|
Re: Back with some new perspective
And ILG, I am happy to clarify (or just provide more material for misinterpretation, as the case may be). Thank you for your gracious welcome back. I am certainly not deserving of it as I was a terror sometimes in the past.
Anyway, I believe I mentioned that for a good while previous to my pastor beginning a Bible study in his home that grew into a daughter work, he and his wife, my husband, our youth pastor and his wife, were looking at a lot of things because the methods that we were using to try to reach our area were not working. I don't know how the climate is spiritually elsewhere in this United States of America, but I do know that in the Pacific Northwest, people are very 'independently spiritual' and are not very likely to visit a church just because somebody left a flyer on their door or a coworker or neighbor invited them to a special service. What many people DO respond to, as the home Bible study/daughter work showed us, is that relationship that is built on trust. In fact, our church format currently is that we have one service in a school gymnasium on Sunday, and during the week, we have house meetings in different areas. My husband leads one of these house meetings and there are several people who are pretty faithful to those meetings, and God is working in their lives in some amazing ways, yet they have been to a Sunday church service less than a dozen times over the past 2 - 3 years. These are people who have good relationships with people in our church, and then they in turn bring others who have good relationships with them.
So, the standard 'outreach' model was not working for our church. And at the same time, separately from the church outreach focus, my pastor was also doing a lot of personal study about just how Biblical these 'holiness standards' were; research beyond David Bernard's "In Search of Holiness" into church history, original Greek texts, etc. He is a very careful man, a good Christian man, and a good pastor with a heart to care for the people in our church, so he wasn't looking for reasons to 'throw everything out' or 'go charismatic' (don't you just love that catch all perjorative label?). He, too, comes from a culture of 'holiness', in fact, before he came to pastor our small church, he was the assistant pastor in a very big church that was part of founding the WPF.
So, these two things, my pastor's personal study and research, and our church's growth, happened at the same time. When my pastor came to our church, he didn't need to 'preach/teach standards'. He inherited a group that already followed these things.
His views were already changing, and likely we would have seen a more gradual change, but when asked an honest question, he felt he could no longer honestly do the scripture hokey pokey and feed these new souls tradition labelled as doctrine.
I also find the snide comments about money rather telling, because these very rumors have been circulated about my pastor and about our church by 'ministering brethren' who never once actually called to ask what was really going on. And I think I will end this part of the story here and let the Righteous Judge handle those who have passed around such lies.
Back to more of my story later.
|
'Some folk don't understand that the middle "F" in AFF is the most important ingredient!' -noeticknight
Linear Mode
