The Idol of Orthodoxy

Friends,

The process of updating We Believe is about to resume in earnest. Before long, the CGGC Administrative Council will be looking over the most recent tweaking. As I understand it, the goal continues to be the approval of a new We Believe by the General Conference in session in 2013. Because I believe I am called to be a prophet, this truth-based enterprise interests me. I believe I would be the servant who buried his talent if I did not initiate/participate in a conversation about official CGGC truth. Here's a first comment as the new chapter begins

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At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught that understanding truth does not make a man or a woman His disciple. Jesus said,

"Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose and the wind blew and beat against that house yet it did not fall because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the wind blew, the streams rose and beat against that house and it fell with a great crash."

For about the last four years the CGGC has been engaged in a strenuous effort to articulate its understanding of orthoxdoxy for the early twenty first century. That effort has been monumental. The group assemble to achieve the task generated a document 21,333 words in length. In the end, that document was not supported the Administrative Council. It was not presented to General Conference in 2010 as planned.

Much of the specific content of that document deeply concerns me. However, it is the existence of the document itself that is most offensive to me.

I believe that any attempt to define right thinking defies a core teaching of Jesus.

According to Jesus, right thinking is not a worthwhile end for those who follow Him. In fact, right thinking is not the end He will bless.

Truth in and of itself never mattered to Jesus. What mattered to Jesus was truth-lived-out.

According to Jesus, a day will come when He will sit on His glorious throne and separate the people of the world as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. On that day He will explain why some will take the inheritance prepared for them since the creation of the world and others will be condemned to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

What will define the difference between the sheep and the goats? Truth-lived-out versus truth merely understood and believed.

On that day everyone will experience what Jesus meant when He said, "Everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man..."

Jesus saw faith and action as one inseparable reality. Any attempt to consider what truth for its own sake is, is folly--is SIN. It is a perilous step toward being numbered with the goats.

Ironically, there was a day when the Church of God--before it was the CGGC--understood that truth and truth-lived-out are two different realites. When John Winebrenner published his famous 27 points, they were not a doctrinal statement. Winebrenner called them, "The Faith and Practice of the Church of God." There was a time that what mattered to us was truth-lived-out.

Can we look at the very idea of We Believe through the eyes of Jesus? Can we honor the wisdom of the founders of our movement?

Orthodoxy for its own sake is an idol. We Believe is an abomination.