The Bible Archive

While looking at the New Testament Church I started off with a few basic assumptions (the Church consists of People, the Church’s existence is based on specific historical requirements and the Church’s leadership is divine). Flowing from these assumptions I pointed out a goal of the Church tied directly to the purpose of the sent Holy Spirit (firstly to edify the Church by teaching and comforting and secondly to convict the World of sin, righteousness and judgment).

As such, I specified seven markers which outlined the boundaries of the Church: (1) the Lord’s Supper, (2) baptizing disciples, (3) loving one another, (4) disciplining its own members, (5) pure worship practices, (6) pure moral practices and (7) preaching the Word. The question now arises: can a church (small c) count as such if it fails in any of these seven boundary markers?

Take 15 minutes. Go read this. Also read the comments. Honestly, you don’t have to participate but Jeremy does an excellent job of thinking through the issues as do his commenters.

Barack Obama has basically declared himself incompetent to make any judgments on one of the key issues of our day, and I have to say that I agree with him. The statements he’s been making show that he’s either hopelessly ignorant on some very important policy matters or deliberately contradicting himself in order to pretend to two opposing groups that he’s on both their sides. That means he probably should have a job where these issues really are above his pay grade. There are a lot of such jobs. Unfortunately for him, the job of U.S. President (not to mention U.S. Senator, Illinois State Senator, or constitutional law professor) would not be in the list.