News-Record.com

Lots of material here for conversation. It seems that the primary imperative for the Christian religion (according to this article) is to conquor the world with Christianity. Hm... that sounds familiar.

More thoughts on this: I was once a Cubmaster, and took over a pack that had been on the decline for several years. I decided to try running the pack "by the book," regardless of how counterintuitive it might seem. What d'ya know, it worked! The pack revived and became a big player in the local council.

Now, what if the Christian church decided to operate as Jesus urged it to -- spreading love and peace, convincing others by a shining example and doing good works? Who knows how far it could go without ever having to worry itself about a lack of converts or being persecuted? Might be worth considering.

I agree with you to a point, John. The Church has a long way to go indeed before actually living out the teachings of Jesus and the Scriptures to the max. The Western Church has become much too smug, self-satistying and mouthy, compared to the Church in China or N. Korea and elsewhere, where they really do have to put their lives on the line everyday. But, two things -

One is that, although a huge part of the Christian ethos is love, we are under direct orders of Christ (Matt. 28:19&20) and the Apostles (Rom. 10: 14-17) to preach the substance of the Gospel as the primary means of bringing about the new birth and conversion. Love is indeed a part of the process, primarily as the result or fruit of conversion, but the call to repentance and faith is also crucial to the spiritual reality promised by the atonement of Christ.

Anti-Christians would just love to have a nice sweet little love-gospel, that never mentioned anything of sin, repentance from it and keeping the moral Law. I mean, everybody loves love after all. But there is the nasty little thing called Truth – the absolute, divine type. In the Scriptures, godly love is inextricably linked to principle and truth. Even the great I Cor. 13 passage does not tell Christians to just love each other on an emotional level; it instructs them in detail as to the truth-constructs of loving others. So, even there, love and truth are wedded together.

As far as the works MO is concerned, even Jesus, who was the good works Master of all time, did not convince all his hearers (who were very much into good works) of His identity and message. He even added real miracles; and still little acceptance of his message. So we are left with the fact that people must have a new inner nature in order to acknowledge Jesus as Lord and Savior, to love and obey His Word and serve God acceptably - conversion. The “love-gospel” is the watered-down, apostate message of liberalism, not the authentic biblical Gospel message.

This goes down hard, St. Paul says, because “we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks (Gentiles) foolishness. But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Messiah the power of God, and the wisdom of God.” I Cor. 1.23,24)

This is not to say that all the approaches and methods employed in the Church at large, now or in the past, are either effective or biblical. There has been a lot of thinking-through on the part of many in the Church in the last few years as to what genuine biblical outreach is. Any way you slice it though, the true Gospel of grace must be preach, shared, conveyed somehow - AND the love of God, as you point out, must be evidenced along with it.

But I do agree John, that there needs be a lot of walk with the talk.