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Christian Living

Pursuing a Balanced Trinitarian Faith

There is an amazing little booklet, sporting a tongue-twister of a title. It is The Threefold Art of Experiencing God: The Liberating Power of a Trinitarian Faith by Christian A. Schwarz. In a stellar example of “less is more,” this diminutive book carries a profound punch.

Facets of Faith

The central theme is that Christianity exists in three streams, the liberals (mainlines), the evangelicals, and the charismatics. In general terms, each places their faith focus primarily on one part of the Godhead: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, respectively.

The perspective of each stream is correct, but at the same time, incomplete. Each of these three segments carries with it corresponding strengths.

However, it simultaneously contains risks inherent from persisting in an unbalanced point of view of the Godhead.

A Trinitarian Faith

Schwarz’s prescription for this is that all Christians should equally pursue the three parts of the Godhead: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, experiencing God in totality, not in part.

In doing so, our understanding of who God is will become more balanced. The result is that we will all arrive at the holistic center of who God is, being more unified in the process.

As I learn more about each of Christianity’s major streams, I become more appreciative of what each as to offer, making my faith fuller. This helps me be more accepting of my brothers and sisters from all Christian walks.

[Read my review of The Threefold Art of Experiencing God: The Liberating Power of a Trinitarian Faith.]

Peter DeHaan writes about biblical Christianity to confront status quo religion and live a life that matters. He seeks a fresh approach to following Jesus through the lens of Scripture, without the baggage of made-up traditions and meaningless practices.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

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Christian Living

42,000 Protestant Denominations

Christianity Today recently reported that there are 42,000 Protestant denominations. That is shocking.

However, given that in the United States we have a consumerism mentality, this development is hardly surprising. Consumerism says that if you don’t like the church you are at, you keep shopping until you find one. If you can’t find one that fits, you start your own.

Compounding consumerism is the celebration of the individual. Individuals don’t value community or the collective good. Instead, blazing one’s own trail is celebrated and exalted. But individualism is selfish and self-centered. The attitude is, “it’s all about me.”

However, 42,000 Protestant denominations are not what Jesus had in mind at all. His intent was one—and that includes the other streams of Christianity, too.

Why can’t we just be one in Jesus and forget about our denominations, our disagreements, and our doctrines?

Consumerism and individuality is not the goal, unity is.

Read more in How Big is Your Tent? A Call for Christian Unity, Tolerance, and Love and discover what the Bible says about following Jesus. Available in e-book and paperback.

Peter DeHaan writes about biblical Christianity to confront status quo religion and live a life that matters. He seeks a fresh approach to following Jesus through the lens of Scripture, without the baggage of made-up traditions and meaningless practices.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

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Christian Living

Take One Step Toward Christian Unity

Where I used to live, a fair number of people attended church. None of them went to the church I attended and, as far as I know, no one else attended the same church as their neighbors.

Even more confounding is that there were two churches within a mile, but no one attended them either. In fact, we all drove by other churches as we motored to our own church of choice.

How sad.

Even though we are all of the Christian faith, we fail to abide in that reality. Instead we denominate ourselves into disparate subgroups based on our individual traditions, preferred practices, and pet perceptions of what it means to be Christian.

This wasn’t what Jesus had in mind. He wants us to be one—just as he and his father are one. Jesus prayed for our unity.

Unity was the intent, but disunity was the result.

Although our enemy would prefer that we not follow God at all, his backup plan seems to be to hold us in adamant disagreement. This may be almost as an effective ploy.

While we can’t quickly repair these centuries old rifts, a good first step is to be open-minded towards our brothers and sisters, willing to listen to what they have to say and accept them regardless. This would show God’s love to another, something that is also important to Jesus.

Read more in How Big is Your Tent? A Call for Christian Unity, Tolerance, and Love and discover what the Bible says about following Jesus. Available in e-book and paperback.

Peter DeHaan writes about biblical Christianity to confront status quo religion and live a life that matters. He seeks a fresh approach to following Jesus through the lens of Scripture, without the baggage of made-up traditions and meaningless practices.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

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Christian Living

Three Streams of Christianity

In my post, “Let’s Get Together,” I pointed out the importance of not going alone on our spiritual journey, but rather enjoying the company fellow travelers and the collective safety of going together.

While this is best accomplished in person, sometimes that is not feasible. Towards that end, I recommend magazines as a supplemental source of spiritual formation.

There are hundreds of worthy periodicals to consider, but there are three that, in my mind, emerge as the prime contenders for consideration. Listed alphabetically, they are:

Check out all three, as each is roughly aligned with a major stream of Christian thought and practice. For me, one of them I mostly resonant with, another stretches me in a good way, and the third frequently irritates me.

