What If...

Here is something I wrote several years ago. I just found it and thought I would post.

What has always amazed and perplexed me about liberals of all kinds is that they constantly holler about tolerance until it is their turn to tolerate. Oh sure, they will tolerate anything except opposition. For example, our liberal church friends will tolerate all types of heresy but no hymns. They will allow every new-fangled fad but want nothing to do with the Faith that was once delivered to the saints. Their tolerance, which they tout as what makes them so different, has well defined limits. When a person dares cross the boundary, they are quickly and summarily declared “out of step” and relegated to irrelevance. It is not enough for them to discard all of Christian history before the 20th century, they also feel the need to decry anything that is not absolutely the newest and the trendiest. If a person happens to “transgress” and appear to them to be “out of date” (meaning something from earlier than last week), they are told that they will never be able to go to the “next level” (wherever that is) and are doomed to stagnate and die.

It would probably have been good if they had caught up with the Early Church before it made all the “mistakes” that it did; I am certain it would have been called “out of date” and irrelevant. After all, they relied on a book that was over 400 years old (at it youngest part) and sang from the Psalms. Surely, they couldn’t grow with a unfriendly non-seeker-friendly program like that. Instead of being seeker sensitive, they provoked the crowd following the tradition of a “wild” preacher that had addressed His audience as “whited sepulchers” and “snakes and hypocrites.” If only they had known how to engage their culture and open up avenues of communication rather than just “speaching” at people. It is obvious that they were bound to shrivel up and die. Far from being user friendly and adapting to the pagan polytheism and philosophy of their day, they preached ludicrous ideas like the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus. In fact, the culture of their day seems to have been the thing they really railed on because one of their “officials” told them to “be careful not to let anyone rob you of this faith through a shallow and misleading philosophy. Such a person follows human traditions and the world's way of doing things rather than following Christ.” (Colossians 2:8 God’s Word) Wow, they were really old fashioned and out of date, weren’t they?

So woefully backward, they didn’t have a drama or mime team and still expected young people to be attracted to their services. They did not conduct surveys to find out the felt needs of their community and thus continued preaching to people’s often unfelt (but deepest) need. The theory (so outdated) was that if you spoke the Word of God, the Holy Spirit would bring people past all their temporary felt needs and reveal to them their true need. The Early Church was so irrelevant and “not with it.” No wonder they foundered.

They were really out of touch in that they believed there was one truth and that it couldn’t be compromised in order to win people. The same leader mentioned earlier even condemned (O, the horror) anyone who preached another message. He was so narrow-minded. Some of them actually felt it was better to die than to accept the premise that there might be another truth. They even flaunted their Pentecostal distinctives by heading to the streets with the Gospel and the power of the Spirit. How could they expect to grow like that? They needed to be more seeker sensitive and become emergent. IF they had, we might have known something about their movement today. As it stands, we seem to know very little about them and their methods.