Friday, August 05, 2005

Polity Matters: Part X

Whether you love or hate Tom Ascol's theological persuasions, I hope you can appreciate his call for meaningful church membership and his honesty about the meaninglessness of membership numbers as an indicator of church health or denominational strength.

Parts One and Two of his "Honest Statistics: A Large Convention of Small Churches" are both incisive. Likewise, Jim Eliff's article, "Southern Baptists, an Unregenerate Denomination," is just brutally honest, scathing, and necessary.

I know that many Paleoevangelical readers, like myself, are not Southern Baptists, but I suspect many of us can find parallels in the churches we know well. But what are we doing about it? Wednesday Al Mohler commented near the end of his daily radio program that without discipline the church "eventually ceases to be the church. It becomes a voluntary association. It becomes a social club with a steeple." I think we all know intuitively that he's right.

Check out a series of articles on church discipline that Christianity Today published here.

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