Josh Benner

Category: Church

  • Presbyterian Church in America adopts Nashville Statement

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    This week, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) voted to endorse the Nashville Statement. The Nashville Statement is a series of affirmations regarding traditional Biblical views of sexuality and gender and was created by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.

    To give a sense of what the Nashville Statement discusses:

    WE AFFIRM that God has designed marriage to be a covenantal, sexual, procreative, lifelong union of one man and one woman, as husband and wife, and is meant to signify the covenant love between Christ and his bride the church.

    WE DENY that God has designed marriage to be a homosexual, polygamous, or polyamorous relationship. We also deny that marriage is a mere human contract rather than a covenant made before God. (more…)

  • United Church of Christ clergy holds service to bless Planned Parenthood

    A group of United Church of Christ (UCC) clergy traveled to a Planned Parenthood clinic in Milwaukee to have a special service of blessing and solidarity.

    The United Church of Christ is among the most progressive mainline denominations. They’re celebrating Planned Parenthood and what they stand for. From a news release on the UCC website, they say quote a minister who attended the event and said “This is not about reproductive rights. This is about controlling women. This is not about saving lives. It’s about controlling women. It is not about children. It is about controlling women. If it were about children, we would have the same amount of energy at the border right now. If it was about children, we wouldn’t have children being hungry at night.” 

    This is a caricature.

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    Not about saving lives? Not about children? Hundreds of thousands of babies are aborted every year in this country. And you have a church standing arm and arm with Planned Parenthood. This is the fallacy that the pro abortion movement likes to commit which is that if you don’t have a plan to actively fix every evil and injustice in society, that you therefore can’t be pro-choice. This is nonsense. Millions of Christians all over the country care about those who are going hungry. Christians support missions and local food banks. Christians disproportionately adopt and foster.

    It’s shameful that people representing a church denomination would conduct themselves in this way and support the termination of the lives of the unborn. It’s disappointing, but given how far the UCC has gone, it’s not surprising.

    Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear what you think, and don’t forget to subscribe!

    Josh Benner has a Master of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He has served churches in Minnesota and Illinois. He enjoys writing about faith and culture. He lives with his wife Kari in St. Louis.

  • What’s the greatest danger to the American church?

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    There are 300,000 churches in America.
    There are many wonderful churches that boldly proclaim the gospel and faithfully teach the Bible every week. There is no perfect church in the world, because every church is full of members who are imperfect people.
    I think that the biggest issue the American church faces today is related to truth and love.
    Love that undermines truth and truth that doesn’t practice love. I’ll briefly explain what that means.
    Love that undermines truth 
    Love is important. The greatest command in scripture is to love God and to love people. God is love.
    But some churches can emphasize love to the point where it undermines truth.
    For instance, there is a temptation in some Christian circles to consider the love of God and reason that: “since God is love, his love extends to all people, whether or not they believe in God and whether or not they want or accept his love.”
    God is love. But that is just taking a slice of the character of God and acting as if that’s the whole pie. God is love. But he is also just, and righteous, and holy. He judges, he has wrath towards sin. God has all of those qualities at all times.
    God is love. But the idea of love is not only exclusive to what our culture defines love as.
    We tend to value acceptance and tolerance as what it is to love. And it’s true that God meets us where we are, but Jesus doesn’t save us to keep us the same. God is a perfecting God. We sin. We sin so much that we needed a savior, and the gospel is not a message that teaches us that we’re ok and we should just keep doing what we’re doing. We need to live for God and pursue him.
    Making love purely about acceptance and tolerance is not the full Biblical scope of what love is. And so it undermines the truth of scripture. And it runs the danger of undermining the inerrancy of scripture (taking the Bible as practical wisdom rather than the infallible word of God). And this view runs the risk of undermining the gospel itself.
    Assuming that love and  demand for justice are mutually exclusive.

    I observe this being the great risk in more liberal denominations.

    Truth that doesn’t practice love

    I think this is more of a danger in conservative and evangelical circles. We place a high value on the scripture and theology. And well we should because both of those are hugely important.

    But we can get so preoccupied with having the right answer that we lose sight of actually living out what we know. This is very similar to the failure of the Pharisees in the gospels. They were very well studied and trained in theology, but they missed the heart of the message.

    It can be easy to know the right answer but it’s difficult to live it out in practice.

    Truth and love. It comes down to belief and practice. We need both.

    Originally published May 9, 2018 under the title “What’s the greatest danger to the church?”

    Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear what you think, and don’t forget to subscribe!

    Josh Benner has a Master of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He has served churches in Minnesota and Illinois. He enjoys writing about faith and culture. He lives with his wife Kari in St. Louis.

     

  • EFCA removes premillennialism from Statement of Faith

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    The Evangelical Free Church of America (EFCA) had an historical event yesterday at their bi-annual EFCA One Conference. The churches voted to alter the Statement of Faith. The change comes to article nine, which previously stated:

    We believe in the personal, bodily and premillennial return of our Lord Jesus Christ. The coming of Christ, at a time known only to God, demands constant expectancy and, as our blessed hope, motivates the believer to godly living, sacrificial service and energetic mission.

    -EFCA Statement of Faith, Article 9

    The change is just one word. Instead of saying “we believe in the personal, bodily and premillennial return of our Lord Jesus Christ” the Statement of Faith will now say “we believe in the personal, bodily and glorious return of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (more…)

  • Southern Baptists address issues of sexual abuse

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    Last week, Southern Baptists from around the country met in Birmingham, Alabama for their annual meeting. A major focus for Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) president J.D. Greear is sexual abuse within the SBC, America’s largest Protestant denomination.

    In February, the Houston Chronicle ran a piece outlining hundreds of examples of sexual abuse allegations within the Southern Baptist Convention since 1998. (more…)