Ablazing Folly
A very good personal opinion piece by Rob can be found at Beggars All. Thanks to Bunnie over at Worldmagblog.com for brining this to my attention…
In this piece, Rob clearly lays out the danger that undergirds the folly that has been foisted upon us by Lutheran Church Missouri Synod President Kieschnick, in the form of his latest evangelism/outreach program, Ablaze!. Ablaze! is a $100,000,000 boondoggle of a program that, from what I have been able to find out, was developed for another, mainline protestant, church body, but which was ultimately never purchased & used by that church body. And, as the LCMS seemingly always seems to be about a generation behind in wanting to adopt contemporary American religious fads (just about as they are sputtering towards a discredited conclusion), Ablaze! has now been adopted in all of its church-growthy, numbers-centric & seeker-”relevant” glory.
The Law based & driven approach of contemporary American evangelicalism (in either Calvinistic or Arminian flavor) is a path fraught with danger, for it focuses on what man can/should/must do to help save himself (as if to call Christ on the cross a lier for proclaiming “It is finished!”…), along with setting human developed & measurable goals for determining “success”.
Despite our innate desire to feel important, relevant, and part of a/the/any process, there is nothing, I repeat NOTHING, that we can do to help save ourselves. We are no more able to help than a physically dead man can “help” himself start breathing again, or than a baby can “help” himself be born.
Programs like Ablaze! are theologically suspect, and border on spiritual malpractice, because their very methods encourage, if not outright demand, that folks take the focus off of faithful execution of the Christ-mandated & Spirit-driven proclaiming, teaching, & baptizing, and put the focus on achieving arbitrary numeric goals. We can never meet the challenge, and fulfill the requirements of the Law, much less determine a numeric measure that would prove that we did so.
Ablaze! takes a good Lutheran concept like evangelism, strips away the nurturing core of doctrinal Truth & integrity, buries the remaining shell in natural bovine fertilizer, and calls it “good,” because it’s based on the discarded recipe that was picked up on the sidewalk in front of the oh-so-trendy wack-jobs down the street.
<*sigh*>
-ghp
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