• Sunday July 6 will be our opportunity to show appreciation for Luke and Karen’s ministry and service among us. Please join us after worship for fellowship, finger-food and cake.
• A key issue at this General Assembly was the so-called Insider Movements (IM), a term usually used to speak of Muslim converts to Christianity who, if they were to make their conversions known, would live under threat of persecution or death.
Borrowing a definition, IM is “basically an attempt on the part of missiologists and missionaries to seek ‘converts’ to Christ, while those ‘converts’ continue to maintain the forms and practices of their birth and societal religions [i.e., worshiping in a mosque, using the Arabic “Allah” to address God and etc.]…. Proponents of the Insider Movement argue that a person who is converted to Christ from [Islam] can still attend mosque and still partake of all of the religious and social practices associated with their former faith. They are called ‘insiders’ in that proponents see them as covert missionaries to [their own] people.”
• My sense is that IM is seen in the PCA as a form of compromise, standing in conflict with passages such as 2 Cor 6:14ff “… what fellowship has light with darkness? …Therefore go out from their midst and be separate from them, says the Lord.”Consequently the Assembly voted nearly unanimously against lending its support to such movements.
• One aspect of IM dealt with at this Assembly was the use of terms “Father” and “Son” for God and Jesus. Bible translations used in the Insider Movement have sometimes substituted “guardian” and “representative,” idioms that are acceptable in Islam. The problem is those original biological, familial terms (Father, Son) are not only uniquely meaningful but also direct translations of the original manuscripts. Thankfully the Assembly also voted against the usage of substitute terms.
• I believe the real issue here is discerning that point where the initially healthy desire to contextualize the Christian faith and message in an alien culture results in confusing or obscuring the message, perhaps even creating an entirely new message and religion altogether (syncretism). It may be glib of us to sit here in North America and tell Muslim converts they just need to pay the price for following Jesus, but our own time is likely coming. I suspect my children will face a day in which the unvarnished truth of sin and redemption, Christ crucified and resurrected, will be counted as grounds for marginalization and persecution. (I don’t believe we’ve yet seen anything like what may come.) For this reason, among others, I’m thankful for the stand taken at this GA, since it establishes a pattern for the hour when we will be tempted to compromise our own language and practices, and embody that cheap grace that Bonhoeffer so detested.
– Pastor Eric