ME, You and Church, Part 2. Robbo responds

I think that all you have written, AW, can be summarized in this statement towards to the end of your treatise.

"I actually feel that the real church of Christ is operating secretly in our present day churches and you have to look for it to find it and then avail yourself of its resources"

I agree with that. I think the writer of the hymn "The Church's one Foundation expresses a bit of that in some of the verses

Elect from every nation,
Yet one o’er all the earth;
Her charter of salvation,
One Lord, one faith, one birth;
One holy Name she blesses,
Partakes one holy food,
And to one hope she presses,
With every grace endued.

Though with a scornful wonder
Men see her sore oppressed,
By schisms rent asunder,
By heresies distressed:
Yet saints their watch are keeping,
Their cry goes up, “How long?”
And soon the night of weeping
Shall be the morn of song!

I just loved the church we were members of when we lived in Connecticut because it was really "racially and ethnically reconciled" with members from suburbia and the inner city and across the economic and social spectrum. The Pastor also had a globalized world view not in the sense of "we need to send missionaries to Africa" but rather I mean to say he was not Americo-centric or jingoistic. Is God now working out his purpose through a nation’s foreign policy? Some Christians here think so and that is why you can have Oliver North and Benjamin Netanyahu doing presentations to churches on Sunday mornings. Personally, I think that kind of activity is misguided.

When we moved, we started attending our local non-denominational church. It is actually walking distance from our home and it is the closest church of any type to where we live. It happens to be a “small” mega church but I have found it to be very sound in vision and outlook. (G Columbus has been to our church before). This year they have decided to start new campuses in other parts of the city with congregations linked by video.

In effect the corporate worship and the service order will be the same and certainly the sermon will be beamed live to the other sites. I am not very comfortable with that. Maybe we are making the best use of modern technology but I would have preferred that we send missionaries to the new site to start a church with some seasoned members accompanying them. They could remain affiliated but they should have their own independent Pastors and they should be allowed to be led directly from the Lord and his Holy Spirit rather than this direct oversight or control from "Headquarters" like some kind of Vatican. I am not even a registered member so I think I should just support the move with prayer.

You know how I run this blog. Some may even say I am the type of guy who reaps where he has not sown. The blog roll on the side bar has only four links for a reason. I run a tight ship. Those links are not there for nothing. There are many other good blogs out there, but I don’t know them. I just do not want any (little) one to follow a link from here and be caused to stumble by what he or she reads. I don’t want any millstone hang around my neck before I am cast into the deep sea.

The Internet Monk who is linked on this blog wrote a post titled How God ruined Church for me on the first day of the year 2007. For that post alone, he will remain on our blogroll until I decide to delete this blog. I read his writing quite often, he considers himself a "post-evangelical".
AW, if you read the article you will see that he raises a lot of excellent points you would identify with and more importantly you will see that he is a far better writer than you.

Calorius also recently mentioned in passing the beauty of a well constructed liturgy like we had in the Aggrey Chapel at Achimota School. (By the way, I think the highest form of liturgy is the Roman Catholic Mass, incense included). Maybe we are all just being nostalgic as we grow older...and AW is just longing for his old role as an apprentice to that Evangelist back in Adenta, near Accra. I heard the same Evangelist received a gift of a white horse from a grateful church member. Not White Horse whiskey, a real white horse, an animal which he kept in the yard of his rented house. - Robbo concurring with AW’s feelings