[OBW]

OK. Enough is enough. I now have to redraft this post because the #*%&^@ McAfee Site Advisor popped-up as I was hitting “review” to ask whether I really wanted to be on this site. While not the inevitable outcome, this time it lost the post so that when I got back to here, to do the reviewing, the post did not exist. It was not in the previous screen. It was gone. 30 minutes of effort lost.

McAfee says that for smaller sites, they don’t have the resources to check everything out, so they need site administrators to register their sites with them. It may be an annoyance, but it will decrease our ongoing annoyance.

But I will try to mostly recreate my thoughts. This time offline. I always used to do it that way. But with the introduction of Office 2007, there began to be problems keeping weird formatting issues out of the forum. But, alas, I guess it must be until that little site advisor turns from yellow to green when I log onto this site.

I’m sure that this version will be quite different from the original.

- - - -

I have probably got some of you wondering what is going on with me. I visit less regularly. More like sporadically. And I have begun to take some even more strong stands in favor of Christianity as we know it. And I don’t really leave any of it out. It does sort of make one wonder why I would bother picking on the LRC if I can be so generous to the RCC. I’m not giving the RCC a free pass. But the problems I have with the LRC affect me and my relationship with family. So those clearly stand out as more important to me.

For the past year I have begun to drop out of some things. I rarely visit facebook any more. I have been reading less of the extreme “emergent” blogs that I used to follow. I have even stopped being regular here. (Add to that a week-long trip to the NW for rest and relaxation with my younger son and I’ve not been around much lately.)

But I am at a different place in my spiritual journey. The journey began in my youth with the Assemblies of God (AOG). During my senior year of high school, we (the whole family) left that for the LRC. Just up and left. (Of course, that is fairly common of LRC converts.) Then 14.5 years later, me, my wife, and our two young children (5 and 2) left the LRC. We have mostly been at one Bible church the whole time. We recently moved to another Bible church. Not because of problems or disagreements. But our son followed a girl at Dallas Theological Seminary to this other group and married her. We get to see them more often this way. (That kind of thing will get you the label of “marginal” in the LRC.)

But before that, back in 2005, I got a copy of The Mind Benders, that awful book that we sued back in the late 70s / early 80s. Then shortly after that, The Thread of Gold. It was through that author that I found out about the BARM and from there we have mostly moved here. What the books, and then the forums showed me was that our exit from the LRC was far from complete. We continued to hold onto too much of their thinking and ways. I began to see the words of scripture as they were written and not as they were reinterpreted for us.

I am now convinced that the old things are neither something to be discarded like dirt from your shoes, nor cherished like there can be no more. The ways of various groups are just that — ways. They are not gospel. Neither are they heresy.

Then why would I come here to join in chastising the LRC when I think that virtually all the others are OK? Not because I think all others are the best, but because I think that the “we are superior” mindset of the LRC, coupled with a core of teaching that gives unrighteous liberties to the leadership while keeping the rank-and-file under worse chains than we think are on those in the RCC.

And I know that my generosity to the RCC may tend to grate on some. I do not think they are simply OK. There is much to say about them. But I also cannot join with those who virtually declare them to be not a church. But within that, I believe that there are many more there who are “saved” than the rest of us like to consider possible. I’m convinced that Martin Luther did not complain that Catholics did not have faith. They simply did not understand that the faith they had gave them surety. Since this was not a teaching pushed forward by the RCC, the fact that salvation was attained by the simple act of faith was not recognized. But that did not make it untrue. I don’t think that Martin Luther was trying to get Catholics saved. He was trying to show that they were and could know it.

And nothing has really changed. Yeah, the RCC still suggests that you need another mediator. Pretty poor. But at the same time, they may be better at confessing their sins one to another than most of the rest of us are. I think that we like to just “tell it to Jesus” and leave it at that. Surely that is the important thing. But as we do find that we are perpetually needing to “tell it,” and often for the same thing over and over, telling it to someone else actually does help us to have someone with an audible voice trying to help us keep in line. Does the RCC system do all of this? No. But then again, I’m not sure of one that fully does.

My alternate journey through study on the “emerging church” movement (They hate to be called a movement) is also dwindling. Not because I have found all my answers, but because I am finding that there has always been a center and that study (along with this one) helped clear away the vines that had grown over the door into the center.

The church is not the center. Ministers are not the center. Jesus is the center. Following Jesus is the center. Obeying is the center. Love God and love your fellow man. If you can’t link it back to this, you probably don’t understand it and it isn’t the center.

And you don’t love your fellow man by denigrating him/her as poor and pathetic. Love does not stand at a distance and demand that everyone rush to your side.

I will continue to participate here on and off because I still have family in the LRC. My father, a brother and a sister, along with their spouses and children. 14 in all, including 3 of my nephews’ spouses. There is no way to avoid the clueless insults that come from their mouths at times. They never mean to insult. They just don’t see it.

They are clueless.

So let’s give them some clues.