Guest Post by: The East Side Monergist
Recently, I read a piece by Carl Trueman titled Yes I am a Christian, just like those over there that really hit home in terms of the mindset among evangelical/protestant circles. So much of what I’m reading and seeing happening these days in Christendom is just reinforcing and incentivizing a need to be more gracious with each other as Protestants. We need to really look at different traditions with more focus upon unity rather than distinctives simply for the sake of solidarity and unity and strength based on first order issues. Over and over again, we’ve been spoiled or sinful or graceless enough to splinter ourselves and have become foolishly divided by secondary and tertiary order issues that we can’t even truly claim to be a part of or include others in the same faith. We spend so much time treating our brothers in the faith as though they are heretics and maybe even unworthy of the title Christian altogether all the while we see agnostics, atheists, wiccans and satanists grow in unity and solidarity. We are fighting our way into being arguably the smallest and most divided faith system in the world.
I sincerely understand how we’ve got to this place but I think the last few years has revealed to us that it’s possible for separated Christian traditions to find themselves together in the same place worshiping. In case we haven’t figured this out yet, we are all on the same side for the same God and cause. The pagans are putting their heads together while we try and find more reasons to divide. Folks, it’s time that Protestants begin putting their heads together and working to eliminate and extinguish the true Evangelical heretics violating first order issues like biblical inerrancy, the Trinity, the bodily resurrection of Christ & God’s hatred of sodomy and murder of the unborn . Christians need to be a unified front in this world and we simply couldn’t be more divided than we are right now.
With that said, I do see micro pockets of hope. For example; our beloved EBC and Trinity Bible Chapel taking in outcasted Presbyterians and allowing them to be members. I tip my hat to Christ Church in Moscow Idaho for onboarding Baptists as members even though they are a Presbyterian Church. Sadly, however, we need to be bold with many Christian sects in rejecting them for their blatant abuse or unfaithfulness to scripture like Rome and the East or the Bethel / Hillsong/ IHOP/ Toronto miracle charismatics. I just would love to see a little more unity between my conservative / biblically orthodox Presbyterian, Dutch Reformed, Particular Baptist, Southern Baptist, independent Fundamentalist Baptist, Congregationalists, Anglicans, and even some forms of conservative Pentecostalism and any other non-denominational or Arminian Churches. You know, those that still live by the first order essentials like FULL submission to the authority of scripture even with some differing emphasis and interpretations. But for this unity to work, first we need to put our pistols back in our holsters or point them towards the enemies of Christ and away from each other.
