Yearly Archives: 2019

I'm proud of my wife. I'm proud of my kids (most of the time!). I'm sometimes proud of this site, and of the people who have made it a good place to grow in faith and knowledge. I'm also proud of my country, and its forefathers who designed it to preserve freedom as well as it has (so far). But then there's this handy little verse I memorized as a kid: Proverbs 16:18 - Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall. Do the above statements make me prideful in the sense that this verse is talking about? Of course not. One of the biggest problems with Stanton's exegeses of scripture is that they refuse to think critically about the meaning of the [...]

I think it's fair to say that anyone raised in Stanton, or who attended there for any length of time, came away with some distorted views of God's nature. Is he wrathful? Vengeful? Loving? Is everything bad thing that happens to me because I sinned and didn't confess it in the proper sequence (privately, then publicly, prior to the Lord's supper, standing up, and with the right formulation of words)? It all depends on how you read the Bible—or didn't, as the case may be. Perhaps a teacher in Stanton warned you that if you were to leave (what they disparagingly call "falling away"), God may punish you with car accidents, cancer, miscarriages, the loss of a child, and more. Maybe you've even had one [...]

Sometimes I think those of us who say we want to restore the "ancient order" of the New Testament church don’t really want to bring the church back to its most primitive state. It is much more comfortable for us to bring the church back to the almost-ancient order of things–perhaps the end of the 1st century–rather than the day of Pentecost. Yes, we give lip service to wanting to rewind the clock on church history a bit. Hence the catch-phrase "Restoration Movement" (although I prefer the name Stone-Campbell Movement, for reasons I'll write about later). But few would be comfortable going all the way back to the beginning. What do I mean by that? Well, consider that by the end of the first century, [...]