By: Leslie Holmes, Moderator
“Building Healthy Churches! Birthing Healthy Christians!” This is our theme for a new moderatorial year. There is, says the Westminster Confession of Faith, ordinarily no salvation outside the church. I agree. I suspect that you do also. It was the church, some arm of the church, or some personality in the church that brought the Gospel to us. And, it was the church that nurtured us in our Christian faith.
I was a church-going Presbyterian pagan for the first 22 years of my life. Can you believe that my home church actually asked me to become a deacon? The only reason I turned down their invitation was that Barbara, my wife, and I were waiting for visas that would be the go-ahead for a new life in America. I had no idea then that God’s idea of a new life in America was far different from mine. As a recently arrived immigrant from Northern Ireland, I heard the message of Jesus in such a compelling way that I experienced firsthand what we Calvinists call, “irresistible grace.” Four days later, without rehearsal or forethought, I heard myself telling Barbara that I wanted to spend the rest of my life telling people what I had just learned: that Jesus died for me and all my sins were washed away in the blood of Calvary’s cross and I was going to heaven for sure. Since then, getting that message out has been the driving force of my life and ministry.
“Building Healthy Churches! Birthing Healthy Christians!”
In the course of my ministry from Mississippi to Georgia to Florida to California to Pennsylvania to South Carolina and over six continents, I have met many church people who concern me greatly. There they are, creeping around half alive, half dead, tired, desultory, and listless. They profess membership in His church but I rather fear that too often they are as I once was. They live with, to borrow a phrase from Paul writing to Timothy, “a form of godliness, but denying its power.” It all reminds me of that moment by the pool of Bethesda when Jesus asks the man who had been lying there for 38 years a question that echoes down through the centuries until today: “Do you want to be well?” That man was dying one day at a time and had Jesus not come that day he likely would have died there by the pool.
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