Believe it or not, I am glad that campus groups are excited about New Orleans. I would have enjoyed having a service component as part of a conference in my college days. What a good idea to establish the idea of community service as part of campus ministry.
I went to the new site and read the news about things happening around the world. It makes me shrug that most of the good news stories are baptisms - that metric isn’t going to change as I’ve mentioned before. I looked around and saw older messages, and a few pictures. The RightTurn folks made a beautiful website.
I saw the Study section and found materials provided by the church in Boston. The sections are Apologetics, Bible Talks, D-Groups, Quiet Times, and Study Series Materials. I thought it would be interesting to see what was made available.
Some of the materials are quite disappointing. The discipleship study continues the error that one must be a disciple before baptism. The church study is the same “only one physical church”, the one church is determined by doctrine of salvation. These two are related because of the unique addition of “Have the heart of a disciple” added before baptism. Very disappointing to see Kip’s doctrine perpetuated.
The more stuff I read, the more it felt like 1995 all over again. Building Family talks about spiritual family being more important than physical family. The sin and baptism study includes a note that folks leading the study need to know what the person studying believes about their salvation and to determine if that person is, in fact, saved.
Again, we don’t address doctrine years ago so nothing changes. We are teaching bad doctrine all over again, at least in Boston. These days, though, I think some in attendance are smart enough to know better. I wonder aloud, though, how long those folks will keep coming.
Still, the inclusion of the book How to Pray by RA Torrey is encouraging. A couple of the Apologetics materials are pretty good as well.
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3 Responses to “Here Am I”
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Interesting. I think a lot of congregations have fixed this by now, so I’m surprised to see it here.
The discipleship study document was created by a guy named Kevin Miller in 2006 according to document properties. It underwent three revision levels so it may have been circulated for comments.
Quote:
> What were they to do with these disciples? Baptize
> them. Who gets baptized? Disciples (John
> 4:1-2).
That used to be supported from Matt 28:19-20
. So perhaps they now recognized that argument was invalid. At least the John passage comes closer to making the point they want. Of course, from the John passage, one can argue tense, sequence, the definition of disciple, and consistency with the accounts in Acts… and perhaps some other things.
> Becoming a disciple/Christian is an informed adult
).
> decision to whole-heartedly follow Jesus with all
> areas of our lives and to specifically start
> converting men (Rom 6:17
This is the part that bothers me. We don’t see that focus and emphasis during conversions in Acts. Evangelism is not the primary thing that should be on someone’s mind at that point IMO.
“How quickly did they respond? Immediately. Becoming a Christian is a decision. Building faith is a process, but being a Christian is a decision.
How much heat did they put into this decision?
• Whole-hearted. They dropped their nets.”
—-
this is troublesome to me because it seems to separate faith from conversion - that becoming a Christian is ‘me’ and continuing as one is ‘faith’. the decision to want to follow Jesus should be prompted by faith.
ttk
I haven’t read the documents in question but the quotes provided here are clearly Pelagian. Can anyone say they are not?
Consider Puritan theologian John Owen’s simple little exercise, FOR WHO DID CHRIST DIE?