1. Are some cultures spiritually or morally superior to other cultures?I guess it's understandable or maybe even natural for us to make extra-biblical assumptions about different things because we grow up being taught so, and we seldom experience alternatives.
2. Are people whom God convicts to leave a particular church inferior or superior to those whom God convicts to stay and reform it?
3. When people leave a church, the church may spend quite some time and effort to keep in touch with them. Why might they the church be upset that these people don't 'return' though the two sides may be on good terms with each other?
3a) If the way people 'do' church today is the best/most biblical way of expressing Christ's commands ("Love one another", and "Make disciples of all nations"), doesn't that mean that the early believers, and underground believers in North Korea and Cambodia are practicing a deficit faith?
OR
3b) If the way people 'do' church today is a cultural expression of Christ's commands, is this expression superior to other cultural forms of expression?
What raises my eyebrows is when we doggedly defend them as biblical truth when it is not in the Bible, or sometimes the Bible warns against it. Lol. Or sometimes we are repeatedly unwilling to check out what God says about these issues in the Bible even though we know that's where we find the truth.
Isn't this why 'Christians' have persecuted one another throughout history, blasphemously, in the name of Jesus Christ? Today, the persecution goes on, more so through verbal violence in the Western/Westernized parts of the world because of modern legal restrictions against physical violence.
Strikingly, nowhere in the New Testament do we find the terms church (ekklesia), temple, or house of God used to refer to a building. To the ears of a first-century Christian, calling an ekklesia (church) a building would have been like calling your wife a condominium or your mother a skyscraper!
George Barna, and Frank Viola in
Pagan Christianity: Exploring the Roots of Our Church Practices (2008).
Pagan Christianity: Exploring the Roots of Our Church Practices (2008).
Just one of the things I wonder about...
3b) If the way people 'do' church today is a cultural expression of Christ's commands, is this expression superior to other cultural forms of expressions?
ReplyDeleteI guess it's understandable or maybe even natural for us to make extra-biblical assumptions about different things because we grow up being taught so, and we seldom experience alternatives.
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IVE BEEN THINKING ABOUT THESE THINGS SINCE IVE COME BACK FROM BERKELEY :) hahahaha its been a very long time actually. haha.
Awesome. I hope you're posing this questions to your GC, cause my GC and even my cell group are starting to ask such questions too, hurray.
ReplyDeleteYou're probably speaking from personal experience, but in a... warped sorta way, what you went through probably opened your mind and allowed you to think of such questions in the first place.
So. Agape, sister. (:
good questions... questions which i'm sure have made people stay away from a church. sometimes i'm surprised to find that young ppl think this way too, definitely not just limited to the older 'christians'
ReplyDelete-sh