MORE CHURCH TALK

It’s not only the severance of our Bibles, but many more factors, which keep church-goers spiritually immature, right to the end of their lives. This is a hard word, but it is true and refined more than seven times - over nearly half a century of work in the vineyard of the Lord from Nazareth, confronted with all the human cunningness in the field of scholastic theology, in all the turmoil of a family of eight sons, two daughters and their mother, who suddenly passed away in her forties, toiling in a far off land, imprisoned against the very laws of that country, as well as discredited by scores of individuals simply lusting for some leadership position. 

After all these years and tribulations, I need to tell you, that followers of the Risen Lord have been deprived of their important right and the crucial necessity to discern matters in this world. This has been worked out by the very leadership of the very church group they belong to! 

Don’t part from us at this place! Don’t shut yourself off from what the Risen Lord wants you to understand! 

The right of discernment lets you mature; the necessity of discernment opens the corridors into all kinds of blessings. This is good news. If it weren't, I couldn’t stand up for it - and rest in it, even though sometimes storms rage all around.

Discerning has to do with judging, but church Christianity in unison raises the finger and admonishes, not to judge. They take that verse of Scripture out of its context, delete others, which clearly state, that we are to judge and wrap their artificial rule of thumb with convincing smiles into a glittering, but very abstract emphasis of love, which, in the end, turns out to be nothing more than passivity and a cheap readiness for all kinds of compromise. 

The consequences of such love-talk are fatal: on the spot, the notion and importance of passing proper judgement is done away with altogether, dark shadows fall on any kind of ‘judgement’ and soon, the path of faith is shrouded in mystery and individualism.

Finally, a clever abuse of the language even justifies macabre cult practices like the burning of crosses for some blasphemous ritual: progressing uncertainty  befalls every single member of such a herd of sheep, who prefer sociability to certainty stemming from humble obedience and subordination to the Scriptures. 

By then, the light of faith, which is a wonderful parable for the precondition for discernment, is already flickering. Little later, it quietly goes out.

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And this has been happening all over America and the western world for the past years: many kinds of interpretations of spiritual matters are presented, many kinds of crosses accepted as normal, but no systematic, genuine efforts are made to reach unity among

                                                 followers of the cross, as our Lord and Saviour himself, despite

                                                 utter distress, emphasized in his prayer in that garden (Joh.17).

                                                 With the air of assurance, that kind of subliminal estrangement

                                                 from discernment, sound judgement and conviction is termed

                                                 ‘tolerance’, ‘broadmindedness’, ‘mutual acceptance’ and 

                                                 ‘maturity’.  

                                                 Meantime and instead, in a seemingly contradictory way, others                                                  do have made the grave problem of dispersion of Christians into                                                  countless denominations their special field of interest, since                                                        decades meeting behind closed doors: in fact, they don’t even                                                      care about true unity among the followers of the Lord, because                                                    they themselves have veered off the narrow path of obedience, but they strive to create an artificial, well calculated impression of unity, just to be able and claim to represent a large proportion of Christendom, as well as Jewdom e.g. by the use of similar thought concepts, behavioural patterns, imagery and words, as was obvious with those ‘prayer-representatives’ at the end of the inauguration offering their various formulations - they all share such common ground — deeper, still, they are connected to the same spirit, who prefers to hide behind that same term: ‘g a d’. 

So called Christian groups and churches all across the globe have not gotten rid of the poison of Nicolaitanism: the teaching of how to lord it over the people of the New Covenant: hierarchical structures, open or hidden, are turning churches into mere businesses. The bigger the name, the better known a certain group, the more separation among the people of GOD, as it is suddenly forced to approve or disapprove, literally to go left or right - exactly, what Vincent van Gogh, who, as a young pastor, wrestled with just this fundamentally worldly phenomenon of clerical pyramids, but found no answers, nor excuses, and finally escaped into the field of arts instead, expressed in his famous 1890 painting of the church at Auvers-sur-Oise, northwest of Paris.