Gang,
I’ve been reading over the new version of We Believe since it was first posted on line in early October. I have four comments and I hope that they will evoke important and meaningful dialog about who we are as a body. -----------------------------------------
In my opinion,
We Believe 2.0 must be sent back to the drawing board.
Let me say from the beginning that I know some of the people are who are on the committee who put this draft together. I consider several of them to be my friends. I love all those people and I respect them. I believe that they are all deeply committed to the Lord. I know that they love the CGGC and the whole Body of Christ. What I write here is not personal criticism. However, I think that the document they presented for our consideration will be bad for the CGGC.
Here are my four comments:
1.
We Believe 2.0 diminishes the authority of the Word.When John Winebrenner was leading the Church of God and the Church of God was a vital, edgy Spirit-empowered movement, Winebrenner described us in this way:
“The Church of God has no authoritative constitution, ritual, creed, catechism, book of discipline, or church standard, but the Bible. The Bible she believes to be the only creed, discipline, church standard, the test-book, which God ever intended his church to have.”
We Believe is something on that list of things Winebrenner says we don't have: A creed or a church standard or a test-book. Whatever it is, its role is to stand between the Bible and us. From the beginning, we have opposed the creation of that sort of document.
There is something about a movement that makes institution people uncomfortable. There is, in a movement, what looks like disorder and chaos. The church in the New Testament was a movement. Read Acts 1-15. There was so much leading of the Spirit that, as Reggie McNeal puts it, the disciples were struggling to catch up.
The New Testament church never made a concerted effort to codify the content of its faith.
Recently, we have invited Reggie McNeal to speak at IMPACT and at several of our Conference Sessions. We’ve booked him to resource the Missional Leadership Initiative. Ed Rosenberry appeared at the Eastern Regional Conference this year encouraging the delegates to read Alan Hirsch’s great book, The Forgotten Ways.
McNeal and Hirsch share an emphasis that was core to Winebrenner’s thought: The Western Church must throw away the Christendom version Christianity.
The new
We Believe and its predecessor advocate Christendom.
Has it occurred to you that the Christendom Era began in AD 313 with Emperor Constantine and that the first major achievement of Constantinian Christianity was the creation of the Creed?
One of the most amazing realities of human history is that the Jesus movement was just that for almost 300 years. It was a movement. It had no creed. Emperor Constantine’s first success in transforming Christianity from movement to institution was to begin to codify the content of Christian faith. That’s what the Nicene Creed began to do.
John Winebrenner knew that efforts to codify belief kill Spirit, kill passion, kill movement.
Since 1925 the Churches of God has played a clever semantic game. It has said, “We don’t have a Creed. We have a Doctrinal Statement.”
Hogwash.
Winebrenner knew how to start and continue a movement. If we want to become a movement again, we need to heed his words and take radical action to make them true once again:
“The Church of God has no authoritative constitution, ritual, creed, catechism, book of discipline, or church standard, but the Bible. The Bible she believes to be the only creed, discipline, church standard, the test-book, which God ever intended his church to have.”
We Believe codifies the content of our belief. It institutionalizes our faith. It creates order. It promotes tranquility. It dulls edge. It quenches spirit. It steals from us the need to do what Winebrenner did in the late 1820s, that is, to read the Scriptures on his knees. We need to get rid of our creed. We need to foster raw faith in the Word. We need to open our Bibles and fall on our knees again.
We Believe makes it possible for us to be a homogenous institution and gives us no room for the raw and edgy spirituality of a movement. It is spiritual Prozac. It gives a peaceful mind but not necessarily peace with God.
If we want to be a movement again. If we want to shed the shackles of institutionalism, we have to send
We Believe back to the drawing board.
2.
We Believe 2.0 is sectarian, church-centered and internally-focused, not Kingdom-oriented.There are two passages in
2.0 that I embrace. If we send
2.0 back to the drawing board, I would want both of these statements to rule 2
.1. One of the two appears in the section on Last Things. This is the statement:
“We believe there are honest differing understandings regarding details or how last things will unfold.”
This is a Kingdom-focused sentence. It connects us to the rest of the Body. It doesn’t distinguish us from it.
In recent years, we have invited Reggie McNeal to motivate us to build the Kingdom. Two times, we have made his books Book of the Year. We have promoted and discussed Alan Hirsch’s
The Forgotten Ways and we have valued, in theory at least, the call to build Christ’s Kingdom.
Yet, read
2.0. That one sentence in the section on Last Things is the only sentence I found that respects what we have in common with others in the Kingdom more than it focuses on puny differences that separate us.
There are points at which
2.0 is so sectarian that it is actually offensive to me. The section on Feetwashing is one example.
The Church of God was the first among many recent movements to teach that followers of Jesus practice Feet Washing.
We can take some pride in the fact that much of the new life in the body of Christ since the early 1800s, especially in the West, follows John Winebrenner on Feet Washing. Much of the Holiness and Pentecostal Movements understood, as Winebrenner did, that people who live out a radical New Testament lifestyle need to take John 13 literally.
Honestly, the Feet Washing section of
2.0 breaks my heart.
I agree with Winebrenner that to follow Jesus in a radical way requires obedience to His words, “Now that I your Lord and Teacher have washed your feet, you also should was one another’s feet.” And, to be fair,
2.0 does affirm Feet Washing.
