“So you work for 9Marks, huh? Aren’t their views on church kind of radical?”
I’d been here before but still didn’t quite know where to take this awkward conversation. Explain why I think New Testament polity is prescriptive? Nope, too heady. Show how the Reformers advocated these same doctrines? Nope, too geeky. I opted for something much simpler.
“We’re not radical,” I said, “we basically just encourage churches: ‘Hey, don’t do weird stuff.’”
THE WEIRD STUFF WE DO
Churches do lots of weird things. Some of that weirdness is a bit outlandish. A few years ago, a pastor in eastern Kentucky decided that traditional “baptismal waters” were a little too tame for his taste, so he started dunking new converts in pools of beer. In God’s providence, while writing this very paragraph, a friend sent me a YouTube clip of a preacher instructing his congregation to take their socks off and wave them over their heads while he improvised a song about how Jesus is spinning them “around … right round.”
Of course, most pastors and churches are sensible enough to avoid such ostentatious displays of weirdness. But we’ve got plenty of well-intentioned, respectable weirdness to go around. We’ve abandoned congregational
To continue...read the full-length post originally published on this site.
