A dad who is joining our church (his wife is already a member) wrote the below in his membership application.  I was so blessed by it.....

"The Family Integration teaching hit me like a ton of bricks.  The first time I heard Pastor speak on this I will admit I didn't have a lot of faith in the idea.  I had never attended a church that thought like this.  Even more, the thought that I should be the spiritual leader of my home....WHAT?!?!  There is no way I can get these kids to turn off the TV, computer, and cell phone to have Bible Study!

But you know what happened?  It worked.  The kids enjoyed it and now look to me for guidance!  I have had to step up my game too; remembering one or two verses was not going to cut it!  The kids had questions and I have to give them answers.  My youngest son was 3 when we started.  He was not a happy camper at first, but can you guess what happened?  He learned discipline!  As I was worshipping in church recently with my hands raised, I looked down at my child...who was doing the same thing...."

And these kinds of testimonies just keep coming...from moms, dads, single parents, and even those without children that are impacting others!

To Christ, and to Him alone be all praise, honor, and glory!

Segregation from NCFIC on Vimeo.

A Re-Post from the archives...and rightly so!

"One of the important assumptions behind a belief in the sufficiency of Scripture is that the church is not our invention. Jesus said, 'I will build My church' (Matthew 16:18).  He has chosen to build it upon the instruction of the Apostles.  The church is not something that we should try to reinvent in every generation, for every generation.  The church should not be built by the creative efforts of His people.  The church has a Head, and He has spoken clearly enough.

Make no mistake about it — the people of God have been given clear practices and standards, and we should keep them 'on task' in every generation:

• Preaching the Word may not be the most stylish or engaging method for your visually stimulated generation;
• The public reading of Scripture may not be the most entertaining means of communication;
• Celebrating communion may not be the most popular rite;
• Prayer may not be the most exciting activity;
• Church discipline may not be the most appreciated tool;

When it comes to that which God has prescribed for the church, our opinions do not matter.  Whether God’s standards are acceptable or popular with Christians and so-called 'seekers' (Romans 3:8) or not, Scripture calls for them to be practiced in the church."

--Scott Brown, Director for the National Center of Family Integrated Churches from this article

I suppose the last 2 years have been truly been reflective, since based on fresh reviews of Scripture we have examined preaching style and focus, youth ministry, etc and come up with expository sermons, Jesus is Enough, refusing to shield people from the tough verses of Scripture, and Family Integration! LOL

I've also spent time looking at worship service evangelism and altar calls.  The "fall away" rates and difficulty of follow up always frustrated me.  And I had questions:

• What does coming forward have to do with salvation?
• How do we know it wasn't the persuasive abilities of the preacher that brought them forward?
• Can a sinful person "decide" to "accept" Christ?
• How can a dark and sinful heart do that if God alone calls them?
• Why do so many who "decided" show no fruit of salvation whatsoever?

Take some time and read the below articles. Since nearly all of us grew up on invitationalism/decisionism, the below counter views will stretch you as they are me as I study this issue.

http://www.frontlinemin.org/decisionism.asp

http://www.gracesermons.com/hisbygrace/invitation.html

http://www.biblicalstudies.com/bstudy/ecclesiology/altar.htm

http://www.founders.org/journal/fj22/article2.htm

http://home.flash.net/~thinkman/articles/invite.htm

THE CAMBRIDGE DECLARATION

of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

April 20, 1996

Evangelical churches today are increasingly dominated by the spirit of this age rather than by the Spirit of Christ. As evangelicals, we call ourselves to repent of this sin and to recover the historic Christian faith.

In the course of history words change. In our day this has happened to the word "evangelical." In the past it served as a bond of unity between Christians from a wide diversity of church traditions. Historic evangelicalism was confessional. It embraced the essential truths of Christianity as those were defined by the great ecumenical councils of the church. In addition, evangelicals also shared a common heritage in the "solas" of the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation.

