Gleaning From the Conference

I cannot believe how much I am gleaning from listening to my mp3s of the conference.

At the conference, Kevin Swanson made the comment that all the government agencys are doing is putting their fingers into the dike to keep it from failing. That Chrisitans should be back another 50 feet building another dike for when it does fail. I do think that this is going to happen, it’s mostly a matter of when, not if. I think the same is true for much of modern evangelicalism. I’m not at the place that Kevin is, where he thinks it time to get the RIP signs ready... But, because it has abandoned the core of God’s Law as the standard for all of life it will be unable to stop its slide into irrelevancy and at some point, will just give way, if broad repentance doesn’t happen. We do need to be busy building, identifying our core identities, as to what our fellowships stand for, to be ready when, and if, that day arrives. Might want to be back further than 50ft.

At Legacy, Rob has been diligently working at this during the year. We have seen the need as a body to nail this stuff down so that as others come in they know where we’re coming from and what they would be joining. The Baptist Confession of Faith 1689 will work just fine for me. You are never gonna love everything, or you will be a church of one. So that’s where the "we are in substantial agreement with..." stuff comes in.

Having heard Swanson reformed talk multiple times now he talked about this subject in relation to the gay and lesbians...

Think about this, you can have every creed in the book and it still doesn’t tell someone whether you are taking a stand against egalitarianism, individualism, blind patriotism, big statist government. (Americana in other words) Even if you are against these things, what really counts is what you are for.

Your creed and confession doesn’t say if you have a biblical understanding of proper jurisdictions for the family, church and state. Embrace biblical patriachy with its multi-generational understanding of families or are even family integrated as a church. None tell you if the church trys to encourage a entreprenurial mindest amongst the fathers and young men and a rejection of the slave/worker bee mentality that was bred into us as a part of govenment controlled education, or if the women are seeking to recover bold biblical femininity. They don’t tell you whether the Pastor is a lone ranger with some eunich deacons or if it understands and embraces or is trying to embrace biblical eldership. They don’t let you know if they are trying to recover a biblical understanding of history and inculcating it into their sons and daughters, " so that they might not run in the day of adversity".

But at this weekends conference with the innocent sounding name of "Uniting Church and Family" almost all of these areas were addressed to one extent or another, if not during one of the talks then maybe from questions and answers. If you have been drinking deep from the cisterns of Vision Forum you will get all of this in spades.

I'm gonna add right here that if you just started downloading and listening to the Generations Radio broadcasts you would also wind up at the same place.

So, I’m not looking to tell people what creeds I embrace, or if I’m pre, post or ah...I will just say "I’m in substantial agreement with Vision Forum." That funny looking group of charismatics, presbeterians (these guys have done most of the heavy lifting), baptists, reformed baptists etc etc....all carrying around a serious attitude about the sovereignty of God and his authority over all of life!

Legacy will have the 1689 Baptist Confession. But the library table keeps looking more and more like pages from the Vision Forum catalog.

Your creed can show what you stand on, but not necessarily where your going. This is, where the battle is at today. Where are you, going?

A side note: all these areas were first being elevated by a group that called this restoration work "Reconstruction". Unfortunately the devil and his humanist friends with the help of dumb Christians, did a good job smearing them and their work, stigmatizing the name. Too bad.