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| Denver Seminary is the source of his drive-buy D.Min. |
St. Mark, DePere - If you search the New Testament for evidence of a formal church membership process, you won’t find it. The reason for this is simple – they didn’t need it. Pretty much anyone who showed up was considered a “committed member” for several reasons: (1) Persecution – The New Testament makes it clear that many of the churches operated in hostile environments. This reality acted as a natural filter that weeded out the uncommitted; (2) Scarcity – There simply weren’t as many churches around back then as there are in modernday America. Today, with dozens of churches in most cities, it’s easy to church “hop and shop” for months, if not years, leading to uncertainty and confusion regarding who is and who isn’t committed to a local church; and (3) Mobility – We live in the most transient society in the history of the world. People move for any number of reasons. In biblical times, people moved around far less, sometimes spending a lifetime in one town or village, thereby making it much easier to know who was – or at least should have been – at church. For all these reasons church membership is a practical response to the very real challenges of our time and culture. It allows the church community to know who’s “in” so that we can focus our time and energy on living as a biblical community, rather than wasting it on trying to figure out who’s in the community in the first place.
Renewal Church Membership - If you search the New Testament for evidence of a formal church membership process, you won’t find it. The reason for this is simple – they didn’t need it. Pretty much anyone who showed up was considered a “committed member” for several reasons: (1) Persecution – The New Testament makes it clear that many of the churches operated in hostile environments. This reality acted as a natural filter that weeded out the uncommitted; (2) Scarcity – There simply weren’t as many churches around back then as there are in modern-day America. Today, with dozens of churches in most cities, it’s easy to church “hop and shop” for months, if not years, leading to uncertainty and confusion regarding who is and who isn’t committed to a local church; and (3) Mobility – We live in the most transient society in the history of the world. People pick up and move for myriad reasons at the drop of a hat. In biblical times, people moved around far less, sometimes spending a lifetime in one town or village, thereby making it much easier to know who was – or at least should have been – at church. For all of these reasons church membership is a practical response to the very real challenges of our time and culture. It allows the church community to know who’s “in” so that we can focus our time and energy on living as a biblical community, rather than wasting it on trying to figure out who’s in the community in the first place.
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| Parlow was one of eight WELSers who attended the Andy Stanley Babtist Drive Conference. Ski wrote on his priceless blog about how they all worshiped with Stanley |
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GJ - The rest of the St. Mark De Pere contract is almost the same as the website material from Sunnyvale, California - whose head past is a Calvinist. St. Mark is the congregation that posted "their" sermons verbatim from other sources on the church website. (Thou shalt not steal?) Once they were caught, the sermons could only be obtained from the church secretary.
Plagiarism in WELS
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| In defense of the Babtists - they voted against having the New NIV displayed in their bookstores. In contrast, WELS has made the NIV their official translation, though they may deny it. |