While each response to the three magazines has merit, it is the third one is most beneficial. After all, if I only read articles that I agree with, what good is that?

However, when I am exposed to sound, biblically-based thoughts that are foreign to me, my perspective of what it means to follow Jesus widens and my acceptance of others becomes more inclusive.

After all, isn’t this what Jesus taught?

[Although a magazine only permits one-way communication, most magazines offer on-line forums and resources that allow readers to interact with others, thereby facilitating true dialogue and aiding the spiritual journey.]

Peter DeHaan writes about biblical Christianity to confront status quo religion and live a life that matters. He seeks a fresh approach to following Jesus through the lens of Scripture, without the baggage of made-up traditions and meaningless practices.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

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Christian Living

Jesus Offers a Prayer for Unity

The last thing that Jesus did as a free man was to pray. The last thing in prayed for was that his future followers would get along. This strongly suggests that unity was important to Jesus.

While unity among his followers was largely realized in the first century that has not been the case in the two millennia that followed. The record shows that Jesus’ followers have been increasingly polarized, divided, and strife-filled.

Although we will never all get along without God’s help, we can be aided by taking to heart the sage advice:

“In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; it all things, charity”

Furthermore, the list of essentials should be short. Very short. As short as possible. My list has but one item: to pursue the God who is revealed in the Bible.

That is it, nothing more. Everything else is a non-essential and for that I advocate tolerance along with a generous portion of brotherly love.

It’s a great first step towards getting along.

[The quote is often attributed to Augustine, but there is no support for that assertion. It most likely originated several centuries later, from Peter Meiderlin, a 17th century Lutheran priest.]

Read more in How Big is Your Tent? A Call for Christian Unity, Tolerance, and Love and discover what the Bible says about following Jesus. Available in e-book and paperback.

Peter DeHaan writes about biblical Christianity to confront status quo religion and live a life that matters. He seeks a fresh approach to following Jesus through the lens of Scripture, without the baggage of made-up traditions and meaningless practices.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

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Christian Living

What is Post-Denominational?

Dividing the Church by Forming Denominations Isn’t Biblical, and It’s Time to Move Past It

Jesus prayed for our unity, that we would be one—just as he and his father are one. He yearned that his followers would get along and live in harmony.

Dividing into religious sects wasn’t his plan. Yet that’s exactly what we’ve done as we formed 42,000 Protestant denominations.

Instead of focusing on our similarities, our common faith in Jesus, these denominations choose to make a big deal over the few things they disagree about.

They should get along, but instead they develop their own narrow theology, which they use as a litmus test to see who they’ll accept and who they’ll reject.

How this must grieve Jesus.

While there has been some disagreement among the followers of Jesus almost from the beginning, the divisions started proliferating 500 years ago with the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.

And since that time, it’s escalated out of control, with a reported 42,000 denominations today.

This represents the most significant degree of Christian disunity ever. The push for denominational division traces its beginning to the modern era.

While the modern era assumed that reason would allow us to converge on a singular understanding of truth, the opposite occurred. Instead, the pursuit of logic resulted in wide-scale disagreement.

This is perhaps most manifest among the followers of Jesus, who love to argue over their individual understandings of theology.

Yet there’s a sense we’re moving away from denominations and the divisions they cause. The word to describe this is post-denominational.

Just as we are moving from the modern era to the postmodern era, we are also moving from a time of denominational division to a time of post-denomination harmony.

In understanding postmodern, we don’t consider it as anti-modern but instead “beyond modern.” The same distinction rightly applies to post-denominational.

Post-denominational is not anti-denomination, as much as it is “beyond denominations.”

So, what is post-denominational? Post-denominational moves beyond the Protestant divisions that proliferated in the last 500 years, during the modern era.

Post-denominational sets aside the man-made religious sects that divide the church of Jesus. In its place, post-denominational advocates a basic theology to form agreement and foster harmony.

This allows the followers of Jesus to live together in unity, which will amplify their impact on the world around them. The people who follow Jesus are beginning to realize this. Many new churches label themselves as non-denominational.

This reflects a general mistrust among today’s people for the brand-name Protestantism of yesteryear, that is, denominations.

They’re weary of the criticism, the finger-pointing, and the disunity that denominations have caused. That’s why the label of non-denominational is so attractive to many people.

This includes those who go to church, those who dropped out, and those who have never been. They don’t want to align themselves with a denomination anymore.

They want a spiritual experience in a loving Christian community, one without denominational division.

For the sake of Jesus and our witness of him to our world, can we set our denominations aside and agree to work together to move forward in unity?

It’s a lot to ask, and it seems humanly impossible. But Jesus already prayed for our success (see John 17:20-26.)

May this generation be the answer to his prayer. May we be one.

