Religious Deople are Dangerous to the Church

Religion and Christianity just don’t mix. Look at what happened when Jesus began his public ministry. The religious community resisted him the most! I realize that Christianity is classified among the religions of the world but I am quite certain the founder would not want any association with religion. The main reason is that religion is about man’s effort to seek God and to try to appease a deity through human effort. Christianity is first about God seeking man and making a way (based on unmerited grace) for humans to be forgiven and restored to fellowship with their Creator. 

 

According to Christianity, if we seek God, it is only because He first pursued us. Check out the way the New Testament summarizes it: “We love because he first loved us” (I John 4:19). The moment we reverse this and make our love for God prerequisite to God loving us, we’ve left Christianity and entered religion! The essence of Christianity is that, “… God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).   Keep Reading...

The TV Church

What is the 'electronic church'? If you turn on your TV, you will find a variety of religious broadcasting, from Roman Catholic masses to traditional Presbyterian services to charismatic talk shows. Some of these programmes are rather amateurish local broadcasts of local worship services. Others are sophisticated and expensive programmes syndicated all over the world. Some of these programmes are produced by honest, earnest people trying to be helpful to others. Others seem to have questionable messages and methods. In one sense, all these programmes are part of the electronic church.

Usually, though, 'electronic church' is used to refer to those programmes distributed beyond a single local area and supported by the contributions of viewers. For the purposes of this article, the 'electronic church' will refer to any TV broadcast that becomes a central part of the religious experience and practice of its viewers.

My concern here is to argue that the electronic church at its best can only be a religious supplement in the life of the Christian. There are indeed many useful supplements for Christians today, including Christian bookstores, radio stations, and a host of local, national and international organizations for various educational, evangelistic and welfare goals. But the purpose of this article is to maintain that all those supplements must remain subordinate to and supportive of the Christian's commitment to the local church. Keep Reading...

Beware “Nigerian Religious Junk”

That’s the warning from Pastor Conrad Mbewe.  He reports on a meeting of evangelical church leaders from southern African countries.  Mbewe explains:

I feel very sad to write about this, but by “Nigerian religious junk” I mean the phenomenon of churches that are personal-to-holder. They exalt the personality of their founding father, who is still alive somewhere in Nigeria (or elsewhere) and is treated with the aura of a state president. It does not matter which country you go to, the bill boards of these churches do not have the faces of the local pastors of the congregations in those towns but of the founding father in Nigeria—or wherever he has since relocated. It is all about image and power. This “man of God” claims to hear the voice of God and proceeds to minister to you accordingly. If you do not obey him you are resisting the ministry of God into your life. So, the churches are often called “ministries” rather than churches. And to make them even more impressive, the term “international” is often added to their name. Keep Reading>>>