has its origin before time began, because the first father was not Adam. It was the first person of the blessed Trinity.”

“God actually gave us the family so that it is possible to think him,” he said, “so that all who have a father with a little ‘f’ can have some basis for being able to think the Father with the capital “F”. And if one cannot think God, then one is destined to live in delusion with all of its inevitable nugatory consequences, because being able to think God is the key to understanding the nature of reality, our own, the ultimate, and all else.

“The processes of existence and life for a human person are the object lesson of all object lessons on the nature of life as the Creator intended it. These processes and relations are also God’s best analogue to help us in understanding the very nature and life of God. His is a familial existence where a Son is begotten by his Father and eternally draws his existence in an unbroken relationship from the Father himself. His relationship to his Father is different from our relationship to our parents in that his umbilical chord has never been cut. We have an individuality in relationship to our parents which the eternal Son never knows from his Father.

“There are many aspects of God’s Good News that bring comfort to us. For me one of the most encouraging is its word about the family. The census bureau may not be able to define one. Our own government may be committed to trying to change its essential nature. I have good news though, and it comes from the highest authority. The family, as God designed it, is not going to go away. Its roots are too deep and its purposes too long ranging. It is the Creator’s best instrument to let us know who he is. In fact, it is his divine gift to help us, if we will use it for its original purpose, to enable us to l) think him and 2) know him personally, for before church or state our Father established the family as his preferred doorway into his holy presence. Yes, the family is here to stay. All praise to the Father, the Son, and to their Holy Spirit for his wisdom, his mercy, and his love. This is enough to make any of us pray a fervent “Amen!”

 

Clamping down on porn
 Religious leaders are joining together to get AT&T and other Fortune 500 companies out of distributing pornography, reports Dr. Jerry Kirk, former pastor of College Hill Presbyterian Church (USA) in Cincinnati, and founder of the National Coalition for the Protection of Children & Families.

“We have worked on this for 2-1/2 years,” Kirk says, “and are now asking Christian leaders to join with us in two ways: by writing a personal letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft, encouraging and supporting him in the prosecution of obscenity, including “white-collar” pornographers. Secondly, we are asking every denomination and Christian organization to join together in a petition campaign to the president and attorney general, giving them broad and energetic support that will build a strong team with staying power for this effort and for future efforts against pornography and the sexualized messages of the culture. We cannot allow these companies to legitimize pornography in the minds of so many Americans.”

Kirk reports that the messages of pornography—which he said are being promoted “consistently through the pop culture of music, radio, television, cable, satellite, movies, magazines and advertisements”—include:

• Sex is at the center of all relationships.

• Promiscuous sex with anyone in any way you want is not only harmless, but beneficial.

• Women have one value, and that is from the neck down, to meet the sexual demands of men.

•The most exciting and fulfilling sex is outside of marriage. Children are a hindrance to good sex.

• Everyone is promiscuous and faithfulness within marriage is very rare.

Leaders of the anti-pornography effort also have released a strategy paper, a petition, and a sample letter. For more information, contact the Religious Alliance

Against Pornography and the National Coalition for the Protection of Children & Families, 800 Compton Road, Suite 9224, Cincinnati, OH 45231;
phone: (513) 521-6227;
fax: (513) 521-6337.

 

Jesus: The rejected cornerstone
 “If we learn anything from our family story,” says Dr. Edith Mary Humphrey, “we learn that Jesus is the stone ‘rejected by humankind’ but chosen by God – God turns even our human rebellion into glory by treading, in his Son, the remarkable route of incarnation, service, humiliation, cross, resurrection and ascension. The very fact of his rejection was used to make Jesus the cornerstone of God’s building!”

Humphrey is an Anglican layperson, associate professor of New Testament Studies at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and the author of A Solid Foundation: The Seven Pillars of the Jesus Seminary Re-examined.

Humphrey singled out the “Jesus Seminar” as a group that has erected a new building “based upon a re-envisioned Jesus, a new Jesus and a new Christianity designed not for the scholars alone, but for the public whom they are hoping to evangelize.”

These claims, she said, are presented not for what they are but, instead, “as though they were simply giving the public the fruit of their scholarly labors, letting them in on the academic conversation about Jesus and history.”

Humphrey says that not all of these claims are accepted by New Testament scholars outside of the Jesus Seminar. The Jesus they have built is based on the assumption that they, “the academics, are the chief builders, the new priests who must present society a picture of Jesus that is good for us.”

“Together then, and without fear, we need to do hard thinking about Jesus and history because we do not worship the gospel, nor do we worship a Christ principle, nor do we pay lip service to a subjective Christ of faith – no, we believe that God, in utter humility, became human for us at a particular place and time in first-century Palestine, to speak to his people, and to reconfigure the family of God so as to include us and to raise us up with all his people.”

“First century folks,” she concluded, “looked at Jesus’ followers and knew that they had been with Jesus. May it be so with us.”



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