Various Ranting and Raving

It seems that this has been my week to rant about things as they come to mind. Perhaps the relative "slowness" of my business and ministry endeavors over the past week has given my mind time to think abou thtings with which I am not well pleased. One such thing that has come to mind more often recently has been the ever present attitude within my church that we are, as it were, God's gift to Christianity. This attitude has eaten at me increasingly over the past two or three years, ever since I realized, through extensive travel and missionary work, the utter vastness of the world and the church outside of America. It was only by traveling to the edges of the world and experiencing how countless others see and worship God, that I was able to realize how much I failed to see before from my perch on the end of a Presbyterian pew in America. While my personal persuasions and beliefs might have changed little, my experiences with other people around the world gave me great insight into the beliefs of others. And, while i could have found plenty to disagree on with just about every person that I met, I found myself many times rather affirming a person's Christianity, based solely upon their belief in the saving work of Jesus Christ, and also affirming their impact for Christ in their community. I realized that the impact that they made for Christ had little to do with whether or not they believed in "the perseverance of the saints", or whether or not they affirmed the Westminster Confession. I realized just how much of a fringe idea Covanental Theology is, and that taking the initiative to share Christ with a complete stranger is much more of a virtue than insisting that only men with a certain sequence of letters behind their name be able to stand in the space behind a pulpit. Now, my ideas and my persuasions didn't change at all, but I certainly stopped judging other Christians by which of my opinions they did and didn't affirm. I discovered that I can fully accept the faiths of truly believing Catholics, Methodists, Armenians, Anglicans, Orthodox Christians, Pentacostals, and so forth, and not only that, but if I accept that they too are Christians, then I must affirm that they are on the same "level" as myself, and that most of the time, I am the one that can learn from them - not the other way around. What a thought, that I - and the rest of the Presbyterian church with me - am but a youngling among a world of Christians that have lived through the ages, and have been subjected to trials that I have only read about while sitting safely in my ivory tower in the United States.