But,
2.0 affirms Feet Washing in a hyper-sectarian way (as does the original for that matter). It ignores the amazing reality that millions of brothers and sisters share our conviction on Feet Washing. It makes an issue of one point of difference that distinguishes us from every other believer in Jesus Christ on the earth. It argues that we believe that Feet Washing commemorates the incarnation. (More about that later.)
The new
We Believe could affirm our connection to the larger community of believers. It could even proudly affirm our important leadership in this area of belief. But, it chooses to emphasize our disagreement with the rest of Christ’s Body. In this way it is sectarian. It works to diminish Kingdom, not to build it.
The new
We Believe is all about how we are distinct. It sets us apart as insular. It is all about CGGC as church. It highlights ways we are different from the rest of the Kingdom. It is aggressive sectarianism. It will serve to kill Kingdom thinking in our body.
Gang, if you care about Kingdom, you cannot let this stand.
3.
We Believe 2.0 is irrelevant.I said that there are two passages in
2.0 that I love. One of them is in the last section. The other is in the Introduction. The Introduction is a marvelous beginning to the document. It sets the correct tone. It says,
“As the family of God moves forward on its journey each generation needs to come to grips anew with the faith once delivered to the saints.”
Amen.
And, when I first read the Introduction, I was thinking about the things we say we are for now:
Movement
Kingdom
Mission
Based on the Introduction, I expected that this document would be—to use Winebrenner’s term—a “
manifesto" that would empower us to shift from institutionalism to movement, from internal to external focus and from church-centric thinking to Kingdom orientation and from tired traditionalism to missionality.
This document is not about movement or Kingdom or mission. It ignores the challenges of our day. It merely re-answers questions that were hot 80 or 180 years ago.
When I read Winebrenner’s 27 Points from the 1840s I know exactly what the point is. The point is that the Church of God strives to be the New Testament Church in its time and place.
When I read the 1925 Doctrinal Statement, I know exactly what the point is. In the midst of the Fundamentalist-Modernist Debate, the Churches of God declared, as clearly as it could, that it proclaims the historic Christian message.
When I read the original
We Believe I have no difficulty knowing what the point is. The point is that we’ve had a liberal seminary in the recent past have flirted with liberalism but our conservatives have won. We’ve also noted the emergence of Evangelicalism from the womb of Fundamentalism and we have chosen a very moderate, shepherd-oriented way of being Evangelical. That’s the point of the original.
In each of those statements of our faith and practice there was a point—one controlling truth that was clearly proclaimed.
In our own time we are struggling with life and death issues of institution v. movement, church v. Kingdom, internal v. external focus and missionalism v. the Christendom model of the church. In any other age, a Church of God statement of faith and practice would have taken a clear stand on those issues.
I defy you to characterize for me where
2.0 comes out on any of these defining issues of this generation.
The new
We Believe is irrelevant. It says nothing to our age. If you care about the CGGC facing its future with clarity and focus, you need to send
2.0 back to the drawing board.
4.
We Believe doesn’t describe what we believe.That wouldn’t bother me, if it was leading us.
Winebrenner’s 27 points and the 1925 Statement and the original
We Believe didn’t actually describe a consensus. They cast vision for a new consensus. If
2.0 cast a vision for what we hope to become, I’d be shouting halleluiah. If it described a future CGGC—a missional, Kingdom-focused movement I’d be praising it.
But—and I’m speaking very personally here—in the ways it fails to represent our consensus it merely serves up moldy leftovers.
Here are two connected examples.
First, the new
We Believe joins the original and insists that C. H. Forney’s fivefold definition of an ordinance is what we believe.
Perhaps you don’t even know what that means. Rejecting Winebrenner (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, in an attempt to correct Winebrenner), Forney argued that an ordinance is defined by five characteristics. It:
Is commanded by Divine Authority
Involves Material Elements
Portrays Redemptive History
Denotes Spiritual Experience
Requires Formal Observance.
I don’t believe that.
Based on 35 years of whispered conversations with others in ministry in the CGGC many of you don’t believe it either. You may pay lip service to it to receive and maintain credentials, but many of you honestly don’t believe that.
And...
...John Winebrenner didn’t believe it either.
I am so purely Winebrennerian on this issue that you couldn't tell his thought from mine. But, according to
2.0 (and the original as well) what I believe is not what we believe.
Second, I don’t believe that the ordinance of Feet Washing commemorates the incarnation of Jesus—another idea we take from Forney.
2.0 says, “We believe in the ordinance of feetwashing as a celebration of the incarnation.”
I don’t believe that. I suspect that many in the CGGC don’t believe that and John Winebrenner certainly didn’t believe it.
According to Winebrenner, Jesus created the ordinance of Feet Washing, “To symbolize or represent the two cardinal graces of the Christian character--humility and love”
And, that is what I believe.
Neither version of
We Believe describes what I believe or what others who whisper to me believe. But, more to the point, it opposes what John Winebrenner believed. It leaves no room for a person in the church to be a Winebrennerian.
It cannot be, therefore, what we believe. If you care about what we believe, I hope you will join me in the opinion that this draft has to be sent back for more work.
So, I have problems with the draft of
2.0 that is being circulated. I love the people who put it together but I love the Lord, the mission and the Kingdom more. I think
2.0 is bad and wrong and that it casts the wrong vision for our future.
Please care about this. Please care about the raw authority of the Word. Please care about Kingdom. Please care about relevance. Please care about the consensus we hope to build for this generation.
Read the draft over. Tell us if you agree that the draft must be redone.
2.0 must go!