I am totally new to this site and through recommendation I looked and the first thing I found struck immediately at thoughts which typified all of my spiritual development over the last few years.

On my own I hadn’t found any single all embracing title but your readers have.

It’s called EMERGING CHURCH and Oliver’s take on 25th Oct suits me just fine.

So now I’m looking to you good folk to hear me out, bear with me, and help to polish off my rough edges.

Please bear in mind that in my enthusiasm to get cracking I have only had a skimp through more recent postings and I will probably be saying things already covered or discredited but all that will resolve as we settle in.

Through a series of experiences I ceased church going a while back but held on to the basics of my fundamentalist faith. Eventually I returned to selective attendances but only as part of a process of complete re-appraisal from a basis of almost total freedom from preconception.

As a result I accede to no articles of constitution or statements of faith and am therefore unacceptable for ‘membership’ of any church from lowest fundamentalism to highest Catholicity.

I abhor denominationalism and believe that as a member of the Body of Christ by virtue of saving faith I have a duty and a right to attend the nearest church to wherever God places me but I do so with considerable isolation because my re-appraisal resulted in radically unconventional convictions.

So you can imagine what anticipation emanates from the prospect of ‘emerging church’ as a supplement (not a replacement you understand otherwise that would be nothing more than a perpetuation of denominationalism). But will my radical convictions also preclude me from ‘emerging church’ I wonder? So here goes with a copy and paste from the summary page of my website after which I will sit back and see what comes.

SUMMARY

My conviction is that Christianity strayed steadily ‘off course’ during the 300 year period shortly following Christ’s resurrection. During which time man progressively reverted to his instinctive reliance on formal written definition in preference to Christ’s newly introduced ‘Way of The Spirit’.

In essence, the inveterate propagators of ‘religion’ overwhelmed the genuine adherents of ‘true Faith’.

Roman Catholicism, being the epitome of ‘Religion’, the natural expression of man’s instinct, and a much more readily acceptable ‘badge’ in the corridors of power, was the inevitable outcome.

The subsequent suppression by Roman Catholicism of all other forms of Christian faith, was then ultimately, but only partially, redressed by the Protestant Revolution of the 17/18th century.

The re-establishing of the principal Protestant tenement, namely justification by faith rather than by conduct and absolution was, after so long a period of eclipse, a momentous undertaking.

So much so in fact that attention was distracted thereby from the fact that there was one other major erroneous emphasis that needed similar correction.

And the simple reason why that didn’t happen was the fact that the Reformers themselves became ensnared by the same beguiling propensity that had led to its introduction in the first place.

Mankind just cannot resist the sense of personal exaltation that derives from being able to pronounce upon, and entrench behind, a Tablets of Stone style Word of God.

  In characteristic Victorian manner the Reformers thumped their Roman Catholic Bibles with such vehemence in support of ‘justification by faith’ that there was no way that they could recognise the degree to which they were perpetuating the erosion of the ‘Way of The Spirit’ by so doing.

 Without appreciating the disastrous sectarian and denominational results that would follow, they unwittingly endorsed the adulation of the collection of selected scriptures that the Catholic Church had enshrined and presented as a divinely ordained centrepiece of idolatrous Worship.

Being able to quote endless scriptures and, more to the point, by endowing them with the unchallengeable authority of being taken from a divinely inspired, and therefore verbally infallible ‘bible’ has always been irresistible to man, and unfortunately the Victorian Revolutionaries proved to be no exception.

If anything, fundamentalism today clings even more tenaciously to the same partial misconception, but the day may soon arrive when the error of Victorian style ‘biblical authority’ will dawn.

THEN, PERCHANCE, WE MIGHT BE LESS ENCLINED TO “GRIEVE THE HOLY SPIRIT OF GOD”

‘Scriptures’ as such, are an invaluable record by ‘Men of God’, many of whom were eye witnesses of mankind’s most momentous events. Certainly the writers were inspired, but not necessarily to the degree of infallibility and not beyond the limitations of their primitive knowledge of the cosmos.

Unquestionably the bible as such, is our most convenient and accessible means of reference for many of the ancient scriptures.

In fact I do not know what I would do without it, and I quote from it endlessly.

But that does not make it ‘The Word of God’ any more than did its canonisation by the Catholic Church long after the launch of Christianity.

If God had wanted a formal ‘bible,’ in addition to his gift of The Holy Spirit, He would not have waited 400 years before entrusting its production to Catholicism.

These are controversial facts but I see no reason to suppress them.