• Just for perspective, our vote between services this Sunday to add language to our by-laws is pretty standard for churches with our theological views. Since the current cultural climate could make us (potentially) a target for law suits, this language offers us some protection. If you’re reading the language carefully, you’ll see it’s nuanced more for the courts than for thoughtful theological discussion. I’ve always appreciated the comment by the brilliant historian Jacques Barzun regarding our cultural moment (in somewhat dated language): “Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.”
• Finally, I mentioned keeping an ear open to the Holy Spirit last Sunday. There are a variety of views in our tradition on the ongoing work of the Spirit (none of them rejecting the truth that the book of Acts was a unique moment connected to the coming of the Messiah, as foretold in Joel 2). But with regard to the tendency in our era to avoid the gifts of the Spirit entirely as problematic, Martyn Lloyd-Jones said: “it implies that the teaching of 1 Thessalonians 5, verses 19 – 21 has no application today. All I say is, that while it is clear from the history of the Church that certain gifts seem to have been in abeyance over the centuries, the Holy Spirit in His Lordship, may give them at any time. Indeed there is clear teaching that towards the end of this age such gifts are likely to reappear in great power, and at the same time many counterfeits. The result of all this is that while I am very unhappy about this Charismatic Movement [he meant some of the excesses of the 1970s], and regard it as a real danger to the true Church and the Gospel, because it implies constantly that doctrine does not matter at all, I am equally concerned that we should not become guilty of ‘quenching the Spirit’ and tying ourselves up in a dead orthodoxy.”
— Pastor Eric