I will defend my traditional religious heritage with great fervor, as long as we remember what we are discussing/defending: tradition!
I never want to forget where I 'came from' with regard to the traditions which helped make me 'me'.
Having said all that, I have developed one simple rule for those types of discussions:
leave the Bible out of it!
(by the way, in my experience, when these types of discussions ensue, most folks have obliged... because the typical argument revolves around the "I feel..." or "I think" mentality, and NOT around what scripture says - or doesn't say...)
So, when someone engages me in a quibble over things like "what order do we do worship in?" or "is clapping in worship ok?", I close my Bible and am happy to discuss it 'til the cows come home' (what does that mean, anyhow?)... I just refuse any longer to try to twist scripture to 'proof' my tradition...
There is NOTHING wrong with tradition! What is wrong is when we (I) try to find scripture to support my tradition!
so... here's the rub: As we try to attract people to Jesus by showing them His love, an incredible thing happens... THEY COME!!!
And that's dangerous... because when we lift Jesus up and show His love, the people we 'attract' will look different than most 'church members' with whom we are familiar... the makeup of our churches will change. No longer will we be surrounded by a bunch of 'same-way-thinkers' who adhere to our long held customs and culture...
When we truly try to 'reach the unchurched', guess what happens? IT WORKS!!! We reach them... and, for some of us, we struggle with the question: "Now what? What do we do with 'em?"
Here's what we CANNOT do... We cannot attract them with Christ's love, then hang our yoke of tradition around their necks!
Traditions are fine... Traditionalism is cancer! It is a crippling disease, a tool of the devil...
May God be with us as we discern the difference between our tradition and the Bible!
Blessings!
2 comments:
Well said, Brother! We needn't go further than our own back yard to see the damage caused by traditionalism. I see this problem as two fold. We must first discover if what we cling to is tradition or Scripturally based. We often accept an idea as Biblical without having ever read it in the Bible, and we pass it on as being Scripturally sound. To determine the basis of an idea, we must, with an earnest heart, search the Scriptures. Often we are simply too lazy to discover for ourselves the truth. We allow another human being to tell us what is truth. That is to our eternal shame. The second problem begins when we understand that something is tradition,but we want to hold to that tradition, and we do not make it clear to others (for example, those who visit our church) that this is our tradition, and not a mandate from God. I do see progress in this area, albeit slow.
Thanks for bringing this to light. We need to be discussing it more freely!
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