Today the light of the Reformation has been significantly dimmed. The consequence is that the word "evangelical" has become so inclusive as to have lost its meaning. We face the peril of losing the unity it has taken centuries to achieve. Because of this crisis and because of our love of Christ, his gospel and his church, we endeavor to assert anew our commitment to the central truths of the Reformation and of historic evangelicalism. These truths we affirm not because of their role in our traditions, but because we believe that they are central to the Bible.

Scripture alone is the inerrant rule of the church's life, but the evangelical church today has separated Scripture from its authoritative function. In practice, the church is guided, far too often, by the culture. Therapeutic technique, marketing strategies, and the beat of the entertainment world often have far more to say about what the church wants, how it functions and what it offers, than does the Word of God. Pastors have neglected their rightful oversight of worship, including the doctrinal content of the music. As biblical authority has been abandoned in practice, as its truths have faded from Christian consciousness, and as its doctrines have lost their saliency, the church has been increasingly emptied of its integrity, moral authority and direction.

Rather than adapting Christian faith to satisfy the felt needs of consumers, we must proclaim the law as the only measure of true righteousness and the gospel as the only announcement of saving truth. Biblical truth is indispensable to the church's understanding, nurture and discipline.

Scripture must take us beyond our perceived needs to our real needs and liberate us from seeing ourselves through the seductive images, cliche's, promises. and priorities of mass culture. It is only in the light of God's truth that we understand ourselves aright and see God's provision for our need. The Bible, therefore, must be taught and preached in the church. Sermons must be expositions of the Bible and its teachings, not expressions of the preachers opinions or the ideas of the age. We must settle for nothing less than what God has given.

The work of the Holy Spirit in personal experience cannot be disengaged from Scripture. The Spirit does not speak in ways that are independent of Scripture. Apart from Scripture we would never have known of God's grace in Christ. The biblical Word, rather than spiritual experience, is the test of truth.

We reaffirm the inerrant Scripture to be the sole source of written divine revelation, which alone can bind the conscience. The Bible alone teaches all that is necessary for our salvation from sin and is the standard by which all Christian behavior must be measured. We deny that any creed, council or individual may bind a Christian's conscience, that the Holy Spirit speaks independently of or contrary to what is set forth in the Bible, or that personal spiritual experience can ever be a vehicle of revelation.

As evangelical faith becomes secularized, its interests have been blurred with those of the culture. The result is a loss of absolute values, permissive individualism, and a substitution of wholeness for holiness, recovery for repentance, intuition for truth, feeling for belief, chance for providence, and immediate gratification for enduring hope. Christ and his cross have moved from the center of our vision.

We reaffirm that our salvation is accomplished by the mediatorial work of the historical Christ alone. His sinless life and substitutionary atonement alone are sufficient for our justification and reconciliation to the Father.

We deny that the gospel is preached if Christ's substitutionary work is not declared and faith in Christ and his work is not solicited.

Unwarranted confidence in human ability is a product of fallen human nature. This false confidence now fills the evangelical world; from the self-esteem gospel, to the health and wealth gospel, from those who have transformed the gospel into a product to be sold and sinners into consumers who want to buy, to others who treat Christian faith as being true simply because it works. This silences the doctrine of justification regardless of the official commitments of our churches.

God's grace in Christ is not merely necessary but is the sole efficient cause of salvation. We confess that human beings are born spiritually dead and are incapable even of cooperating with regenerating grace.

We reaffirm that in salvation we are rescued from God's wrath by his grace alone. It is the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit that brings us to Christ by releasing us from our bondage to sin and raising us from spiritual death to spiritual life.

We deny that salvation is in any sense a human work. Human methods, techniques or strategies by themselves cannot accomplish this transformation. Faith is not produced by our unregenerated human nature.

Justification is by grace alone through faith alone because of Christ alone. This is the article by which the church stands or falls. Today this article is often ignored, distorted or sometimes even denied by leaders, scholars and pastors who claim to be evangelical. Although fallen human nature has always recoiled from recognizing its need for Christ's imputed righteousness, modernity greatly fuels the fires of this discontent with the biblical Gospel. We have allowed this discontent to dictate the nature of our ministry and what it is we are preaching.