Peter DeHaan writes about biblical Christianity to confront status quo religion and live a life that matters. He seeks a fresh approach to following Jesus through the lens of Scripture, without the baggage of made-up traditions and meaningless practices.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

Bogged Down Reading the Bible?

10 Essential Bible Reading Tips, from Peter DeHaan

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Christian Living

The Bible Teaches Us How to Live With One Another

Scripture is packed with instructions of how Christians should treat each other

Last year I shared 13 Reasons Why I Love the Bible, and I periodically expand upon one of those thirteen reasons. Today we’ll explore how the Bible teaches us to live with each other.

Although these lessons occur throughout the Bible, let’s focus on one reoccurring theme.

I call these the “one another” commands. These instructions teach us how to treat each other.

The Bible contains thirty-one of these one-another instructions. Most only occur once, but four of them occur multiple times. This must mean they’re more important, or else they wouldn’t be repeated. They are:

Love One Another

The command to love one another occurs ten times in the Bible, all in the New Testament. John writes about this the most but so do Paul and Peter.

Unfortunately our society today has a skewed understanding of the word love. Consider the following.

  • I’d love to go to the movies with you.
  • I love pizza.
  • I love to read the Bible.
  • I love my family.
  • I love God.

These are all phrases I’ve used. But they convey different meanings of the word love, ranging from preference to passion. What is love? Our society often treats love as an emotion, but let’s consider love as an attitude that prompts unselfish action.

When it comes to loving one another, 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 gives us some helpful instructions on how to do this. By following these verses we can begin to love others in a biblical way.

Encourage One Another

In four places, both the Old and New Testaments, the Bible tells us to encourage one another.

Using positive words to lift others up and inspire them in their life and faith is a simple thing, yet most of us fail to do so most of the time. This is a skill we need to learn and then apply.

We all know people who encourage us. We enjoy our time with them, because we feel better about ourselves afterwards. May we be like them.

However, we also know people who we don’t enjoy being around because they discourage us, either directly through negative talk or indirectly through their attitudes. May we not be like them.

Let us encourage others and provide a positive, nurturing relationship that motivates them to do better.

Live in Harmony With One Another

Paul and Peter tell us we’re to live in harmony with one another. This is key. Harmony comes out of biblical love and is bolstered by encouragement, but there is more to harmony than that.

Two words come to mind that relate to harmony. The first is peace. We should strive to live at peace with everyone (Romans 12:18).

The second word is unity. It’s critically important for followers of Jesus to live in unity with one another. When we do so, we point others to Jesus. When we fail to do so, we push people away from Jesus. May it never be so.

Unity—that is, harmony—is important to Jesus. In one of his prayers he asks his father that we will live in unity, that we will be one just as he and his father are one (John 17:21).

Greet One Another With a Holy Kiss

The fourth of the one-another commands that appears multiple times in the Bible is a perplexing one. It’s the instruction to greet one another with a holy kiss. What does that mean?

I explored this in another post where I speculated that this command might be a “sacred act of intimacy for the church community.” Then I admitted that I’m not really sure.

Another thought is that greet another with a holy kiss might be like a secret handshake, a way to express Christian affinity without saying a word. I suppose that works, too.

Or we could interpret this command to greet one another with a holy kiss as a principle that implies acceptance and affection with all others who follow Jesus. This also might be a viable interpretation of this confusing phrase.

In addition to these four, there are twenty-seven other one-another commands in the Bible. As we strive to follow them and put them into practice, the Church of Jesus will grow, and the world will be better for it.

May we learn to treat one another as the Bible tells us.

Peter DeHaan writes about biblical Christianity to confront status quo religion and live a life that matters. He seeks a fresh approach to following Jesus through the lens of Scripture, without the baggage of made-up traditions and meaningless practices.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

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Christian Living

Why Are Denominations Dangerous?

Jesus Wants Us to Live in Unity but Instead Our Manmade Denominations Divide Us

I recently attended a friend’s ordination ceremony who had graduated from seminary and became a minister. It’s not the first such occasion I attended, and it won’t likely be the last. It was, however, the first time I really listened to what took place.

Integrated into the liturgy of the proceedings were a series of questions posed to the new minister. Early on one of the queries caught my attention.

I’ll purposely not quote the question to hide the identity of the guilty denomination, but I will paraphrase it.

In essence the denomination asked the young minister to pledge his loyalty to it and do his best to promote its mission locally and around the world.

My friend’s expected response affirmed his willingness to do so.

I don’t think I would have agreed to such a condition. Shouldn’t we pledge our loyalty to God and do our best to promote his mission locally and around the world?

With 42,000 Protestant denominations, why does each one work so hard to preserve and promote its own brand of Christianity, often at the expense of others? Why not ditch the denomination and instead work hard to promote Christ?

