Just the other day I was on the phone with Sister Anne, one
of the older members of our church. At
some point in the conversation I inquired of the welfare of Sister Thelma, another
lady who yet remains with the “Primitive Baptist” church that I used to serve;
the one that excluded me when I began preaching, as they referred to it, “unsound
doctrine”. They both remain good friends
and are in constant contact with one another.
This is good. I do
not feel the scriptures to teach that when a member has been excluded that all
communication is to cease. I believe 2
Thessalonians 3:14 establishes this fact. My deceived friends could learn a lot from
this. I’m quite sure there have been
many cases where a member was either excluded or left of their own accord in
which not a single member of the church reached out to them to try to win them
back. Was there bitterness in their heart
which prevented them from so doing?
Fear? Lack of concern? Maybe
their Hyper-Calvinism had convinced them that if they are a true Old Baptist
the Lord will just bring them back. After all, we shouldn’t “help” the Lord,
should we?
I asked Anne to convey to Sister Thelma how much I and
everyone else would love to see her. She’s
traveled a rough road of late, losing her husband to cancer and not in good
health herself. Anne said she had
already invited her to our church but to no avail. The reason given came as no
surprise to me. It is one I have known about far
too long.
She was scared.
Scared to visit a church which had been deemed “out of order”.
Remarkable.
Ponder this reader, especially if you are of the Calvinistic
persuasion. I believe strongly in
election, predestination, and total depravity (the most emphasized doctrines
among the Hardshell church), having never recanted them. Yet simply because I grew
in grace and the knowledge of the truth, burning the midnight oil in hours of
study, and came to see that God makes use of means in effectual calling and
that the saints will persevere in their allegiance to Christ, I was excluded
and my current home church labelled “out of order”. Each member who chose to come with me
received a personal letter in the mail a week or so later stating that they had
all been excluded.
When I hung up I took a deep breath, deeply saddened because
of two things. First, that a church can
be called out of order simply because it believes in the basic truth of
evangelism advocated by the majority of Christendom, and secondly, that an
elderly member is afraid of being disciplined by her home church or being made
the subject of gossip because she chose to visit it.
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