Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans

Bishop of Winchester warns Christians may have to give up public sector jobs because of secular agenda

January 21st, 2010 Posted in Religious Liberty |

Audrey Barrick, Christian PostPosted: Friday, January 15, 2010, 13:31 (GMT)

January 6th, 2010 Posted in Culture |

By Bill Bouknight, Good News Magazine (Hat Tip: Barbara Gauthier)

Unlike the Lutherans (ELCA) and Presbyterians (PC-USA), the United Methodist Church is pulling back from following TEC into the future. The Methodist Church was at one point was accounted even more liberal than the Episcopal Church, but that liberal tide now appears to have crested and is beginning to recede. The turnaround has taken place through educating the laity in the Biblical faith, evangelizing, renewal, and learning much from Global South Methodism:

Over the past 15 years, we have witnessed the cresting and subsequent decline of the liberal tide in American Methodism. Simultaneously, the influence of evangelicalism and orthodoxy has been steadily increasing within the last decade.

As measured by membership and influence, the United Methodist Church has been in decline for the last 40 years. A definite low point for the denomination was November 1993, when United Methodists participated in the infamous “Re-Imagining Conference” in Minneapolis. Sophia, the goddess of wisdom, was worshipped, the doctrine of Atonement was ridiculed, and lesbianism was glorified. At least one United Methodist helped plan that conference, and it was an approved continuing education event for many staff members of United Methodist general boards and agencies.

Most UM bishops made no public response to this heretical display. Only a handful of UM leaders such as Bishops William Cannon, Earl Hunt, and Tom Stockton denounced certain teachings of that conference as being contrary to United Methodist doctrines and ethical standards. Despite the silence of most UM leaders, the Re-Imagining Conference had a sobering impact on the denomination—serving as a wake-up call within United Methodism.

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St Andrew’s Cathedral viewed from a flank. (Photo: Terence Ong)

This Christmas the vicar of the Anglican cathedral urged his members to aim at nothing less than emulating Jesus Christ; he wrote a booklet outlining certain characteristics of the life of the Lord he hoped his flock would learn.

In his introduction and in an interview that appeared in the latest issue of the church magazine, The Very Revd Kuan Kim Seng, dean of the 4,500-member St Andrew’s Cathedral, stressed that spiritual maturity is to be measured against the life of Jesus Christ and expressed his wish for his parishioners to reach their ‘full potential’ in resembling Him.

Explaining why he wrote the booklet in an interview with ‘The Courier’ magazine, Dean Kuan said: “All of us will agree that it is a tragedy when a twenty-five-year-old adult functions with the mind of a five-year-old. It is even more tragic when people who have been Christians for many years still live and behave like spiritual babes. Being perpetual spiritual babes is definitely not God’s will for our lives.”

Reflecting on his six years as chief cleric, he said: “I [have] become conscious that there is so much more potential in the St Andrew’s church-community that is yet to be realised.”

He added: “Whether as an individual or as a community, the fulfillment of our full potential in God is not found in imposing upon ourselves more and more work or rules. It is found in our becoming more and more like the Lord Jesus Christ.”

This, he said, is because human beings were created in the image of God; Christians believe that Jesus Christ is the perfect revelation of God.

In his 15-page devotional resource, Dean Kuan explained how Christ demonstrated sacrifice, obedience and grace in His life, characteristics which “sum up all that the Lord Jesus Christ is” and which are the “sum total of living in agape love, the love that comes from God Himself,” he said in an interview with the magazine.

He said: “Jesus’ death for our sake made it possible for us to get to the starting line, and the Holy Spirit enables us to run and complete the race that transforms us back into the image of God that was lost when we sinned against God. The more we are transformed into the image of God, the more mature we are spiritually.”

In his booklet the dean explained and defended the importance of tithing.

Tithing, he said, is not an act of giving since God owns the tithe, but it is God’s ‘all-wise institution’ and ‘chief tool’ to mould Christians into the image of Jesus Christ the true giver.

Dean Kuan argued that there is no biblical evidence to support the teaching that tithing is no longer compulsory if it is not an act of freewill.

Tithing is also God’s way of financing the work of the Church, especially its task of preaching and teaching the Gospel throughout the world.

He said: “One of the reasons why the Gospel of the Kingdom is not proclaimed and demonstrated in the extent and pace that it should have been is due to the fact that many Christians sin against God in the area of the tithe and freewill giving. If all Christians were to just bring God’s tithe back to Him, all the financial needs in the Church would be met overnight, and Matthew 24:14 (i.e. the promise of the gospel proclaimed in the whole world and the contingent return of the Lord Jesus Christ) would be fulfilled sooner rather than later.”

In the section on obedience, Dean Kuan said that disobedience “declares that God cannot be trusted; that’s why He should not be obeyed” whereas obedience affirms “the trustworthiness and goodness of God… expressing such an affirmation in non-verbal language.” Obedience also shows that God is indeed the Father of the Christian.

Concerning grace, the dean, describing the love of God in the event of the cross, told the story of a man who chose to forgive the person who murdered his son and then offered to receive the murderer as his own son, giving all the benefits of and inheritance of the household to the one that deserved death.

December 27th, 2009 Posted in Faith, Politics, Religious Liberty |

December 24th, 2009 Posted in Apologetics, Theology |

By John Dickson, Sydney Morning Herald (Hat Tip: ACL)

There are enough question marks over the Christmas story for dogmatic sceptics to have a field day at this time of year, but the core historical realities are not easily swept away.

It is common at Christmas to hear experts questioning the Gospel accounts. Writers such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Michel Onfray and Bishop John Shelby Spong make their pronouncements with something approaching glee: there is not a skerrick of evidence outside the Gospel of Luke for a census at the time of Jesus’s birth; Matthew’s hovering star over Bethlehem is a fiction; and the virgin birth is the neurotic invention of a church trying to distance the Son of God from any association with sex.

Then there are questions about the date of Jesus’ supposed birth. December 25 was a pagan festival until it was hijacked, we are told, by a church desperate for relevance. Evidence that the starting point of the Western calendar, AD1, cannot have been the year of Jesus’s nativity helps the sceptics’ case, and we are left with the impression that perhaps Jesus never lived at all. Maybe the whole thing is a fable with no more credibility than Santa Claus. And, like that story, thinking adults ought to grow out of it.

But while much of this is factually correct, it is ultimately wrong. Take the absence of corroborating evidence for the Roman census, the visit of foreign Magi or the great star. The sceptics would have us think, if these things really did take place, there would be mention of them in other sources. But scholars of antiquity often note we probably have in our possession less than 1 per cent of the literary works that existed in the first century. Ninety-nine per cent of our evidence is lost.

”As every student of ancient history is aware,” Professor Graham Stanton of Cambridge University writes, ”it is an elementary error to suppose that the unmentioned did not exist.” With only 1 per cent of the evidence to hand, it is foolhardy to deny something just because it appears in a single source.

As recently as June 2004, a large public pool mentioned only in John’s Gospel – and so doubted by some – was uncovered during sewerage works in Jerusalem.

It is true there is no corroborating evidence for the finer details of the Christmas story but it is wrong, and wrong-headed, to turn this into evidence that they are untrue. People are free not to trust what the Gospels report, but this is a choice based on a preference, not an argument arising from evidence.

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