With this still bouncing around in my brain, a second item caught my attention as the ceremony wound down. In this part of the proceedings, my friend promised to take various actions.

One such action has him pursuing unity within the church. My friend promised to do so.

Assuming that by church those words refer to the universal church of Jesus, as opposed to the denomination, I see a contradiction of intent, that my friend promised to pursue two mutually exclusive goals.

Our Protestant denominations divide us, whereas Jesus wants us to be one, to get along with each other, and to live in unity (John 17:21, 23). When we consider this carefully, our manmade denominations are the antithesis of the unity Jesus prays for.

If my friend would indeed pursue unity as he promised, he should seek to dismantle the denomination, because its very existence opposes unity.

Peter DeHaan writes about biblical Christianity to confront status quo religion and live a life that matters. He seeks a fresh approach to following Jesus through the lens of Scripture, without the baggage of made-up traditions and meaningless practices.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

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Christian Living

Is Spiritual Truth More Important Than Christian Unity?

Arguing Over What is True Has Divided Jesus’s Church for Centuries

I’m a huge advocate of Christian unity, that as Jesus’s followers we should all get along and live in harmony. Denominations and theological perspectives don’t matter; Jesus does.

In the book of John Jesus prays that his future followers will play nice with each other, that we will be as one.

This is so others will get to know him. In praying this Jesus realizes that discord among his people will serve as the biggest deterrent to growing his church (John 17:20-26).

Paul likewise writes that we need to strive to live in unity. He commands it (Ephesians 4:3-6). He says there is only one body; there is only one church, not 42,000 variations that we call denominations.

This disunity is the downside of the Protestant Reformation.

When I tweeted about the importance of unity, one person messaged me with the stipulation that the basis for unity must be truth. The problem with using truth as a litmus test is agreeing on what is true.

In effect this person was justifying disunity.

Specifying a requirement of truth provides an excuse to avoid being one church. Christians have used this pretext for five centuries and divided the church of Jesus into religious factions as they argued about what is true.

The Age of Enlightenment, part of the modern era, brought with it the assumption that over time, through ongoing iterations, human thought would eventually converge on a singular comprehension of truth.

This didn’t happen. The opposite occurred. Truth became multifaceted, the product of each person’s individual logic and bias.

Christians have fallen victim to this thinking over the past few centuries, with otherwise well-meaning people assuming their comprehension of spiritual truth was correct. Ergo everyone else was wrong.

As a result we have separated ourselves into denominational schisms, subverting the intended unity of God’s church in the process. How this must grieve him. It certainly grieves me.

Spiritual truth is important, but we must hold it loosely. After all, our comprehension of what is true just might be wrong, mine included.

Peter DeHaan writes about biblical Christianity to confront status quo religion and live a life that matters. He seeks a fresh approach to following Jesus through the lens of Scripture, without the baggage of made-up traditions and meaningless practices.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

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Bible Insights

As Followers of Jesus We Need to Live in Harmony

Pursue Christian Unity

The last thing Jesus does before his arrest and execution is to pray. The last part of his prayer is for the unity of his future followers (John 17:20-26).

Yet two thousand years later, we still wait for Papa to answer this imperative request from his Son. We are not one, far from it.

When John records Jesus’s prayer for unity, he uses a poetic flare. But when Paul later writes about the necessity of unity, he is direct and unequivocal.

Paul says we must “make every effort” to live in unity, to pursue peace. To underscore this essential need for us to live in harmony, Paul reminds us that there is one church and one Spirit.

We have one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism (that’s a hard one for many folks to accept), and one Father God.

With all of this oneness that surrounds our faith, why do we feel a need to divide it and divide us? It is our sin that causes division. It is our human nature that results in us moving in direct opposition to Jesus’s prayer and Paul’s command.

Our selfishness and lack of godly righteousness has resulted in a plethora of churches to pick from on any given Sunday and the 42,000 denominations in our world today. That’s a lot more than the one that Jesus and Paul envision and desire.

Jesus prays for our unity. Jesus and his Father model unity. Paul commands unity and then explains why a lack of unity makes no sense.

Yet we persist in our division with ungodly fervor and in unbiblical error, when we should make every effort to live as one.

[Read through the Bible with us this year. Today’s reading is Ephesians 4-6, and today’s post is on Ephesians 4:3-6.]

Peter DeHaan writes about biblical Christianity to confront status quo religion and live a life that matters. He seeks a fresh approach to following Jesus through the lens of Scripture, without the baggage of made-up traditions and meaningless practices.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

Bogged Down Reading the Bible?

10 Essential Bible Reading Tips, from Peter DeHaan

Get the Bible Reading Tip Sheet: “10 Tips to Turn Bible Reading from Drudgery to Delight.”

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