The Trouble with Tradition

It was a great day in the Lord all day yesterday starting with the Voices of Faith Gospel Choir, which consists of college students from St. Mary's and Notre Dame who shared with us in our church service Sunday and did a wonderful job, It went higher with a great text, tenor and testimony from Pastor Staples who preached from Luke 22:31-32(Check his blog for the outline) and ended with the legend, preaching machine and my state president, Dr. Issac Culver Jr., who preached from Esther 4:14 and told us "Its My Time". The man laid me out dead.

Mondays are days of review for me and as I review, I realize that Sunday service was hard on some of my members because it was something new and although we didn't do anything that Pastor Pettus or Pastor F.D. Johnson hadn't done as far as outreach to the colleges in this town, it still has been almost 5 years since they have seen that and in that place, a lot of man-made tradition has set in.

I laugh as I look at us. We embrace President Obama as our president. We herald him for his view to change Washington. We wear change on our shirts, ride it as bumper stickers on our cars and use it as jargon in our speech, but as a whole church people are the most resistant people there will ever be to change.

We are quick to tell you how things were, how they have been, what the former Pastor....did or back in our day....and let me quickly say, I embrace the stones that have been left us for to show us where we have been and what God has done and those stones should never be moved. However, everything we do in church is not based on Biblical standards, some of it is based on tradition.

Tradition is not wrong in and of itself but where the Bible is silent we must be careful we are not substituting our will in the place of God's. We are commanded to worship but the time we worship is tradition. We are commanded to partake of the Lord's supper as our sign of remembrance of Him but when we do it and what we wear when we do it( Black in some churches, white in others) is tradition.

It was this problem with tradition that made Luke write his great letter of Luke/Acts to tell Theophilus he could be certain in what he was being taught although it flew directly in the face of thousands of years of tradition. For 2,000 years if God spoke, He said it in Hebrew, for 2,000 years the Jews were a specially chosen and a privileged people but Luke writes his letter to say Gentiles matter too.

Luke/Acts is an apologetic defense of the gentile movement. That is the seminary answer what it means for us is, God can use ANYBODY, ANYTIME, ANYWHERE, ANYHOW and in ANYWAY and he does not need our APPROVAL our ACCEPTANCE or our AGREEMENT.

Our churches have to embrace what Luke was trying to suggest, God welcomes everyone at the table. Men and Women! Black and White! Young and Old! He is not a Black God or a God just for women or a God for the Educated but He is a "Who so ever will let them come God".

God has called us to proclaim the truth and anytime tradition surpasses or contradicts the Truth, it has become a bad thing. Our Message should NEVER change but our Methods must change as we do all we can to be relevant in this present age even if that rubs the "traditionalists" the wrong way.

I may need to run now,

Owens