… to steal a phrase.
I ran across an article about the Reformed Church in America at the Christian news site, Christian Post. Entitled “Reformed Church in America Is Imploding, Professor Says”, the article describes turmoil in a denomination I don’t know a lot about.
Several things struck me about the way the conflict was described however. Note these key paragraphs:
Amid years of contention between liberals and conservatives over issues such as the civil-rights movement, women’s ordination and evangelism with regard to social witness, Luidens says "loyalists" emerged to keep the denomination together. They were more dedicated to denominational survival than to ideological purity, he notes.
Though the two extremes were held together then, today many liberals have left the RCA in significant numbers and conservatives have shifted their target to the loyalists and continue to "rail against ‘liberalism,’" he says.
Now before anyone shrieks, ‘none of these people are fundamentalists’, let me say I am quite aware of that. But the conflict illustrates exactly what fundamentalism is all about, how it came into existence, and why a need for it still exists.
Comments