Many in the church growth movement believe that sociological understanding of those in the pew is as important to the success of the gospel as is the biblical truth which is proclaimed. As a result, theological convictions are frequently divorced from the work of the ministry. The marketing orientation in many churches takes this even further, erasing the distinction between the biblical Word and the world, robbing Christ's cross of its offense, and reducing Christian faith to the principles and methods which bring success to secular corporations.

While the theology of the cross may be believed, these movements are actually emptying it of its meaning. There is no gospel except that of Christ's substitution in our place whereby God imputed to him our sin and imputed to us his righteousness. Because he bore our judgment, we now walk in his grace as those who are forever pardoned, accepted and adopted as God's children. There is no basis for our acceptance before God except in Christ's saving work, not in our patriotism, churchly devotion or moral decency. The gospel declares what God has done for us in Christ. It is not about what we can do to reach him.

We reaffirm that justification is by grace alone through faith alone because of Christ alone. In justification Christ's righteousness is imputed to us as the only possible satisfaction of God's perfect justice.

We deny that justification rests on any merit to be found in us, or upon the grounds of an infusion of Christ's righteousness in us, or that an institution claiming to be a church that denies or condemns sola fide can be recognized as a legitimate church.

Wherever in the church biblical authority has been lost, Christ has been displaced, the gospel has been distorted, or faith has been perverted, it has always been for one reason: our interests have displaced God's and we are doing his work in our way. The loss of God's centrality in the life of today's church is common and lamentable. It is this loss that allows us to transform worship into entertainment, gospel preaching into marketing, believing into technique, being good into feeling good about ourselves, and faithfulness into being successful. As a result, God, Christ and the Bible have come to mean too little to us and rest too inconsequentially upon us.

God does not exist to satisfy human ambitions, cravings, the appetite for consumption, or our own private spiritual interests. We must focus on God in our worship, rather than the satisfaction of our personal needs. God is sovereign in worship; we are not. Our concern must be for God's kingdom, not our own empires, popularity or success.

We reaffirm that because salvation is of God and has been accomplished by God, it is for God's glory and that we must glorify him always. We must live our entire lives before the face of God, under the authority of God and for his glory alone. We deny that we can properly glorify God if our worship is confused with entertainment, if we neglect either Law or Gospel in our preaching, or if self-improvement, self-esteem or self- fulfillment are allowed to become alternatives to the gospel.

The faithfulness of the evangelical church in the past contrasts sharply with its unfaithfulness in the present. Earlier in this century, evangelical churches sustained a remarkable missionary endeavor, and built many religious institutions to serve the cause of biblical truth and Christ's kingdom. That was a time when Christian behavior and expectations were markedly different from those in the culture. Today they often are not. The evangelical world today is losing its biblical fidelity, moral compass and missionary zeal.

We repent of our worldliness. We have been influenced by the "gospels" of our secular culture, which are no gospels. We have weakened the church by our own lack of serious repentance, our blindness to the sins in ourselves which we see so clearly in others, and our inexcusable failure adequately to tell others about God's saving work in Jesus Christ.

We also earnestly call back erring professing evangelicals who have deviated from God's Word in the matters discussed in this Declaration. This includes those who declare that there is hope of eternal life apart from explicit faith in Jesus Christ, who claim that those who reject Christ in this life will be annihilated rather than endure the just judgment of God through eternal suffering, or who claim that evangelicals and Roman Catholics are one in Jesus Christ even where the biblical doctrine of justification is not believed.

The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals asks all Christians to give consideration to implementing this Declaration in the church's worship, ministry, policies, life and evangelism. For Christ's sake. Amen.

Hey fellow readers!

I changed my blog format because...honestly...I didn't want to keep giving money to an organization like Go Daddy.  After this year's Super Bowl and their marketing laced with such blatant unrighteousness, I was convicted.  I don't know why it took me that long!  So the old posts have been archived.

I pray this blog continues to be a blessing to those who read it!

Carlton C. McLeod