Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Having a form of Godliness, and denying the power thereof

My friend Jim links to an interesting bit of guidance from a Baptist day school.  More or less, a church in the Twin Cities area is suggesting that all graduates of their day school need to go on to Bible college because it will be too dangerous for these "young skulls full of mush" to take a job or attend college elsewhere.

In a nutshell, what they're arguing is that 18 years of sermons, schooling, mandatory chapel, AWANA, youth group, summer camps, and the like is insufficient to prepare a young man or woman to face the challenges to their faith posed by their boss or professor.

In contrast, early Christians were known to the Roman pagans as those who would not give up their faith when confronted with the Roman philosophers, lions, and even being burned as a human torch.  In later days, the heroism of John Hus, William Tyndale, John Bunyan, and innumerable missionaries who were imprisoned or killed for their testimony is also well known.  Among the fruit of the spirit is endurance, no?

As baptistic and fundamental as I am, I've got to suggest that if a church truly believes that their members are incapable of confronting the world, they need to take a serious look at whether what they're preaching is really the Gospel, and whether the armor they're strapping on to young believers is really the armor of God.

And yes, I've got to say it; a lot of churches have a form of Godliness but deny its power.  From such stay away, even if they're quoting a lot of Scripture at you.

6 comments:

Jim Peet said...

Thanks for the blog post and the link over to mine.

I appreciate you

Gino said...

college age is when most (of any faith) have that faith tested and worse.

you have to place confidence that a foundation has been laid so that when challenges and failures do occur (some bigger than others), the Christian knows that there is a faith home for him to fall back into line with.

Bike Bubba said...

Jim; you're welcome. I just had the thought that might illustrate how critically important it is to note what the transforming power of the Gospel actually is.

pentamom said...

Jim's personal story reminds me a bit of my own high school experience. I believe I was a Christian from a very early age, but by the grace of God in a very obvious way, since I was raised in a church that had long since discarded the power of the gospel for modernism, and by parents who, while I believe they were sympathetic to spiritual things, had a lot of cultural baggage that made it all rather an embarrassing topic. So that's all to say that while I believed, I didn't really know how to "present" as a Christian since I lacked much foundation and nearly all the cultural trappings of being evangelical.

So imagine my surprise when, in college, I finally became convicted that I needed to be in a better church, and started attending an nice little fundy church in town -- and discovered that a whole passel of girls in my high school who kept to one another and came off as too stuck up to associate with most other kids, were actually Christians who probably thought they were being "holy" by being cool and unfriendly to normal people. They talked a really good game in Sunday school, BTW. I do have to emphasize that I think the church was better than that, and that there were a few girls I was not surprised to find there, as I'd always had a positive impression of them; I just had never known them well enough to know much about them (it was a big school.)

So there are all kinds of wrong ways of "being a good Christian kid" that get transmitted to kids. This just seems like a particularly blatant example.

pentamom said...

"This" meaning the church that wants all kids to go to their own spotless college, that is.

Artisanal Toad said...

Hi Bubba

Rather than respond to you on SSM's blog, I responded to you on mine.

http://wp.me/p3Hat9-2b