A reader wrote into EN. He was worried.
He wondered what I thought of a talk on YouTube given at this year’s Spring Harvest. If you want to see for yourself what is being said, you can find it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAZ4FKHE9cQ.
The talk is given by Les Isaac, who is involved with Street Pastors ministry, and is about Christian unity. He refers to Revelation 7, which speaks of John’s vision of heaven in which people from every nation, tribe and language worship together before God’s throne. The speaker’s thrust is that a lot of Christians are waiting for such unity in heaven, but God ‘wants us to be one now’.
Anything that divides
He deduced that we must set aside anything that divides professing Christians, from worship styles to ‘theological differences’ (a dirty phrase for today’s post-modern hearers). Much of this we can say ‘Amen!’ to. There are secondary issues which are not essential to the gospel which ought not to act as obstacles to fellowship. However, it soon becomes clear, especially from the subtext, that what Mr. Isaac had in mind specifically is that evangelicals need to accept the Catholic Church and stand with all within it. The main illustrating stories concern a Catholic nun who prayed for Street Pastors and the miracle of Catholic and Protestant communities coming together in Northern Ireland. It is in that context that he speaks of setting aside ‘historical barriers’ which divide us. The Reformation is plainly in view. All this drew bursts of applause from the Spring Harvest faithful.
The re-emergence of heavy shepherds
What would you think if you received a letter from your church leaders that read like this? ‘Are church members …