The weeks guest post is brought to us by Rex Schultz:

I have been reflecting on the church – the one, holy, catholic, apostolic church. I am influenced at the moment by Matthew Kelly’s book, “Rediscovering Catholicism” (©2002, published by Beacon Publishing, Cincinnati, OH) and the discussion with some Catholics in my neighborhood. I am not a member of the Catholic Church but he reminds me that more than two thousand years ago, a small group of people began to follow & proclaim the teachings of Jesus – became known as “Christians”. They were the original members of “the church” – the seat of and for holiness. God is the Source and He provided a mechanism for the practice of holiness; the infrastructures of forgiveness, grace, and service. God has seeded the assembly with practitioners to encourage, exhort, guide, etc. the faithful (and not so faithful).

Kelly writes, “the Church, like so many other things in life, is not something we inherit from generations past or take over from our predecessors. The Church is on loan to us from future generations.”

In my quest for critical thinking, I have developed a habit of trying to put issues into perspective. On the issue of “the church”, here is my perspective:

As humans, we have four important and integrated aspects – physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. God created us that way; it is part of His design. It is impossible to separate them into distinctly different and separate dimensions –  to isolate one from the others. So, the spiritual aspect of our lives causes us to seek congruence and alignment with the physical, emotional, and intellectual. As a whole person then I search for authentic guidance and development of my spiritual using the physical, emotional, and intellectual aspects.

My spiritual hunger leads me to the church. Jesus revealed the church to Peter, in Matthew 16:18 when He said He would build His church on a heavenly-taught confessor of a faith – that Jesus is the Christ. Peter confessed that the Messiah of the Old Testament was personified in Jesus of Nazareth!
Kelly’s book reminds me that we live in a time of great moral and ethical confusion. Is it not interesting to note that some people confuse the confession while others seek the truth and the authentic?

In a personal study of “conscience”, I listened to a broadcast of R.C. Sproul on “building a Christian conscience”. Sproul says that the confusion between ethics and morality is based on a lack of understanding between the two words. Ethics comes from the Greek ethos which deals with foundational values and is concerned with “oughtness” – the imperative right that we ought to be doing. Morality, on the other hand, is derived from mores or customs and habits within normal behavior. It is descriptive “isness” and describes what people actually do. The consequence of this confusion, according to Sproul, is the emergence of statistical morality – the normal becomes the normative. We determine what people are doing and when enough people are doing the same thing, we declare that behavior to be normal or acceptable. A new morality is born that ignores Biblical ethics.

What has that got to do with the church?  Is the church teaching, preaching, encouraging, and discipling people in ethics or morality? Is there any confusion in the Mission and Vision of your Church?

Rex Schultz is Discipleship Pastor on staff at a Reformed church in Colorado Springs. A lifelong learner, Rex has been a Christian since 1958. By his own admission, he did not completely surrender his life to Christ until 1992. He and Sue have been married 48 years and they have four children and twelve grandchildren. -CQMissional